The Kongo of My Ancestors

The Kongo of My Ancestors PDF Author: Fungula Fumu Ngondji
Publisher: Tate Publishing
ISBN: 1617399167
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Do you know what it is that makes you who you are? Is it your name? Your education? Your race, religion, job, or bank account? Or is it your origin, the land of your ancestors, your culture? In The Kongo of My Ancestors, Fungula Fumu Ngondji describes his quest to find out what makes him who he is. Born and raised in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Fungula has seen many changes in his home country. Fungula offers a firsthand account of his youth in a traditional Congolese village; his teenage years living in the Congo's capital city, Leopoldville (now called Kinshasa), during the time of Belgium's colonial rule; and his career as an influential journalist, labor organizer, and freedom fighter under Mobutu's dictatorship. Fungula recounts the tragedies inflicted on the people of the Congo through the slave trade, colonization, evangelization, and neocolonialism, as well as his own search for freedom and self-realization. The Kongo of My Ancestors is a powerful, passionate call to action for the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and for all the people of Africa and the African diaspora.

The Kongo of My Ancestors

The Kongo of My Ancestors PDF Author: Fungula Fumu Ngondji
Publisher: Tate Publishing
ISBN: 1617399167
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Do you know what it is that makes you who you are? Is it your name? Your education? Your race, religion, job, or bank account? Or is it your origin, the land of your ancestors, your culture? In The Kongo of My Ancestors, Fungula Fumu Ngondji describes his quest to find out what makes him who he is. Born and raised in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Fungula has seen many changes in his home country. Fungula offers a firsthand account of his youth in a traditional Congolese village; his teenage years living in the Congo's capital city, Leopoldville (now called Kinshasa), during the time of Belgium's colonial rule; and his career as an influential journalist, labor organizer, and freedom fighter under Mobutu's dictatorship. Fungula recounts the tragedies inflicted on the people of the Congo through the slave trade, colonization, evangelization, and neocolonialism, as well as his own search for freedom and self-realization. The Kongo of My Ancestors is a powerful, passionate call to action for the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and for all the people of Africa and the African diaspora.

The Kongo Kingdom

The Kongo Kingdom PDF Author: Koen Bostoen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474187
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A unique and forward-thinking book that sheds new light on the origins, dynamics, and cosmopolitan culture of the Kongo Kingdom from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

The Kingdom of Kongo

The Kingdom of Kongo PDF Author: John Kelly Thornton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description


African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry

African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry PDF Author: Ras Michael Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139561049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.

Death and the Invisible Powers

Death and the Invisible Powers PDF Author: Simon Bockie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253315649
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
"[Bockie's] description of Kongo culture is vivid, beautifullyclear, and absolutely authentic, as only a native could make it.... I don't know ofanything of its kind that is both as good, ethnographically, and asreadable." -- Wyatt MacGaffey "Simon Bockie haswritten an engaging, often personal account of the views and behaviors surroundingdeath in his own society, the Kongo of Lower Zaire, northern Angola, and theCongo." -- Cahiers d'Etudes africaines ..". excellentbook of Kongo religious life and thought... " --Religion "It is a book that is remarkably well written, bothfor its readability and for its explanatory value.... the book is a superb startingplace for understanding Kongo religion, and will work as an introduction to Africanreligion in general as well." -- International Journal of African HistoricalStudies ..". an excellent introduction for anyone seeking tounderstand Kongo traditional culture and thought." --Oshun Rich in anecdote and case histories, Death and the InvisiblePowers is a personal account of the spiritual life of the Kongo people. It describesthe ancient traditions that nourish a culture whose name symbolizes the heart ofCentral Africa.

The Kongo

The Kongo PDF Author: Karl Edvard Laman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description


