African Minkisi Introduced into American Culture: What Are Minkisi, and What Form Did They Take in the Americas?

African Minkisi Introduced Into American Culture: What Are Minkisi, and What Form Did They Take in the Americas?

I. Introduction

African Minkisi have been used for hundreds of years in West Central Africa, This area where they are traditionally from was once known as the kingdom of Kongo, when Europeans started settling and trading with the BaKongo people. Kongo was a well-known state throughout much of the world by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The BaKongo, however, had probably long used minkisi before ethnographers and anthropologists ever recorded them. Minkisi are complex items that are used to heal and to harm people, and there is no equivalent term for nkisi in any European language. A seventeenth century Dutch geographer first wrote of the nkisi, and said that, "These Ethiopians [that is, the BaKongo] call moquisie [minkisi] everything in which resides, in their opinion, a secret and incomprehensible virtue to do them good or ill, and to reveal event of past and future" (Williams, 13). The term illness, in this context, is quite different than what we refer to illness. Illness, to the BaKongo, meant anything from sickness, to loss of property, and the inability to succeed in things like school and work. . "The perpetual struggle with the unseen forces that cause illness and misfortunes was (and is) called "war" in Kongo" (MacGaffey, 98). A war is ended when one side of the struggle proves that they have better magic. The objects themselves are extremely complex, and most of them require hours of, "painstaking labor to construct" (MacGaffey, 33). "All minkisi, whether in the form of wooden figures, snail shells, raffia bags, or clay pots, are containers for "medicines" that empowers them" (MacGaffey, 43). "The usual containers included the shells of large snails, antelope horns, cloth bags, gourds, and clay pots. Although minkisi in museums are usually wooden figurines and statues, containers of this kind may well have been the minority" (MacGaffey, 63). Without medicines, the minkisi are nothing, they are not alive, nor can they perform their functions. "To BaKongo, all exceptional powers result from some sort of communication with the dead" (MacGaffey, 59). Chiefs, witches, diviners/prophets, and magicians could all do this, especially through and with the help of the minkisi. There are rules and ways of doing things with them, to them, that exemplify so many aspects of Kongo culture. To understand minkisi, you must first understand the Kongo people that made, used, and discarded them. To understand the people, you also must first understand their worldviews, their history, religion, economic conditions, how advanced their scientific knowledge was, etc. By learning about this one item used in Kongo culture, I have learned an enormous amount about the Kongo culture and the BaKongo, and have come to a new level of awareness about material culture.

The goals of this paper have changed throughout the course of my research. At first, I didn't even know what an nkisi was, let alone did I know where I wanted to go with this paper. After doing my research though, I have decided against a paper completely focused on original ideas. Instead, my goal of this paper is to use the things that I learned in our anthropology class, and apply them to minkisi. By applying the things I have learned in the readings from our class, I have learned a lot more about minkisi than I could ever gain by just reading a few books. I will especially focus on the works of Deetz, Vlach, and the authors about folk objects. I will also focus on what we talked about in class about "usable truth" when referring to objects associated with slave resistance.

The first conclusion I have come to during the course of my research, is that I don't know how anybody could reduce African religion to being anything less than complicated. At first the minkisi seem "savage". "Until quite recently, our (the Western world) response to these objects was purely visual with little or no understanding of history, meaning, and function" (Williams, 14). But when you look at the whole picture, they are really fascinating. The second conclusion I have come to is that because these items are kind of fascinating, I can see why they are not only collected for their aesthetic worth, but how they archaeologists and other people studying them could get wrapped up in the object and read more into them than is actually there. Also, because I can see why people could read more into them, they could try to make them something they were not. One author I read said that, "During the course of history, periods of crisis and hardship have often caused people to turn to supernatural means to relieve their suffering. Minkisi are both a dramatic example of Kongo resilience and a visually spectacular response to such needs" (Williams, 12). Robert Farris Thompson said that, "Aspects of Kongo culture retained by blacks enslaved in the Americs inspired men and women to come together as brothers and sisters in Kongo-American societies virtually devoted to the idea of being Kongo" (Thompson, 106). Were minkisi really a form of resilience, or was it just a part of their religion, just like prayer is today for many Westerners? Why does clinging onto tradition have to automatically be a form of resistance? Nothing in my research has convinced me or pointed me in the direction of thinking that the use of minkisi in the Americas was anything more than people trying to make slave life more bearable, and making it their own. Just like Vlach recognized in his book about how slaves did things, like taking paths other than the one's white planters' created, so they could make the landscape their own. If Africans in the Americas took wooden Saint sculptures and assimilated them into their culture, I would think this would be a form of conserving traditional practices. "Minkisi were powerful devices for enforcing conformity" (MacGaffey, 87). "Many African Americans recognize conjure's great sway over African Americans than over whites..."(Arnett, 131). I am not convinced it is as glorious as some anthropologists have made it out to be.

The second set of conclusions I focused on were about how the minkisi were very traditional objects, therefore they were highly conserved. "The