Minkisi: Kongo Sacred Medicines, Nkondi and the Diaspora

Minkisi (singular nkisi) are the sacred medicines of the Kongo peoples of west-central Africa: containers such as carved figures, bags, pots and shells, filled with selected substances and animated by a spirit from the land of the dead, which a ritual expert called an nganga could direct to heal, protect, detect wrongdoers or enforce oaths. The most famous are the nail-studded nkisi nkondi figures now held in museums worldwide, and Kongo ideas about such medicines travelled with enslaved Africans to Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and the United States.

Kongo and the Meaning of Nkisi§

The Kongo peoples live along the lower Congo River and the Atlantic coast, in parts of present-day Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo, and speak varieties of the Kikongo language. From the fourteenth century a powerful kingdom of Kongo dominated the region, and from 1491, when King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised, it had a Christian monarchy in close contact with Portugal and Rome.

In Kongo thought the world of the living is mirrored by a land of the dead, often imagined as lying beneath water or across a boundary, from which ancestors and other spirits can act upon the living. Anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey, the leading modern interpreter of Kongo religion, describes an nkisi as a personalised force from the land of the dead that has agreed to submit to a degree of human control through ritual. The word refers both to this force and to the physical object in which it dwells. Minkisi were therefore not idols in the European sense, nor simply amulets, but instruments of relationship between the living and the invisible world.

Minkisi belonged to a wider religious system that included ancestor veneration, territorial spirits (simbi), chiefs who held sacred authority, and witches (ndoki) believed to consume the life of others in secret. Much illness and misfortune was explained as the work of witchcraft or of offended spirits, and minkisi were the principal means of diagnosis and remedy. The broader setting of African religious systems is described in African Traditional Religions.

Medicines, Containers and the Nganga§

What gave an nkisi its power was its bilongo, the medicines placed inside it. These included white clay (mpemba), associated with the dead and with clarity; red pigment (tukula); earth from graves; seeds, stones, shells, claws and plant matter. Kongo commentators explained that many ingredients were chosen because their names sounded like words describing what the nkisi should do, a form of verbal play in which substance and speech reinforced each other.

The container varied. Some minkisi were bundles or bags, some clay pots or gourds, some snail shells, and some carved wooden figures in human or animal form with a cavity in the belly or head to hold the medicines. This cavity was frequently sealed with a piece of mirror or glass, which has been interpreted as the eye through which the nkisi saw into the invisible world and as a reflective surface recalling the water that divides the living from the dead.

The nganga (plural banganga) was the specialist who knew how to compose an nkisi, observe its rules and call upon it. Many minkisi had their own nganga, songs, taboos and initiation, and some were linked to large associations. One of the best documented is Lemba, a healing and trade association active from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, which the historian John Janzen described as a "drum of affliction" that bound together merchants and their families along the trade routes north of the Congo River.

Nkisi Nkondi: The Nail Figures§

The minkisi best known outside Africa are the minkondi, a word usually translated "hunters". These standing wooden figures, often with a raised arm that once held a spear or knife, bristle with nails, blades and other pieces of iron driven into their bodies. Most surviving examples were made in the coastal and northern Kongo regions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Each nail recorded a transaction. When two parties swore an oath or concluded an agreement, or when someone sought to identify a thief, a witch or the author of an injury, the nganga would drive a nail into the figure to awaken and direct it. The nkondi was then believed to hunt down and punish whoever broke the oath or committed the wrong. A heavily nailed figure therefore embodied a community's history of disputes, contracts and calls for justice. Some large regional figures of this type, known by names such as Mangaaka, were associated with chiefs and with public law.

European observers in the colonial period often called these figures "fetishes" and read them as evidence of savagery or sorcery. Modern scholarship, led by MacGaffey and by the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, has stressed instead their judicial and protective role and their remarkable sculptural power. They were displayed in the major exhibition "Kongo: Power and Majesty" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015.

