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2016

Constructing a Kongo Identity: Scholarship and Mythopoesis

Wyatt MacGaffey
Haverford College

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Repository Citation
MacGaffey, Wyatt. "Constructing a Kongo Identity: Scholarship and Mythopoesis" Comparative Studies in
Society and History 58(1):159-180, 2016.

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Comparative Studies in Society and History 2016;58(1):159–180.
0010-4175/16 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016
doi:10.1017/S0010417515000602

Constructing a Kongo Identity:

Scholarship and Mythopoesis
W YATT MA C G A F F E Y
Anthropology, Haverford College

The past thirty years have seen, particularly in the United States, a transforma-
tion in the public image of Kongo, an ill-defined entity (a tribe, a kingdom, a
culture, a region?) on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa. Kongo (with K) long
stood in the shadow of Congo (with C), which for at least two hundred years
represented in the imagination of Europeans and Americans the heart of dark-
ness, the homeland of fetishism and cannibalism. In the United States after the
Civil War, during the age of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, “Congo” summa-
rized America’s racial attitudes. This reputation was further darkened
between 1885 and 1908 by reports of atrocities in King Leopold’s Congo
and the controversies they generated. Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo
(A Study of the Negro Race),” published in 1912 and widely anthologized
until the 1960s, lays out, layer by layer, the entire palimpsest of American fan-
tasies about blacks, in which the “savagery” of Africa has been redeemed by
Christianity but retains in America its exotic and still threatening vitality. The
poem begins with “1. Their Basic Savagery,” and describes “fat black bucks”
who “pounded on a table” and remind the poet of tattooed cannibals beating
on a tin pan with a thigh-bone. It is unnecessary to follow his analogies further.1
In the Americas generally, “Kongo” as an element in the population of
West Central Africa known collectively as “Congos” and “Bantu” has also
long been disparaged in comparison with another imagined entity, Yoruba, a
construction based upon elements in the population of West Africa including
Fanti, Allada, Dahomeyans, and other primarily coastal groups.2 The origins
of this invidious distinction lie deep in the history of European race theory,

Acknowledgments: I am grateful for the comments of J. Lorand Matory and of the anonymous
CSSH readers. I have also benefited over the years from many conversations with J. M. Janzen
and J. K. Thornton.
1
Lindsay’s defenders excuse his embarrassingly racist perspective by arguing that he meant
well. For pro and con, see “Race Criticism of the Congo,” Modern American Poetry: www.
english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/Lindsay/congo (accessed 3 Sept. 2015).
2
I place “Kongo” and “Yoruba” in quotation marks to refer to cultural entities that have been
constructed in transatlantic discourses, as opposed to Kongo and Yoruba as they are known to his-
torians of Africa.

159
160 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

and not in any real difference between the cultures or histories of different
groups of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas. In the nine-
teenth century, whites were supposed to be further advanced on the evolution-
ary scale and thus innately superior to blacks. The “races” of Africa reproduced
this relationship in such a way that those of the north of the continent were sup-
posedly superior to those dwelling further south; West Africans were, if not civ-
ilized, at least more amenable to civilization than Central Africans (“Bantous”).
As Stefania Capone has shown, authorities including R. Nina Rodrigues, Artur
Ramos, Gilberto Freyre, Roger Bastide, Fernando Ortiz, and Pierre Verger sub-
scribed to the view that the Yoruba, with their pantheon of orisha deities, were
endowed with “religion,” whereas Congos (slaves from the Congo/Angolan
coast) had only ancestor worship and sorcery. Congos, being docile, were
suited to agricultural labor, whereas Yoruba made better house servants, al-
though (paradoxically) they were noted for “resistance” and for retaining
their African cultural heritage in relatively pure form. Freyre even held that
the higher proportion of West rather than Central Africans in Brazil’s popula-
tion meant that Brazilian civilization was less compromised than that of the
United States, prompting Melville Herskovits to reply defensively that the
Congo presence was in fact inconsequential.3
The independence won by the majority of former colonies in Africa in
1960 required a sweeping ideological reorientation in Western scholarship,
seeking to correct a picture now seen as not only inaccurate but offensive,
while still exhibiting a reluctance to accept the challenge of difference. Long
represented as the homeland of barbarism, Africa was now to be admitted to
the community of the civilized, and the culture of even Congos and Bantous
deserved exploration. “Culture” notoriously escapes definition, but its
general modern sense, “a high level of aesthetic and intellectual achievement,”
emerges in Europe in the nineteenth century along with the rise of manufactur-
ing industry and the development of a self-conscious middle class eager to as-
sociate itself with the refinements of the aristocracy. The three pillars of culture
in this sense are religion, art, and royalty, all of which Africa supposedly
lacked. For Hegel, a representative thinker, African thought was dominated
by fetishism, a product of a childish illusion of omnipotent control of nature.
A fetish therefore “has no independent existence as an object of religion, and
even less as a work of art.” African kings were mere arbitrary despots, and
even their despotism was cancelled out by contradictory forces.4 Now, a con-
tinent that formerly had no history was to be provided with a politically respect-
able past in the heroic form of kingdoms and empires, forerunners of

3
S. Capone, “Entre Yoruba et Bantou: l’Influence des Stéréotypes Raciaux dans les Etudes
Afro-Américaines,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 40, Cah. 157 (2000): 55–77.
4
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, H. B. Nisbet, trans. (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1975), 180, 185–86.
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 161

nation-states in the making. Fetishism became “Traditional African Religion”

and fetishes became “Art.” As the American “melting pot” melted down in
the 1960s, to be replaced by multiculturalism and the politics of identity,
demand surged for stories of ethnic origin and cultural distinctiveness. It was
no longer enough to be of European or African descent. The decoding of
human DNA seemed to offer Americans the possibility of pinpointing their
“origins” and aroused new interest in the cultures of imagined homelands.
But this new discourse continued to privilege “Yoruba” and “Kongo” as
rival representatives of “Africa,” and the presentation of Kongo to the Ameri-
can public continued to be apologetic, an essay in defensive vindication by out-
siders.5 This paper explores the history of an invention.6

KONGO IN AFRICA

The construction of “Kongo” by outsiders begins with the arrival of the Portu-
guese explorer Diogo Cao at the mouth of the river he called Nzari, later the
Congo, in 1483. He entered into diplomatic relations with the Mani Kongo,
whom the Portuguese thought of as “king” of a “kingdom,” although these
terms have no good equivalents in Kongo language or political thought. In
the language that came to be called Kikongo, kongo refers to a gathering or
to an enclosure, related to nkongolo, a circle; any space prepared for a ritual,
such as the enclosure where the Kimpasi initiation took place, could be
called (di)kongo. If the kingdom had been what the Portuguese thought it
was, an early modern state similar to Portugal itself, we would expect to find
similar political systems nearby in Central Africa, but none exist. Like other
African capitals, Mbanza Kongo was a center of power, prestige, economic op-
portunity, and ritual validation, whose influence spread over a wide but fluctu-
ating area. The authority of the Mani Kongo was precarious and he welcomed
the support of the strangers. It became secure only as he, his nobles, and his
successors adopted Portuguese Christianity, took Portuguese names and
titles, made war with Portuguese assistance, and entered into the Atlantic
trade and diplomatic relations with other Atlantic powers. After the civil
wars of the seventeenth century the kingdom lost much of its veneer of moder-
nity, and by 1891 it was little more than a memory.7

