Notes and comments

African objects and the idea of fetish

WYATT MACGAFFEY

RES 25, 1994

William Pietz has written a series of provocative and wide-ranging articles

on the origin of the idea of fetishism and the role of that idea in European

social thought, particularly in the last century (Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988, 1991).

Currently we are ashamed to apply nineteenth-century labels and

explanations to African culture without some attempt at modification, but in

some areas we have not really developed any strong substitutes. In an

attempt to move in that direction, this article makes use of the outline of

Pietz’s argument as a framework for describing some aspects of the religion of

the BaKongo of western Zaire.1

Fetish

Pietz distinguishes between, on the one hand, actual African objects that

may be called fetishes in Europe, together with the indigenous theories of

them, and on the other hand, “fetish,” an idea, and an idea of a kind of object,

which as he says “originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West

Africa during the 16th and 17th centuries” (1985:5). In these cross-cultural

spaces Europeans were challenged to rethink the capacity of the material

object to embody religious, commercial, aesthetic, and sexual values. What

was originally a problem in understanding African culture became, in the work

of such thinkers as Marx and Freud, a perspective, or group of perspectives, 1 Most of the objects called "fetishes" in museums were collected between

1870 and 1920. In general, the past tense is used here to discuss them; the

BaKongo no longer make the objects in similar forms, although the principles

that generated them are still vital.

on European culture.

Pietz says, “Fetish could originate only in conjunction with the emergent

articulation of the commodity form that defined itself within and against the

social values and religious ideologies of two different types of non-capitalist

society” (1985:7). The two types are European feudalism, with the Catholic

theological tradition, and African societies. The third factor operating in the

intercultural, coastal space was Dutch capitalism, which is closely related to

Calvinist theology and the Protestant ethic. The components of [123b] “fetish”

that emerged from the interaction of these three are identified by Pietz as

follows:

1. The fetish is irreducibly material-unlike an idol, which represents an

immaterial something located elsewhere.

2. The fetish is the fixation of a unique originating event that has brought

together previously heterogeneous elements into a novel identity. Desires and

beliefs and narrative structures also fixed by the fetish, whose power is to

repeat its originating act of rearticulating these heterogeneous elements. In

this respect also, fetishism contrasts with idolatry, which was understood by

European thinkers as a [rational] principle of social order; the fetish idea

labeled a social order that seemed to have been generated paradoxically, by

natural and lawless contingency.

3. Fetishism embodied the problem of the nonuniversality and social

constructed ness of value. Early travelers to West Africa were puzzled because

gold was valued by West Africans and yet exchanged by them for articles that

the Europeans considered worthless.

4. The material fetish as an object established an intense relation with, and

exerted power over, the desires, actions, health, and self-identity of

individuals whose personhood was conceived as inseparable from their bodies:

the human body (as the material locus of action and desire) was subjected to

the influence of amulets and the like that, although cut off from the body,

functioned as its controlling organs at certain moments; for example, for

healing. The alienness of African culture, in particular its resistance to rational

trade relations, was explained (especially by Protestant traders) in terms of

the African’s supposed irrational propensity to personify material objects,

which seemed to reveal a false understanding of natural causality. Africans

also attributed causal relations to random association. They seemed to

2

confuse the religious and the material, which Europeans had recently begun to

think of as quite separate, and not to value properly material objects, such as

gold. So it became conventional to describe Africans as worshipers of “trifles.”

The false religious [124]

Figure 1. Male figure (nkisi). Kongo peoples, Congo and Zaire. Wood, glass,

iron, and other materials,43.2 cm. Gift of Helen and Dr. Robert Kuhn, 91-22-1.

Photo: Franko Khoury, Courtesy of National Museumof African Art, Eliot

Elisofon Archives, Smithsonian Institution. [125a]

values of Africans explained their irrational economic values and their

allegedly superstitious response to European technology. The Dutch idea of

3

African irrationality was turned into a full-fledged evolutionary theory by

Enlightenment intellectuals and consecrated by Hegel. According to Hegel,

Africans lacked the category of universality; they worshiped the first thing that

came their way.

