I would like to thank the six readers for their careful reading and their responses to my book, and to Hau journal for giving me the opportunity to discuss it. The six readers reassure me that the message has come across, both about what I did and about how I wanted to do it.

I met Wabeladio Payi, the inventor of Mandombe, in 2009, at a pilgrimage to the holy city of N’kamba, the spiritual center of the Kimbanguist church. As soon as he told me about how a divine revelation in 1978 had led him to elaborate the writing system known as Mandombe (well known but understudied in the scholarship of vernacular writing systems), I knew I would like to write his biography, and we set a solid plan accordingly. In the following four years, before his tragic death in 2013, Wabeladio visited Europe several times and I visited him in the DRC twice a year. In posthumously writing the book, following an outline we had worked out together, I wanted to achieve four goals: first, I wanted to reflect on the relationship between spirituality and creativity. Second, I wanted to bring the individual to the center of attention in the study of African forms of innovation. Third, I wanted to contextualize why Kimbanguists, and many other Congolese who learn Mandombe, were so avid to have their own alphabet, their own graphic and epistemological independence. Fourth, I wanted to explore the inner working of Mandombe as both a writing system and a form of art. I was sure that this analysis would tell us something comparatively useful for the study of the universal will to graphein, the inescapable urge to scribble and design.

Stephan Palmié has identified the main theoretical trends I wanted to engage with, starting with the issues of “influence” and “invention” and moving to more general concepts of how to root the universal in the particular. He notes how my work builds on the work of my predecessor Edwin Ardener on the prophetic condition, while focusing on the process of invention rather than on a finalized product. I was particularly lucky to meet the inventor of the alphabet, as most analyses of this kind have typically been done after the inventor has passed away.

Adrienne Cohen focuses on my contribution to biographic ethnography. Cohen is concerned that my too-closeness and my duty of loyalty to Wabeladio may have prevented me from offering more distanced interpretations of Mandombe and some of its products. In response, I note that chapter 8, titled “A different road,” is intended to show my misgivings about elements of Wabeladio’s teleological telling of the story. There, I rely on a close rereading of his 1985 “Method of discovery” manuscript and some interviews about it. This was the most difficult chapter to write, both technically and ethically, as I found myself questioning the official narrative my late interlocutor had been providing for over twenty years without being able to confront him about it.

Cohen mentions as an example the figure called “Nkua Tulendo.” Nkua Tulendo does not really represent a work of art (unlike, for instance, the beautiful work by professional Mandombe artist Rubain Watulunda on the cover of the book, now at the National Museum in Kinshasa). It is a figure that those coming to the end of the three-months-long Mandombe elementary course must learn to make emerge out of some basic graphemes they draw without raising the pen from the paper. Cohen sees the Mandombe portrayal of the Nkua Tulendo, a messianic figure in Kongo religious culture (identified with Kimbangu in Kimbanguist theology), as a well-dressed businessman with a tie. She wonders whether there might be any humor or ambiguity there that could have been explored with more critical distance. Perhaps—but then again, perhaps it is as a very well-dressed businessman with a tie that the Messiah will come at the end of times. Should Cohen visit N’kamba and look at how Simon Kimbangu Kiangani (the incarnation of the Holy Ghost) is dressed (with a suit and a tie), she would probably understand that suggesting that the image emerging in the lines of Mandombe is an ironic cultural comment rather than a deep spiritual one would imply that we, external readers, can claim we know how the Messiah looks like, but not so the Kimbanguist believers.

Cohen asks another poignant question about the extent to which I could have explored questions around the difference between genius and folly. Although I make some points about such discussions in the book, I did not want to engage with them. If Wabeladio’s uncles were right that the young Wabeladio was becoming “mad” when he was incessantly scribbling line after line after line on pieces of papers in the streets of Kinshasa in the early 1980s, then we must admit that by finally turning all this scribbling into a proper graphic system, Wabeladio learned how to write himself out of his own hypergraphic maniac obsession and recover a healthy communication with other individuals. It is this healing process, this disentanglement from his own creation, which I wanted to both investigate and honor. However, in the book, I opted to avoid any psychiatric engagement and bypass the genius/mad person distinction (or collapse) that has obfuscated many of the twentieth-century approaches to creativity.

António Tomás wonders to what extent I may have satisfactorily addressed the question of authorship. Is Mandombe’s “God’s alphabet” or Wabeladio’s alphabet? The answer depends very much on whom you ask. It is crucial to remember that Wabeladio Payi became the inventor of Mandombe after experiencing an initial revelation. Today many people in the DRC accuse Wabeladio of the sin of pride. Some Kimbanguists omit his name when giving talks about Mandombe, as for them this was God’s creation. While I believe Wabeladio to be the creator, I also believe it is technically and legally difficult to get copyright protection for an alphabet. Perhaps I can best summarize my position by saying that while I am sure Wabeladio was the inventor of Mandombe, I am not so sure he was the author of Mandombe.