5
L. M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the Americas (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); T. Falola and M. D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora
in the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); L. M. Heywood and J. K.
Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
6
For an exhaustive annotated bibliography of all things Kongo, see J. M. Janzen, “Diaspora,
Kongo Atlantic,” Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies, www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.
com (accessed 3 Sept. 2015).
7
S. H. Broadhead, “Beyond Decline: The Kingdom of the Kongo in the Eighteenth and Nine-
teenth Centuries,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 12, 4 (1979), 615–50.
162 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

The Kongo identity emerged as a product of colonization. In the seven-

teenth century, mwisi Kongo, “inhabitant of Kongo,” meant someone from
Mbanza Kongo, the populous seat of the Mani Kongo (in what is now north-
western Angola), as opposed to mwisi vata, a villager. The unity of the
Kongo people, or “tribe,” was the creation first of administrators and historians
and later of linguists. Supposedly, the kingdom was founded by a conqueror
named Ntinu Wene; amid rejoicing and festivity, he assigned sections of the
country to nine lieutenants, each of whom adopted a praise-name and
founded a clan.8 Much later, according to traditions that village elders
offered to twentieth-century Catholic missionaries, quarrels broke out and
their ancestors left their original home, Kongo dia Ntotila, crossed the Nzadi,
and traveled north to the places where their descendants now live. Nzadi, the
name of any large river, including the Congo, became Zaire in Portuguese
usage. Kongo dia Ntotila is one of the names of Mbanza Kongo.9 Historians
took these traditions literally, following the lead of Msgr. J. Cuvelier and
other Redemptorist missionaries. As a way to represent Christianity as indige-
nous rather than imposed, Catholic historians revived the idea of old Kongo as
a Catholic kingdom, and popularized the story through the mission journal Ku
Kiele. Today, when village elders in Catholic communities in the Democratic
Republic of Congo retell stories of Ntinu Wene, the famous sixteenth-century
King Nzing’a Mvemba, and the revolutionary prophetess Kimpa Vita, they
present them as traditions handed down across the generations, but in fact
they learned them in school and from Ku Kiele.
Research by John Thornton has shown that Cuvelier’s account of the
origins of the Kongo kingdom fused modern village traditions anachronistical-
ly with early missionary chronicles, and he has cast serious doubt on the sup-
posed originating conquest.10 Other research has revealed that traditions
referring to Kongo dia Ntotila are told not only north of the Congo but also
south of it, showing that, though Nzadi is often identified with the geographical
Congo River, in oral tradition it labels a mythic transition from an original con-
dition of social harmony to today’s social division. These traditions are not his-
torical records but sociological models, and Kongo dia Ntotila is only one of
several mythical “origins” to which they may refer, only loosely related to
history. Elsewhere it is replaced by several places called Mwembe Nsundi,
which led Swedish missionary scholars to assert that the people should really
be called “Basundi” rather than “Bakongo.”
In traditional thought, all these places of origin, including Mbanza Kongo,
are local versions of “the land of the dead,” cemeteries from which the powers

8
J. Cuvelier, L’Ancien Royaume de Congo (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1946).
9
Ntotila from tota, “to gather,” thus a place where many were gathered together.
10
J. K. Thornton, “The Origins and Early History of the Kingdom of Kongo, c. 1350–1550,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, 1 (2001): 94–95.
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 163

of chiefs and ritual experts were thought ultimately to derive. The routes fol-
lowed by the founding chiefs to the present abodes of their successors were
in reality the principal trade routes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
from the great market and transfer station on the river at Mpumbu (modern Kin-
shasa and Brazzaville) toward the brokerage houses on the coast. South of the
river, the principal route ran through the real Mbanza Kongo, where the king,
who even in decline retained considerable authority over trade, issued the tal-
ismans and titles that regulated it.11 North of the river, various difficult tracks
through the mountains led in the same direction from the Nsundi (Manianga)
market through the mountains toward Cabinda and Loango. In this age of
endemic petty warfare and slaving there was no public security and traders de-
pended on the patronage of chiefs who could provide ritual insignia as laissez-
passer. Thus the pursuit of wealth was intimately bound up with chieftaincy and
magic.12
Linguists identified the dialects spoken in much of this area, now divided
among the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and
Angola, as belonging to one language, Kikongo. But the first evidence of con-
sciousness of a “national” Kongo identity appears in an appeal Kavuna Simon
addressed to fellow readers of the Protestant mission bulletin Minsamu
Miayenge in 1910. “What is Kikongo?” he had first to ask, and he explained
that it was the language of “the Bakongo,” those who lived in the administrative
province of Belgian Congo called Bas-Congo. “We Bakongo,” wrote Kavuna,
“must respect our language, speak it at all times, and not allow it to be corrupted.”
The context of this appeal included both rising discontent with foreign rule and
awareness of incipient competition within the colonial framework between the
Bakongo and other “tribes” identified as such by the administration.13 This
consciousness of Kikongo as the property of a social group is thus specifically
political. At that time Kongo men increasingly spent their working years in co-
lonial centers where the predominant languages were those of the administra-
tion: Lingala and a corrupt Kikongo called Kileta, “government language.” The
Kikongo in which Kavuna’s appeal was couched was itself a product of inten-
sive missionary education efforts that from 1888 onward used Minsamu
Miayenge, the Swedish mission’s translation of the Bible, and other texts to
spread literacy. This written Kikongo was in many ways a European language
and, as J. M. Janzen has shown, it profoundly changed Kongo thought.14 The

11
Broadhead, “Beyond Decline,” 632–37.
12
W. MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2000), 61–77.
13
W. MacGaffey, “Ethnography and the Closing of the Frontier in Lower Congo, 1885–1921,”
Africa 56 (1986): 263–79.
14
J. M. Janzen, “The Consequences of Literacy in African Religion: The Kongo Case,”
in W. van Binsbergen and M. Schoffeleers, eds., Theoretical Explorations in African Religion
(London: Routledge, 1984).
164 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

Swedish Bible translation was one of two—the other produced by the British
Baptist mission—and both still today exert their separate influences. When
Catholic missions arrived later in Belgian Congo they were less zealous in
teaching literacy and approached the problems of translation in a different
spirit. Thus, even where Kikongo is spoken, there is no standard form. In ev-
eryday life most people think of themselves as speaking, not “Kikongo,” but
their local dialect, Kimanteke, Kimanianga, Kiyombe, and so on.
As the end of Belgian colonial rule approached rapidly, the Kongo elite, ed-
ucated in Catholic schools, struggled to find a political model suited to indepen-
dence. Their Kikongo newspapers, including Kongo Dieto (“Our Kongo,” a
deliberate reply to the Belgian Onze Congo) and Kongo dia Ntotila, published ar-
ticles full of traditional cosmological references, moving toward the image of a
world turned upside down, in which black would become white and the ancestors
would return, bringing health and wealth. They formed an association that became
a political party, the Alliance des Bakongo (ABAKO). They sometimes called
their leader, Joseph Kasavubu, “the king,” and referred so often to the old
Kongo kingdom that opposition figures parodied the title of Cuvelier’s book
and joked about l’ancien royaume ABAKO. This ideological fantasy disappeared
as the real politics of independence took over and the opposition began accusing
the leaders of ABAKO of witchcraft.15 The idea of the former kingdom receded so
far from the popular imagination that I once heard it said, of a man who in fact came
from Mbanza Kongo, “Oh, he’s not a Mukongo, he’s an Angolan.”
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries and co-
lonial officials in West Africa joined African scholars in the project of furnish-
ing the Yoruba heritage with a commendable religion, rich with a degree of
mythological complexity, wisdom, dignity, and organization lacking in the doc-
umentation for other African religions.16 Reports of Kongo religion and
culture, on the other hand, were all negative. The Kongo kingdom had been
known since the reports of seventeenth-century missionaries and travelers as
the homeland of demonic paganism. In the twentieth century missionaries
never ceased to deplore the prevalence of superstition among Kongo-speakers,
despite a relatively sympathetic account of their belief in spirits by the influen-
tial Jesuit J. van Wing in 1937.17 In his own much richer ethnographic reports,
the Scheutist missionary L. Bittremieux spared no derogatory adjectives:
“superstitious, fetishistic, immoral.”18 The Kongo kingdom centered in

