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Kongo Atlantic Diaspora (African Studies)

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  1. Introduction
  2. The full African diaspora must include references to actors, localities, or cultural features in the Mediterranean, continental Europe, and South Asia as well as North and South America over several thousand years. This article explores western equatorial Africa and its extension in the New World, where Kongo people, speakers of the KiKongo language, and their successors have participated actively in the continuation and transformation of their African way of life and their story. The Kongo Atlantic world is unique in encompassing five centuries of historical documentation. Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao’s visit in 1482 began a several-century interaction between the Kongo court and region, and Portuguese and other European nations that opened diplomatic ties with Kongo and European states while the Kongo elite adopted Christianity, European language, clothing, religion and social trappings. Commercial relations were launched that included ever increasing enslavement of Africans. During the course of five centuries, the relationship of western equatorial Africa to Europe and the Americas transformed the lives of millions of people, who provided massive labor for the development of plantations and industries and founded the cultural ancestry of an important cross-section of the New—the African-American—World. Accessible English sources are given preferential treatment in this article. Old World contexts reviewed include the precolonial kingdoms of the region (Kongo, Loango, KaKongo, Ngoyo, Tio), the people, the language and culture, and the history; the ports and hinterlands of a massive inland trading empire that moved people and goods across vast distances from the 17th to the 19th centuries; this region as the point of entry of three colonial territories (the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo, Portuguese Angola, and part of French West Africa) and of three modern African states (Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, and Congo-Kinshasa). See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on Angola, Kongo and the Coastal States of West Central Africa, Congo, Republic of (Congo Brazzaville), and Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire). A sampling of New World Kongo settings are found in Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti, and Cuba as well as along the Georgia and Carolina coasts and in New Orleans in the United States—nations, regions, or localities that originate in the spheres of British, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and American colonialism, respectively.
  3.  
  4. General Overviews
  5. The African Diaspora Studies Institutes (Harris 1993) have sought to identify the full scope of this diasporic world. Other scholars and works have treated this vast and complex story in other ways. Lovejoy and Trotman 2003 has sought to clarify shifting ethnic and national identities in the transatlantic experience. In contrast, Gilroy 1993 (Black Atlantic) introduces a non-national, nonethnic, pan-African, black Atlantic consciousness derived from artistic and intellectual performance. Rahier, et al. 2010 follows in this vein in portraying the African diaspora as an imagined modern, global community of black consciousness against the negating forces of colonialism. Obboe and Scacchi 2008 has “recharted” the African diaspora as the voices and images of contemporary culture in a black Atlantic world. Heywood and Thornton 2007 and Fennell 2007 utilize the focus on regional developments—western equatorial Africa, western Central Africa, Kongo, Angola, etc.—to untangle complex gradual developments in the transatlantic world that produced slave migrations to, and resettlements in, the New World. Students and researchers may need a few simple rules of thumb to navigate the complexities of the names Kongo, Congo, Zaire, and Nzadi. Kongo (with a “K”) refers to the historic kingdom, the people (BaKongo), the language (KiKongo), and the contemporary cultural traditions of the wider region and the diaspora. Congo (with a “C”) refers to the Congo River and to the colonial states that were created beginning in the 1880s: the Congo Free State, the Belgian Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as the southern region of French West Africa renamed the Republic of Congo. President Mobutu renamed the DRC and the river “Zaire.” The northern province of Angola already bore this name. “Zaire” is a Portuguese/European mispronunciation of Nzadi, the ancient KiKongo term for not only this major river running through its territory, but also the metaphysical river that flows between the world of the living and that of the ancestors. After Mobutu, the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the river returned to being called the “Congo” River.
  6.  
  7. Fennell, Christopher C.. Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
  8.  
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  10.  
  11. Treats symbolic expression, formation and maintenance of social group identities, and individual innovation in offering an understanding of core symbols in the diasporas of African cultures such as the BaKongo, Yoruba, and Fon. The concept of “ethnogenic bricolage” explains the crystallization of cultural identity in New World sites.
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  15.  
  16. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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  19.  
  20. Gilroy’s writes from a cultural studies perspective, and his work has moved African diaspora analysis away from “ethnic absolutism” toward a focus on African intellectual history and its cultural construction. The “black Atlantic” becomes a space of transnational, self-conscious, artistic, and literary creativity. Gilroy’s “double consciousness” refers to the black Atlantic striving to be both European and black.
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  24.  
  25. Harris, Joseph, ed. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. 2d ed. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.
  26.  
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  28.  
  29. Incorporates essays from African Diaspora Institutes, with emphasis on the widest possible geographical, historical, and sociopolitical scope. Chapters relevant to this article include Montilus 1993 (cited under Haiti) on collective e memory in Haiti of “Guinea” versus “Congo” lands of origin, and Mahaniah 1993 (cited under History of Western Equatorial Africa: Colonial) on Garveyite influence in early colonial Lower Congo.
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  33.  
  34. Heywood, Linda M., ed. Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  35.  
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  37.  
  38. Chapters by the leading Central-African and Atlantic authors and case studies from Brazil, Haiti and Spanish America, North America and the Caribbean, suggest that émigrés from western Equatorial Africa provided much more foundational experience for the African Atlantic diaspora than has previously been realized because of the high numbers of slaves taken early to several New World regions.
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  42.  
  43. Heywood, Linda M., and John K. Thornton. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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  46.  
  47. Recent archival research establishes Central Africa as the origin of most Africans brought to the English and Dutch colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and South America before 1660. These Central Africans were frequently possessors of an Atlantic Creole culture that included adaptation of Christianity and elements of European languages.
  48.  
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  50.  
  51.  
  52. Lovejoy, Paul E., and David V. Trotman. Trans-Atlantic Dimension of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora. London: Continuum, 2003.
  53.  
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  55.  
  56. Transatlantic case studies feature conditions of slave work, African legal status that fated some people to be taken as slaves while protecting others, and emerging creolized identities. Thus, western equatorial African places and ethnonyms—Kongo, Umbundu, Kimbundu, Cabinda, Angola, etc.—provide helpful references for an understanding of the fates of people from this African region and in the New World diaspora.
  57.  
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  59.  
  60.  
  61. Oboe, Annalisa, and Anna Scacchi, eds. Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections. Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies 1. London: Routledge, 2008.
  62.  
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  64.  
  65. Essays examine the “black Atlantic” in an effort to transcend the limitations of the concept of “African diaspora” and to globalize the American national parochialism of “African-American.” Essays of particular importance to this article include Fischer-Hornung 2008 (cited under Haiti) on the films of Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren.
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  68.  
  69.  
  70. Rahier, Jean Muteba, Percy C. Hintzen, and Felipe Smith. Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
  71.  
  72. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  73.  
  74. Explores the African diaspora in terms of the “imagined community” of self-consciousness around black identity, with special attention to 20th-century writing and activism.
  75.  
  76. Find this resource:
  77.  
  78.  
  79. Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  80.  
  81. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511800276Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  82.  
  83. This is Thornton’s first overview work to define the historical foundations and features of an African Atlantic world. Chapters on sailing technology and shipping patterns, trade and economics, labor practices, slavery, politics, society, and religion make this work very useful as an introductory college textbook to the topic.
  84.  
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  86.  
  87.  
  88. Reference Works and Journals
  89. Kongo cultural influence is arguably the best-documented historic culture of West and western equatorial Africa. Five centuries of contacts among Europe, Africa, and the New World have left massive archival resources in Rome, Lisbon, Brussels, Paris, Stockholm, London, Rio, Port-au-Prince, Havana, Philadelphia, and, of course, in Pointe-Noire, Brazzaville, Luanda, Kinshasa, Matadi, Luozi, and many points in between. Midway through the 20th century, researchers in the Vatican Library rediscovered a lost 18th-century bibliography on the Kongo region. The aspiring Kongo scholar should be able to consider archival or published materials in KiKongo, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Swedish. Very little of this material is in English. The sources included in the sections that follow are either ones that are in English or ones that English authors have made use of. Thus, they are likely to be more readily accessible. Starr 1908 provides an early English bibliography of scholarship on Congo Basin languages, including KiKongo. Soderberg and Widman 1978 presents Swedish contributions to KiKongo language writings. The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter offers insight into the unfolding network of scholarship on African and New World research interests coordinated by Christopher C. Fennel. The Journal of African History and the International Journal of African History are two leading journals that provide an ongoing forum for scholars. Two widely available reference works provide accessible basic information on African background issues and scholarship that became available in the late 20th century: The Cambridge History of Africa (Fage and Oliver 1975–1986) and the General History of Africa volumes (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization 1981–1993).
  90.  
  91. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. 1994–.
  92.  
  93. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  94.  
  95. In 2005 the ADAN, under the direction of Christopher C. Fennell, carried forward online the African-American Archaeology Newsletter (1994–2000) with a quarterly newsletter devoted to articles, research reports, schools in the field, conferences, and initiatives in African diaspora history. In 2012, the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage was launched for more formalized research reporting.
  96.  
  97. Find this resource:
  98.  
  99.  
  100. Fage, J. D., and Roland Oliver, eds. Cambridge History of Africa. 8 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975–1986.
  101.  
  102. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  103.  
  104. This eight-volume series on African history is part of the prestigious Cambridge Histories series, available in print and online. Edited and written by leading English-language scholars, it covers earliest prehistory to 20th-century developments.
  105.  
  106. Find this resource:
  107.  
  108.  
  109. International Journal of African Historical Studies. 1968–.
  110.  
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  112.  
  113. Published by the Boston University African Studies Center. Available in print and online. The IJAHS (formerly African Historical Studies) publishes articles on prehistoric archaeology to the present problems of the continent, including interactions between Africa and the Afro-American peoples of the New World.
  114.  
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  117.  
  118. Journal of African History. 1960–.
  119.  
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  121.  
  122. One of the leading English-language peer-reviewed journals, print and online, that deals with current scholarship on African history.
  123.  
  124. Find this resource:
  125.  
  126.  
  127. Söderberg, Bertil, and Ragnar Widman. Publications en Kikongo: Bibliographie relative aux contributions suedoises entre 1885 et 1970. Uppsala, Sweden: Institut Scandinave d’Études Africaines, 1978.
  128.  
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  130.  
  131. Includes a general overview of “Kongo literature” covering works prepared for schools, Christian literature, and other materials such as hygiene manuals and African folklore publications. A section follows on the history of printing presses in Lower Congo (Bas-Congo). The third section includes an annotated list of eighty-one authors or publishing sources and their works.
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  134.  
  135.  
  136. Starr, Fredrick. A Bibliography of Congo Languages. Bulletin of the Department of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908.
  137.  
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  139.  
  140. An early-20th-century compilation of 678 entries treating languages and cultures of the Congo Free State, including 160 references to Kongo language and culture.
  141.  
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  143.  
  144.  
  145. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. General History of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981–1993.
  146.  
  147. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  148.  
  149. This eight-volume series covers the entire scope of African history from earliest prehistory to 20th century issues, edited and written by leading scholars of the mid-20th century from many countries. Provides a ready reference work on all aspects of historical study and scholarship.
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  154. Primary Sources
  155. This section lists an eclectic category of texts by Kongolese narrators and outside observers that offer insight into the contours of Kongo culture and history. Selected novels are included for their availability to English readers and their documentary quality.
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  157. KiKongo Notebooks
  158. The most valuable, yet difficult to access, single source of writing on Kongo culture and society is the collection of 344 KiKongo notebooks (23,000 hand-written pages) commissioned by Swedish linguist-ethnographer Karl Laman around 1900–1915 from fifty Kongolese teacher-ethnographers, written in response to his questionnaire about customs, language uses, beliefs, and many more topics (Janzen 1972; MacGaffey n.d.). The notebooks, now housed in the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm, provided Laman with the basis for his dictionary, his grammar, and his four-volume ethnography. The notebooks were microfilmed in 1972, and the original master is available for copying from the Swedish National Archives. This hand-written Kongo “encyclopedia,” although available now for several decades, has been used by only a few scholars; (see Janzen 1982, cited under Health and Healing), MacGaffey’s writings on minkisi (e.g., MacGaffey 1991, cited under Health and Healing), and narrative accounts of rulers, such as MacGaffey 2000 (cited under Culture and Society). MacGaffey 1991 (cited under Health and Healing) offers the most comprehensive account of these Kongo writers, and describes something of their circumstances in connection with Laman’s project, together with their careers with the Svenska Missionsforbundet and beyond.