Tomás suggests that the second issue around authorship has to do with the influences to which Wabeladio was subjected, that is, possible coauthors or at least collaborators. Have I been fair to all those we interviewed about Wabeladio or have I ignored their contribution to the invention too flippantly? I agree with Tomás that inventions are the outcome of many influences, the crystallization in the mind of one individual of the work of many previous minds that the inventor then knows how to shut off, in a movement I describe as “double rupture.” In the book I discuss at length the diverse influences Wabeladio was exposed to under the theoretical guidance of Bloom’s “anxiety of influences,” Husserl’s discussion of how Galileo concealed influences on him while revealing “his” discoveries, T. S. Eliot’s and many others’ reflections on the social context of individual creativity, or Marilyn Strathern’s “cutting the network” approach, to name but a few of the plethora of authors that help me sustain the crucial point that Tomás reminds us of. I wanted to show that Wabeladio was indeed a master at connecting and disconnecting all the influences he received, presenting a pure object disconnected from the network out of which it was created, and that this is but one example of how creativity in general occurs. In a section on “connection and rupture” (172–73), I discuss what I refer to as “the anxiety of inventors,” that is, the anxiety about having to present as uniquely yours what you know also comes from others (not only humans, as I explain there).

Tomás also raises the issue of the political dimensions of Mandombe, both historically (namely, its connection with Mobutu’s politics of authenticity) and today. In my initial research, there was a temptation to locate Mandombe in the context of Mobutu’s famous search for authenticité (though this would be much easier if Mandombe had been invented several years earlier, as discourses about authenticité were boiling down in 1979). Yet, I gradually resisted the temptation, especially after speaking with some of the Kinshasa artists who witnessed Wabeladio present his then rather inchoate invention at the Académie des Beaux Arts in 1979, and whose positive appreciation of what the man was doing was motivated by the fact that they wanted to distance themselves from artists working a decade earlier and not by their engagement with the authenticité program. The political ambience of Mobutu’s days was of course part and parcel of the conditions under which Mandombe was created, but trying to connect the early days of Wabeladio’s own search to politics, or to the politics of cultural authenticité, would require something of a stretch on my side and probably force me to move too far away from Wabeladio’s own narrative. Political context, however, did become very important as an element of the search for a Kongo identity at the end of the Mobutu rule, which coincided with the Bundu-dia-Kongo religious groups’ support for Wabeladio, as I explain in the book. The entire “Kongo-ization” of Mandombe in the 1990s has to do with that overall political scene. Something could be here added about the political context of the days in which I conducted most of my fieldwork in the DRC (2009–2013).

Finally, Tomás problematizes the fact that Wabeladio needed to extract the Roman consonants and vowels from the Konde grids. Why the Roman consonants and vowels? I believe this is an example of what linguist Roy Harris referred to as “the tyranny of the alphabet” (Harris 1986), a concept I discuss in the book. Once you know how the alphabet works, it becomes an inescapable model for your thinking about language in general and, certainly, the invention of other scripts. Despite his urge to be original, Wabeladio could not think of alphabets without having the model of the Roman one in his head. To answer Tomás’s question: there is no doubt that Mandombe, initially a wider generative mode of extracting figures out of lines, became, at some point, an alphabet. I do not think that the invention would have become so popular and been so well received had Wabeladio not decided to make an alphabet out of the lines and graphemes, something he started to do at some point in the 1990s.

I am proud to read that Theresia Hofer, a linguistic anthropologist with an interest in writing systems, approved of my findings. She offers what I hope may become a useful part-by-part guide to the book, highlighting the main points of each chapter and celebrating the fact that I explore the invention of one alphabet while also regretting that I did not compare my case with some other cases. She also asks some very technical questions. The languages that are most easily written down using Mandombe are several varieties of Kikongo and the lingua franca Lingala, though members of CENA (the Centre d’Écriture Négro-Africaine created by Wabeladio, today housed at the University Simon Kimbangu) will tell you they can use it to transcribe many other Congolese languages. Linguistically speaking, I believe that Mandombe manages to transcribe some Kikongo sounds in ways that may be more satisfactory than the Roman alphabet. Whether it can also better transcribe other languages is a matter of research. The question of whether Mandombe (or other scripts) can help sustain endangered languages falls beyond my area of expertise. I suspect that if speakers of an endangered language knew of an African alphabet sent by God to write down African languages and learned to use it with the help of a qualified Mandombe teacher who could figure out how to transcribe the sounds of that language, they would embrace Mandombe. The issue of scientific collaboration with members of communities that Hofer raises is urgent today. It is clear we need to encourage more collaboration, both in research and in writing, but I want to stress that mine was a very specific case, for it was both a biographical and a research collaboration on a technology with the person who invented it. How to be collaborative while acknowledging collaboration more widely, beyond the biographical and thematically narrow model offered here, is what we need to talk about. It is a conversation I am happy to engage with.

