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15 C H A P T E R 2 The Atlantic Passage: The Spread of Kongo Belief in Africa and to the Americas The Bakongo people are found today in northern Angola, southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, southern Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo. A subset of broader Bantu culture that today stretches across much of eastern, central, and southern Africa, the Bakongo first settled in Central Africa as a result of larger migrations across the continent. It is generally believed that the Bantu originated in the vicinity of the Cross River Valley, an area covered by present-day Chad and Sudan. Archaeologist John Desmond Clark, in his book The Prehistory of Africa, calls the spread of Bantu-speaking people “one of the most intriguing and challenging problems in African studies today” and asserts that its route and full impact on the peopling of the continent will only be known “through a correlation of many lines of evidence,” including tracing the genetic similarities between groups and mapping the linguistic variations measurable today.1 According to the geog­ rapher James L. Newman, two major streams of expansion and migration began approximately five thousand years ago. The first spread south from regions presently comprising Chad and Sudan toward and through presentday Cameroon before turning slightly eastward and spreading across and down to cover present-day Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and northern Angola. The second stream tracked farther to the east, also moving south, to present-day Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania .2 Bakongo oral history identifies Ntunu Nzaku Nevunda as the founder, hero, warlord, bearer of civilization, and creator of the Kongo Kingdom.3 Georges Balandier and Joseph van Wing mention the importance of the Nevunda family name in the growth of the kingdom. The following legend cited by van Wing speaks to the direct relationship between expansion and migratory routes that originally facilitated the acquisition of neighboring lands.4 At the Kongo of the king the first man after the king is one who does not yield, Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign 16 It is I, Mpungu. It was old grandmother Nkumba-Nkumba who gave birth to us all. When we left the Kongo there were nine caravans, nine leaders’ staffs The bone of our ancestors, we brought, we use them to anoint the chiefs, and the grass rings as well. The roads were sure, the villages where we slept were peaceful. We arrived at the ford of Nsimba. We stayed together, We did not separate. We came to many rivers, to waters of all kinds. A woman, the mother of a clan, stayed at the ford of the Mfidi.5 According to Balandier, this legend alludes to a migration under one single authority and highlights the matrilineal origin of the Bakongo: “It was old grandmother Nkumba-Nkumba who gave birth to us all. . . . A woman, the mother of a clan, stayed at the ford of the Mfidi.”6 The population that moved through and settled in what are today the Democratic Republic of the Congo and northern Angola found a rich subsistence environment in the equatorial rain forest and along the coastal areas.7 They likely encountered settlements of early ancestors of a people known today as the Mbuti, whose life in the Ituri forest in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dated as far back as twenty thousand years ago,8 and other human settlements, evidence of whose Tschitolian industry has been documented in territories controlled today by Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as far back as approximately seventeen thousand years ago and as recently as A.D. 1000.9 The new arrivals continued the cultivation of yams and the practice of fishing and hunting evidenced throughout their migration. In this new land the Bakongo prospered and eventually developed into one of the most powerful kingdoms in Africa. Before delving fully into the history and culture of the Kongo, we should note that the term Kongo is inherently problematic insofar as it conflates into a single term a complex regional history and multiple cultural identities. The Kongo kingdom’s dominance in Central Africa from as early as the thirteenth century until the colonial period certainly shaped the development of the region, but reliance on the term Kongo to describe a complex amalgamation of cultures and a dispersed, varied population glosses over the region’s history of war, occupation, migration, and intraAfrican...

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