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  160. Janzen, John M. “Laman’s Kongo Ethnography: Observations on Sources, Methods, and Theories.” Africa 422 (1972): 316–328.
  161.  
  162. DOI: 10.2307/1158499Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  163.  
  164. Published at the time the 433 notebooks were microfilmed and made available to scholars and others. Analysis of posthumous editing of Laman’s work reveals the dominance of the culture area paradigm that reduces individual writing in a particular place in time and space to homogeneous, timeless, cultural construction. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  165.  
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  167.  
  168.  
  169. MacGaffey, Wyatt. Karl Edvard Laman’s Kikongo monograph. Chicago: Center for Reference Libraries.
  170.  
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  172.  
  173. Names the fifty Kongo catechist-ethnographers. This manuscript preserves Laman’s references of the Kongo authors, thereby identifying the regional location of the information. The four-volume posthumous work The Kongo abandons these references, leaving the reader with the illusion of timeless, homogenous Kongo culture.
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  177.  
  178. Myths, Folktales, and Legends
  179. Kongo culture has a rich history of myths, folktales, and legends, often featuring regional variations and historical transformations. The recognizable features of origin accounts, trickster cycles, proverbs and other genres known to folklorists are not readily available in English. De Heusch 2000, written in French, is one of the most accessible collections of these narratives. Knappert 1971 is a very readable English-language volume that includes Kongo texts in a work devoted to the more inclusive Congo Basin cultures.
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  181. De Heusch, Luc. Le roi de Kongo et les monstres sacrés. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
  182.  
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  184.  
  185. Offers original texts or translations of twenty-four myths from all Kongo regions as source material for a structural analysis of Kongo religion and history. The trickster cycle and the androgynous Mahungu cycle are offered by Janzen in Lemba, 1650–1930 (Janzen 1982, cited under Health and Healing).
  186.  
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  188.  
  189.  
  190. Knappert, Jan. Myths and Legends of the Congo. Nairobi, Kenya: Heinemann Educational, 1971.
  191.  
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  193.  
  194. English-language collection of vast oral literature from selected peoples of the entire Congo region, including the Bakongo, the Woyo, and the Mayombe of the Lower Congo. The stories of this collection reappear in various institutional settings—religious rituals, education of children, and moral tales, including the diaspora.
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  199. Novels
  200. Although by definition not “primary sources,” the three works included here offer to the English reader and scholar excellent descriptions of the authors’ own experience of Kongo culture. Conrad 2012 (originally published in 1899) entered the world of the Congo Free State and on foot walked through a region left barren by labor recruiters; Kingsolver 1998 knew missionaries who lived in Kongo country. Agualusa 2002, a well-known Angolan author, vividly re-creates the conditions in Lusophone Africa at the very end of the slave trade.
  201.  
  202. Agualusa, José Eduardo. Creole. London: Arcadia, 2002.
  203.  
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  205.  
  206. The story is set in Loanda, coastal Angola, Brazil, and Europe, and portrays the tensions between elites and commoners over control and enslavement at the very close of the transatlantic slave trade during approximately the 1860s. This work is an excellent reading resource for undergraduate courses on the Kongo Atlantic world. English translation from Portuguese.
  207.  
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  209.  
  210.  
  211. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 2012.
  212.  
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  214.  
  215. Originally published in 1899. Although presented as fiction, Conrad’s account of the search up the Congo River for an employee of the Congo Free State conveys vivid imagery due to Conrad’s own trek upriver by foot through the Lower Congo. The walk through territory deserted by labor recruits to the Matadi-Kinshasa railroad, and the flight of remaining people, provides a highly graphic depiction of early colonialism.
  216.  
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  219.  
  220. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
  221.  
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  223.  
  224. An unlikely source of Kongo insights, this American bestselling author has mined sources personal, literary, and scientific, e.g., Karl Laman’s KiKongo-French dictionary, to portray the Kongo social environment of a missionary family somewhere on the eastern edge of Kongo territory. The most vivid and accurate scene is of the construction and use of an n’kisi.
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  228.  
  229. Travelers’ Narratives
  230. The historical depth of European contact with the Kongo civilization, stretching for five hundred years, has yielded dozens, if not hundreds, of accounts by merchants, missionaries, diplomats, adventurers, and scholars. A number of these works have been published in one or more European languages and are found in libraries and archives around the world,, as well as on the shelves of antiquarians and booksellers, such as Graves-Johnson 2011. As in other categories of writing on Kongo, only a few of the most well-known of these works are available in English original or translation—except for Battell 1901 and Dapper 1670, a compilation of accounts of many travelers to various points along the West African coast, including Loango and Kongo, collected in this volume that has appeared in Dutch, German, and French editions. Lopes and Pigafetta 1970 (originally published in 1597) records geographical and political information of central and southern Angola with a map that changed European understanding of the African landscape. Sanson 1656 offers insightful accounts of several Kongo institutions in French.
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  232. Battell, Andrew, Ernest George Ravenstein, Samuel Purchas, and Anthony Knivet. The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell, of Leigh, in Angola and the Adjoining Regions: Reprinted from “Purchas His Pilgrimes”: Edited, with Notes and a Concise History of Kongo and Angola, by E. G. Ravenstein. London: Hakluyt Society, 1901.
  233.  
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  235.  
  236. Battell’s eyewitness accounts, as told to Samuel Purchas after his return to England, are valuable sources for western equatorial Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Atlantic passage, and Brazil. Battell was originally a sailor who was then captured in an African war, escaped, and was able to wander around the African region. His account is full of adventure, interspersed with some fantasy, and it includes sufficiently accurate observations that professional historians consider this a credible source. Includes maps.
  237.  
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  239.  
  240.  
  241. Dapper, Olfert. Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Egypt, Barbary, Lybia and Billedulgerid. Translated by John Ogilby. London: Tho. Jonson, 1670.
  242.  
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  244.  
  245. Compiled by a 17th-century Dutch publisher from diverse sources, and illustrated with mostly realistic engravings based on eyewitness sketches, Dapper’s account includes extensive accounts of West Africa, the Guinea Coast, and western equatorial African coastal societies, including extensive detail and illustrations of the Loango and Kongo capitals and kingdoms. Offers the first systematic inventory of the coastal Kongo-Loango min’kisi. Originally published as Naukeurige Beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche Gewesten (Amsterdam: Wolfgang, Wassberge, Boom & van Sonnern, 1668). More recent editions are available in French, Description de l’Afrique (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970), and German, Beschreibung von Afrika (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1967).
  246.  
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  248.  
  249.  
  250. Graves-Johnson, Michael. “Early African Travel Literature.” 2011.
  251.  
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  253.  
  254. This bookseller’s website offers a valuable overview of early travel literature, especially English-language sources or translations.
  255.  
  256. Find this resource:
  257.  
  258.  
  259. Lopes, Duarte, and Filippo Pigafetta. A Report of the Kingdome of the Congo. New York: Da Capo, 1970.
  260.  
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  262.  
  263. Originally published in 1597. Lopes, a 16th-century merchant at Luanda, Boma, and Loango, became the Kongo king’s emissary to European capitals. His text and a map published by the Italian Filippo Pigafetta offered new knowledge of the interior of southern and Central Africa that replaced the Ptolemaic map of fictional rivers and “empty spots” on the landscape. Map of the Congo also appears in Abraham Ortelius, Ortelius Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp: Aegidius Coppenius Diesth, 1570).
  264.  
  265. Find this resource:
  266.  
  267.  
  268. Sanson, Nicolas. Royaume de Congo, & c. Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1656.
  269.  
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  271.  
  272. Valuable French account of the Kongo kingdom, particularly good description of technology, metallurgy, and agriculture. Includes a map “8 x 10.”
  273.  
  274. Find this resource:
  275.  
  276.  
  277. Maps
  278. Of the many maps that are available on the Kongo region, its history, and transatlantic diasporas, the following examples provide a cross-section available to the student and scholar. Thornton 1998 provides historic ethnonyms by century on the African continent as well as those found in New World sources. Vansina 1990 (cited under Language) offers an in-depth language genealogy reconstructions of basic Western Bantu words. In addition to the maps included in Vansina 1990, Thornton 1998, and Batsikama ba Mampuya 2009, Klemp 1970 and Tooley 1968 are bound collections found in most reference libraries that will give the scholar of the African diaspora a feel for the evolving cartography in the ages of exploration prior to the 20th century.
  279.  
  280. Batsikama ba Mampuya, Raphaël. Histoire du Royaume du Congo selon sa toponymie de Kinshasa. Paris: Harmattan, 2009.
  281.  
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  283.  
  284. The author, a postcolonial intellectual, sought to raise awareness of the importance of Kongo culture in this posthumous work edited by his grandson and homonym in explicating the origins and meanings of place names throughout the Lower Congo, namely, the Kongo kingdom.
  285.  
  286. Find this resource:
  287.  
  288.  
  289. Klemp, Egon. Africa on Maps Dating from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
  290.  
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  292.  
  293. Compilation of maps found in other sources; a useful beginning point to grasp the unfolding cartographic practices, conventions, and understandings of European sailors, scholars, and travelers.
  294.  
  295. Find this resource:
  296.  
  297.  
  298. Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  299.  
  300. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511800276Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  301.  
  302. Included in the preface is a series of toponymic charts or maps of West African and Central African locations of named historical nations and ethnic regions in the 17th and 18th centuries. A second set of maps identifies references to such national and ethnic entities as found in New World sources and self-identifications. See maps (pp. vii–xiv) and source notes for Maps 1–3 (pp. xv–xxxvi).
  303.  
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  305.  
  306.  
  307. Tooley, Ronald. Maps of Africa: A Selection of Printed Maps from the 16th to the 19th Centuries. London: Map Collector’s World, 1968.
  308.  
  309. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  310.  
  311. Similar to Klemp 1970, compiles maps of African regions in historic sequence, reflecting expanding knowledge of the continent, cartographic practices and conventions, and general public knowledge.
  312.  
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  314.  
  315.  
  316. Language
  317. The history of literacy in KiKongo spans five hundred years and has given rise to many language study resources, including dictionaries, grammars, and instructional manuals. Galensis 1928, a 17th-century KiKongo-Latin dictionary, is the earliest Bantu dictionary. Nsondé 1995 provides a study of historical language trends in KiKongo; Starr 1908 (cited under Reference Works and Journals) reviews 19th-century works on the languages of the Congo Basin. Bentley 1887, Laman 1964, and Swartenbroeckx 1973 offer dictionaries of southern, northern, and eastern dialects, respectively. Carter 1973 and Carter and Makoondekwa 1987 are relatively recent KiKongo grammar and teaching manuals. One of the marks of ancestral awareness in a diasporic community is the presence of the ancestral language, whether in single verbal concepts, phrases in rituals, or in the selective use of the language in conversation or as part of creolized speech. The following sources offer access to a range of dictionaries, grammars, and instructional resources. The findings of the “historical linguistic” approach to historical research is particularly useful to scholars wishing to identify deep threads of verbal concept linkages from diaspora contexts back to their ultimate origins in Old World developments. Vansina 1990 offers the best source for this kind of language resource.
  318.  
  319. Bentley, William Holman. Dictionary and a Grammar of the Kongo Language, as Spoken at San Salvador. London: Baptist Missionary Society, 1887.
  320.  
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  322.  
  323. Only Kikongo dictionary and grammar in English, written by a leading 19th-century British Baptist missionary scholar. Based on southern KiKongo of the San Salvador region in Angola.
  324.  
  325. Find this resource:
  326.  
  327.  
  328. Carter, Hazel. Syntax and Tone in Kongo (Zoombo). London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1973.
  329.  
  330. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331.  
