From the Kongo to Cuba

Tradition described: Kongo (Central Africa)

From the Kongo to Cuba

The people the Cuban records call Congos came from the Kongo–Angola coast and its hinterland — the old kingdom of Kongo and the peoples around it, speakers of Kikongo and related Bantu languages — and were among the largest groups carried to Cuba across the whole period of the slave trade. What they brought is the religious world MacGaffey describes for the BaKongo: a distant creator, Nzambi Mpungu; the dead, who remain part of the community and cross to and from the land of the living; and the minkisi (singular nkisi), containers of powerful substances assembled by a specialist called a nganga, through which the dead and the forces of the world are made to act.

In Cuba the vocabulary survived with its meanings shifted. Nzambi became Nsambi or Sambia, the God above; the word nganga, which in Kikongo names the specialist, came to name the vessel itself, and the specialist became the tata or yaya nganga, its father or mother; the nkisi is still heard in the phrase nkisi or nkiso for a prenda, and in the name of one of the branches, Kimbisa. Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler traced this vocabulary — the lengua, as practitioners call the ritual language — word by word to Kikongo, and found that a great deal of it is Kikongo pronounced through Spanish, not a Cuban invention.

Thompson followed the same line in objects rather than words: the Cuban prenda as a descendant of the nkisi, and the chalk signatures drawn in Palo ceremony as descendants of the Kongo cosmogram, the cross-in-a-circle that maps the sun's four moments and the boundary between the living and the dead. Descendant, in both cases, is the right word. Two centuries in Cuba, alongside Catholicism, Lucumí religion and spiritism, made the Regla de Congo its own thing; the pages here describe the Cuban tradition and name the Kongo antecedent where a source does.

Editorially reviewed against the sources named

Next on the path: The ngangaAll articlesPalo Monte