15
W. MacGaffey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1970), 256–58; L. Monnier, Ethnie et Intégration Régionale au Bas-Congo (Paris:
EDICEF, 1971).
16
J.D.Y. Peel, Religious Encounters and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2000); J. L. Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the
Yoruba Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 1 (1999), 72–103.
17
Van Wing, Etudes Bakongo (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959 [1921, 1937]).
18
L. Bittremieux, La Société Secrète des Bakhimba au Mayombe (Brussels: IRCB, 1936).
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 165

Angola had disappeared after two centuries of decline, leaving nothing in the
recent record that lent itself to a heroic narrative, and no statues of rulers on
horseback to focus modern admiration. Kongo art, in the form of wooden
sculptures, was little noticed by collectors until the 1960s. They were, after
all, fetishes.

KONGO IN AMERICA

After 1960, political events in the newly independent Democratic Republic of

Congo, summarized in headlines as “Chaos in the Congo,” did nothing to
enhance the reputation of things Kongo. Then, in 1981, Robert Farris Thomp-
son, an art historian at Yale, at a stroke gave Kongo a public identity in the
United States and redeemed its image. He mounted a major exhibition at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. titled “The Four Moments of
the Sun” and, with Joseph Cornet, published an accompanying volume by
the same name.19 For the first time, the public was introduced to remarkable
funerary terracottas and sculptures from the hinterland of the port of Mboma
on the Congo estuary, including figures carved in soapstone (mintadi) and
highly decorated cylindrical ceramic “urns” (mabondo). Thompson related
these figures, together with photographs of actual Kongo graves, to
African-American graves in the southern states, and extended the connections
to African-American music, dance, and bodily gestures. Here, then, was Art,
together with convincing evidence of the continued vitality of apparently
Kongo cultural themes in the New World. The book goes further still, endow-
ing “Kongo” with royalty and, if not religion, then an ethical philosophy of ex-
ceptional wisdom and dignity.
Thompson achieved his breakthrough by collaboration with André
Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki, a native of the Manianga area in Lower Congo then res-
ident in Boston. Fu-Kiau supplied his own commentaries on the objects, often
in considerable detail and with accompanying terms in Kikongo. Fu-Kiau was
born and raised in a relatively isolated part of Lower Congo which nevertheless
was so heavily influenced by Catholic and Protestant missionaries that it pro-
duced more secondary-school graduates than any other area. As a young
man he lived in a time when, to the very eve of independence in 1960, mission-
aries, colonial agents, and government spokesmen openly described Congo-
lese, particularly villagers, as primitives so shackled by clannish collectivism
that they could not hope to become civilized without European help. Like
Kavuna, who came from the same area, Fu-Kiau worked for the preservation
of Kikongo, compiling a wordlist that showed how modern expressions such
as “minister of agriculture” could be rendered. The title of the Smithsonian

19
R. F. Thompson and J. Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1981). Cornet was responsible for the field research that recovered many of
these artifacts.
166 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

exhibition, “The Four Moments of the Sun,” referred to a diagram by Fu-Kiau,

a cross inscribed in a circle, in a book he had published in Kikongo in Kinshasa
with the assistance of the anthropologist J. M. Janzen.20 The diagram, later
known as a “cosmogram,” showed how Bakongo understood the universe
they lived in as divided into the two worlds of the living and the dead, separated
by water; the life of man paralleled that of the sun in its rising in one world and
setting in the other.21 For Fu-Kiau, the diagram was the starting point for a vig-
orous demonstration, refuting Belgian belittlements, that the Bakongo had
ideas, a worldview, and a moral philosophy. For the rest of his life Fu-Kiau
worked to elaborate a “Bantu-Kongo philosophy,” an ideal that grew increas-
ingly remote from Kongo realities as documented by indigenous writers and
by ethnographers. He insured himself against criticism by saying that the
elders had revealed secrets to him that would not be told to the uninitiated
and certainly not to inquiring missionaries and anthropologists.
Belgians were not the only foreigners that needed to be convinced that
there was “culture” in Africa. Thompson’s text confronted a real challenge:
the latent fear in many Americans drawn to Africa that if they get too close
they will discover that its cultures are repellent or, at best, so different from
the familiar as not to be worth the effort required to understand them.22 His
technique, with Fu-Kiau’s assistance, was to ennoble and sanitize everything
Kongo to the point that all sense of a realistic human community was lost. A
single example from Four Moments in the Sun, shows how this distancing
was effected.
A soapstone figure in The Four Moments (fig. 90, p. 112) shows a well-
dressed person holding a staff ornamented with imported brass furniture nails in
his right hand. He carries an imported Dutch gin bottle in his left hand and a
similar bottle tucked under his left arm. A Mboma elder, shown a photograph
of this piece, thought the bottles showed that this was “an elegant man, bold and
rich, and capable of buying liquors” (p. 114). Thompson quotes but ignores this

20
A. Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki Lumanisa, N’kongo ye Nza Yakun’zungidila. Le Mukongo et le
Monde qui l’Entourait, Zamenga Batukezanga, trans., Introduction by J. M. Janzen (Kinshasa:
Office Nationale de la Recherche et de Développement, 1969).
21
Without realizing that I had invented it, I began to use the word “cosmogram” in 1970 in dis-
cussions with R. F. Thompson, who subsequently popularized it. I meant it to refer to improvised
marks made on the ground as a setting for rituals. The diagram itself is authentic and represents a
concept that must have been current in the nineteenth century, if not before; Ortiz reported it in
Cuba, marked with terms in Kikongo, though the interpretation is not the same as Fu-Kiau’s.
F. Ortiz, Los Instrumentos de la Música Afrocubana, 5 vols. (Havana: Ministerio de Educación,
1952–1955), 3: 166–71; W. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1986), 46.
22
This is a common theme in comments on the state of African Art. See C. B. Steiner, “First
Word: Discovering African Art … Again?” African Arts 29, 4 (1996): 1–8; T. O. Beidelman, “Pro-
moting Africa Art: The Catalogue to the Exhibit of African Art at the Royal Academy of Arts,
London,” Anthropos 92, 1/3 (1997): 3–20, 9. See also T. Ranger, “Scotland Yard in the Bush: Med-
icine Murders, Child Witches, and the Construction of the Occult,” Africa 77, 2 (2007): 272–83.
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 167