  332. The main English-language grammar of KiKongo, somewhat out-of-date but still useful in understanding some of the intricacies of the language; focuses on KiZoombo, a southeast dialect of KiKongo.
  333.  
  334. Find this resource:
  335.  
  336.  
  337. Carter, Hazel, and Joao Makoondekwa. Kongo Language Course: Maloongi Makikoongo: A Course in the Dialect of Zoombo, Northern Angola. Publications in African Language Teaching 1. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
  338.  
  339. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  340.  
  341. Of several contemporary Kongo language manuals, the main one available in English.
  342.  
  343. Find this resource:
  344.  
  345.  
  346. Galensis, Georgius P. Le plus ancien dictionnaire bantu: Het oudste Bantu-woordenboek: Vocabularium p. Georgii Gelensis. Edited by Jan van Wing and C. Penders. Bibliothèque Congo series. Louvain, Belgium: J. Kuyl-Otto, 1928.
  347.  
  348. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  349.  
  350. This 18th-century Kikongo-Latin dictionary is the first ever produced of a Bantu language. Translated into the Belgian colonial languages of French and Flemish and interpreted by Belgian missionary ethnologist-linguists Jan van Wing and C. Penders. Of historical interest as well as a useful tool to trace the archaic uses of KiKongo that may have survived in New World settings.
  351.  
  352. Find this resource:
  353.  
  354.  
  355. Laman, K. E. (Karl Edvard). Dictionnaire kikongo-français, avec une étude phonétique décrivant les dialectes les plus importants de la langue dite kikongo. 2 vols. Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg, 1964.
  356.  
  357. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  358.  
  359. Most exhaustive KiKongo dictionary based on 23,000 notebook pages compiled by a catechist/ethnographer in listing responses to a set of questions posed by Laman at the turn of the 20th century. Reproduction of the Brussels, 1936 ed. Bibliographical references included in the introduction (Vol. 1, p. ix). Includes a map.
  360.  
  361. Find this resource:
  362.  
  363.  
  364. Nsondé, Jean de Dieu. Langues, culture et histoire Koongo aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: À travers les documents linguistiques. Preface by Jean Devisse. Paris: Harmattan, 1995.
  365.  
  366. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367.  
  368. A scholarly undertaking in the examination of historic KiKongo patterns.
  369.  
  370. Find this resource:
  371.  
  372.  
  373. Swartenbroeckx, Pierre. Dictionnaire kikongo-et kituba-français: Vocabulaire comparé des langages kongo traditionnels et véhiculaires. Bandundu, Democratic Republic of the Congo: CEEBA, 1973.
  374.  
  375. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  376.  
  377. For Francophone readers, easy to use because it builds all entries around verbal stems as core definition in KiKongo words. Includes a map.
  378.  
  379. Find this resource:
  380.  
  381.  
  382. Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rain Forests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
  383.  
  384. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  385.  
  386. The appendix (pp. 267–301) offers a list of 129 core verbal concepts of basic practices, institutions, and cultural realities that are traced to Proto-Bantu, Western Bantu, or more recent and localized developments using historical linguistic methods.
  387.  
  388. Find this resource:
  389.  
  390.  
  391. History of Western Equatorial Africa
  392. The scholar of the Kongo, or any other African, diaspora, requires a good set of historical works on Old World social, economic, political, and religious developments to grasp the sources of culture and behavior that may have been brought to the New World and transformed there into local or regional practices and institutions. The following sources are those available in English, or used by authors writing in English, and, therefore, they are somewhat more accessible to an Anglophone readership. The Cambridge History of Africa and the General History of Africa volumes (Fage and Oliver 1975–1986 and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization 1981–1993, both cited under Reference Works and Journals) offer the most authoritative and general entries into a topic that might be daunting to the novice researcher. Students are encouraged to consult readily available journals such as the Journal of African History and the International Journal of African Historical Studies (both cited under Reference Works and Journals).
  393.  
  394. Prehistoric
  395. An accounting of the history of western equatorial Africa and the Kongo region needs to recognize the deep history of social and cultural institutions, technology, and the human impact on the environment. Kongo society is situated within the regions encompassed by the Western Bantu expansion of food cultivation, which reached the Congo River region approximately 2,000 years ago, joining and then displacing hunter-gatherer societies. Scholarly sources that provide the English-reading scholar with an overview of this story include Bayle des Hermens 1981 for the Upper Paleolithic, van Noten 1981 for the Neolithic (revolution marked by food production) and Vansina 1990 for the story of the Bantu expansion, including the formation of kingdoms and the impact of the coastal trade and early colonialism. The latter work encompasses a collaborative effort of archaeological, ethnographic, and archival-historical sources, and it exemplifies, in particular, the “historical linguistic” method of genealogical reconstructions of language families.
  396.  
  397. de Bayle des Hermens, R. “The Prehistory of Central Africa.” In General History of Africa. Vol. 1, Methodology. Edited by Jacqueline Ki-Zerbo, 532–567. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
  398.  
  399. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  400.  
  401. Identifies the major Paleolithic sites and industries of the Kongo region.
  402.  
  403. Find this resource:
  404.  
  405.  
  406. van Noten, F. “Central Africa.” In General History of Africa. Vol. 2, Ancient Civilizations of Africa. Edited by G. Mokhtar, 620–638. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
  407.  
  408. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  409.  
  410. Reviews the upper Neolithic sites in the Kongo region and the transition to iron industries that marked the transition around 2,000 years ago to cultivation and sedentary communities associated with the Bantu expansion.
  411.  
  412. Find this resource:
  413.  
  414.  
  415. Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rain Forests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
  416.  
  417. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  418.  
  419. The single most inclusive and authoritative history of the broader region based on archival, ethnographic, archaeological, and historical linguistic reconstructions. Contains an extensive list of core verbs and terms in Western Bantu institutions identified historically following the “historical linguistic” method. Helpful maps in each chapter show historical linguistic evidence for historical changes, alongside archaeological, ethnographic, and archival records.
  420.  
  421. Find this resource:
  422.  
  423.  
  424. Precolonial
  425. The designation of “precolonial” Kongo history somewhat arbitrarily covers the period from the Portuguese arrival in Central Africa in the late 15th century until the establishment of the Congo Free State in 1885. Hilton 1985 provides a readable English introduction to the Kongo kingdom. Thornton 1983 concentrates on the civil wars of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Balandier 1968 attempts a sociological portrayal of daily life in the 18th-century Kongo kingdom. Martin 1972 gives a history of the impact of the coastal trade upon the Loango kingdom and should be studied together with Janzen 1982 (cited under Health and Healing), which documents and analyzes the trading network between the coast and the inland market of Mpumbu near today’s Kinshasa. Okeke 1997 is a lavishly colored reader on Kongo society targeted at the juvenile reader.
  426.  
  427. Balandier, Georges. Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1968.
  428.  
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  430.  
  431. Translation from the French original of a work by an eminent sociologist and Africanist; easy-to-read introduction to basic Kongo culture, foundations of the kingdom, contact and dealings with Europeans, and transformations leading to the disintegration of the kingdom. Attempts to feature the life of ordinary people in this elite-driven society.
  432.  
  433. Find this resource:
  434.  
  435.  
  436. Hilton, Anne. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford Studies in African Affairs. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
  437.  
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439.  
  440. A general overview of the history of the Kongo kingdom from its origins to its eventual demise.
  441.  
  442. Find this resource:
  443.  
  444.  
  445. Martin, Phyllis. The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576–1870: The Effects of Changing Commercial Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
  446.  
  447. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  448.  
  449. An accessible account of the internal affairs and external relations of the Loango kingdom north of the Congo River among the coastal Vili peoples. This work is particularly helpful in understanding the impact of the Atlantic trade upon the kingdom and the eventual collapse of the kingdom in the 18th century.
  450.  
  451. Find this resource:
  452.  
  453.  
  454. Okeke, Chika. Kongo. Heritage Library of African Peoples. New York: Rosen, 1997.
  455.  
  456. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  457.  
  458. A thin, richly illustrated, high school introductory text on Kongo culture and civilization that attempts to convey the richness of Kongo history and its encounters with global forces to North American youth. Provides a brief lexicon of KiKongo terms.
  459.  
  460. Find this resource:
  461.  
  462.  
  463. Thornton, John K. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
  464.  
  465. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  466.  
  467. Perhaps the most accessible English-language history of the Kongo kingdom during the critical period of its disintegration; offers good identification of published and unpublished primary sources in Italian, Latin, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and English archives.
  468.  
  469. Find this resource:
  470.  
  471.  
  472. Colonial
  473. The colonial history in the Kongo region includes consideration of the policies and practices in Portuguese Angola, French Equatorial Africa, the Congo Free State, and the Belgian Congo. Works offered provide but a brief introduction to those colonial experiences. Brausch 1986 provides an insider’s history of Belgian colonialism. Axelson 1970 offers a thoroughgoing critical history of colonialism in western equatorial Africa and of the work of Swedish missionaries who strove to offset colonial oppression in their educational, literacy, church and medical work. The narrative in Axelson 1970 is laced with many accounts of individuals, both European and African, acting within a confrontational setting, including accounts of resistance movements during the Free State’s attempts at labor recruitment and pacification of the region. Mahaniah 1975, written by a Congolese historian, provides an overview of prophetism as a tradition-based effort to resist the colonial and missionary presence. In Mahaniah 1993, the author details the impact on Kongolese prophetism of Garveyism, brought by North Americans to African workers in Léopoldville.
  474.  
  475. Axelson, Sigbert. Culture Confrontation in the Lower Congo: From the Old Congo Kingdom to the Congo Independent State with Special Reference to the Swedish Missionaries in the 1880s and 1890s. Stockholm: Gummesson, 1970.
  476.  
  477. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  478.  
  479. Accessible English-language rendering with emphasis on the Swedish role in the rising clash of cultures that began with King Mvemba Nzinga (Affonso) in the 16th century and that became pervasively destructive by the era of the Congo Free State. Swedish missions and missionaries were in a unique position to witness firsthand the impact of the Congo Free State upon Kongo society.
  480.  
  481. Find this resource:
  482.  
  483.  
  484. Brausch, Georges. Belgian Administration in the Congo. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.
  485.  
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487.  
  488. An administrator in the Belgian colonial government, the author sketches a history of the main policies and practices that were used to govern colonial Congo from 1908 until 1960. This history has been criticized by later reviewers for not sufficiently acknowledging the paternalism and racism implicit in Belgian policies. Originally published in 1961.
  489.  
  490. Find this resource:
  491.  
  492.  
  493. Mahaniah, Kimpianga. “The Background of Prophetic Movements in the Belgian Congo: A Study of the Congolese Reaction to the Policies and Methods of Belgian Colonization and to the Evangelization of the Lower Congo by Catholic and Protestant Missionaries, from 1877 to 1921.” PhD diss., Temple University, 1975.
  494.  
  495. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  496.  
  497. With a focus on religious protest in mostly Kongo society, where a tradition of prophetism (kingunza) goes back several centuries, the author is able to integrate in his analysis the tradition of visionary renewal as well as the colonial and missionary policies that prompted the emergence of major figures such as Simon Kimbangu, Andre Matswa, Mbumba Filippo, and others throughout the colonial period.
  498.  
  499. Find this resource:
  500.  
  501.  
  502. Mahaniah, Kimpianga. “The Presence of Black Americans in the Lower Congo from 1878–1921.” In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. 2d ed. Edited by Joseph E. Harris, 405–420. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.
  503.  
  504. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  505.  
  506. Explores colonial archives, personal interviews, and mission archives to identify Kongo individuals who were in contact with, and influenced by, African Americans who helped radicalize resistance against Belgian colonialism, including Kongo prophet Simon Kimbangu who launched the start of that effort in 1921 with the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth.
  507.  
  508. Find this resource:
  509.  
  510.  