Minkisi, Christianity and Colonial Collecting§

Kongo Christianity developed in a long dialogue with indigenous religion. King Afonso I, who ruled in the early sixteenth century, ordered the destruction of minkisi associated with older cults, and later Capuchin missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries burned many objects they regarded as idols. At the same time Kongo Christians understood the cross, saints' medals and rosaries partly through local ideas of sacred power, and religious movements such as the Antonian movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita between 1704 and 1706 combined Christian and Kongo themes.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under Belgian, French and Portuguese colonial rule, minkisi were collected in very large numbers. Some were given up by converts, others seized during military expeditions or purchased by traders, missionaries and officials. Many are now in museums in Europe and North America, and questions about how they were acquired form part of present-day debates over the restitution of African cultural heritage.

Kongo Writers and the Laman Collection§

An unusual source for understanding minkisi comes from Kongo people themselves. In the early twentieth century the Swedish missionary and linguist Karl Edvard Laman encouraged literate Kongo teachers and catechists to write detailed accounts of their customs, including the composition, rules and uses of particular minkisi. These notebooks, written in Kikongo, are preserved in Sweden. MacGaffey translated and published selections in 1991, giving modern readers descriptions of minkisi in the words of people who had grown up with them, a perspective very different from that of colonial observers.

Kongo Charms in the Atlantic Diaspora§

West-central Africa was one of the largest sources of enslaved people in the Atlantic slave trade, and Kongo and Angolan captives were taken in great numbers to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America. Scholars have traced Kongo influence on several religious and magical traditions in the Americas, though the degree of continuity is debated and each tradition developed in its own way.

In Cuba, the religion known as Palo Monte or Palo Mayombe centres on a consecrated vessel, itself called an nganga or prenda, filled with earth, sticks, stones and other substances and inhabited by a spirit of the dead, an arrangement that clearly recalls Kongo minkisi. In Haitian Vodou, discussed in Haitian Vodou, the Kongo and Petwo rites and the wrapped bundles called pakèt kongo show similar inheritances. In the United States, the charm bags and bundles of hoodoo and rootwork have been compared with Kongo medicine bundles, and archaeologists have interpreted caches of crystals, pierced coins, pins and beads found beneath floors and hearths in some African American homes as protective deposits with possible Kongo roots, though such readings remain cautious.

Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit argued for a strong Kongo contribution to African American art and religion, including a cosmogram of crossed lines representing the boundary between the living and the dead. Some scholars think Thompson overstated the uniformity of these ideas, but his work, together with MacGaffey's, made Kongo religion central to the study of the African diaspora. The wider family of traditions is surveyed in African Diasporic Religions, and a related Afro-Atlantic protective object is described in Bolsas de Mandinga.

Frequently asked questions§

What is an nkisi?§

An nkisi is a Kongo sacred medicine: a spirit from the land of the dead housed in a container such as a figure, bag or pot that is filled with selected substances. Under the direction of a ritual expert, it could heal, protect, divine or punish wrongdoing.

Why do nkisi nkondi figures have nails?§

Each nail or blade was driven in to activate the figure when an oath was sworn, an agreement made or a wrongdoer sought. The figure was believed to hunt down anyone who broke the oath, so the nails record a history of disputes and judgements.

What is a nganga?§

In Kongo, an nganga is a ritual specialist who composes and operates minkisi. In Cuban Palo, the word also refers to the consecrated vessel that is the centre of the practitioner's religious work.

Sources and further reading§

• Astonishment and Power: The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi — Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris, 1993
• Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire — Wyatt MacGaffey, 1986
• Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves: Minkisi from the Laman Collection — Wyatt MacGaffey, 1991
• Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy — Robert Farris Thompson, 1983
• Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World — John M. Janzen, 1982
• Kongo: Power and Majesty — Alisa LaGamma, 2015
• The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 — John K. Thornton, 1998