opinion in favor of an extended commentary by Fu-Kiau, which leads to the

conclusion that the man is a nganga (ritual expert) who carries two bottles
because “they symbolize two different powers. He is dealing in two worlds,
actual and spiritual, town and forest. He has to hold two worlds within his
hands, and bring them both together.” One informant’s opinion is perhaps as
good as another’s, but that attributed to Fu-Kiau ignores and in fact obscures
the purpose for which these funerary objects were actually commissioned.
Between 1844 and 1867 Mboma was the main port for the illegal slave
trade, exporting up to twenty-five thousand slaves a year, more than at any
earlier time in its history. From 1845 to 1872 it was also the main port for
the “legitimate” Congo trade in palm oil, peanuts, rubber, gum copal, and
ivory. In a highly competitive business environment, families grew rich.
Their funerals were “unparalleled occasions for the ostentatious display and de-
struction of imported prestige goods,” including clothing, gin, guns, and
sewing machines. Their cemeteries, the ultimate repositories of wealth from
which mabondo and mintadi were recovered, are “microcosms that depict
chiefs and commercial officials, slavery, economic activity, politics, social
practices, esteemed foreign trade goods and objects of local manufacture
from a vanished golden age in Mboma history.”23
Eulogistic references to the wisdom and dignity of Kongo rulers pervade
The Four Moments. “It is amazing,” writes Thompson, “how many times the
image of the vanished capital returns, like a shimmering chimera, in the dispo-
sitions of judgment and decision [in legal proceedings].” Ordinary Kikongo
words are adduced by Thompson/Fu-Kiau as though they were technical
terms bearing deep metaphysical significance. For example, any occurrence
of luumbu, “an enclosure, a residential compound,” becomes a coded reference
to the court of the kings of Kongo.24 The image of Kongo Thompson celebrates
as though it were a living memory in twentieth-century Kongo villages is that
of an idealized early modern kingdom, a Camelot on the Congo. This image,
initiated by the Portuguese and perpetuated and elaborated by Cuvelier
and others, resists challenge because it is familiar and attracts favorable
judgments.25
Fu-Kiau, who died in 2013, went on to an impressive career as a teacher
and interpreter of African culture in the United States, with a devoted following

23
N. Schrag, Mboma and the Lower Zaire: A Socio-Economic Study of a Kongo Trading Com-
munity, ca. 1785–1885 (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1985).
24
Thompson and Cornet, Four Moments, 41. It is important to mention that Thompson’s work
on Yoruba culture, art, and belief is much richer, based as it is on thorough personal familiarity; see
R. F. Thompson, Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of the African Americas (New York: Museum for
African Art, 1993).
25
Downstream from Thompson’s original breakthrough, the kingdom has taken on fantastic di-
mensions. For example: “At its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Kongo kingdom
stretched from Gabon to Zambia.” B. Martínez-Ruiz, in Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine,
Foreword by Carol Thompson (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2011), 186.
168 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

throughout the Americas. This is best summarized in a eulogy posted on Face-

book: “K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, B.A., M.Ed., M.S. and Ph.D., is an indigenous
African teacher, scholar, lecturer, healer and spiritual guide. He is the author of
many books including ‘Simbi-Simbi: Hold Up That Which Holds You Up’
(2006), ‘African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo’ (2001), and ‘Self-Healing
Power and Therapy’ (1991). He has lectured on African concepts of reality
and African spiritual practices throughout Africa, Europe, the United States,
the Caribbean and South America. He is one of the great elders of the
African family and a true gift to humanity.”26 Thousands of Americans have
now been persuaded, through scholarly writing and innumerable museum ex-
hibits since 1981, in many of which Fu-Kiau is quoted, that Kongo art and
thought deserve serious respect. A flood of research into things Kongo has fol-
lowed. This is no small achievement.
As Kongo became recognized as an identity, the hunt was on to find traces
of it in the United States. The search faced the difficulty that on the continent
itself Kongo is not well established as a discrete entity.27 Internally, the
Kikongo language zone was and is not culturally homogeneous, and externally
it has much in common with its neighbors in not only Central Africa but also in
the forested zones of West Africa.28 Dunja Hersak has made the point that
“There are many Kongo worlds” by showing differences between coastal
and hinterland cultural expressions, and Raoul Lehuard has complained that
artworks should be assigned to local communities rather than attributed to
Kongo.29
How, then, can the cultural heritage associated with Kongo be filled out?
The search for specifically Kongo traces in the diaspora and the task of estab-
lishing their function or “meaning” must deal with particularities of word,
object, or representation made available by reports that say, “so and so is the
case.” Such reports occur at three stages in the process: the work of scholars
pronouncing on Kongo presences, the evidence of such presences available
for them to examine, and records of “ancestral” words, objects, or representa-
tions in Kongo itself. Reports are communications, and as such they are molded
by their social context and the social role of the reporter. At each stage, multiple
occasions of bias or miscommunication may occur to mislead the unwary.
Careful critique of sources, basic to the historian’s methodology, is therefore

26
At: hedgemason.blogspot.com/2013/memorial for tata Bunseki Fu-kiau (accessed 3 Sept.
2015).
27
W. MacGaffey, “Kongo Identity 1483–1993,” in V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., Nations, Identities, Cul-
tures (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 45–57.
28
W. MacGaffey, “The Cultural Tradition of the African Forests,” in J. Pemberton III. ed.,
Insight and Artistry in African Divination (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
2000), 13–24.
29
D. Hersak, “There are Many Kongo Worlds: Particularities of Magico-Religious Beliefs
among the Vili and Yombe of Congo-Brazzaville,” Africa 71, 4 (2001): 614–40; R. Lehuard, Art
Bakongo: Les Centres du Style, 2 vols. (Arnouville: Arts de l’Afrique Noire, 1989).
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 169

essential. The hazards of the process are well illustrated by a single Kikongo
word, mbumba, and its career in the historical record.
In Haiti (St. Domingue) accounts of the activities of slaves in the eigh-
teenth century mention a chant, Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!/ Canga bafiot é/
Canga mound dé lé/ Canga doki la/ Canga li. Cuvelier, a historian of the
Kongo kingdom, recognized the language as Kikongo and rewrote it, with
more correct spelling, as “Eh, Mbumba, eh! Kanga bafioti, kanga mundele,
kanga ndoki, kanga!” He described it as a song in honor of Mbumba,
“a snake.” He based this interpretation on passages in Bittremieux’s account
of the Nkimba cult in Lower Congo, in which the central fetish is a represen-
tation of Mbumba Luangu, the rainbow, which is thought of as a snake that
arises from the water and launches itself into the sky to control the rain. Gen-
erations of scholars have followed Cuvelier in translating mbumba as “snake”
and finding snake cults in Kongo.30 The chant may be paraphrased: “Eh,
Mbumba, bind all the witches, black or white, bind them!” Contemporary ob-
servers, fearful of slave uprisings, as well as later scholars eager to celebrate the
slaves’ revolutionary spirit, proposed creative translations to qualify the chant
as a revolutionary anthem urging death to whites. More recent scholars argue
that the chant was simply part of slaves’ efforts, using the cultural tools they
brought with them, to control the witches they thought were responsible for
the extreme hardships they experienced on colonial estates. The importance at-
tached to signs of “resistance” and “rebellion” is weighted with racial evalua-
tions, as we have seen, and it carries the unfortunate implication that the
majority, notably women, who carried on their lives as best they could under
the burden of oppression, were less commendable as human beings.
The outcome of the revolution has made it difficult to assess such humble
pre-revolutionary activity, given our predilection for grand, totalizing narra-
tives.31 Thornton, arguing that we should respect the belief of the colonists
that it had revolutionary overtones, seeks to restore to the chant at least a “dem-
ocratic” though not revolutionary significance. He cites Anne Hilton’s The
Kingdom of Kongo and numerous sources both missionary and ethnographic
to suggest that Mbumba was a fertility cult, represented by a snake or a
rainbow, dedicated to “the peaceful and harmonious dimension of life,”
which Hilton called “the mbumba dimension.”32 Therefore, “Its general
terms of address, to blacks (bafiote) and whites (mundele) alike, and the invo-
cation of Mbumba suggest that [the chant] had a social as much as a personal

