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This small but highly charged book is based on the Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African and African American Art, delivered by Wole Soyinka at Harvard in 2017 in connection with an exhibition of so...

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 comparison 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.

Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests (1990) provides an instructive example of progress in overcoming the continuing burden of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in studies of precolonial Africa in both historiography and anthropology. This article focuses on a critical section of the book, which outlines social evolution and ‘the invention of matrilinearity’ in the area around the lower Congo, showing both the strengths and the weaknesses of Vansina's approach.

The received history of northern Ghana is based on anthropological assumptions imported by colonial officials at the end of the 19th century. This history is now unreflectively incorporated in the political discourse of the north, associated with ongoing conflicts that threaten at times to engulf all three northern regions in warfare. A critique of colonial anthropology, in combination with new research, suggests an alternative history of the North.

This article examines how historiography makes its objects and includes critical reflections on the epistemological frames that have shaped historical representations of Central African states and social structures. The article examines the seductive quality of migration narratives; mythical features of some classical models, creating order from reduced totalities; historiographic burdens imposed by questionable anthropological models of kinship and matrilineal descent; and asks if the prevalence of dual regimes of priest and king is a product more of ideology than history. The article argues for increasing recognition of the value in political studies of data relating to religion and art.

It is useful, for the sake of my topic today, that since I declared my title the Republic of Zaire (in May 1997) changed its identity, or at least, resumed one of its former names, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The change is also a nuisance, because the new/old name revives the likelihood of confusion not only with ex-Zaire's neighbour across the Zaire River, the Republic of Congo, but also with the people called BaKongo, who owned the name in the first place. I will try to explain all that in a moment.

ResumeComme les autres societes africaines post-coloniales, le Zaire est engage dans le processus de transformation allant du pluralisme institutionnel a l'homogeneite institutionnelle, stratifiee en classes. Le processus du changement a ete debattu par certains intellectuels a partir d'une perspective politique (le pluralisme), et par d'autres, en termes de l'articulation des modes de production. Il n'existe pas necessairement de contradiction entre ces deux points de vue, et tous deux ont besoin d'un troisieme, complementaire, celui du concept de l'articulation ideologique. Les recents developpements dans l'histoire religieuse du Zaire sont discutes a partir de cette perspective, puisqu’ ils ont un rapport avec, a la fois, la classe emergente et le changement institutionnel.

Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. With Dominique Schnapper. Translated by Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 (first published in French 1969). Figures, appendices, bibliography, index. $29.50 (hardcover).

The following exploration of social scientific thought as applied to Africa is an exercise in ethnography, not in debunking. At one level the argument, referring mainly to social change in western Zaire in the last hundred years, offers a descriptive interpretation which I assert is better than others. At another level I seek to establish what kind of phenomenon, in an ethnographic sense, historiography really is. At this level, I apply the methods of social science to a body of work in “social science” which is, in fact, myth, and which itself deals, in part, with a body of “myth” which is, in fact, social science.In “African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” Robin Horton first shows the ways in which the first is like the second in producing model-building explanatory schemes, and then argues that the difference between the two is essentially that “in traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such an awareness is highly developed ” He elaborates this difference between “the open and closed predicaments” in terms of such factors as unreflective versus reflective thinking, mixed versus segregated motives, absence versus presence of experimental method; these factors he finds superior in explanatory power to “most of the well-worn dichotomies used to conceptualize the difference between scientific and tradition religious thought. Intellectual versus emotional; rational versus mystical; reality-oriented versus fantasy-oriented …”Only occasionally does Horton refer to social science, however; he seems to assimilate it to natural science.

Nkisi is a Kikongo word that has no near equivalent in English. 'Fetish' is a usual but inadequate translation; nkisi and its cognates in many Bantu languages can refer to a spirit, an amulet, a medical treatment, a mask and certain specially qualified human beings. 'Fetish', moreover, brings with it a load of prior assumptions about fetishism, derived from the speculations of nineteenth-century anthropology, that may not apply to nikisi but instead tend to obscure our understanding of the phenomenon. Like similar forms of African religious practice, minkisi (the plural form) have adapted very well to changing social conditions, whereas some better-known forms such as ancestor cults and central shrines may have declined. Minkisi, however, are difficult to study because they are multitudinous, secret and expensive. Knowledge of them must be acquired piecemeal, often in the form of an extended initiation, yet only in considerable numbers do they reveal the principles of their composition and use. The practical difficulties of research into fetishism are largely overcome in the unique case of the BaKongo of western Zaire, thanks to the work of K.E. Laman in the first two decades of this century. He collected both a large number of minkisi and an even larger number of indigenous texts describing their origins, composition, uses and ritual context. His Congolese research associates, the authors of the texts, were teachers and leading members of the Swedish Missionary Church, which was at the time in the forefront of the European occupation of what had recently become Belgian Congo. Laman and his collaborators were deliberately attempting to create an authentic record for posterity of every aspect of Kongo culture, which they knew to be in the process of rapid and destructive change. With respect to minkisi the record that has come down to us, whether in the form of objects or of words, has been somewhat mutilated. An object haphazardly selected as representative of a given nkisi and subsequently labelled 'fetish' in a museum collection may be only a small part of a complex material apparatus. Even that part is likely to have suffered in the process of collection, losing its colour and some or all of its attachments. The present essay is based on a study of some 40 such objects in the Laman Collection of the Swedish Ethnographic Museum, Stockholm, chosen because

Based on interviews with participants and witnesses, together with some documentation, the article describes the means and conditions by which Kimbanguist doctrines were introduced to Kisangani (Stanleyville) between 1945 and 1959, before the foundation of the Church of Christ on the Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu as a national and international church. The special place in the covert theology of the Church of certain events in 1952, at the camp for Kimbanguist exiles in Lowa, is described. Discussion of ethnic rivalries during and after the foundation of the Church is related to the content of the oral traditions, which represent several political tendencies. The conclusion is that Kimbanguism in Upper Zaire differs from that of its place of origin in Lower Zaire in lacking roots in local culture and politics, and in having been primarily a product of nationalist sentiment after World War II.