Pietz says he is not concerned with the relation of the fetish idea to the

actual conceptions of West African culture. Here, I will attempt to do the same

thing, at least with respect to the ritual practice of the BaKongo, a people of

western Zaire and northern Angola whom the Dutch knew relatively well, and

for whose culture there exists a unique volume of indigenous documentation.

What follows is a restatement of the elements of the fetish idea, and an

examination of the extent to which they describe the kind of object the

BaKongo call minkisi (fig. 1).2

1. The irreducible materiality of the nkisi: it does not represent an

immaterial something, a spirit, located elsewhere.

Two indigenous texts, dating from about 1915, describe certain spiritual

entities and their material manifestations in the form of minkisi:

Funza is like a man, but invisible. Also he is like a large pot in a

well-made basket that has twisted driftwood in it and stones from the

water, in which he placed his human body (Momo kakitudila lunitu

lwandi lwa kimuntu). He lives in the water, but his servants have

houses built for them in the same kind of grass in which the first

couple is said to have built. These houses are placed at the end of

the village, on account of looking after people who make sacrifices to

them, which they take back to Funza, where he lives alone, so that

he can oversee everybody. Sometimes he appears in dreams, telling

someone “compose me.” The person then sets up an nkisi to BUNZI

or KINKITA or MUTINU, the three servants of Funza, sent by him to

help man set limits to death sent by God, the eater of men).3

2 Singular, nkisi; plural, minkisi. See MacGaffey and Harris 1993.3 The texts identified as “Cahiers” were written by Kongo authors in their own

language, KiKongo, between 1912 and 1916. The translations are my own. See

MacGaffey 1986.

4

Cahier 138:7

Nkisi Mbola is called Mbola because it comes from “rotting” and it

“rots” (bola) living things. Its origin is as follows. Once upon a time

there was a man who lived to a [125b] very great age. He died and

was buried in his grave. After his burial he lived for a long time in the

land of the dead and grew old there. He died once again, but found

himself no closer to his relatives there in the land of the dead, so he

thought, What am I to do in this second death? I should become an

nkisi. So he betook himself to a stream. When he got there he met a

man crossing, so he began to bob about on the surface of the water.

The man’s eyes opened wide, he plucked a leaf and popped it three

times on his hand [in salutation). Then he took up [the thing he saw

in the water], brought it to the village and put it in his house. Night

fell, and the man went to sleep. [The ghost] then revealed his name

to the man in his sleep, saying: I am one who formerly lived on earth

and have died the second death; take me and keep me to be your

nkisi. My name will be Mbola, because I rotted twice. You will make

me a mpidi basket and a lukobe box, that I may live inside the box,

but have a statue carved that I may be put in it. So he came with his

sharp knives, his adze, his hatchet and his other tools.

The actual procedure for constituting this nkisi Mbola includes the

following:

Then they go to the cemetery to wherever lies buried a man who was

exceptionally strong and virile. They take him and put him in Mbola,

they take earth from the grave and rub it on the statue. Then they

return to the grave and sacrifice a chicken and drip (the blood] on

the nkisi, singing: “Where the chicken died, may a man die, chop!

the bracelets of the master nganga.” After the invocation they install

the spirits in the basket and the box, singing: “1 took it, I put it. Eh

yaya, I took it, I put it in the basket.”

Cahier 390

5

From such accounts it is clear that an nkisi was a spiritual entity, a personality

from the land of the dead, present in a material body, by its own choice or

otherwise, but not restricted to that body.4 The material object did not

represent such a spiritual personality but provided a local habitation for it.

