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Manuscripts in their own language by indigenous ethnographers at the beginning of the colonial period, not hitherto examined in detail, give unique insight into precolonial beliefs in the Kikongo-speaking region of what was then Belgian Congo, and the transition to Christianity. That transition depended in large part on translation, giving new meanings to old words. The texts suggest that Nzambi, now the Kongo name for the Christian God, was originally a personification of death. The power of life, on the other hand, was credited to bisimbi, chthonic forces that are simultaneously both material and immaterial. Although scholars have generally overlooked this issue, belief in these forces is foundational to what has usually been called traditional religion and its rituals, most of them now extinct. This Kongo configuration exemplifies, on a small scale, one that is found generally in West and Central Africa.

Though seemingly innocent, descriptive, and even commendatory, both “spirits” and “healing” are problematic terms in the history of African studies. Rather than identifying well-bounded domains of African life, both of them have evolved from the history of European attitudes toward Africa. “Spirits” often give rise to problems of well-being that “healing” is called upon to solve. Despite this close connection, spirits have been the primary subject matter of religious studies, whereas healing is among the concerns of anthropology. The study of African religion has thus come to be divided between two disciplines embodying the distinction between “belief” and “knowledge,” the irrational and the rational, developed in Europe during the Enlightenment. Anthropology itself has long divided social life into the separate domains of religion, politics, and economics, assigning the study of each to a different discipline with its own preoccupations and specialized vocabulary. This ethnocentric template misrepresented African societies whose institutions were unlike those of Europe. In the forest zones of West and Central Africa a particular set of beliefs and practices regulated the use of power for personal and collective well-being. Power, or the ability to effect change for good or ill, was and is still thought to be derived from forces called “spirits,” which are in fact as much material as spiritual. Following special procedures, gifted persons obtain power from an otherworld that is simultaneously the earth itself and the land of “the living dead,” who are buried in it. The uses of such power to kill or to cure, for collective or private benefit, define a contrast set of four roles—called for convenience chief, priest, witch, and magician—whose functions are simultaneously moral, political, economic, and therapeutic. This system is open to novel revelations within a stable cognitive framework, and adapts to new conditions. Different ideologies and practices of social regulation are found in other parts of Africa.

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.

In the last twenty years the number of smiths and the range of their activity have greatly increased in Tamale, the principal city of northern Ghana. The evolution of the national economy and the particular situation of Tamale in the geography of Ghana explain this development and the contribution that the city's smiths make to the economy, national as well as local. Au cours des vingt dernieres annees, le nombre de forgerons et l'eventail de leurs activites ont considerablement augmente a Tamale, principale ville du Nord du Ghana. L'evolution de l'economie nationale et la situation particuliere de Tamale dans la geographie du Ghana expliquent ce developpement et la contribution des forgerons de la ville a l'economie locale, mais aussi nationale.

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.

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.

Le texte de reference sur les instruments de musique kongo est la these de Bertil Soderberg (1956), qui lui-meme s'appuie sur le Dictionnaire kikongo-francais de K.E. Laman (1936), celui-ci derivant ses termes musicaux des manuscrits kikongo (les cahiers) rediges en 1915 par quatre ou cinq collaborateurs de Laman originaires de Manianga et de l'est de Mayombe (Congo belge de l'epoque). Soderberg publia un autre texte en 1968. L'A. se propose de completer ces sources avec des notes extraites des textes kikongo originaux de 1915, non seulement celles decrivant des instruments de musique, mais egalementy les notes plus nombreuses dans lequelles des instruments sont mentionnes en relation avec les differents minkisi, executions du complexe rituel nkisi qui a pour objectif de remedier aux problemes de sante, de mauvaise chance ou d'injustice. L'A. mentionne egalement d'autres fonctions et associations des instruments de musique, particulierement dans le domaine de l'art, notamment avec la peinture, la sculpture, et la pyrographie.

The BaKongo and other Central African peoples understand the place of violence in their lives in ways that resist translation into English because they seem to be both 'real' and 'imaginary.' In the nineteenth century, imagined violence was represented in the rituals of chiefs and in the complex forms of, fabricated objects which could be invoked to inflict retribution on others. The imaginative representation of occult violence in these objects and in the insignia of chiefship has earned many of them a place in the world's art museums. In recent years, vividly imagined violence has been central to the popular understanding of national politics, in Congo/Zaire as in many other African countries; it can in fact be regarded as a theory of political life, and compared as such with Western theories concerning the social ordering of violence.