  511. Culture and Society
  512. Historical and social science writing about Kongo society is mainly in French, Portuguese, and Flemish. Entries here feature the most widely cited and accessible English works (Laman 1953–1968, MacGaffey 1970, MacGaffey 2000, MacGaffey 2008, Friedman 1991, Mahaniah and Mazy 1983), and a few of the more dependable and readable French works (De Heusch 2000, van Wing 1959). Disciplinary and thematic boundaries are quite fluid; thus, many of the works cited in other sections, including History of Western Equatorial Africa, Religion, and Health and Healing, are relevant to this section. De Heusch 2000 is particularly strong in its depiction of the common features of a dualistic structure of authority, rooted, on the one hand, in nature and water spirits—the sacred monsters—and, on the other, in more secular sources of power such as the state and trade. MacGaffey 2000 offers an interpretation of these sources from Kongo writers and includes the author’s understanding of the relatively recent advent of matrilineal descent in Kongo and neighboring societies, which was brought about by the international slave trade as recently as the 18th century.
  513.  
  514. De Heusch, Luc. Le roi de Kongo et les monstres sacrés. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
  515.  
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  517.  
  518. This scholar of wider Central African society and history portrays the historical, social, and political structure of the Kongo region, particularly the cluster of kingdoms that had emerged along the Congo River and the Atlantic coast by the 12th century. He traces these experiments in centralization through their demise in the 18th and 19th centuries and, in a final chapter, the extension of these sociocultural models into Haiti and other New World settings.
  519.  
  520. Find this resource:
  521.  
  522.  
  523. Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm. Catastrophe and Creation: The Transformation of an African Culture. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1991.
  524.  
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  526.  
  527. An anthropological study with a focus on the displacements and oppressive rule of the Congo Free State upon Kongo society, and how communities and families sought to adapt by participating in Belgium’s eventual policy of indirect rule, mission education, Christianity, and embracing of the colonial/global capitalist economy.
  528.  
  529. Find this resource:
  530.  
  531.  
  532. Laman, Karel E. The Kongo. 4 vols. Uppsala, Sweden: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 1953–1968.
  533.  
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  535.  
  536. English translation of Laman’s Swedish ethnography manuscript based on the catechist/ethnographers’ notebooks and his own interpretation. Text is drawn from the catechists’ notebooks; organization of the four volumes follows Laman’s questionnaire. But, unfortunately, it is almost entirely devoid of contextual place identification (see Janzen 1972, cited under KiKongo Notebooks for an account and critique of this project).
  537.  
  538. Find this resource:
  539.  
  540.  
  541. MacGaffey, Wyatt. Custom and Government in the Lower Congo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
  542.  
  543. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  544.  
  545. An accessible English study of Mbanza Manteke, one community and region on the left bank of the Lower Congo, based on two years of fieldwork in the 1960s.
  546.  
  547. Find this resource:
  548.  
  549.  
  550. MacGaffey, Wyatt. Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
  551.  
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  553.  
  554. Work draws on extensive use of notebooks by Kongo catechist/ethnographers to reconstruct and analyze 19th-century political culture and the use of min’kisi. The rhetorical uses of violence offered 19th-century chiefs the means to exercise social control in the face of extensive social disintegration.
  555.  
  556. Find this resource:
  557.  
  558.  
  559. MacGaffey, Wyatt. “Kongo Slavery Remembered by Themselves: Texts from 1915.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 41.1 (2008): 55–76.
  560.  
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  562.  
  563. A reading drawing on the notebooks of Kongo catechist-ethnographers reveals original memory constructs and anecdotes about slavery and the international slave trade at a time when colonial rule was commencing. Slavery in these sources of Kongo writing is many different things and social features, not just one institution. Ways of becoming enslaved, too, were various, e.g., capture, transfer, hereditary, political “slippage, and loss of land.
  564.  
  565. Find this resource:
  566.  
  567.  
  568. Mahaniah, Kimpianga, and Kubuanu Mazy. Grandir et vieillir au Manianga: Époque et vie de Mbuta Mahania. Kinshasa, Zaire: Centre de Vulgarisation Agricole, 1983.
  569.  
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  571.  
  572. A Kongo scholar, teacher, administrator, and entrepreneur, Mahianiah has held various positions in Europe and the United States while founding a research and development center and the Free University of Luozi. This is a regional history of the colonial period through a biographical sketch of the author’s father, a prominent figure in the Swedish mission Svenskaförbundet, the Free State, and Belgian colonial government as well as in the colonial market economy.
  573.  
  574. Find this resource:
  575.  
  576.  
  577. van Wing, Joseph. Études Bakongo: Sociologie, religion et magie. 2d ed. Museum Lessianum. Section missiologique no. 39, 512p. Bruges, Belgium: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959.
  578.  
  579. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  580.  
  581. This Belgian Jesuit priest with a longstanding presence at Kisantu, among the BaMpangu group of BaKongo, provided the most authoritative portrayal of Kongo society and culture for generations of BaKongo intellectuals and foreign scholars, missionaries, and colonial administrators.
  582.  
  583. Find this resource:
  584.  
  585.  
  586. Religion
  587. Religion has elicited more interest both in Kongo circles and in the outside scholarly world than any other dimension of Kongo society and culture. The combination of such seemingly unlikely features in one tradition as startling min’kisi, prophets in trance, monotheism, ancestor cults, and various versions of Christianity, attracts curiosity seekers as well as serious scholars. Add to this the availability of documentary sources spanning five centuries, and this field becomes a veritable gold mine. Works presented here provide a sampling of English-language writings in this field. Janzen and MacGaffey 1974 presents an anthology of oral and written texts to show the underlying common features of Kongo religion. Bockie 1993 and Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki 2001 represent Kongolese authors with their analyses and syntheses of aspects of Kongo religion, the first on approaches to the world of the dead and the second to underlying structures and ideas of cosmological representation as found in rituals. Jacobson-Widding 1979 investigates the Kongo variant of the widespread color triad—red, white, black—in ritual, ceremony, and art. Three works represent the long tradition of Kongo prophetism: Thornton 1998 uses Capuchin accounts to reconstruct the emergence, trial for heresy, and martyrdom of Kongo prophetess Kimpa Vita in 1704, and the subsequent relegation to slavery of many of her adepts and their likely role in the Stono rebellion in South Carolina several decades later. Mahaniah 1975 provides an overview history of early colonial Kongo prophetism. Simbandumwe 1992 evaluates Kongo and Zulu prophetism in light of Old Testament prophetic writing. Finally, Martin 1975 offers a European believer’s apology and history of Kimbanguism, the largest independent African church. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article on African Christianity.
  588.  
  589. Bockie, Simon. Death and the Invisible Powers: The World of Kongo Belief. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
  590.  
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  592.  
  593. Kongo Manianga teacher, pastor, and now California librarian, writes about Kongo concepts of death and the dead as well as related stories recalled from his childhood.
  594.  
  595. Find this resource:
  596.  
  597.  
  598. Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki, Kimbwandènde. African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: Tying the Spiritual Knot: Principles of Life and Living. 2d ed. Brooklyn, NY: Athelia Henrietta Press, 2001.
  599.  
  600. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  601.  
  602. The original KiKongo version of N’kongo ye Nza yakunzungidila / Cosmogonie Kongo was written in 1969 in response to anthropologist J. M. Janzen’s questions and the author’s ideas about the structures and practices behind Kongo rituals and cultural organization. Decades later, the basic ideas of Nza-Kongo were reformulated in English as a life philosophy. Fu-kiau’s scheme of graphics and KiKongo etymological reconstructions have inspired a generation of students and scholars. Introduction by John M. Janzen, French translation by Raphael Mampuya.
  603.  
  604. Find this resource:
  605.  
  606.  
  607. Jacobson-Widding, Anita. Red—White—Black as a Mode of Thought: A Study of Triadic Classification by Colours in the Ritual Symbolism and Cognitive Thought of the Peoples of the Lower Congo. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1979.
  608.  
  609. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  610.  
  611. Based on her own fieldwork and on a careful reading of Laman’s English monograph, Jacobson-Widding demonstrates the full ramifications of the West and Central African color symbolism as a code for ritual and spiritual contemplation. Students of New World diasporic ritual may find this work a helpful source for interpretation.
  612.  
  613. Find this resource:
  614.  
  615.  
  616. Janzen, John M., and Wyatt MacGaffey. An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire. University of Kansas Publication in Anthropology 5. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974.
  617.  
  618. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  619.  
  620. Fifty-two oral and written texts, in translation, representing aspects of Kongo religion beginning with the pre-Christian and including the prophetic churches and those of mission Christianity. Discussion in the introduction of language features differentiating oral and written uses of KiKongo in religious contexts. Anthology has become a semi-sacred text in some circles among those pursuing an American Kongo spiritual quest.
  621.  
  622. Find this resource:
  623.  
  624.  
  625. Mahaniah, Kimpianga. “The Background of Prophetic Movements in the Belgian Congo: A Study of the Congolese Reaction to the Policies and Methods of Belgian Colonization and to the Evangelization of the Lower Congo by Catholic and Protestant Missionaries, from 1877 to 1921.” PhD diss., Temple University, 1975.
  626.  
  627. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  628.  
  629. Mahaniah’s dissertation provided the foundation for many of his later works in French and KiKongo on Lower Congo prophet-ngunzist movements. This text remains the most widely accessible work to an English-reading North American audience.
  630.  
  631. Find this resource:
  632.  
  633.  
  634. Martin, Marie-Louise. Kimbangu, an African Prophet and His Church. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975.
  635.  
  636. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  637.  
  638. Of the scores of writings on the Église du Christ sur la Terre par le Prophet Simon Kimbangu (EJCSK), Martin’s writing holds a special place because of her active defense of the church in European ecclesiastical circles. As both a scholar and a member of the church, she argued that it should be recognized as a fully-fledged member of global Protestantism.
  639.  
  640. Find this resource:
  641.  
  642.  
  643. Simbandumwe, Samuel S. A Socio-religious and Political Analysis of the Judeo-Christian Concept of Prophetism and Modern Bakongo and Zulu African Prophet Movements. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen, 1992.
  644.  
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  646.  
  647. In this comparative study of two leading African independent church traditions, among the Kongo and Zulu, Simbandumwe asserts that these movements have incorporated certain elements from biblical Christianity (and Judaism) to revitalize African religion along the lines of global legitimacy. Revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation (University of Edinburgh, 1989).
  648.  
  649. Find this resource:
  650.  
  651.  
  652. Thornton, John Kelly. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  653.  
  654. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511572791Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  655.  
  656. This work details the circumstances leading to, and following, the emergence of an 18th-century Kongo reformer and her martyrdom by Capuchin priests. Using her background as a Kimpasi initiate, and claiming revelation from St. Anthony, she sought to repopulate Mbanza Kongo and to reconcile King Pedro IV with the Mani of Soyo. This is a detailed account of the political upheaval that produced transatlantic slaves and the continuity of a political-religious revival. Includes a map.
  657.  
  658. Find this resource:
  659.  
  660.  
  661. Health and Healing
  662. As a result of long-term and recurrent epidemiological and demographic crises, health and healing have become one of the most dynamic areas of study in western equatorial African life and thought. The vibrant field of medicinal plant use, ritually enriched healing of individual and society, experimentation with social arrangements to assure health and well-being, and the introduction of Western biomedicine have all contributed to this field. Janzen 1982 provides a historical study ranging from the 17th to the 20th centuries of the public “drum of affliction,” n’kisi Lemba, that reconciled contradictions evoked by the inland trade between wealth accumulation and the collective clan community. MacGaffey 1991 identifies and explicates min’kisi held in Swedish collections. Mahaniah 1982 outlines the philosophical and social characteristics of Kongo healing. Janzen 1978 interprets the interaction between African forms of healing and biomedicine in North Kongo quests for healing. New World diaspora accounts of African medicine are provided in Covey 2007 as well as Carney and Rosomoff 2009 (cited under Landscape Ecologies, Plant Uses, and Significance).
  663.  
  664. Janzen, John M. The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
  665.  
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  667.  