30
Cuvelier, L’Ancien Royaume, 289–90.
31
H. Vanhee, “Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion,”
in L. M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the Americas (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
32
A. Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 12–19.
170 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

significance.”33 The invocation of Mbumba “suggests that it expressed the

spirit of harmony and peace as an alternative to personal greed,” and “could
serve as a shorthand expression of a revolutionary creed to restore justice
and harmony.”34 All this is ingenious and inspiring, but it is a house built on
sand. The Kongo dictionaries of Van Dyck, Bentley, and Laman remind us
that mbùmba (low tone) means “a secret”; leeka mbùmba, “to keep a secret,
to make something mysterious.” Not surprisingly, the word appears in the
name of many minkisi (“fetishes,” sing. nkisi), some of which were explicitly
violent rather than dedicated to social harmony; in fact, m’vandi a mbùmba
is an ordinary expression for one who composes a fetish.35 The Haitian
chant was an appeal to a nkisi called Mbumba to do something about the
witches, black or white. Hilton was mistaken in lumping together, even “for
convenience only,” all occurrences not only of mbumba but of similar words,
including (m)bùmba, the medicine bundle of a nkisi, and mbombo, which in
the seventeenth century as in the twentieth indeed meant “fertility.”36 Her reck-
less mash-up of Kongo ritual and belief has been uncritically followed by too
many scholars.
The idea that Mbumba was the name of a snake or a snake cult is based on
two sources: early missionary reports of such cults and a misreading of Bittre-
mieux. Luca da Caltanisetta, for example, a Capuchin who could not witness a
Kongo celebration without shuddering at the diabolical horror of it all, de-
scribes a ritual at the beginning of the agricultural season in which the
people cultivate a field, with the exception of a grove at its center which is
the abode of a snake. Once the cultivation is over, the people appeal “to the
snake” for rain and prosperity.37 This reporting is unreliable—what the mis-
sionary saw was an example of a territorial cult such as occurs all over West
and Central Africa, often centered on a grove in which remarkable animals
(called “totemic” in older anthropology) are treated as emanations of the
spirit of the earth.38 Likewise the Nkimba cult, Bittremieux wrote, is addressed

33
Bafyòti, “black people,” from fyòta (low tone), “to become dark”; not to be confused with fyóti
(high tone), “little.”
34
J. K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo’: African Political Ideology and the
Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, 2 (1993), 181–214.
35
Mbumba Luangu is also the name of a “nail-fetish,” an anthropomorphic nkondi figure into
which nails were driven (Bittremieux, La Société Secrète, 173). An example from eastern Mayombe
is in Etnografiska Museet, Stockholm, no. 19.1.1192.
36
Not to be confused with mbùmba (low tone), “a cat”; bùmba, “to copulate”; mbùmba, ” bad
breath, stomach reflux”; or mbúmba (high tone), “pottery making”; búmmba, “a trap for porcu-
pines”; and others!
37
F. Bontinck, ed., Diaire Congolais (1690–1701) de Fra Luca da Caltanisetta (Louvain: Nau-
welaerts, 1970), 111–12.
38
V. W. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1974), 185; W. MacGaffey, Chiefs, Priests, and Praise-Singers:
History, Politics and Land Ownership in Northern Ghana (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2013), 71, 102–3.
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 171

“not directly to the rainbow itself, neither as snake, nor as snake-fetish, but to
the Spirit of Mbumba Luangu, the rainbow, localized in [a double anthropo-
morphic figure in wood called] kele ki Thafu, the image of Mbumba
Luangu.” That explains, he continues, “why the ‘snake’ and the visible
rainbow are relegated to the background. This cult is rendered ultimately to
the Spirit of the Earth, [the nkisi nsi].”39 Cuvelier’s text shows that his misread-
ing was prompted by a bygone anthropology of the “primitive mind” in which
primitive religion was supposedly based on fear of natural phenomena, espe-
cially dangerous animals. Kongo beliefs are more complex and much more ab-
stract than Cuvelier allows, but at the same time they are labile; they form a
consistent, viable, and life-shaping whole, but they are products of bricolage
rather than doctrine.40
The project of constructing a usable “Kongo” from a position on the other
side of the Atlantic is beset with difficulties, as we have seen. Besides the in-
evitable lacunae in the record (though Kongo is by far the best documented area
in the interior of precolonial Africa), and the bias of observers, most reports on
which historians rely use orthographic conventions that do not indicate tones or
vowel length in Kikongo, with the result that entirely different words may look
the same. In any case, the principal Kongo cultural export to the Americas was
Roman Catholicism. (This fact makes “Kongo” seem less authentically African
in its Atlantic “rivalry” with “Yoruba.”) After the first baptism of the Mani
Kongo in 1491, Kongo adopted a Catholicism that they understood in their
own terms, an “unusual” interpretation developed and taught, under the leader-
ship of the long-lived and scholarly King Affonso Mvemb’a Nzinga, by a corps
of teachers who were educated and often of high rank. This Catholicism was
acceptable to Rome until, in the eighteenth century, Europeans adopted a
view of orthodoxy that was as much cultural as theological, and began to
regard all Africa as pagan and primitive.41
Once arrived in St. Domingue, Kikongo-speaking Catholics continued ac-
tively to preach and to administer the sacraments, undoubtedly reinforcing Ca-
tholicism in that country. “Syncretism” between saints and minkisi had already
been effected in Kongo, where for example in the eighteenth century an avatar
of St. Anthony of Padua was Toni Malau, a nkisi for good hunting (malau,
“hunting luck”), and Our Lady of Mpinda was a rain shrine.42 Since for the

39
Bittremieux, La Société Secrète, 188. The modifier Lwangu probably reflects the origin of the
cult among the Vili, who regard “Mbumba” as one of the oldest bakisi basi, “nature spirits.” See
Hersak, “Many Kongo Worlds.”
40
The complexities of Central African rainbow mythology are examined in L. de Heusch, Le
Roi de Kongo et les Monstres Sacrées (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), ch. 12.
41
J. K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo,
1491–1750,” Journal of African History 25, 2 (1984): 147–67.
42
T. Rey, “Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism,” in L. M. Heywood,
ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2002). De Heusch was wrong to assert that in Haiti vodou and Catholicism existed
172 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

immigrants religion was not a matter of creeds and denominations but rather of
recognizing and dealing with the forces that shape experience, they were
quicker than anthropologists to recognize the family resemblances between
the great Kongo minkisi and the Yoruba (Nagó, Lucumi, Rada) orisha that
was also present in Haiti as elsewhere in the Americas. The supposed cultural
difference between Central and West Africa is partly a product of colonial his-
tories and their residue in the ecology of scholarship. In both areas of the At-
lantic coast of Africa the great spirits were divided into those that are
masculine, fiery, and violent, contrasted (though not perfectly) with those
that are cool, feminine, and associated with water and women’s concerns.43
In Haiti these functions were redistributed, in such a way that the Kongo
(Petro) spirits are associated with the left hand and the upward direction, and
with fire and violence, as opposed to the Rada (Allada) group, marked by fem-
inine concerns, the right hand, water, and healing. This reorganization, while it
preserved the common structure, overrode purely linguistic significances so
that, for example, in Haiti the nkisi Mbumba Maza (maza, “water”) is associ-
ated with fire.44