Though some Kongo minkisi may always have been anthropomorphic, they

were probably much less “realistic” before the mid-nineteenth century, when

European influence intensified. The celebrated naturalism of Kongo figures is

much more marked in coastal areas than inland.5 [126a]

Although nkisi cannot be invoked except in its material form, Kongo

theory is clearly inconsistent with the view that a fetish is irreducibly a

material entity. Is it therefore an “idol”? A complicating factor is that

Europeans tend to think of “spirits” as necessarily “objects of worship.” The

idea of an “idol,” as understood by the Fathers of the Church, depended on a

concept of “worship,” a form of observance proper only to the true God, which

became “idolatry” when addressed to false gods. A number of observers at

the end of the last century, protesting against an idea of African culture that

had already been found unsatisfactory in the sixteenth century, insisted that

minkisi were not “worshiped” and thus were not “idols.” One of them wrote

that belief in charms (minkisi) was universal, but that no worship, prayer, or

adulation was offered them. The keeper of a charm in its house might send for

local youth to assist in his magical rites, “but so far from worshipping, the

youngsters amuse themselves with laughing and dancing in front of the

image, occasionally pushing each other over in fun” (Phillips 1887:159). An

nkisi violates our categories of the ritual and technical, spiritual and material,

by being all of these; it is not approached in pious humility and may be abused

and insulted to motivate it to perform appropriately.

4 There is a close analogy between different minkisi of the same name and

Christian shrines of the virgin, each of which has its own identity, so that they

are not substitutable; nor is the Virgin, who continues to reside in God’s

presence, bounded by any one shrine.5 A nineteenth-century figure of Saint Anthony, evidently carved by an African,

testifies to the influence of European models by its careful carving of the folds

of the saint’s robe (Beumers and Koloss 1992, fig. 59).

6

2. The nkisi fixes previously heterogeneous elements into a novel

identity. Desires and beliefs and narrative structures are also fixed

by the nkisi.

Europeans thought that Africans made fetishes of any trifles that

happened to catch their eye. According to one of the principal informants of

the widely read Dutch trader, William Bosman, an African about to undertake

a project, and feeling the need of a sponsoring deity for it, would recognize as

that deity “the first creature that presents itself to our Eyes, whether Dog, Cat,

or the most contemptible animal in the world” (quoted in Pietz 1985:8). The

resulting fetish thus recorded a unique originating event, as Pietz puts it, by

combining into a novel identity previously heterogeneous elements, including

not only its material ingredients but the desires and beliefs associated with

the project. Africans were thus paradoxically supposed to generate a social

order out of “a chaotic principle of contingency” (Pietz 1985:7-8).

The contents of nkisi Nkita Nsumbu (fig. 1) might seem to confirm

Bosman’s view. It is easy to show that in fact very little in Kongo ritual is there

by chance. It is [126b] true that the BaKongo might well emphasize the

particularity of an nkisi and the singularity of its origin, but in their account

they would reverse the direction of the originating impulse. The object that

became an nkisi would likely have been presented to its intended owner on

the initiative of the spirit personality that it represented, as in the case of both

Mbola and the servants of Funza; minkisi were standardized objects that

people adopted because they were obliged to do so. The process of initiation

by which minkisi were acquired might well be long and arduous.

Secondly, it is also true that some ingredients were included in the

material composite of the nkisi simply because they were ornamental or

remarkable to look at. Many minkisi, and the nganga himself who operated

them, were dressed up theatrically to provoke astonishment, partly as a way

to lend authority to the performance. Most of the components, however, so far

from being random trifles, were included for specific reasons, some of which

varied very little from one nkisi to another. One kind of ingredient, or

“medicine” (bilongo), consisted of such things as grave dirt or kaolin from the

abode of the dead under the water, to adduce the presence and power of the

dead in the composite. A second category expressed the uses to which this

7

power would be put in this particular nkisi, either metaphorically or by a play

on words. Metaphors included such things as a snake’s head for an nkisi to

attack wrongdoers, or the sharp tools of Mbola with which the nkisi carved

away the noses and fingers of its victims. Twisted roots expressed a sense of

the original, creative power of Funza. Other bilongo were included because

their names suggested abstract qualities desirable in the nkisi. Here for

example is part of an indigenous list of such medicines:

kala zima (charcoal), that it may “strike” (zima) all who are evilly

disposed;

tondo (a subterranean mushroom), that the spirits be praised

(tondisa) and the healing process be effective (tonda mbote);

nkandikila (a red kernel), to bar (kandika) the path by which witches,

bad dreams, and spirits may come; luhezomo (fossil resin), that

witches, malicious persons, and evil spirits of all kinds should flee,

just as we lee the flash of lightning (mpezomo) in the sky.