  668. This work sketches the dynamic relationship between Kongo medicine and healing and biomedicine introduced by Europeans. Case studies reveal a pattern of “quest” for solutions to complex cases whose symptoms reveal invisible social and cognitive dimensions in the cause of the affliction. “Natural” versus “human-caused affliction” and “therapy management,” as presented in this work, are widespread in diaspora healing.
  669.  
  670. Find this resource:
  671.  
  672.  
  673. Janzen, John M. Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World. New York: Garland, 1982.
  674.  
  675. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  676.  
  677. Features the rise, spread, and eventual decline of a major n’kisi that dealt with the contradictions between the disintegrative forces of the international trade—in material commodities and slaves—and kin-based local societies in which exchange and common ownership of key resources was the dominant value. Lemba also emerged in the New World, as a set of deities in Brazilian Candomble, and as a cluster of loas with respect to the Petro or Congo side of voodoo in Haiti (see Haiti).
  678.  
  679. Find this resource:
  680.  
  681.  
  682. MacGaffey, Wyatt. Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented on by Themselves: Minkisi from the Laman Collection Kikongo Texts. Stockholm: Folkens Museum—Etnografiska, 1991.
  683.  
  684. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  685.  
  686. Classification of min’kisi in Swedish museums using Laman’s ethnographers’ notebooks, features texts in English translation.
  687.  
  688. Find this resource:
  689.  
  690.  
  691. Mahaniah, Kimpianga. La maladie et la guérison en milieu Kongo. Kinshasa, Zaire: Centre de Vulgarisation Agricole, 1982.
  692.  
  693. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  694.  
  695. Historian Mahaniah sketches the contours of the Kongo perception of sickness and healing in placing an emphasis on the social dimensions at play, including ancestors, lineage, community leaders, and prophets. His rendering of practices and knowledge in this realm represent a unique form of psycho- and sociotherapy that needs to be understood, cultivated, and promoted.
  696.  
  697. Find this resource:
  698.  
  699.  
  700. Art
  701. Kongo art in both the Old World and New World diasporas has evoked a vigorous interest on the part of Western collectors, scholars, and the general public, while in the Kongo homelands traditional arts have largely died out, although modern forms of art—painting and relief sculptures with a beaux-arts quality—are found in some settings. An exhibition catalogue, Cocksey, et al. 2013 exemplifies the interest in, and connoisseurship of Kongo art with respect to both its historic Old World traditions and the New World diaspora. Felix, et al. 1995 illustrates the style center analysis of Kongo art used by collectors and scholars. Lehuard 1989–1998 offers an example of intensive scholarship on one particular genre of traditional sculpture, the Pfemba maternity figures of the Mayombe. MacGaffey and Harris 1993 illuminates the genre of the n’kisi, both in its historic context and in its derivative artistic creativity. Thompson and Cornet 1981 brings the authors’ energetic creative scholarship to bear in a major exhibition of wide-ranging collections of Kongo art.
  702.  
  703. Cocksey, Susan, Robin Poynor, and Hein Vanhee. Kongo across the Waters. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.
  704.  
  705. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  706.  
  707. Catalogue and essays for an exhibition of Kongo works in Africa and the Americas, as well as Kongo in contemporary art, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the first free Kongo influenced black settlement in the New World, at Mose, near Saint Augustine, Florida.
  708.  
  709. Find this resource:
  710.  
  711.  
  712. Felix, Marc Leo, Charles Meur, and Niangi Batulukis. Art & Kongos: Les peuples kongophones et leur sculpture (Biteki bia Bakongo). Brussels: Art History Research Center, 1995.
  713.  
  714. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  715.  
  716. Kongo sculpture presented in stylistic distribution maps associated with the subethnicities, e.g., Yombe, Vili, Nsundi, Mpangu, etc.
  717.  
  718. Find this resource:
  719.  
  720.  
  721. Lehuard, Raoul. Arts d’Afrique noire: T. 55 (Supplement) Art Bakongo: Les centres de style. 4 vols. Arnouville, France: Arts d’Afrique Noire, 1989–1998.
  722.  
  723. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  724.  
  725. Special issue of French African art journal devoted to all types of “traditional” Kongo art, with attention to stylistic centers.
  726.  
  727. Find this resource:
  728.  
  729.  
  730. MacGaffey, Wyatt, and Michael D. Harris. Astonishment and Power. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
  731.  
  732. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  733.  
  734. Exhibition catalogue featuring the juxtaposition of a historical-ethnographic presentation of Kongo min’kisi with the 20th-century work of an African-American artist whose pieces resemble Kongo min’kisi. MacGaffey’s introduction to Kongo min’kisi features Kongo ethnographers working with Karl Laman at the turn of the 20th century and a list of key concepts in Kongo religion and society.
  735.  
  736. Find this resource:
  737.  
  738.  
  739. Thompson, Robert Farris, and Joseph Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981.
  740.  
  741. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  742.  
  743. Catalogue of large exhibition of Kongo art from the collections of the National Museum of Zaire, curated by Thompson and then director Joseph Cornet. Exhibition title plays up the double entendre of “two worlds,” both the visible human world and the world of spirits, as well as Kongo art in Old World and the New World diasporas. Includes a map.
  744.  
  745. Find this resource:
  746.  
  747.  
  748. Kongo Diaspora Sites and Traces
  749. This section features the most prominent settlements derived from western equatorial Africa, found, respectively, within the colonial regions of Portugal (Brazil), England (Jamaica), France (Haiti), Spain (Cuba), and sites within the United States. These sites are suggestive and may be expanded significantly to the entire New World. The overview sources included here suggest that interdisciplinary perspectives, including linguistic, social, historical, economic, and musical analyses, are appropriate, and such perspectives will be taken up in the final sections under the heading of Themes in Kongo-Transatlantic Research. Dianteill 2002 and García 1995 result from museum exhibitions; Lienhard 2001 is a collection of slave narratives from the Lusophone world, translated into French; Monroe 2003 presents the proceedings of a conference on African–Latin American cultural-historical connections; Warner-Lewis 2006 reviews Central African traces and practices in the Caribbean; Fennell 2007 is an analytical synthesis seeking to compare identity formation in diasporas.
  750.  
  751. Dianteill, Erwan. “Les Amériques Kongo, Brésil, Cuba, Haiti.” In Le geste Kongo. Edited by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, 185–197. Paris: Musée Dapper, 2002.
  752.  
  753. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  754.  
  755. A catalogue based on art that features the dynamic character and retained bodily memory of gestures, whether from dance, rhetoric, or simply emotional reflections.
  756.  
  757. Find this resource:
  758.  
  759.  
  760. Fennell, Christopher C.. Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
  761.  
  762. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  763.  
  764. Compares African diasporas such as the BaKongo, Yoruba, Fon, and other immigrant groups of European origin to explore modes of symbolic expression, formation and maintenance of social group identities, and individual creativity to account for the past creation and use of material expressions of core symbols within the diasporas. The notion of “ethnogenic bricolage” is introduced to analyze these cultural developments.
  765.  
  766. Find this resource:
  767.  
  768.  
  769. García, Jesús Alberto. La diaspora de los kongos en las Américas y los Caribes. Caracas, Venezuela: Dirección de Desarrollo Regional de la Fundación Afroamericana, 1995.
  770.  
  771. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  772.  
  773. An overview in Spanish of Kongo diasporas in the Americas and the Caribbean.
  774.  
  775. Find this resource:
  776.  
  777.  
  778. Lienhard, Martin. Le discours des esclaves de l’Afrique à l’Amérique latine: Kongo, Angola, Brésil, Caraibes. Paris: Harmattan, 2001.
  779.  
  780. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  781.  
  782. An example of the growing body of literature from the voices of slaves; a collection of slave narratives translated from Portuguese into French by Beatriz Lienhard-Fernández and the author. Preface by Emmanuel B. Dongala.
  783.  
  784. Find this resource:
  785.  
  786.  
  787. Monroe, Alicia L. On the Africa-Latin America Workshop for Transatlantic and African Diaspora Research. 2003.
  788.  
  789. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  790.  
  791. The proceedings of a conference sponsored by the African Studies Center at the University of Kansas to explore the linkages between Africa and Latin America.
  792.  
  793. Find this resource:
  794.  
  795.  
  796. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures. Kingston, Jamaica: Universities of the West Indies Press, 2006.
  797.  
  798. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  799.  
  800. Traces Kongo, Mbundu, and Ovimbundu cultural continuities and their linguistic identities in the Caribbean, through extensive literature reviews and fieldwork.
  801.  
  802. Find this resource:
  803.  
  804.  
  805. Brazil
  806. Long in the orbit of Portuguese colonialism, Brazil was the destination of several million Central Africans, and it served as the setting of a range of African-Brazilian cultural manifestations. Many quilombos—escaped maroon settlements in the interior—were able to reestablish African institutions and practices, as illustrated in Karasch 2002 and Abrams 2006, or, as in Slenes 2002, practices and interpretations of natural phenomena that demonstrated continuing African significance. The largest, Palmares, existed as a veritable nation for a century before being conquered in the 19th century. Sweet 2003 establishes deep Mbundu cultural continuities in Brazil from the 15th to 17th centuries; whereas Ferreira 2012 offers evidence of the Angola-Brazil slave trade transforming African institutions within a closely knit Atlantic social world. In coastal urban settings, African-Brazilian religious movements—Candomble, Umbanda—provide a dynamic performance setting for many African traditions and named rituals or deities (see Byrne 2004). A host of Afro-Brazilian festivals have become part of Carnival and other celebrative cycles, as seen in Kiddy 2002. The readings in this section offer mainly case studies drawing on Kongo (or West Central Africa) and two recently produced films in English (Byrne 2004, Abrams 2006).
  807.  
  808. Abrams, Leonard, dir.. Quilombo Country: Afrobrazilian Villages in the 21st Century. DVD. New York: Moving Eye Productions, 2006.
  809.  
  810. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  811.  
  812. Offers a brief historical background of Maroon African settlements and features interviews with residents in several northern Brazilian quilombos, how they have claimed their long-occupied lands under Brazil’s constitution, how they make a living, and what they do to retain their distinctive identity.
  813.  
  814. Find this resource:
  815.  
  816.  
  817. Byrne, David, dir. Ilé Aiyé, 1989. DVD. New York: Plexifilm, 2004.
  818.  
  819. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  820.  
  821. An artistic filming of Candomble in Brazil; most of the dances and deities depicted are West African, although more thorough ethnographies of Candomble, such as Bastide, give ample evidence of the Kongo and Angolan deities alongside those from Dahomey, Yoruba, and those representing Catholic Christianity.
  822.  
  823. Find this resource:
  824.  
  825.  
  826. Ferreira, Roquinaldo. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  827.  
  828. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139025096Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  829.  
  830. Reconstructing biographies of Africans and merchants, Ferreira demonstrates how cross-cultural trade, identity formation, religious ties, and resistance to slaving were central to the formation of the Atlantic world. The book illustrates how Atlantic slaving transformed key African institutions.
  831.  
  832. Find this resource:
  833.  
  834.  
  835. Karasch, Mary C. “Central Africans in Central Brazil, 1780–1835.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 117–152. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  836.  
  837. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  838.  
  839. Reviews historical records of slave origins and identities in central Brazil.
  840.  
  841. Find this resource:
  842.  
  843.  
  844. Kiddy, Elizabeth W. “Who Is the King of Congo? A New Look at African and Afro-Brazilian Kings in Brazil.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 153–182. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  845.  
  846. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  847.  
  848. An example of continued recognition of Kongo statehood in Brazilian festivals.
  849.  
  850. Find this resource:
  851.  
  852.  
  853. Schwegler, Armin. “Chi ma nkongo”: Lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia). 2 vols. Preface by German de Granda. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1996.
  854.  
  855. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  856.  
  857. Study of a historic enclave community in Brazil that recognizes its Kongo ancestry.
  858.  
  859. Find this resource:
  860.  
  861.  
  862. Slenes, Robert W. “The Great Porpoise-Skull Strike: Central African Water Spirits and Slave Identity in Early Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 183–210. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  863.  
  864. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  865.  
  866. A Brazilian historian presents and interprets an incident reflecting the reality of water spirits among 19th-century slaves in Central Africa.