A DIAGRAM FETISHIZED

The need to identify specifically Kongo traits and to represent them in high-
cultural terms responds to American needs at the time when the stories are
told. In the absence of words, ritual sequences, and evidence of specific
skills, archeologists and folklorists have had to make do with ambiguous
signs. Such uncertainty often led, in the first years of “Kongo” research, to a
fetishization of Fu-Kiau’s “cosmogram” as a substantial though unconscious
presence in African American folk art. Too often, merely decorative features
or signs of uncertain origin were hailed as cosmograms and furnished with
imputed meaning. An exhibition of African American quilts, for example, as-
serted that a stuffed effect in a quilt “recalls” (to whom?) a nkisi; that a shell
motif is an “emblem of the sea, the world of Kongo ancestors”; and that a
diamond or cross “may represent a memory of the Kongo cosmogram.” The
lack of methodological rigor in such speculations betrays an underlying conde-
scension, though not one peculiar to writing about Africa and Africans. When
the search for the cultural essentials of royalty, art, and religion runs into prob-
lems of language, translation, and strangeness, the imperative of “respectabil-
ity” inclines scholars and the educated public alike to reach into their store

side by side without merging; that was not even true at any time in Congo itself. De Heusch,
“Kongo in Haiti: A New Approach to Religious Syncretism,” Man 24 (1989): 290–303.
43
M. Augé, Le Dieu Objet (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).
44
W. MacGaffey, “Twins, Simbi Spirits and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti,” in L. M. Heywood, ed.,
Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 211–26; De Heusch, “Kongo in Haiti,” 292.
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 173

of ready-made images of romantic Others, imagining that they are conferring

praise. The pressure to enlarge upon and celebrate “Kongo” (as opposed to
Congo) is such that even the best work tends to condense into a “Kongo”
reality scraps of information from much of Central Africa and then transport
that reality across the Atlantic to merge with another collection of possibilities
and speculations, similarly condensed, that should be more modestly identified
as West African. No such pressure bears on, say, Igbo identity.45
The effort to use Fu-Kiau’s diagram as a kind of DNA for things Kongo
fails because the same cosmology of divided worlds is found in the forest zones
of West Africa as well as in Central Africa. One example is Benin, where in Edo
art a circled cross represents simultaneously the cardinal directions, the four
days of the week, and the unfolding of the first day—morning, afternoon,
evening, and night. The Yoruba visualize their universe as a spherical gourd
with upper and lower hemispheres that fit tightly together, or as a round Ifá
tray on which the diviner inscribes a cross as he begins.46 All over the world
rituals are conducted in prepared spaces oriented toward the cardinal points.
Circles and crosses appear everywhere; they may have ritual significance or
they may be simply decorative, as they often are in Kongo itself. In Kongo
thought, things should come in complementary pairs, because any one item
by itself is an oddity (nsùnda), unbalanced by a counterpart. One pair balanced
by another gives an aesthetically satisfying fourfold result. I once bought some-
thing in the market from a woman who was more comfortable counting with
peanuts than with francs. One peanut by itself, however, was insignificant,
an anomaly, and so two peanuts were necessary to stand for one franc. Five
peanuts amounted to two francs, the fifth one standing for the unity of the set.
In parts of the Americas where it can be shown that there were concentra-
tions of “Congos,” the plausibility of a proposed Kongo trace is of course much
greater. Though the record of the Stono rebellion in South Carolina in 1739
mentions no identifiable words or signs, Thornton was able to conclude from
the Catholicism of the rebel core, their knowledge of Portuguese, their apparent
origin from the port of Cabinda, their maneuvers, and especially their familiar-
ity with firearms, that they were probably Kongolese soldiers who had been en-
slaved in the course of warfare.47 The most productive investigation of Kongo
elements in the hybrid African cultures of the Americas is Janzen’s analysis of a

45
For a well-researched but overstated study, see J. Ringquist, “Kongo Iron: Symbolic Power,
Superior Technology and Slave Wisdom,” African Diaspora Archaeology Network, Sept. 2008
Newsletter. At: http://www.diaspora.illinois.edu/news0908/news0908-3.pdf (accessed 31 Aug
2015).
46
P. Ben-Amos, “Symbolism in Olokun Art,” African Arts 6, 4 (1973): 28–31, 95; H. J. Drewal,
J. Pemberton, and R. Abiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York:
Center for African Art, 1989).
47
J. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96, 4
(1991): 1101–13.
174 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

Lemba ritual reported by J. Price-Mars from Haiti in the 1930s.48 His investi-
gation identified not words alone but a whole ritual process, and began by an-
alyzing detailed accounts of Lemba in Kongo itself, written in Kikongo in 1915
while the cult was still vital. From this basis Janzen was able to focus, not only
on words and objects, but also on the underlying logic of the ritual, which re-
mained the same in Haiti as in Kongo, despite merging with Yoruba and Cath-
olic elements. His conclusion is thus firmly based on data rather than
speculation.
At a still more abstract level, African cult practices embody “philosophi-
cal” reflections; they are not simply assemblages of traits. In both West and
Central Africa a distinction is made between legitimate, public uses of occult
power and its illegitimate use for personal benefit. In principle, everybody
should respect his or her assigned position in a hierarchically ordered
society, and those who pursue their own advantage (as of course, most
people normally do) are “witches.” This distinction has been transposed to
Cuba, where Yoruba-related orisha cults are supposedly disciplined, civilized,
and “religious,” whereas the various forms of Bantu-Cuban Palo are regarded
(at least from a “Yoruba” perspective) as “black magic,” barbaric and self-
seeking. The distinction is of course judgmental, in Cuba as in Africa; it
does not describe what people actually do, but constitutes what Stephan
Palmié calls “an indigenous sociology of religious forms.” On one level
these are functionally differentiated ritual technologies, at another they “cir-
cumscribe opposed images of sociality,” two models of the relations between
individual and society. The tension between them “renders palpable the contra-
dictions of dependency and individuation in a social world where objects at
times take on the role of social actors and people mutate into things.”49
African rituals, in the Americas as on the continent, embody a “philosophical”
component that transcends the assemblage of objects and gestures that meet the
eye. The manipulation in ritual of personified objects and objectified persons
enables the participants to think about who they are.
Fu-Kiau’s diagram is not, in any case, an unmediated transcription of an
immemorial property of the collective Kongo mind. Fu-Kiau, who had been
working with Janzen, presents his book as an ethnographer’s report explaining
certain concepts and rituals to outsiders, although as we shall see that is not
really what it is. As an ethnographic report it is open to critique.50 The emer-
gence of the diagram as an object in its own right and its elaboration as a
“symbol” laden with meanings is a consequence, in the first place, of literacy

