Dikenga

The dikenga, also called the yowa or the Kongo cosmogram, is a cross-within-a-circle figure central to the cosmology of the Bakongo of Central Africa and to a number of traditions in the Americas descended from it. Its horizontal line is understood as the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, frequently figured as the surface of water, and its vertical as the path connecting them.

The four points are commonly given as a cycle corresponding to the sun's course: rising, zenith, setting, and the midnight position beneath the world, and thereby to birth, maturity, death and existence in the ancestral realm, followed by return. The figure therefore expresses a cyclical understanding of a person's course and of the continuing relation between the living and the dead. It is a statement about time and community rather than a map of space, and this is the point most often lost when it is reproduced as decoration.

The interpretation most widely known outside Kongo communities is Robert Farris Thompson's. His Flash of the Spirit (1983) presented the cosmogram and traced what he identified as its retentions and transformations across the Americas, in the ground-drawings of Cuban Palo, in marks on colonoware pottery and objects recovered from archaeological sites in the United States, and in a range of African-American practices. Thompson's account has been enormously influential and is responsible for most general familiarity with the figure.

It is also contested. Some scholars have argued that the fourfold interpretation is more systematised than the Kongo evidence will support, that Thompson and his collaborators worked from a limited set of informants, and that crosses and cross-marks in the Americas have sometimes been identified as Kongo cosmograms too readily, where other explanations are available, including Christian ones, given the presence of Christianity in the Kongo kingdom from the late fifteenth century, which makes the cross a doubly available sign in exactly these communities. Others defend the identification and point to the strength of the documented continuities. The debate remains live in African diaspora archaeology and art history.

One boundary should be noted. In initiatory traditions such as Palo, ground-drawings incorporating the figure are made and used in ritual contexts that practitioners regard as closed, and detailed accounts of their construction and use are not appropriate for general publication. What is described here is the cosmological figure and the scholarly discussion of it, not ritual practice.

The complicating factor the main entry raises briefly, that Christianity arrived in the Kongo kingdom in the late fifteenth century, deserves fuller treatment, since the Kongo case is one of the earliest instances of an African kingdom adopting Christianity on its own terms rather than through colonial imposition.

King Nzinga a Nkuwu of Kongo converted to Catholicism in 1491 following contact with Portuguese traders, taking the name Joao I, and his successor, Afonso I, who reigned from 1509 to 1543, became a genuinely committed Christian ruler, corresponding with the Portuguese crown and papacy, sending Kongolese students to study in Portugal and Rome, one of whom became a Catholic bishop, and working to establish Christianity as the kingdom's official religion while protesting the escalating Portuguese slave trade his kingdom was becoming entangled in. Kongo Christianity developed its own character over the following two centuries, incorporating indigenous concepts, ancestor veneration among them, into Catholic practice, and producing, in the early eighteenth century, an independent prophetic movement led by Kimpa Vita, known as Dona Beatriz, who taught that Jesus, Mary and the saints had been Kongolese before being burned at the stake as a heretic in 1706.

This two-century history, predating by centuries the colonial-era missionary Christianity more commonly associated with African conversion, is the direct context the main entry gestures toward in noting that crosses in Kongo-descended American communities may reflect Christian rather than, or in addition to, cosmogram symbolism, since the cross had already been a live, locally adapted symbol in Kongo society for two hundred years before the slave trade carried Kongo religious material to the Americas.