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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.

The ongoing dynastic dispute in the kingdom of Dagbon in northern Ghana, which led to the killing of the king in 2002, remains unresolved and perhaps unresolvable. This paper updates Staniland's account of Dagomba politics from 1880 to 1974, and elaborates on the contradictions inherent in the social pluralism of a post-colonial state.

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.

National integration continues to be a matter of considerable debate and experiment among those concerned with the administration of Zaïre, but has attracted little attention elsewhere, even within the country. It is not to be confused with another policy – or alleged policy – that of suppressing tribalism in favour of national solidarity. Although ‘tribalism’ and ‘regionalism’ are constantly denounced by President Mobutu Sese Seko and other officials, they are major sources of corruption which the Government, by its practice, actively encourages by frequently reassigning all personnel in the higher ranks of the public service, and making sure that an ethnic mix is maintained in every agency. Officers commonly complain that the only thing that matters is one's tribal designation, not one's ability or performance. Engineered ‘tribalism’ of this sort has nothing to do with ancestral traditions and communal habits.

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

In this article, I try to translate what America means to a MuKongo, the ordinary inhabitant of the province of Kongo Central in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The subject has the advantage of being to some extent marginal among Kongo beliefs, and therefore more readily isolable, but it is not without relevance to international affairs.

The concept of modes of production was originally hailed with excessive enthusiasm; having now failed, like structuralism, to lead us into the Promised Land of total human self-understanding (Willis, 1982), it is now being widely abandoned, often with a sigh of relief. It is paradoxical that anthropology, proclaiming itself a science, should apparently proceed by a series of religious movements. This brief review pleads for greater pragmatism.

Alfredo Margarido has recently pointed out the Eurocentrism of certain linguists who, when faced with a puzzling West African concept, "solve" the puzzle to their satisfaction by adducing what seems to them to be the most relevant feature of the environment. This procedure leads them to conclude that a fifteenth-century expression said to mean "a white child" may refer to cabin boys on European ships. Margarido, on the other hand, points to the relatively common presence of albinos in the population and their ritually important roles in West and Central African capitals.' By both its form and its content, this minor difference of opinion draws attention to much broader issues which social scientists, particularly historians, have not yet squarely faced. In brief, I suspect that the interpretation of oral tradition in Africa is far more difficult than is usually supposed. The modern willingness to employ indigenous texts and concepts for historiographic purposes is not enough unless the cosmologies that generate them can first be understood. This viewpoint can be illustrated from an analysis of Kongo and other traditions from west central Africa, with reference to the work of Jan Vansina and W.G.L. Randles among others. Andre Fu-kiau provides the best summary of the Kongo view of the universe.2