48
J. M. Janzen, Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World
(New York: Garland, 1982).
49
S. Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 162–68; MacGaffey, Religion and Society, 171–75.
50
Janzen, Lemba, 187–88; R. Batsikama ba Mampuya, “A Propos de ‘la Cosmogonie Kongo,’”
Cultures au Zaire et en Afrique 4 (1974): 239–64.
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 175

and secondly of art-historical enthusiasm. In specific rituals, Kongo might draw

crosses and circles to orient the action or to explain relationships, but they
thought of secular situations in the same way. Nobody before Fu-Kiau called
“the cosmogram” tendwa kia nza-n’Kongo or “the dikenga,” or thought of it
as an entity in itself, still less as a vehicle for ethical instruction as it became
in Fu-Kiau’s later work.51 Scholarship has ignored the comments of
R. Batsikama, whose critique of Fu-Kiau is the only one by a native speaker
of Kikongo. Batsikama, like Fu-Kiau, was a self-taught scholar whose own in-
terpretations of Kongo history and culture are equally idiosyncratic, but his ob-
jections to Fu-Kiau’s methods are right on target: Fu-kiau’s Kongo is ahistorical,
uncertainly both ancient and contemporary, and his interpretations of ritual are
inconsistent with the wealth of information we have from other indigenous
sources. The meanings he gives for Kikongo words are often based on fanciful
etymology, and he “translates” French (and English) concepts with invented
Kikongo expressions to give the impression that such concepts are already indig-
enous. Batsikama harshly concludes that the author offers too many unsupported
assertions and too much gratuitous praise of the Kongo people. His book, he
says, would be more interesting if he did not try so hard to appear Christian,
an “obsession” that makes him avoid delving deeply into Kongo religion.52
Batsikama’s criticism is unfair in the sense that Fu-Kiau’s goals were those
of an African nationalist liberated from a particularly demeaning form of colo-
nial rule, not an ethnographer. To understand them one must read the long poem
with which he concludes his original book. After listing the insults to which he
has been subject (“Pig! Monkey! Barbarian!”), he writes: “I want to emerge, out
to where I see a cascade of light; to overcome, to reveal, to expound, to explain
to all peoples and tongues all that the ancestors confided to me. You deep think-
ers, true philosophers! Think upon it!”53 His “Christian obsession” is not theo-
logical but apologetic, a moral vindication of his people in terms appropriate to
the missionary values of his youth. In later writings, and in his life as a lecturer
and teacher in the United States, Fu-Kiau abandoned the ethnographic style for
one that was frankly “philosophical.”
Scholarly commentary on “the cosmogram” among archaeologists and art
historians has followed Fu-Kiau in being ahistorical, assuming that it records
Kongo thought and practice since the time of the kingdom, or before.54 In

51
A. Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki, African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo (New York: Athelia Hen-
rietta Press, 2001).
52
Batsikama, “A Propos,” 254.
53
My translation. This fragment is a cry of pain; the verbs the poet uses are very heavy. In the
original: “Nzolele vaika/ Ku mbazi, bu mbweni miezi/ Mu sengumuna/ Mu tendula/ Mu yalumuna/
Ye mu saasila/ Kwa zindinga ye makanda/ Mayatuikwa kwa bakulu. Lu bayinda, minyundudi mia-
kedika, luyindula!”
54
For examples, S. Cooksey et al., eds., Kongo across the Waters (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2013).
176 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

fact, Fu-Kiau gives us a view of the world that was current in Lower Congo in
the 1960s, after fifty years of colonial repression and mission activity, during
which chiefs invested at the nkisi nsi were replaced by chefs médaillés and
the great minkisi, such as Pulubunzi, Mbenza, and Lusunzi, were reduced to
a faded memory. Other cosmologies were current at the beginning of the colo-
nial occupation; for Mayombe, for example, Bittremieux described in detail a
three-level universe.55 To the diagram Fu-Kiau adds his interpretation: “Like
the setting of the sun, a man dies, and in that death he is born in Mpemba
and continues his life until he is old. In old age he dies again and is (re-)
born on earth.”56 Yet regular reincarnation was and is not a Kongo belief.
Laman’s Kikongo texts from 1915 and the comments of modern informants
provide evidence of a more complex cosmology in which the dead, instead
of “circulating” by rebirth in this world, as Fu-Kiau has it, die successive
deaths, gradually becoming simbi spirits and the animating forces of minkisi
before merging with natural features such as termite hills and strange
rocks.57 A folk “philosophy” does emerge from these texts, which consists
of reflections, symbolically rather than discursively expressed, on the tension
between the transience of human life and the permanence of institutions. The
investiture and funeral rituals of chiefs at sites associated with simbi spirits
(pl. bisimbi) were central to these “reflections,” and the sense of how the
world works was directly related to contemporary ritual practice and
experience.58
To Fu-Kiau’s ode to his ancestral culture, Thompson added a gloss of his
own that moves the diagram into the neighborhood of the Christianity implicit
in the original: “The Kongo yowa [dikenga] does not signify the crucifixion of
Jesus for the salvation of mankind; it signifies the equally compelling vision of
the circular motion of human souls about the circumference of its intersecting
lines. The Kongo cross therefore refers to the everlasting continuity of all righ-
teous men and women.” To this reading Desch-Obi added a further gloss,
“Thus, Kongo cosmograms were more than mere symbols; they could also
be ritually activated to mediate power between the spiritual world of the ances-
tors and the world of the living.” The fetishization continues: “Dikenga is itself
the energy of the universe, the force of all existence and creation.”59

55
L. Bittremieux, Mayombsche Idioticon (Ghent: Erasmus, 1922–1927), s.v. diyilu.
56
Muntu weti fwa va kimosi ye ndiamunu a ntangu, mu mfwilu yoyo, weti butuluka ku mpemba
ye tatamana zingu nate ye nuna mpe. Bu kameni nuna weti fwa diaka ye butukulu mu nza. Fu-Kiau,
N’kongo, 30. The saying Fu-Kiau uses to support his idea of cosmic circulation, Nzungi, nzungi
nzila, “Man circles on the path,” is a mistaken version of the song Nsongi, nsongi nzila, “The
guide, who shows the way,” sung while a nganga leads a client across a boundary.
57
The same belief has been reported among the Vili; Hersak, “Many Kongo Worlds,” 622.
58
MacGaffey, Political Culture, ch. 8.
59
Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage, 1983) 108–9, quoted by T. J. Desch-Obi,
“Combat and the Crossing of Kalunga,” in L. M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 177

This sort of commentary leaves Kongo reality far behind. In the lives of
real human beings, “cosmology” was not an established doctrine but an
ongoing discussion of everyday experiences, such as the philosopher Richard
Rorty would call “a conversation between persons.”60 Such conversations
can be heard in daily life, but develop especially when afflicted persons
consult a diviner in search of explanations and solutions for their problems.61
The boundary between the living and the dead was not a line on a diagram but
rather the edge of the village (mpambu a nzila, “the parting of the ways”), on an
out-going path where twins were buried and where medicines might be planted
for good or ill; the edge of the forest, next to the cultivated fields, where me-
diating plants could be gathered for healing, and where the voices of the
dead might be heard in the evening; the river’s edge, where bisimbi, spirits
of those who have died the second death, guarded the path to the eternal
bankita, or so some people said; the uncertain line between dreams and
waking reality; the difference between hidden causes and their fortunate or mis-
fortunate effects, a relationship that only those with four eyes could investigate.
Transactions across the boundary, explicitly modeled on negotiations between
neighboring villages, were incessant, including both the interventions of occult
forces in daily life and the efforts of the living to procure advantage, redress, or
healing. But there was no fixed model of the cosmos.
Fu-kiau succeeded in his mission to make the world pay attention to the
culture of his people, but as Batsikama wrote, the results present Kongo
ritual and belief selectively, glossed in such a way as to make them seem
uniquely virtuous. His inspired meditation finds its validation not in the ethnog-
raphy of the fifteenth or the twentieth centuries but in the reception accorded to
it in the twenty-first, especially by artists of African descent who incorporate
“the dikenga” directly or indirectly in their work. Artists are little concerned
with the specifics of language, history, and culture; they frankly take a sign,
an image, and build it into their work for what it means to them. For artists
and many others of African descent, the dikenga has come to have value like
that of a relic of a saint in medieval Europe: negating separations of time
and space, it establishes connection to an absent origin. As an aesthetically sat-
isfying fragment, it supports a cloud of imaginative associations. That is their priv-
ilege, even though their creations are inspired in part by the products of lazy
scholarship. Tendwa simply means “diagram,” from tenda, “to make a mark,”
but dikenga implies turning and returning, from kenga, “to go around a corner,

Transformation in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Martínez-Ruiz,

in Radcliffe Bailey, 187.
60
R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),
156–57.
61
W. MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983),
159–74.
178 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

to disappear,” as in folktales about a girl called Nkenge who disappears into the
water-land of the bankita but returns, changed. For these artists, dikenga is like
mpemba, white kaolin clay, which, when applied to the body or incorporated in
an amulet, brings close the revivifying forces of Mpemba, the land of the ancestors.