Rituals of Resistance

Rituals of Resistance PDF Author: Jason R. Young
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807132791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In Rituals of Resistance Jason R. Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. The choice of these two sites mirrors the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through the ports of Charleston and Savannah. Analyzing the historical exigencies of slavery and the slave trade that sent not only men and women but also cultural meanings, signs, symbols, and patterns across the Atlantic, Young argues that religion operated as a central form of resistance against slavery and the ideological underpinnings that supported it. Through a series of comparative chapters on Christianity, ritual medicine, burial practices, and transmigration, Young details the manner in which Kongolese people, along with their contemporaries and their progeny who were enslaved in the Americas, utilized religious practices to resist the savagery of the slave trade and slavery itself. When slaves acted outside accepted parameters -- in transmigration, spirit possession, ritual internment, and conjure -- Young explains, they attacked not only the condition of being a slave, but also the systems of modernity and scientific rationalism that supported slavery. In effect, he argues, slave spirituality played a crucial role in the resocialization of the slave body and behavior away from the oppressions and brutalities of the master class. Young's work expands traditional scholarship on slavery to include both the extensive work done by African historians and current interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies, anthropology, and literature. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources from both American and African archives, including slave autobiography, folktales, and material culture, Rituals of Resistance offers readers a nuanced understanding of the cultural and religious connections that linked blacks in Africa with their enslaved contemporaries in the Americas. Moreover, Young's groundbreaking work gestures toward broader themes and connections, using the case of the Kongo and the Lowcountry to articulate the development of a much larger African Atlantic space that connected peoples, cultures, languages, and lives on and across the ocean's waters.

Voices of Our Ancestors

Voices of Our Ancestors PDF Author: Patricia Causey Nichols
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643363492
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The first detailed linguistic history of South Carolina, with a new preface by the author In Voices of Our Ancestors Patricia Causey Nichols offers the first detailed linguistic history of South Carolina as she explores the contacts between distinctive language cultures in the colonial and early federal eras and studies the dialects that evolved even as English became paramount in the state. As language development reflects historical development, Nichols's work also serves as a new avenue of inquiry into South Carolina's social history from the epoch of Native American primacy to the present day. Because Charleston was among the foremost colonial American seaports, South Carolina experienced a diverse influx of cultures and languages from the onset, drawing influences from Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and a plethora of European peoples—Scots-Irish, English, Jewish, German, and French Huguenot chief among them. Nichols tells the richly complex story of language contact from groups representing three continents and myriad cultures. In examining how South Carolinians spoke in public and private we glean much about how they developed a common culture while still honoring as best they could the heritages and tongues of their ancestors. Nichols pays particular attention to the development of the Gullah language among the coastal African American peoples and the ways in which this language—and others of South Carolina's early inhabitants—continues to influence the communication and culture of the state's current populations. Nichols's synthetic treatment of language history makes expert use of primary source materials and is further enhanced by the author's field research with Gullah-speaking African Americans and with descendants of Native Americans, as well as her keen observation of her own European American community in South Carolina. Through her deft analysis of contemporary language variations and regional and ethnic speech communities, she advances our understanding of how diverse the South Carolina experience has been, from the lowcountry to the upcountry and all points in between, and yet how the need to communicate shared experiences and values has united the state's population with a common meaningful language in which the diverse voices of our ancestors can still be heard. In a new preface, Nichols reflects on the growing diversity of the United States as a whole and how relationships across communities shape language and culture.

The Fiddler on Pantico Run

The Fiddler on Pantico Run PDF Author: Joe Mozingo
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451627610
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In this gorgeously written and “vividly fascinating” (Elle) account, a prize-winning journalist digs deep into his ancestry looking for the origins of his unusual last name and discovers that he comes from one of America’s earliest mixed-race families. “My dad’s family was a mystery,” writes journalist Joe Mozingo, having grown up with only rumors about where his father’s family was from—Italy, France, the Basque Country. But when a college professor told the blue-eyed Californian that his family name may have come from sub-Saharan Africa, Mozingo set out on an epic journey to uncover the truth. He soon discovered that all Mozingos in America, including his father’s line, appeared to have descended from a black man named Edward Mozingo who was brought to America as a slave in 1644 and, after winning his freedom twenty-eight years later, became a tenant tobacco farmer, married a white woman, and fathered one of the country’s earliest mixed-race family lineages. Tugging at the buried thread of his origins, Joe Mozingo has unearthed a saga that encompasses the full sweep of America’s history and lays bare the country’s tortured and paradoxical experience with race. Haunting and beautiful, Mozingo’s memoir paints a world where the lines based on color are both illusory and life altering. He traces his family line from the ravages of the slave trade to the mixed-race society of colonial Virginia and through the brutal imposition of racial laws.

The Limits of State Power in Africa

The Limits of State Power in Africa PDF Author: Georges/Sembe Bakaly
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1427611491
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description