Power Figure (Nkisi N'Kondi: Mangaaka), 19th century, inventoried 1900. Kongo peoples, Cabinda, Angola, Chiloango River region. Wood, iron, resin, ceramic, plant fiber, textile, pigment; H. 44 1/8 in. (112 cm), W. 18 1/8 in. (46 cm), D. 9 in. (23 cm). National Museums Liverpool, World Museum
World Museum Liverpool's majestic Mangaaka figure, currently on loan to the Met and featured in Kongo: Power and Majesty, was acquired at the end of March 1900 from the Chiloango River region in Cabinda, Angola. Like other Kongo power figures of its kind, the Liverpool Mangaaka takes the form of a powerfully planted male figure, leaning slightly forward with his hands on his hips.
During my courier visit to the Metropolitan Museum in early September in order to supervise the installation of the figure, I was struck not only by his uniquely slender and upright form, when compared to other Mangaaka figures in the final exhibition gallery, but also by how many of his parts and attachments had been removed. In the middle of his belly, for instance, he sports a raised boss, which holds the impression of a large cowrie shell that must originally have been inserted into it.
Detail of World Museum Liverpool Mangaaka figure showing belly boss with impression of a now-absent cowrie shell. National Museums Liverpool, World Museum. Photograph by Ellen Howe
Like the cowrie shell missing from his belly boss, the resinous beard and fiber skirt are also missing and would have been integral to his effectiveness as a power sculpture in his original Central African context. These sites would originally have held part of his empowering bilongo, or spiritually charged medicinal matter, and it appears that they were deliberately removed.
View of the final gallery in Kongo: Power and Majesty showing the Mangaaka power figure from the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, with many of its attachments still in place. Photograph by Peter Zeray
Although undocumented in its accession record, the partial disassembly of the Liverpool Mangaaka was evidently performed in Central Africa before the figure's departure for Liverpool and would have constituted a form of deconsecration. As Alisa LaGamma has noted in the exhibition catalogue, it is highly likely that virtually all the other Mangaaka figures displayed in Kongo: Power and Majesty would have been deconsecrated in one way or another before they left Central Africa; indeed, in their present states, they can be seen to show varying degrees of disassembly.
As conservator Ellen Howe has noted, the missing iron pupils and the lack of a resinous sealant around the ceramic inlay indicate that the ocular cavities have had their bilongo removed. Photograph by Ellen Howe
It is perhaps not hard to see why the Liverpool Mangaaka's original owners would have wanted to deconsecrate him before handing him over to Europeans. Nkisi N'Kondi (pl. minkisi minkondi) figures are a class of nkisi, literally a medicine, that take the form of a wooden sculpture to which hardware is added over the course of their use, charged with "hunting" or persecuting wrongdoers.[1] Figures of the Mangaaka type played an important role as judicial instruments and in maintaining the prevailing social order in Kongo societies within the wider Cabinda region at the end of the nineteenth century. They were held in particular awe by the populace and could be used to open and close trade routes, punish thieves, and sanction social rules.[2]
Deconsecration of such instruments would have been one way of disempowering them and making them ineffective, but also safe, for another owner. Indeed, from a Kongo point of view, a powerful nkisi nkondi like Mangaaka in European hands would have been seen as both inappropriate and potentially harmful for its unintended new owner. In 1915, Simon Kavuna, a Kongo ethnographer educated at a Swedish mission, described the properties of minkisi thus:
[Minkisi] receive … powers by composition, conjuring, and consecration. They are composed of earths, ashes, herbs, and leaves, and of relics of the dead … These are the properties of minkisi, to cause sickness in a man and also to remove it. To destroy, to kill, to benefit. … The way of every nkisi is this: when you have composed it, observe its rules lest it be annoyed and punish you. It knows no mercy.[3]
Kongo understandings and agendas with regard to minkisi evidently clashed with those of European collectors. "Knowledge gathering" would have remained the dominant framing motivation for European collecting, which would have been geared toward acquiring complete examples to illustrate the "primitive" religious practices supposedly typified by minkisi. But the deconsecration and partial disassembly of the Liverpool Mangaaka shows that his original Kongo owners caused European collectors' aims to be subverted.