CONCLUSION

The project of identification hovers uneasily between scholarship and myth-

making. Myths offer eternal verities, but the history of West Central Africa is
one of constant change brought on by the deliberate efforts of chiefs,
healers, and prophets, summarized by Janzen as “the tradition of renewal,”
to restore social, hygienic, and psychological integrity in response to war,
slaving, disease, drought, colonial occupation, and missionary teaching.62
The first of these efforts was the adoption of Catholic Christianity by Mani
Kongo Nzing’a Nkuwu in 1491. Others included the local performance of
rituals intended to restore social harmony by renewing contact with the vital
forces of nature. Of these, Kimpasi and Kinkimba are familiar because mission-
aries described them, but there were many others, including Mbinda, Ndembo,
Na Kongo, and the Antonine Movement of Kimpa Vita. All such movements
seem “religious” because they refer to invisible forces, but their opponents cor-
rectly perceived all of them as political projects.63
In 1921, before Belgian authorities arrested him and sentenced him to life
imprisonment, the prophet Simon Kimbangu inspired what became the best-
documented revival, carried on by his many followers in the twentieth
century. Kimbanguism combined Protestant Christianity with half-remembered
references to the traditional cosmology of divided worlds and to the mediating
role of the bisimbi (spirits of the earth), in a vital synthesis comparable to the
Kongo Catholicism of the seventeenth century. The result was called “syncre-
tism,” a judgment of inauthenticity that can only be made by those who do not
perceive its inner integrity and have not experienced the social and psycholog-
ical stresses that demand “renewal.”64 People of African origin or descent in the
Americas have carried on closely similar processes of renewal. Drawing on the
arguments of David Scott, Jason R. Young rejects the prevailing view that in
order to be regarded as valid, “African cultural continuities have to be pre-
served in some sort of formal praxis to be compared with a presumed
African precedent.”65 Focusing on African Americans of the Carolina

62
J. M. Janzen, “Renewal and Reinterpretation in Kongo Religion,” in Cooksey et al., Kongo
across the Waters, 141.
63
See, for example, Bittremieux, La Société Secrète, 210–14. Kimpa Vita was burned alive.
64
MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, 180–88; W. MacGaffey, “Kimbanguism and the Ques-
tion of Syncretism in Zaire,” in T. D. Blakely et al., eds., Religion in Africa (London: James Currey,
1994), 241–56.
65
J. R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry
South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 8.
 CONSTRUCTING A KONGO IDENTITY 179

Lowcountry, Young gives a historical account of their construction of an ethos,

a way of living and thinking, a bricolage of memories, materials, and intentions
that came to hand in confrontation with the conditions of slavery. Many of its
elements are of Kongo origin, including explicit references to bisimbi, but
Young is not concerned to authenticate single traits. He summarizes what he
calls “a broad set of religious principles first developed in Kongo” on which
he concentrates because it has been documented in exceptional historical
depth. Like Janzen investigating Lemba in Haiti, he finds evidence of its pres-
ence in the American south but he does not discount the importance of other
African traditions. In Kongo itself, the product of such cultural work is an ever-
evolving lifeway called fu kya nsi, “our custom,” or “our culture.”
Although some scholars have argued that the African diaspora should be
understood not as exile but as a continuing exchange of influence across the
ocean, that case can be made for West or even South Africa much better
than for Central Africa.66 Yoruba intellectuals in Africa and others of
African descent in Brazil, “ethnicity entrepreneurs,” as Matory calls them, con-
tributed substantially to the “Yoruba” idea.67 Whereas visitors to West Africa
can witness “traditional rituals,” be initiated as babalawos, and conceivably
embark on the long course of study and practice necessary to becoming a com-
petent and accepted practitioner, there is no comparable institution among
Kikongo speakers. There is as yet no substantial literature by Kongo intellec-
tuals on their cultural heritage nor any thriving, self-consciously Kongo com-
munities overseas to concern themselves with it. Nationalist Kongo writers
such as M.-J. Koulumbu, eager like Fu-Kiau to restore the dignity of Kongo
in the face of foreign misrepresentations, are generally ignorant of postcolonial
work in English by Swedish and American scholars and rely on outdated books
by W.G.L. Randles and Cuvelier.68 C. Bakwa Muelanzambi in Belgium and
Mbanzila Yambula in Italy have devoted theses to aspects of Kongo culture,
but no field ethnographer has emerged to replace the late Gérard Buakasa.69
Efforts have been made toward intellectual cooperation among centers in Braz-
zaville, Kinshasa, and Luanda, but the real handicap is the lack of a political
base to serve as the constituency for a new image of Kongo.
It has been established beyond question that Africans, many of them
“Congos,” defended and enriched diasporic communities, using the knowl-
edge, intellect, creativity, and skills they brought with them. An increasing

66
K. Mann and E. Bay, Rethinking the African Diaspora (Portland: Frank Cass, 2001).
67
Matory, “English Professors”; J.D.Y. Peel, “The Cultural Work of Ethnogenesis,” in T. Falola,
ed., Pioneer, Patriot and Patriarch: Samuel Johnson and the Yoruba People (Madison: African
Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1993).
68
M.-J. Kouloumbu, Histoire et Civilisation Kongo. Publication de l’Association Mbanza
Kongo pour Culture (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). But see also the numerous publications of Patricio
Batsikama ba Mampuya, grandson of R. Batsikama.
69
G. Buakasa, L’impensé du Discours (Kinshasa: Presses Universitaires du Zaire, 1973).
180 W YAT T M A C G A F F E Y

volume of detailed research has replaced the methodological recklessness of the

early search for “Africanisms” in American culture, although too many of those
eager to construct and celebrate “Kongo” are still content with a simplistic
image summed up in a single word, and seem to feel that the humanity of Af-
ricans and people of African descent can only be validated by exalted language.

Abstract: The past thirty years have seen, particularly in the United States, a
transformation in the public image of “Kongo,” an ill-defined entity (a tribe, a
kingdom, a culture, a region?) on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa. The
efforts of R. F. Thompson, professor of art history at Yale, and A. Fu-kiau,
himself Kongolese, have done much to popularize a “Kongo” characterized
more by its romantic appeal than by historical or ethnographic verisimilitude.
Elsewhere in the Americas, the reputation of “Kongo” has suffered by compari-
son with “Yoruba,” another historically emergent Atlantic identity, based in West
Africa. These identities, and the supposed contrast between them, are products of
an increasingly complex trans-Atlantic discourse.