traditionsBakongo nkisi craftkinganga

Close communication with ancestors, and confidence in what they can do, is what minkisi are for. Among the peoples of the Congo Basin, exceptional human powers are held to come from some kind of communication with the dead, and banganga are the people who do that communicating — working as healers, diviners and mediators, defending the living against harmful workings and supplying remedies against sicknesses caused either by those workings or by the demands of the bakisi, the spirits who are emissaries from the land of the dead.

The substances are chosen by metaphor, not by pharmacy. Wyatt MacGaffey's correction is the one this record follows: bilongo is usually translated 'medicine', but they are not applied to the sick or swallowed, so 'therapeutic substances' is closer. Bird claws to catch a wrongdoer. Fruit, charcoal, mushrooms. Minerals from places associated with the dead — grave earth, riverbed earth. White clay, because white carries dead skin, moral rightness and spiritual positivity against the black of negativity; red ochre where the powers of the dead are being mediated. Many minkisi contain earth or relics from the grave of a powerful person as a prime ingredient, which is why the objects have been described as portable graves.

The practice sorts itself. Minkisi and the afflictions that go with them are classed 'of the above' and 'of the below'. The above are the sky, rain and thunderstorms, counted masculine, tied to violence and violent forces, used to maintain order, serve justice and seal treaties; their motifs are birds of prey, lightning, weapons, fire, and they affect the upper body, so head, neck and chest pains are attributed to them. The below are the earth and the waters on land. Some figures are animals — most often dogs, kozo, sometimes carved with two heads, because a dog lives in two worlds at once, the village of the living and the forest of the dead. Na monanga minkisi are made carefully, with tranquil expressions, and are associated with a powerful person of great reasoning who brings happiness and fortune; npezo figures are made to look menacing and their power is held to be weakened by laughter. Personal minkisi are anonymous and kept in a private house; community ones are placed to be seen, often overlooking the village, though kept in their own enclosure by day.

The word is old in writing and older in use. Its earliest attestations are in Kikongo dialects in the early seventeenth century, transliterated into Dutch as mokissie; Dutch visitors to Loango used it in 1668 for both the object and the spirit in it; when Kongo converted in the sixteenth century, the Kikongo Catechism of 1624 used ukisi to translate 'holy'.

The practice crossed the Atlantic. Aspects of Kongo spirituality reached the Americas with the slave trade, and Hoodoo and Palo carry them; the art historian Robert Farris Thompson has been the influential identifier of Kongo elements in African-descended populations of the Americas. The Kikongo word mooyo, the cavity in an nkisi where charged items sit, is where the American word mojo comes from. Archaeologists working at the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan found Kongo-related material — minkisi and nkisi bundles — buried with African remains.

The objects left. Collectors wanted the nailed figures as soon as the German Loango expedition published them in the 1870s; Robert Visser, a German trader and diplomat, supplied Berlin and Stuttgart. Many were purchased, others confiscated or removed by colonial authorities, and often found their way to museums, while many also remain in private hands. Where they should be now is an argument with names attached: the 2018 Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, which moved the debate onto moral rather than only legal ground; the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, holding more than 180,000 objects mainly from the former Belgian Congo and rebuilt around decolonisation; the Pitt Rivers Museum's four tenets of provenance, transparency, repatriation and redress, and its 2020 Restitution of Knowledge project with Savoy and colleagues at Technische Universität Berlin; and the British Museum, which has consistently refused to return objects, citing the British Museum Act 1963.

Inference — the European word for these objects came out of Portuguese traders on the West African coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was applied to Central African things from outside. This atlas treats it as a term with a history, filed under fetish-word, and does not use it to describe what an nganga makes.

The nganga gathers the bilongo and assembles them, most often into a carved figure with a cavity cut for them at the belly, the head, or in pouches at the neck, closed with a resin-fixed mirror. He then either becomes possessed by the spirit or leaves the object in a graveyard or another place spirits frequent. Nkondi are often composed at the edge of the village, on the reasoning that a village, like a body, must have its entrances guarded; the nganga works isolated in a hidden camp and comes back covered in paint and behaving strangely. Before use he recites invocations to wake the nkondi. Banganga paint themselves for performances — white circles around the eyes to see past the physical world, white stripes on participants — dress unlike anyone else, wear ornate jewellery and work knots into their clothing, knots being tied to closing up or sealing spiritual forces.

Contested, and split three ways: Kongo communities, museum stores in Europe and North America, and private hands. Artists have taken the form up — Renee Stout, Tania Bruguera, Kara Walker, Dread Scott, Karen Seneferu, Wesley Clark, Stephanie Dinkins, Michael MacGarry, Andrew Lamprecht, Justin Par. The Republic of the Congo painter Trigo Piula made a New Fetish series against what he called the rebuffing of traditional objects, and described the work as "a way of engaging with my community and a way of denouncing things that I believe are impacting us, like television for example". As of 2026 this project has read no count of how many minkisi are held outside Central Africa, and no source dating an end to the practice inside it.