Cahier 298

Minkisi were thus composed according to rules both specific to any one nkisi

and characteristic of the genre. The principles underlying the rules were those

of metaphor and metonymy, which are basic to figures of [127a] speech and

to ritual, the world over. The “materiality” of the composite is therefore

ambiguous.

The myth of origin of the nkisi Nkita Nsumbu

The myths of origin of minkisi are similarly ambiguous, stories of a purported

past and prescriptions for the present.

A woman called Ndandi Mfuka was walking by the edge of the water

when she was seized by nkita spirits [a variety of simbi] who took her

into the pool, where she remained for nine Nsona days [nine four-day

weeks]. On the tenth she emerged with two stones with which she

had composed nkisi Nkita under the water. When she appeared in

8

the village she was covered with spots of red camwood. She

remained in an enclosure for another Nsona day. On the next, she

came out of it, knowing many things about the places under the

earth and under the water where the bankita live. That day, she was

asked many questions, but answered all of them, forgetting none,

and explaining everything.6

This story of the origin of an nkisi, which might once have been read as a

report of a random encounter with a “trifle,” can now be seen as a narrative of

an initiation sequence. To become qualified as the operator of this nkisi, the

candidate is secluded for a period of time, during which she is supposedly

being taught how to compose the nkisi in the land of spirits.

Elements of regularity in the story include the banality of the event, which

recurs as a trope very widely in West and Central Africa; the red spots,

presupposing a color code, which indicate a liminal condition, partly in this

world and partly in the world of spirits; and the cosmological setting, in which

powers related to “the above” and to celestial waters are associated, as in

Mbola, with men’s concerns, with the upper part of the body, and with

violence, whereas those “of below” and terrestrial waters are associated, as in

Nkita Nsumbu, with women’s concerns, healing, and the loins.

What the nkisi records is not the mythical encounter of a particular woman

with a materialized spiritual entity but local understanding of a disease, or

group of diseases which the nkisi was believe to control In t e myths of origin,

“Whatever order emerges is not [127b] erroneous history, or the history of

humans forgotten, but the resolution of human and cosmic dilemmas through

analogy and metaphor, by transference to parallel domains” (Janzen

1982:304).

3. The fetish embodied the problem of the nonuniversality of value.

Just as European traders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries deemed 6 Text by Lutete Esaya, ca. 1915. Complete text and translation in MacGaffey

1991:88. KiKongo pronouns are not gender-specific, so he” could have been

used throughout.

9

the socioreligious orders of African societies to be founded on the valuing of

trifles and trash, so also they remarked constantly on the fact that they could

trade their own trinkets for objects of real value (Pietz 1985:9). Pietz says,

“The discourse of the fetish has always been a critical discourse about the

false objective values of a culture from which the speaker is personally

distanced” (Pietz 1985:14). He goes on to say that in the intercultural space

that is the home of fetish, Africans too, and specifically the BaKongo, took

certain objects to be minkisi of the Europeans. There is some truth to this

assertion, though on the whole I doubt that nkisi as a conceptual category is

illuminated by it. Here are two examples from contemporary Zaire.

The construction of bridges in difficult terrain proved impossible in

the 1950s until, according to local belief, the territorial spirits

(bisimbi) of the locality were captured by the European engineers

and their powers controlled in bottles, the equivalent of nkisi

containers. Surgeons are believed sometimes to make victims of

their patients, stealing parts of their bodies to be the power sources

for minkisi made up in what are, in fact, specimen jars.7

In these examples, Kongo interpretation of their experience led them to

suppose that Europeans, inhabitants of the “other world”-the land of the

dead-fabricated their minkisi by incorporating in them spirits from their own

“other world,” that is, the land of black people. On the whole, however, the

equivalent African “discourse” functionally parallel to fetish in the intercultural

space is probably not nkisi as such but African Christianity as developed in the

independent churches. It can be argued that the leaders of these churches

were, among other things, intellectuals who formulated answers to popular

questions about the nature and meaning of Europe in its relation to Africa

(MacGaffey 1983; 1984). [128a]

4. Fetish, though separate from the body, functioned at times as

though it were a controlling organ.7 This information is from indigenous manuscripts in the Laman National

Archives, Stockholm, 1915.