  867.  
  868. Find this resource:
  869.  
  870.  
  871. Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
  872.  
  873. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  874.  
  875. Specific Mbundu rituals and cultural constructs identified with verbal concepts provide evidence of a living cultural world among Brazilian Africans in the 15th to 17th centuries. Rejects premise of creolization in all Portuguese territories in favor of a carefully documented continuity of cultural practices tied to identity.
  876.  
  877. Find this resource:
  878.  
  879.  
  880. Jamaica
  881. Kongo-Jamaican communities originated mainly from British freed slaves in the 19th century, who were given landholdings in British territories as indentured communities on colonial estates. Schuler 1980 and Schuler 2002 offer excellent linguistic material to demonstrate continuing Kongo practices and identities. Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki 1983 and Lewin 2000, written by a folklorist, analyze the Kumina ritual in Jamaica as an example of continued Kongo expression.
  882.  
  883. Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki, Kimbwandènde. Kumina: A Kongo-Based Tradition in the New World. Brussels: Centre d’Étude et de Documentation Africaines, 1983.
  884.  
  885. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  886.  
  887. A study of the songs and language features, and other aspects, of one of the most common Kongo-derived rituals of Jamaican communities.
  888.  
  889. Find this resource:
  890.  
  891.  
  892. Lewin, Olive. Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2000.
  893.  
  894. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  895.  
  896. Deals with Kumina music and ritual in Jamaica.
  897.  
  898. Find this resource:
  899.  
  900.  
  901. Schuler, Monica. “Alas, Alas Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
  902.  
  903. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  904.  
  905. A historical ethnography of Jamaican settlers of Kongo origin, with a focus on language retention and naming practices.
  906.  
  907. Find this resource:
  908.  
  909.  
  910. Schuler, Monica. “Liberated Central Africans in Nineteenth-Century Guyana.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 319–352. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  911.  
  912. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  913.  
  914. Utilizes analyses in a Guyana African Maroon community similar to those used in Jamaica to demonstrate Central African identities and practices.
  915.  
  916. Find this resource:
  917.  
  918.  
  919. Haiti
  920. Western Central African influences are prominent in all aspects of Haitian life, juxtaposed with other West African as well as French colonial influences. Much scholarly interest has focused on how the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th century shaped developments in the 19th century, when the impact of French authority waned and Haitians were free to shape their own civilization. Fick 1990 provides a new look at the role of maroons (escaped slaves) and the masses in the Haitian Revolution. MacGaffey 2002 presents Kongo religious elements and how they have become integrated into Haitian voodoo as laws. Montilus 1993 examines the internal Haitian debate over “Guinea versus Congo” influences and how they were mixed or synthesized. Vanhee 2002, Rey 2002, and De Heusch 1989 continue the discussion over the presence in Haitian voodoo of elements of Christian ritual. Herskovits 1937 provides an early ethnography of a Haitian village by a scholar who also studied Dahomean society, the source of much of voodoo ceremonialism. The power of Haitian dance has attracted the attention of scholars Maya Deren and Katherine Dunham, giving rise to the famous film Divine Horsemen” (Deren 1983, Deren 2005) as well as the work The Dances of Haiti (Dunham 1983), and to a follow-up analysis, Fischer-Hornung 2008, on this now classic film work by Deren and Dunham.
  921.  
  922. Aboudja. Traditional Music of Haiti Series, Vol. 1: Soukri. CD. New York: Crowing Rooster Arts, 1997.
  923.  
  924. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  925.  
  926. Soukri, located 13 kilometers north of Gonaïves, is a lakou where the Kongo ritual inherited from the ancestors prevails: First, on 5 January to honor Bazou Mennen Wa Dewongol, who symbolizes the father of all the Kongo Lwa, and, second, from 13 August through the first week of September, to honor Manbo Inan, the mother of all Kongo lwa.
  927.  
  928. Find this resource:
  929.  
  930.  
  931. De Heusch, Luc. “Kongo in Haiti: A New Approach to Religious Syncretism.” Man 24.2 (1989): 290–303.
  932.  
  933. DOI: 10.2307/2803307Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  934.  
  935. A translation of De Heusch’s final chapter in his Le roi de Kongo et les monstres sacrés (see De Heusch 2000, cited under Culture and Society); reviews French sources of the late 17th to 19th centuries of the peopling of Haiti, recognizing the influx of Kongo slaves in the late 18th century. The syncretism mentioned is that between Rada (Dahomean) and Petro (Kongo) influences represented in voodoo rites. Catholic Christian elements in voodoo derive from the baptism of all slaves in French plantations before the Haitian Revolution. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  936.  
  937. Find this resource:
  938.  
  939.  
  940. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. New York: McPherson, 1983.
  941.  
  942. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  943.  
  944. A monographic account of the religious and aesthetic background of Haitian voodoo dances. Originally published in 1953.
  945.  
  946. Find this resource:
  947.  
  948.  
  949. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1985. DVD. Montauk, NY: Mystic Fire Video, 2005.
  950.  
  951. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  952.  
  953. Deren’s footage from 1947 to 1951 features the distinctive dances of the various loas, and of the “action de grace” segment of the Catholic mass within voodoo. The film sequences of loa possessions are driven by her aesthetic motivation to highlight the dynamic power of Haitian dance.
  954.  
  955. Find this resource:
  956.  
  957.  
  958. Dunham, Katherine. Dances of Haiti. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
  959.  
  960. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  961.  
  962. Offers a sophisticated view of Haitian voodoo rituals as performance art.
  963.  
  964. Find this resource:
  965.  
  966.  
  967. Fick, Carolyn. The Making Haiti: The Saint Dominque Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
  968.  
  969. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  970.  
  971. A history of the Haitian Revolution with a special focus on the role of Maroons and the masses in making Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership successful.
  972.  
  973. Find this resource:
  974.  
  975.  
  976. Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea. “Transbodied/Transcultured: Moving Spirits in Katherine Dunham’s and Maya Deren’s Caribbean.” In Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections. Edited by Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi, 197–224. Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies 1. New York: Routledge, 2008.
  977.  
  978. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  979.  
  980. Reviews the careers and work of these two prominent dancers, scholars, and filmmakers with particular reference to their focus on the dances and rituals of Haitian voodoo. This essay situates them in the context of historical, anthropological, and contemporary dance and film scholarship.
  981.  
  982. Find this resource:
  983.  
  984.  
  985. Herskovits, Melville. Life in a Haitian Village. New York: Knopf, 1937.
  986.  
  987. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  988.  
  989. Situates in a fuller ethnography the structure of voodoo ritual, demonstrating the dual influence of Kongo (Petro) rituals and Dahomean (Rada) rituals, and the choreographic positioning of the “Action de Grace” Catholic mass within the entire complex.
  990.  
  991. Find this resource:
  992.  
  993.  
  994. MacGaffey, Wyatt. “Twins, Simbi Spirits, and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 211–226. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  995.  
  996. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  997.  
  998. Traces the deep connection between Kongo religion and the named figures in Haitian religion, the lwas of voodoo possession.
  999.  
  1000. Find this resource:
  1001.  
  1002.  
  1003. Montilus, Guerin C. “Guinea versus Congo Lands: Aspects of the Collective Memory in Haiti.” In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. 2d ed. Edited by Joseph Harris, 159–165. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.
  1004.  
  1005. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1006.  
  1007. Explores the memory and stereotypic myth-making in the popular Haitian identities of “Guinea”—neg Ginin—and “Congo”—neg Congo—and the shifting meanings of these constructs in Haitian popular language and consciousness.
  1008.  
  1009. Find this resource:
  1010.  
  1011.  
  1012. Rey, Terry. “Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism: A Sociohistorical Exploration.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 265–288. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  1013.  
  1014. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1015.  
  1016. Also argues that historical evidence suggests that Catholic Christian elements in Haitian voodoo are from the early Kongo Christianity brought to Haiti by Kongo slaves in the 18th century.
  1017.  
  1018. Find this resource:
  1019.  
  1020.  
  1021. Vanhee, Hein. “Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 243–264. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  1022.  
  1023. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1024.  
  1025. Presents historical evidence and argues that the Catholic Christian elements in Haitian voodoo are from the early Kongo Christianization brought to Haiti by Christianized Kongo slaves in the 18th century.
  1026.  
  1027. Find this resource:
  1028.  
  1029.  
  1030. Cuba
  1031. Cuba was settled by Spanish colonists who brought slaves from across West and Central Africa. Later, these groups were joined by an inflow of Spanish-speaking Central Africans fleeing the southeastern United States when the United States conquered the Spanish enclave of Saint Augustine. Free Africans fled to Cuba while others joined Native American groups such as the Seminoles, Cherokee, and Creek. Among these new Cubans and black Seminoles were some BaKongo. In Cuba, the Palo Kongo or Palo Mayombe religion thrived. Granda Guitterez 1973–1974 offers a linguistic analysis of Kongo influences in Cuba. Landers 2002 provides a picture of Kongo enclaves in Cuba and other Spanish territories. Ochoa 2010 offers the most accessible and thorough account of Kongo-Cuban religion based on extensive field research in Havana and the countryside. The Cuban national television film Nganga Kiyangala presents videofilm portrayals of Afro-Cuban worship and healing.
  1032.  
  1033. Quiñones, Tato, and Luis A. Soto, prods. Nganga Kiyangala: Sobre la religion de los Congos en Cuba. VHS. New York: International Media Resource Exchange, 1991.
  1034.  
  1035. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1036.  
  1037. Produced by Cuban Television, Cuban anthropologists introduce African religion in Cuba, with a special focus on Congo and the nganga kiyangala, a particular nganga of Palo who performs with several prenda-altars.
  1038.  
  1039. Find this resource:
  1040.  
  1041.  
  1042. Granda Gutiérrez, Germán de. De la matrice africaine de la langue congo de Cuba: Recherches préliminaires. Publications du Centre de Hautes Études afro-ibéro-américaines de l’Université de Dakar 19. Dakar, Senegal: Université de Dakar, 1973–1974.
  1043.  
  1044. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1045.  
  1046. A linguistic study of the origins of the Kongo language in Cuban enclaves.
  1047.  
  1048. Find this resource:
  1049.  
  1050.  
  1051. Landers, Jane. “The Central African Presence in Spanish Maroon Communities.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 242–264. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  1052.  
  1053. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1054.  
  1055. Reviews Maroon communities in Cuba and other Spanish territories.
  1056.  
  1057. Find this resource:
  1058.  
  1059.  
  1060. Ochoa, Todd Ramon. Society of the Dead: Nkita Mana Nkita and Palo Praise in Cuba. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
  1061.  
  1062. DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520256835.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1063.  
  1064. The most exhaustive investigation available of Kongo-Cuban religion, based on field research undertaken over several years in and around Havana together with several priests. Reveals the adaptive strategies of Palo adherents vis-à-vis Christianity and Judaism in the quest for credible religious reality.
  1065.  
  1066. Find this resource:
  1067.  
  1068.  
  1069. United States
  1070. Western Central African influence in American society is concentrated in both local settings—in coastal Georgia (Brown 2002, Brown 2012) and the Carolinas (Young 2007), in plantations across the South (Covey 2007), in the history of New Orleans and in archaeological sites on former plantations (Fennel 2003)—and, with respect to folk art, across the entire country (Thompson 1983). Thornton 1991 traces the influence of Kongo prophetism upon the 1730 Stono rebellion in South Carolina. Holloway 1990 offers a useful first entry into this vast topic, including several chapters on Kongo-specific features.
  1071.  
  1072. Brown, Ras Michael. “‘Walk in the Feenda’: West-Central Africans and the Forest in the South Carolina-Georgia Lowcountry.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 289–318. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  1073.  
  1074. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1075.  
  1076. Reports on and interprets an important activity in traditional Kongo men, working in their forests, here captured with the phrase used by Lowcountry men with regard to their domain.
  1077.  
  1078. Find this resource:
  1079.  
  1080.  
  1081. Brown, Ras Michael. African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  1082.  
  1083. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139162241Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1084.  
