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.

African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo

African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo PDF Author: Kimbwandènde Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau
Publisher: Athelia Henrietta Press
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
"Life is fundamentally a process of perpetual and mutual communication; and to communicate is to emit and to receive waves and radiations (minika ye minienie). This process of, receiving and releasing or passing them on (tambula ye tambikisa) is the key to human beings game of survival. A person is perpetually bathed by radiations' weight, (zitu kia minienie). The weight (zitu/demo) of radiations may have a negative as well as positive impact on any tiny being, for example a person who represents the most vibrating: "kolo" (knot) of relationships." "The following expressions are very common among the Bantu, in general, and among the Kongo in particular, which prove to us the antiquity of these concepts in the African continent; Our businesses are waved/shaken; our health is waved/shaken; what we possess is waved/shaken; the communities are waved/shaken: Where are these (negative) waves coming from (Salu bieto bieti nikunwa; mavimpi nikunwa; biltuvwidi nikunwa; makanda nikunwa: Kwe kutukanga minika miami)?" "For the Bantu, a person lives and moves within an ocean of waves/radiations. One is sensitive or immune to them. To be sensitive to waves is to be able to react negatively or positively to those waves/forces. But to be immune to surrounding waves/forces, is to be less reactive to them or not at all. These differences account for varying degrees in the process of knowing/learning among individuals" --BOOK Cover.

The Art of Conversion

The Art of Conversion PDF Author: Cécile Fromont
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618729
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries. The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

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.