10

From economics to psychology.

The fourth theme found in the idea of the fetish is, then, that of the

subjection of the human body (as the material locus of action and

desire) to the influence of certain significant material objects that,

although cut off from the body, function as its controlling organs at

certain moments. It was, of course, psychoanalysis that developed

most fully this theme of the effective symbolization of the sexual

human body “fixated” in relation to certain material things.

Pietz 1985:10

The repertoire of minkisi known in any locality was a handbook of current

problems, whose etiology it explained, together with courses of action

intended as remedies. As new problems arose, including not only new

diseases but, for example, the problem of European interference with local

commerce in the 1880s, new minkisi emerged to deal with them (MacGaffey

1987). In many minkisi the beneficiary of the procedure would be given a

sample of the medicines made up in a portable version of the nkisi itself, that

is, as an amulet to be worn about the body, and others made up in a potion to

be swallowed. By such means the nkisi and its particular powers would be

incorporated in the person of the client, who would thereby be protected or

cured. In addition to the metaphorical elements described above, certain kinds

of nkisi themselves incorporated pieces of the client, such as his hair and

nails, or of objects associated with him, such as a scrap of his clothing.

Certainly, the material fetish as an object “established an intense relation

with, and exerted power over, the desires, actions, health and self-identity of

individuals whose personhood was conceived as inseparable from their

bodies” (as in the medical practice of the modern United States, we might

add). To regard the nkisi as simply an expression or projection of personal

desires and passions is, I suggest, an explanation inadequate to the data,

however much it may seem to save us from the embarrassments of “idolatry”

and “fetishism.” The passions, the rituals, and the material objects are clearly

simultaneous in their production and use, and must be explained together

rather than serially.

11

The scandal of this sort of practice is the confusion it makes between the

spiritual body of a human being and the profane materiality of things, between

being the subject or the object of action. In the modern United States one of

the worst things you can do, apparently, is [128b] to objectify someone. In

fact, the distinctively European idea of the autonomous human individual

entirely independent of material supports is realized only in extreme

iconoclastic ideological forms, such as Quakerism and classical economics. In

art, the aesthetic response depends largely on the identification of viewers

with artworks; the Minimalist sculptor, Carl André is quoted as saying, “Works

of art are fetishes; that is, material objects of human production that we

endow with extra-material powers” (Baker 1988:36). Baker comments, “The

implicit analogy between works of art and their viewers had to be undone, in

the Minimalist view, because the distinction between the animate and the

inanimate, between active, responsible beings and inert ones, is an obvious

first principle for an effort to see and think about the world clearly” (Baker

1988:138). The decline of Minimalism measures the failure of this ideal.

In real life, despite the eighteenth-century rationalist credo, human

beings are conscious of their identity in terms of relations with other people,

mediated by material things that we only describe as fetishes if they happen

not to be part of our own social practice and personae. All such objects-.the

child’s stuffed animal, an engagement ring, a souvenir of a trip to Nepal-are

potent because they embody self-defining experiences and relations with

other people. As such, they acquire a sort of sacredness obliging us to treat

them in exceptional ways, such as not discarding them when they cease to be

useful. The public sacredness of national monuments is assured by legally

enforced rules that not only oblige us to behave toward them much as one

would behave in a temple but exclude them from ordinary commodification.

The underlying principle that makes it possible for such objects to seem

meaningful is not mistaken causality but, once again, that of metonymy.

Like human beings, and like national monuments, shrines, and works of

art, minkisi normally imposed restrictions on the behavior of people. In its

original context, an nkisi was never the things it was made of, never just an

object such as what we now find in museums of African art. Its power

depended on the rules of alimentary and sexual avoidance that it imposed on

its owner and on those who become its clients. If the rules were broken the

12

nkisi was profaned (sumuka) and reverted to the status of object until it had

been reconstituted.