  1085. Examines the role of religious imagery, particularly of the Kongo simbi nature spirits, and landscape in the evolving identity of Lowcountry inhabitants.
  1086.  
  1087. Find this resource:
  1088.  
  1089.  
  1090. Covey, Herbert. African-American Slave Medicine: Herbal and Non-herbal Treatments. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007.
  1091.  
  1092. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1093.  
  1094. Although the main focus of this work is on the medicine practiced in plantation slave communities, both extensive plants and “conjuring” rituals, the use of narratives of former slaves undertaken under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration served as the basis for data on medicine and healing and should be of interest to researchers.
  1095.  
  1096. Find this resource:
  1097.  
  1098.  
  1099. Fennell, Christopher C. “Group Identity, Individual Creativity, and Symbolic Generation in a BaKongo Diaspora.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7.1 (March 2003): 1–31.
  1100.  
  1101. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1102.  
  1103. Analyzes three archaeological sites—in Virginia, Maryland, and Texas—as possible Kongo altars; a case study in advancing the more ambitious project of Fennell 2007 (cited under General Overviews). Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1104.  
  1105. Find this resource:
  1106.  
  1107.  
  1108. Holloway, Joseph E., ed. Africanisms in American culture. Blacks in the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
  1109.  
  1110. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1111.  
  1112. Provides widely recorded examples of Africanisms in American culture as well as case studies of more narrowly identified cultural continua, such as Thompson’s work on Kongo influences on African-American artistic culture.
  1113.  
  1114. Find this resource:
  1115.  
  1116.  
  1117. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983.
  1118.  
  1119. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1120.  
  1121. Traces themes of Kongo religion and ritual in the New World with a comparison to other African traditions. The Kongo cosmogram is seen as the leading icon of Kongo identity, manifesting itself in Haitian voodoo, min’kisi such as Palo Mayombe in Cuba, and tomb art in the Caribbean, the Carolina coast, other regions of the US South, and in modern African-American art.
  1122.  
  1123. Find this resource:
  1124.  
  1125.  
  1126. Thornton, John K. “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” American Historical Review 96.4 (October 1991): 1101–1113.
  1127.  
  1128. DOI: 10.2307/2164997Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1129.  
  1130. Introduces evidence to suggest that the 1730 Stono rebellion, South Carolina’s largest slave insurrection, was launched by partisans of Kongo prophetess Dona Beatrice (Kimpa Vita), many of whom were sold into slavery after the 1704 execution of their leader and following the unsuccessful bid to reunite the Kongo kingdom. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1131.  
  1132. Find this resource:
  1133.  
  1134.  
  1135. Young, Jason. Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.
  1136.  
  1137. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1138.  
  1139. A study of historical and contemporary examples in the Lowcountry of resistance in permitted and clandestine rituals, including funerals, burials, worship services, and songs.
  1140.  
  1141. Find this resource:
  1142.  
  1143.  
  1144. Themes in Kongo-Transatlantic Research
  1145. The seven synthesizing themes listed in this section are only suggestive of the ways that Atlantic African diaspora research may track Old World characteristics and trends as they reappear in the New World. In teaching Kongo religion and ritual, both Old and New Worlds, it is wise to avoid giving students off-the-shelf notions such as “syncretism,” “creolization,” and “hybridity,” or Thornton’s “parallel revelation,” too quickly because they are so easily seduced by these models of cultural fusion and transformation. Authors cited here demonstrate more sophisticated approaches that are usually rooted in historical research, interdisciplinary analysis, and a comparative assessment of traditions.
  1146.  
  1147. Narratives, Verbal Categories, Lexical Inventories, Names, and Genealogies
  1148. The most important indicator of western equatorial African cultural specificity—Kongo or other—in all of these New World diaspora settings is the presence of words, phrases, names, songs, and stories that show up in everyday usages or are performed in rituals in which the earlier meaning has been retained either in literal or esoteric form (see Sweet 2003). Short epithets, songs, and stories told in connection with recurring events or rituals are the strongest indicator of self-conscious agency. Musical lyrics, whether in ancestral rituals or in art songs, may elevate vague popular consciousness into the vivid awareness of tradition revitalized (see Boukman Eksperyans 1992, Foula Vodoule 1999). Where words and phrases are retained and reiterated but have lost their meaning, the discerning ear of a scholar who knows the ancestral language may be able to piece together its earlier context (e.g., Schuler 1980, Schuler 2002, cited under Jamaica). In some cases, a term of great importance is conveyed within a ritual but the historic context and exact earlier meaning is lost. Frequently KiKongo or a related western equatorial African language is mixed with other African languages, or the languages are creolized with French, Spanish, English, or Portuguese. Fortunately, authors in recent publications (e.g., Heywood 2002, cited under General Overviews) pay attention to the African-rooted language used in New World contexts. Vansina 1990 (cited under Prehistoric) offers scholars of New World African diaspora cultures an invaluable systematic historical sketch of the core western equatorial African verbal concepts and words in tracing the course of their evolution up until the 20th century.
  1149.  
  1150. Boukman Eksperyans. Kalfou Danjere. CD. New York: Island Records, 1992.
  1151.  
  1152. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1153.  
  1154. Lyrics in this album from the Soukri region of Haiti retain memory of Angola and Kongo. The song “Mayi a gaye” includes the following: “Wangòl o, ou ale. Kilè ou ap vini wè m ankò, ou ale. Peyi a chanje [Wangòl, you’re going. When are you going to come see me again? You’re going. The country has changed.]” This group has another song, the refrain of which is “Kongo. Kongo doesn’t bother me. You’re calling me Kongo to embarrass me. Maybe you want me to hate myself.”
  1155.  
  1156. Find this resource:
  1157.  
  1158.  
  1159. Foula Vodoule. Ede Ti Moun Yo. 1999.
  1160.  
  1161. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1162.  
  1163. Lyrics are a play on African identities in Haiti: “We are Nago people. We are Kongo people.”
  1164.  
  1165. Find this resource:
  1166.  
  1167.  
  1168. Sweet, James. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
  1169.  
  1170. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1171.  
  1172. Specific Mbundu rituals and cultural practices identified by African verbal categories—e.g., quiludo, nganga Nzambi, nganga was, canza, atabaque, engoma, mpembe—in Portuguese accounts offer vivid evidence of continuity of consciousness, of agency, in the Atlantic passage and resettlement in Brazil.
  1173.  
  1174. Find this resource:
  1175.  
  1176.  
  1177. Landscape Ecologies, Plant Uses, and Significance
  1178. Kongo methods and manners of relating to the natural world show up in New World counterparts, especially when slaves escaped their confinement early after crossing the Atlantic and were able to establish their own settlements in environments resembling their earlier homes, e.g., the more than 200 quilombos of the Brazilian rain forest or the Georgian islands and coasts of North America. Carney and Rosomoff 2009 provides a solid scholarly literature on the African botanical legacy in the New World. BaKongo attitudes and concepts of the natural world combine pragmatic knowledge of gardening, use of plants in the forests and savanna and of the animals and birds, with a spiritual orientation that recognizes the powers of natural materials and living things and their manifestation of the spirit world—bisimbi and binkita water and nature spirits, Mbumba Nlangu the rainbow serpent, Bunzi the earth spirit, and the earth embracing waters of Kalunga as well as Nzambi-Mpungu. These names crop up in many places in association either with rituals or with sacred places and spirits, e.g., Brown 2002 (cited under United States) to walk in the feenda (forest). The nsanda fig tree, recognized in Kongo and Brazil as a harbinger of water and of an auspicious settlement site, offers another example of ecological continuity. Compare Janzen 1978 (p. 163) and Janzen 2003 with Slenes 2005 for similar uses of the nsanda tree. Thornton 1998 (see Religion) shows that the more spiritual side of the nsanda is present in the life and work of Kimpa Vita, the 18th-century prophetess The nsanda was the source of the bark cloth crown she and her principal adepts wore and also served as an indicator that she was attuned to simbi spirits. The importance of mfinda and nsanda as referents to forest and trees should alert scholars to the possibilities inherent in the even more powerful symbol of the makulu ancestral forest, an ancient village turned cemetery. One might also extend this examination of the plant world to healing and the use of medicinal plants by comparing Kongo herbaria (e.g., Janzen 1978) with New World herbaria (e.g., Covey 2007).
  1179.  
  1180. Carney, Judith A., and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
  1181.  
  1182. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1183.  
  1184. An extensive review of literature and research concerning plant knowledge, use, and adaptation in New World settings among African diaspora communities.
  1185.  
  1186. Find this resource:
  1187.  
  1188.  
  1189. Covey, Herbert. African-American Slave Medicine: Herbal and Non-herbal Treatments. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007.
  1190.  
  1191. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1192.  
  1193. Provides a record of plantation slavery and the knowledge of plant uses based on research that entailed interviews of former slaves undertaken by the Works Progress Administration during 1930s.
  1194.  
  1195. Find this resource:
  1196.  
  1197.  
  1198. Janzen, John M. The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
  1199.  
  1200. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1201.  
  1202. Of particular importance in this discussion is the appendix presenting the landscape map and herbarium identifications of nganga nkisi Nzoamambu Oscar of Mbanza Mwembe, Territory of Luozi, Lower Congo.
  1203.  
  1204. Find this resource:
  1205.  
  1206.  
  1207. Janzen, John M., and Edward Green. “Continuity, Change, and Challenge in African Medicine.” In Medicine across Cultures: History and Practice of Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Edited by Helaine Selin, 1–26. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.
  1208.  
  1209. DOI: 10.1007/0-306-48094-8Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1210.  
  1211. Features a herbarium map of all plantings in Kumbi village, Kivunda Secteur, North Manianga, Lower Congo, with nsanda shown as the opening plant and first on the map list recorded by Mabanza Philippe in 1969.
  1212.  
  1213. Find this resource:
  1214.  
  1215.  
  1216. Slenes, Robert W. “The Nsanda Tree Transplanted: Kongo Cults of Affliction and Slave Identity in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.” Paper presented at Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, 17 May 2005.
  1217.  
  1218. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1219.  
  1220. Research paper based on original archival and field research in Brazil, demonstrating role of nsanda tree in revival and resistance rituals.
  1221.  
  1222. Find this resource:
  1223.  
  1224.  
  1225. Techniques, Technologies, and Artifacts in Food Production and Warfare
  1226. The art of metallurgy has been noted in many historical sources about the Lower Congo and societies of the region. It is prominent in accounts of Kongo regional courts and dealings. Archaeological records and linguistic historical calculations (Vansina 1990, cited under History of Western Equatorial Africa: Prehistoric) indicate that ironworking reached the mouth of the Congo River region about 400 CE, replacing stone tools in the basic tool kit of the Western Bantu-speaking societies. Iron and copper were mined and smelted throughout the resource-rich region and may have played a role in the rise of kingdoms. After the 16th century, metal figures in the mercantile trade economy both as currency (the ngiele rod) as well as export. Sketchy sources suggest what may have happened to the technical knowledge of metallurgy among slave migrants to the New World. This raises the question of how ironworking was socially situated in Kongo. Ringquist 2008 hypothesizes that although it was protected by the kings, it was not controlled by them and was not confined to a caste as in other regions of Africa. Therefore, its practitioners were able to compete and experiment, which perhaps explains why equatorial African iron became so highly reputed, and its makers, though they were enslaved, so sought after to make iron and fashion the tools of colonial industries.
  1227.  
  1228. Ringquist, John. “Kongo Iron: Symbolic Power, Superior Technology and Slave Wisdom.” African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter (September 2008).
  1229.  
  1230. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1231.  
  1232. Examines the central role of Kongo ironworking in both the Old World and the New World. Kongo ironworkers were much sought after in the colonial plantation economies of the New World for their ability to produce superior alloys. Ringquist studies the relationship of maroon smiths and rebellions on Hispaniola and concludes that the superior knowledge of smelting and ironworking were critical to the ability of those who lived in mountain settlements to resist capture.
  1233.  
  1234. Find this resource:
  1235.  
  1236.  