Roger Canals sets out a series of most creative renderings of my monograph, playing the creative process of Wabeladio, inventing an alphabet, against mine, using an alphabet to reinvent, on my own terms, his creativity. Beyond the inspiriting reflections on the work of ethnography as mirroring that of prophetic invention, the specific issues he raises are provocative enough. Let me focus on one: did I encounter any kind of friction with Wabeladio? The most significant friction that lingers on in my memory is between me and me, as I did not know for a long time how to start writing a book that was meant to be written within Wabeladio’s lifetime but ended up being a posthumous homage. Sadly, there was no final discussion in which Wabeladio could share that he was happy with the product. The lack of closure will haunt me for the rest of my life. This is why I opted to be so close to the degree zero of writing, sticking to Wabeladio’s reflections and his own words, especially in the biographical chapters, and carefully citing his words and letting the reader decide what to accept or reject. I wanted to show that I took his revelations and miracles with a pinch of salt, taking them seriously but not necessarily literally. I had to make considerable efforts to let my “excess of loyalty” (I thank Cohen for the diagnostic of my ethnographic predicament) become too close to overt, acritical admiration, let alone hagiography. Seriousness was enough for me even if Cohen is perhaps right that I could have been more daring in investigating, with more critical distance, the ironies, sarcasm, mimicries, etc. implicit in the cultural products of a prophetic religion such as Kimbanguism. But, to put it this way, I made the effort to see the Messiah where Wabeladio and many others told me there was a Messiah.

Canals wisely elaborates the twinned topic of shadows and mirrors, but there is no room to engage adequately with this angle here. Suffice it to say that the mirror principle is discussed in the book as a fundamental element of Mandombe. Finally, I appreciate his seeing the book in the light of the dialectics of movement and stillness (Wabeladio got “stuck” many times and so did I), and I appreciate the way he relates this to the invention of Mandombe, to the writing of a book about it, and the processual and simultaneously nonprocessual nature of ethnographic writing in general. We anthropologists need to cut the network at some point and present an object disconnected from many people, contexts, and influences. I could have contented myself with the experience I was privileged to live through for many years of learning with Wabeladio, but I am glad I put a stop and created something that, as the six readers testify, resonates with the work and preoccupations of so many other individuals.

Arthur Cimwanga Badibanga, the most significant Mandombist in the DRC academic milieu, is the scholar who, in 2012, worked hardest with universities and the ministries to nominate Wabeladio a Doctor Honoris Causa and to create a Mandombe Chair in the national university system. Cimwanga has highlighted the continuity between my previous work on iconoclastic landscapes in West Africa and my discovery of how relevant the spiritual landscape was for Wabeladio’s process of creativity. I am glad he recognized the transition, in my career, from the study of destruction to the study of creativity. Cimwanga identifies as the core problem of my narrative the relationship between science and spirituality, as well as between Wabeladio’s and Kimbangu’s agencies. The Eurocentric, “modern” episteme that neatly distinguishes between science and religion does not help much to study Mandombe or its origins, as the creation of this graphic system is as much scientific as it is spiritual. I have documented the difficulties Wabeladio had in making his publics understand the two complementary sources of the invention: his own mind and God’s revelations. What Wabeladio made of the revelation he received from God (through Kimbangu) was truly remarkable, and I try to honor it by paying close attention to how he explained it. Delving into the tension between Wabeladio’s and God’s agencies, Cimwanga provokes me by suggesting I could have dedicated the book to Simon Kimbangu, the inspirator of Mandombe. His Divinity Simon Kimbangu Kiangani (Kimbangu’s grandson and reincarnation), the current head of the church, has indeed been instrumental in the research (we visited him often, and in 2011 he lent us a car to visit the many centers where Mandombe was being taught around the province of Kongo Central, which boasts the holy city of N’kamba). The gratitude to him and to his institution is duly acknowledged, as is my admiration for his grandfather the “prophet” and his anticolonial resistance movement. But following my own inner calling I dedicated the book to future generations of Congolese who may forget how much Wabeladio suffered in order to leave a legacy for his people. Wabeladio, a most faithful Kimbanguist, passed away very painfully and traumatically, just a few months after being made Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Kinshasa. His legacy was thwarted before he could start organizing the chair of Mandombe he was holding. On the very delicate topic Cimwanga raises about possible causes and intentions behind Wabeladio’s tragic and untimely death—which occurred on a plane when he was being transferred from DRC to India to have a liver transplant in April 2013—I am afraid I have nothing to contribute. I heard many contested versions, but I decided to focus on the lamentation of his tragic passing away. A loss for the DRC, for Kimbanguists, for me, and, most immediately, for his widow Eugénie Dinkembi and their five daughters.