The nganga of Na Kongo may not eat a white chicken or a cock with

other people, although he may share a hen, unless it also is white.

He may not share anything white [129a] with uninitiated persons,

even his own children, although if he loves the child very much and

the child is very hungry he may take the chicken to the edge of the

village and there put it down for a while; thereafter the taboo is

suspended and he may eat with the child, though not with anyone

else.

Cahier 58

One who has been possessed by Nkita should not eat pork. After

eating bananas he may not enter his house without first passing

through the scent of luyangu-yangu flowers. These taboos stay in

force all his life.

Cahier 224

None of these rules of conduct constitutive of an nkisi are arbitrary. For

example, the scented herb luyangu-yangu is used because it invokes the verb

yangumuna, “to strengthen,” with the intention that the heart of the devotee

may be strengthened after a violation of the rules. The rules also had the

sociological function of defining its owner’s relations with others, sharpening

the contrast between men and women, and between the initiated, who are

powerful, and the uninitiated.

Is nkisi a fetish?

In what sense is a reading of minkisi possible within “the discourse of

fetishism”? Marx ironically applied the term “fetish” to commodities in a

capitalist economy, meaning that, in their apparent objectivity, commodities

concealed real social relations among human beings. We might say that in

noncapitalist economies this observation would not be news. In “gift

13

economies” the value of an object often depends in part on the social relations

it mediates. A famous example is that of the cattle-keeping Nilotic societies of

southern Sudan, in which the history of the marriages and other transactions

in which an animal has been transferred remains inscribed upon it, at least in

the mind of its owner. In modern Kongo, a gift is withdrawn when the recipient

violates the bond it established. The difference between an object (alienable)

and a person (inalienable) is much less marked in such an economy than it is

under capitalism, and the meaning of objects as signs of social relationships

would seem to be more evident.

In Kongo the different kinds of spirit, and the objects that actualize them,

can be related to their sociological counterparts. When a descent group,

conscious of its identity and its distinctive concerns, addresses itself to an

abstract expression of that identity it thereby creates an ancestor. Likewise,

local groups, which in Kongo are lineally heterogeneous, create by their ritual

[129b] statements an entity, a local spirit, called simbi, which represents their

proper and collective local concerns, primarily those of production. In a third

ritual complex, the clients or congregations of minkisi consist of people

identified not by social locus, whether lineage or place of residence, but by

specific problems-pneumonia, childbirth, hunting luck, difficulty passing

exams, and the like; to each such problem corresponds one or more minkisi.

The various spiritual entities in Kongo religion-ancestors, local spirits, and

minkisi-are thus not random products of the imagination but specific

reflections of human experience in a society organized in a particular way

(MacGaffey 1977; 1986).

The organization of Kongo society established the environment in which

the securities and insecurities of personal experience were generated, and

provided the possibilities of finding one’s own place in it. A closer look

suggests, however, that the seemingly transparent correspondence between

rituals (and ritual objects) and the social morphology is misleading. Consider a

particularly lucid account of the operation of nkisi Maniangu:

If someone has had manioc or plantains stolen and is unable to

discover what person or thief stole them, he cuts pieces of the

manioc left by the thief and presents them to the nganga Maniangu

that he may put them in the nkisi. This is called putting mfunya in

14

the nkisi.

When these tokens have been placed in the nkisi, it will afflict the

one who stole the manioc with the disease of the ribs, lubanzi, or

with bloody stools. Then those who are responsible for the sick

person will seek the help of a diviner. When the diviner comes, he

will say: “They have fixed tokens in Maniangu, and therefore the

nkisi has seized him.” So then the owner of the sick man will go to

the nganga of Maniangu and tell him all that the diviner says he has

seen in the spirit. Nganga Maniangu will remove the mfunya from his

nkisi. After taking them out, he treats the patient.