  1237. Gestures, Song, Dance, Martial Arts
  1238. Nonverbal performative culture provides another dimension of study of the legacy of western equatorial African societies in the New World. Anyone who has lived in Kongo knows that verbal and nonverbal discourses are almost always synchronized in a myriad of settings, from the work-a-day world in which fellow gardeners or hunters communicate with each other often with singing or work together to song-dance to public debates over bride prices and land disputes. Proverbs and bodily gestures amplify the impact of what the speaker/performer wishes to convey. Yet, in the diaspora setting or in the quest to interpret physical gestures in bodies in motion or in sculptures in far-flung museums, the understanding of the single gesture has proven important as a code for a range of social stances and messages. We must credit Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki 2001 (cited under Religion), and Thompson 2002 with important contributions in this field, which is variously called “arts in motion” or simply the meaning of Kongo gestures. Dianteill 2002 (cited under Kongo Diaspora Sites and Traces) and Martinez-Ruiz 2009 offer the results of recent research in studies of this important expressive idiom. Metz 2008 offers an application of the perspective and methodology of gestural signification to musical performance in Afro-Brazil. Capoeira performance has evolved from a martial art in war practice to self-defense and resistance to slavery in Brazil to an international high-art form.
  1239.  
  1240. Martinez-Ruiz, Barbaro. Kongo Atlantic Body Language. Les actes de colloque: Performance, art, et anthropologie (Musée du quai Branley) (December 2009).
  1241.  
  1242. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1243.  
  1244. Presentation and analysis of thirty significant hand/body/social gestures most with specific names; drawn from fieldwork, historical images in books, and petrogylphs in Lower Congo caves.
  1245.  
  1246. Find this resource:
  1247.  
  1248.  
  1249. Metz, Jerry. “Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice: Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação (Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil).” Latin American Music Review 29.1 (2008): 64.
  1250.  
  1251. DOI: 10.1353/lat.0.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1252.  
  1253. Metz links numerous musical instruments used historically and contemporaneously in Central Africa to the historical and contemporary instruments in Brazil and to their uses. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1254.  
  1255. Find this resource:
  1256.  
  1257.  
  1258. Thompson, Robert Farris. “La guestuelle Kongo dans les Amériques noires.” In Le geste Kongo. Edited by Christiane Falgayettes-Leveau, 161–184. Paris: Musée Dapper, 2002.
  1259.  
  1260. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1261.  
  1262. Thompson here explores New World traces of ten named characteristic Kongo gestures in ritual spaces, grave markers, sculptures, paintings, and drawings from a variety of sources in the United States and the Caribbean.
  1263.  
  1264. Find this resource:
  1265.  
  1266.  
  1267. Icons of Religious Practice, Art, Ritual, Cosmology
  1268. As in song, gestures, and song-dance, so visual icons of Kongo religion, ritual, and cosmology have widely suggested the threads of a fuller Old World culture. Yet, the scholarly world is divided over the significance of such icons. Several illustrations of this process will need to suffice for the present article. Thus, in Maya Deren’s 1940s art film Divine Horsemen: Living Gods of Haiti (Deren 2005, cited under Haiti), the image of the encircled cross, the Kongo “cosmogram,” traced in white on the floor of the hungan, flashes onto the screen in connection with the action de grâce, the reenactment of the Catholic sacrament of Holy Communion, in serving as a transition from possession dances to West African gods, culminating in Ogun, to gods of agriculture, and to the Congo and Petro loas. This resembles the choreographic position of the action de grâce in another early-20th-century voodoo (Herskovits 1937 [pp. 154–176, cited under Haiti], Janzen 1982 [p. 281, cited under Health and Healing]) as an opening to performances of Petro loas in the first day-night-day phase, succeeding in the second day-night-day phase to Rada loas. These two depictions of specific Haitian voodoo performances illustrate the findings of recent scholarship (Heywood and Thornton 2007, cited under General Overviews) that strongly suggests that we are witness to a New World perpetuation of the central ritual of early—from the 15th to 17th centuries—Kongo Christianity brought by slaves to Haiti and elsewhere in the New World. What is the ritual or metaphoric operation by which these performance traditions, which appear separate to outsiders, are conjoined in this manner? Vanhee 2002 and Rey 2002 (both cited under Haiti) argue that this vestige of a Christian rite within Haitian voodoo reflects the influential place of 16th-century Kongo Christianity in the religious culture of slaves from Kongo arriving in Haiti before the Haitian Revolution, and, thus, that the Kongo cosmogram is at least, in part, a vestige of early Kongo Christianity. Thompson and Cornet 1981 (cited under Art), Thompson 1983, Fennell 2003, and Fennell 2007 have argued, after Fu-Kiau 2001 (cited under Religion), that the cosmogram is a fully autochtonous symbol arising from the independent complexity of Kongo culture and has no basis in Christianity in the 16th to 18th centuries. The works cited here offer documentation and analysis of this central symbol and other aspects of visual and material culture in Old World and diaspora settings. See Ballard 2005 for an excellent general introduction to New World manifestations of African religions.
  1269.  
  1270. Ballard, Eoghan C. “Ndoki bueno ndoki malo: Historic and Contemporary Kongo Religion in the African Diaspora (Angola, Brazil, Cuba, United States).” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
  1271.  
  1272. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1273.  
  1274. Reviews literature and ethnographic examples of Kongo religion in the entire African diaspora. Excellent general introduction to topic.
  1275.  
  1276. Find this resource:
  1277.  
  1278.  
  1279. Fennell, Christopher C. “Group Identity, Individual Creativity, and Symbolic Generation in a BaKongo Diaspora.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7.1 (March 2003): 1–31.
  1280.  
  1281. DOI: 10.1023/A:1023267019232Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1282.  
  1283. Documents and analyzes archaeological sites in Maryland, Virginia, and Texas in terms of the possible placement of objects in the form of a Kongo cosmological altar or cosmogram. Depends heavily on Thompson and Fu-Kiau for his primary evidence of such a cosmogram in Kongo historical culture. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  1284.  
  1285. Find this resource:
  1286.  
  1287.  
  1288. Fennell, Christopher C.. Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
  1289.  
  1290. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1291.  
  1292. Further comparative analysis of the Kongo cosmogram/altar as a dominant metaphor for Kongo and creolizing identity in archaeological sites. Comparative material presented from Yoruba and other African histories as well as from traditions brought to America by Germans from the Palatinate.
  1293.  
  1294. Find this resource:
  1295.  
  1296.  
  1297. Thompson, Robert Farris, and Joseph Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981.
  1298.  
  1299. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1300.  
  1301. This lavishly illustrated catalogue accompanied an exhibition by the same title at the National Gallery of Art. Visual reference to the cosmographic image of “four moments of the sun” is from the terra cotta funerary stelae (maboondo) of the Mboma culture near Boma on the Congo River. Part 2 of the book illustrates Thompson’s extensive field research in the United States in seeking evidence of a continuing Kongo tradition in sculpture, performance, and song.
  1302.  
  1303. Find this resource:
  1304.  
  1305.  
  1306. Thompson, Robert Farris. “The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art and Religion in the Americas.” In Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. By Robert Farris Thompson, 101–160. New York: Random House, 1983.
  1307.  
  1308. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1309.  
  1310. Traces numerous themes of Kongo religion and ritual in the New World. The Kongo cosmogram is given central attention as the leading icon or hallmark of Kongo identity, manifesting itself in Haitian voodoo; min’kisi in various settings such as Palo Mayombe in Cuba; in tomb art in the Caribbean, the Carolina coast, and other regions of the southern United States; and in modern African-American art.
  1311.  
  1312. Find this resource:
  1313.  
  1314.  
  1315. Society and Institutions
  1316. Social institutions (kin-based as well as larger political systems), more than any other area covered in this article, suffered in the transatlantic forced migration of the middle passage. For the most part, Kongo slaves could not replicate the social institutions from which they had been wrenched: kingdoms, lineages, markets, networks, or sodalities. They were forced into other institutional structures: plantations and households controlled by others, and they became commodities rather than merchants. Where and when they were able to reconstitute a semblance of their own social forms, or vestiges of social forms, a turned-in-on-itself set of aggressive forces often emerged that have given Kongo-derived practices a rather negative reputation (e.g., the Petro side of Haitian voodoo; the image of “voodoo dolls” with pins stuck into them, possibly derived imagery from min’kisi Nkondi (see Ochoa 2010 [cited under Cuba] for a reconstruction of Palo-Kongo forces that attack the Christian God at his moment of cosmological weakness from the time of his death on the cross to his resurrection). On the other hand, there have been continuations of sociopolitical social structures, at least for a time in some of the Brazilian quilombos. As seen in Karasch 2002 and Slenes 2005, centralization of African institutions in the New World is but a memory or, as depicted in Kiddy 2002, a celebration of the memory thereof, e.g., the King of Kongo sodalities in Carnival in Recife.
  1317.  
  1318. Karasch, Mary C. “Central Africans in Central Brazil, 1780–1835.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 117–152. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  1319.  
  1320. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1321.  
  1322. Reviews historical records of slave origins, identities, and communities in central Brazil.
  1323.  
  1324. Find this resource:
  1325.  
  1326.  
  1327. Kiddy, Elizabeth W. “Who Is the King of Congo? A New Look at African and Afro-Brazilian Kings in Brazil.” In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood, 153–182. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  1328.  
  1329. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1330.  
  1331. An example of continued recognition of Kongo statehood in Brazilian festivals.
  1332.  
  1333. Find this resource:
  1334.  
  1335.  
  1336. Slenes, Robert W. “The Nsanda Tree Transplanted: Kongo Cults of Affliction and Slave Identity in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.” Paper presented at Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Stanford University, 17 May 2005.
  1337.  
  1338. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1339.  
  1340. Research paper based on original archival and field research in Brazil on the significance of revival and resistance rituals.
  1341.  
  1342. Find this resource:
  1343.  
  1344.  
  1345. Resistance, Accommodation, and Identity
  1346. Much of New World African culture is pervaded with a combination of resistance to oppression and exploitation, on the one hand, and degrees of accommodation and acculturation, on the other. Agualusa 2002 weaves these themes together in this fictionalized account of late Portuguese slavery in Angola and Brazil. In many settings, resistance is embedded in ritual activity that may hide it from masters and dominant society while at the same time drawing inspiration from deep African metaphors, as described in Young 2007 in connection with Lowcountry funerals and cemeteries. Thus, water spirits and nature spirits, the very aura of nature, connote resistance to being forced onto a plantation or its slave quarters. The nsanda fig tree, a harbinger of good water, on the one hand, is, on the other hand, also an expression of the simbi spirits that give strength and force to those who resist, such as Dona Beatrice (see Thornton 1998, cited under Religion), or the cults of affliction and resistance of Brazil in the work of Slenes (see Slenes 2005, cited under Society and Institutions). Iron working in Ringquist’s account of mountain settlements in Hispaniola (see Ringquist 2008, cited under Techniques, Technologies, and Artifacts in Food Production and Warfare) constitutes an example of ventures of resistance. Evidence such as this calls for a renewed understanding of all these areas of life and history in seeking to uncover their broader social and political purposes.
  1347.  
  1348. Agualusa, José Eduardo. Creole. London: Arcadia, 2002.
  1349.  
  1350. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1351.  
  1352. English translation from Portuguese. The story of this fictional account set in Loanda, coastal Angola, Brazil, and Europe portrays the tensions between elites and commoners over control and enslavement at the very close of the transatlantic slave trade in about the 1860s. Themes of enslavement, resistance, creolization, identity lost and regained, the journey into exile and returning home, reverberate through this very readable work by a well-known Lusophone Angolan author.
  1353.  
  1354. Find this resource:
  1355.  
  1356.  
  1357. Young, Jason. Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.
  1358.  
  1359. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1360.  
  1361. Jason Young studies historical records and oral traditions in the Georgia coastal areas where burial practices provided the expression of resistance to the effort by plantation owners to oppressively control all aspects of the lives of their slaves. Slaves remained free in their souls and spirits through singing and dancing in the cemetery.
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