Kongo

Kongo religion addresses a high god, Nzambi a Mpungu, who is not approached directly, and works instead through the ancestors, the bakulu, and through minkisi, objects charged with a spirit and with materials that direct it. Wyatt MacGaffey's study of the BaKongo describes an nkisi as a composed instrument rather than an idol. It holds medicines chosen for their names and properties, it is activated by words, and it has a defined job, whether healing, adjudication, or the punishment of a broken oath.

The figures driven full of nails and blades, which are the objects most often seen in museums, are one class among many. Each nail records a transaction: a case brought, an agreement sealed, an accusation lodged. What looks like violence directed at the figure is a record of use.

The scheme usually called the Kongo cosmogram is a cross within a circle, its horizontal line dividing the world of the living above from the world of the dead below, with the sun's course carrying a person from birth through maturity, death and return. Kimbwandende Fu-Kiau, writing from inside the tradition, presents it as a philosophy of life stages rather than as a map of geography, and the atlas records both his account and the scholarly readings that qualify it.

The kingdom of Kongo accepted Christianity at the end of the fifteenth century by the decision of its own ruler and not by conquest. Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised in 1491, and his son Afonso I made Catholicism the religion of the state, corresponded with Lisbon and Rome, and sent his son Henrique to be consecrated a bishop in 1518. Kongo was therefore a Christian kingdom of Africa in its own right, with a literate elite writing in Portuguese, for centuries before the colonial partition.

That Christianity was read through Kongo categories from the beginning. John Thornton's study of Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a young noblewoman who in 1704 declared herself possessed by Saint Anthony and led a movement to reoccupy the ruined capital and restore its kingship, shows how far the fusion had gone. She was burned as a heretic in 1706 and her movement outlived her.

The Atlantic slave trade carried the same religious vocabulary to the Americas on a very large scale. Kongo minkisi practice underlies Palo Monte in Cuba, the cosmogram appears in African American grave decoration and in the ring shout, and Kongo words are embedded in several Afro-Atlantic religions. A number of those are living traditions entered by closed initiation, and the atlas names them as closed rather than describing what is held inside them.