Treatment. The nganga collects leaves, crushes them and puts them

in a pot, cuts up [the juicy vine] munkwisa, and puts that in the pot,

adds water and heats it until it boils over. When it boils, he takes it

off the fire, blows off the foam, and applies it to the body of the

patient. Then he gives the rest of the mixture to the patient, saying:

“Take the pot home, and drink a spoonful every day.” The patient

does this, and another day the nganga returns, makes him stand on

the thatch of his house, and spits juice of munkwisa on his ribs while

reciting: “Pfu! Raise him up, Lord Maniangu, the fault was

committed, the fine was paid; pfu! raise up [130a]

When he has been treated like this, the patient may get better,

but paying the nganga’s fee will cause him a lot of pain. The cost of

this nkisi is a pig and cloths worth 20 francs, or even much more if

the nganga is fetched from far. At that price people generally think it

is much too expensive.

Cahier 15

Presumably, rituals did something to relieve the anxieties of people faced

with disease, theft, or other problems. Belief in the possibility of being nailed

by Maniangu and other retributive minkisi no doubt discouraged crime. It may

well have been that the man who fell ill was indeed the thief, who intimated

his fault to his family and indirectly to the diviner, but there can be no

15

assurance of this connection and, therefore, we can have no confidence in

functionalist explanations. There was theft, there were diseases, but the mere

assumption or excuse of a connection among theft, disease, and a particular

individual as wrongdoer ensured a flow of wealth from the vulnerable to those

who had been able to invest in punitive devices. The most powerful minkisi

were the most expensive, not only in initial outlay but in the periodic care and

feeding they required; as investments, they were capable of generating

impressive revenues (Schragg 1990:19).

The political economy of minkisi is generalized by another Kongo writer:

A magician wants things to be sacred so that his charm may be

violated and he himself may receive money from the one who has

broken the taboo. Such a person will fail ill, go to the magician, and

pay the fine. If there were no taboo there would be no way to get

money. The prohibitions of the chiefs are the same, but worse, since

the violator can be accused and killed or fined by force, whereas one

who breaks a magician’s rules need do nothing unless he falls ill.

Cahier 137

The predatory function of ritual in support of wealth and power is

expressed in the composition of minkisi themselves: “When they compose an

nkisi, they incorporate in it the spirit of some man who in his lifetime killed

much game, owned much livestock and many slaves, one who was wily,

wealthy, virile and successful in fighting other clans” (Cahier 65, describing

nkisi Mbola).

Minkisi were only one sector of Kongo religion, as we have already seen.

All sectors, including those centered on descent groups and on local groups,

operated in essentially the same way, with similar taboos and symbolism; the

differences among them are [130b] sociological. Kongo religion, for which we

have no convenient name, thus reveals the morphology of Kongo society while

at the same time conceals its dynamics by mystification. In local theory, chiefs

(heads of lineal groups) and ritual experts (operators of minkisi) defended the

people against witches, thieves, wrongdoers, and members of hostile groups.

This segmentary model partly concealed a form of intergroup stratification in

which the wealthy and powerful, using the beliefs and devices of ritual,

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cooperated to extract a continuous flow of wealth from the relatively poor.

This kind of stratification corresponded, in a different mode of production, to

class in capitalism, in that through ritual the dominant class controlled the

conditions of social reproduction (Rey 1975). In its extreme forms, as seen in

nineteenth-century coastal kingdoms, the Kongo population was stratified into

nobles, free people, and slaves; as a way of generating slaves for the Atlantic

trade, ritual traps were more common than simple capture (MacGaffey

1986:28-39).

The ritual system as a whole thus bears a relationship to Kongo society

similar to that which Marx supposed that “political economy” bore to

capitalism as its “religion” (Pietz 1991), but not for the reasons advanced by

Bosman, the Enlightenment thinkers, and Hegel. The irrationally “animate”

character of the ritual system’s symbolic apparatus, including minkisi,

divination devices, and witch-testing ordeals obliquely expressed real relations

of power among the participants in ritual. “Fetishism” is about relations

among people, rather than about the objects that mediate and disguise those

relations. Ultimately, however, it may be that all this analysis does is to

translate certain Kongo realities into the categories developed in the

emergent social sciences of nineteenth century, post-Enlightenment Europe.

[131a]

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