Oscar Sonnenberg, who apparently donated the Mangaaka figure to the Liverpool Museum in 1900 was an employee of the Liverpool firm Hatton & Cookson at Landana in Cabinda, Angola, where the firm had its largest trading post. Like most of the Kongo artworks in World Museum Liverpool's collection, the work was transported to Liverpool by Arnold Ridyard, who was chief engineer on the SS Niger, one of the steamships of Elder, Dempster & Co.'s West Africa service.
The SS Niger, the steamship on which Ridyard served as chief engineer and in which he transported Kongo collections to Liverpool between 1895 and 1901. Photograph © National Museums Liverpool, Merseyside Maritime Museum
Ridyard was a remarkable collector who transported almost twenty-five hundred "ethnographic" artifacts from the western coasts of Africa to various museum collections in the United Kingdom during a twenty-one-year period from 1895 to 1916. During the period from 1895 and 1901, he collected works specifically from Central Africa, including the Chiloango River region, where Mangaaka power figures were then in use. While Liverpool received the majority of these works, he also transported items to the Salford Museum and the Manchester Museum, including the Mangaaka and Kozo figures now held by the Manchester Museum and also on view at the Met. Although Ridyard's collecting in Central Africa was restricted to a roughly six-year period, it yielded an important collection of minkisi figures at a crucial time when colonial regimes, intent on consolidating their hold on the region, had embarked on a campaign to eradicate minkisi on the grounds that they represented an alternate system of governance.
The rapacious and heavy-handed attempts of Portuguese colonial officials to do away with Kongo minkisi in Cabinda are revealed in fragmentary records from the last decade of the nineteenth century held in the archives of the World Museum Liverpool and the Salford Museum. The museum records show that European traders employed by the Liverpool trading company Hatton & Cookson assisted Portuguese officials in Cabinda in confiscating minkisi, but that these confiscations utterly failed to destroy the offending "fetishism."[4]
Arthur Clare, the Hatton & Cookson employee who claims to have been the one who gave the Manchester Museum Mangaaka to Ridyard in 1898, specifically stated in a 1904 letter to the curator of the Salford Museum where this work was originally housed: "It may be of interest to know that, owing to the great abuses of the fetish priests the Portuguese Government determined to destroy the fetishes some six years ago but notwithstanding the destruction fetishism is just as it was then." A few years earlier, in September 1901, Oscar Sonnenberg had explained in his own note to the Salford Museum curator that
the Portuguese Government has removed by force some of these fetishes but by no means is fetishism extinct amongst the natives, even in the vicinity of the settlements of the whites.[5]
In the early colonial environment, European interest in, and desire to appropriate, Kongo minkisi probably only helped to demonstrate the strategic value of minkisi ownership and practices in Kongo eyes, with the likely outcome that it reinforced the prestige and prevalence of certain types of minkisi in Kongo communities, along with the beliefs and practices associated with them. Hence Sonnenberg's statement in his 1901 note to the Salford Museum, quoted above.
Of particular interest in Sonnenberg's note is the phrase "even in the vicinity of the...whites," which begs the question of whether we can really understand the prevalence, power, and prestige of Kongo minkisi minkondi at the end of the nineteenth century without taking into account the impact of European interests in these remarkable instruments of judicial and social control.
Despite participating in the removal of minkisi, the British traders were fully aware that the confiscations did not have the effect that the Portuguese colonial authorities intended. Furthermore, the actions of the Portuguese may have had an opposite effect to that which they intended and could have helped to uphold the use of minkisi in Cabinda by stimulating increased production of the figures in order to replace the ones that had been confiscated. In was only in the second decade of the twentieth century that European colonists and "iconoclastic indigenous religious movements" eventually succeeded in doing away with minkisi as spectacular figurative objects.[6]
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the organizers of the Metropolitan Museum's pre-exhibition Kongo: Power and Majesty colloquium (March 7 and 8, 2014; Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts), who invited me to present a paper at the colloquium that forms the basis of this blog post. I am also grateful to participants at that colloquium for their invaluable comments on my presentation. Another outcome of my research on the World Museum Liverpool Kongo collection is forthcoming with the following reference: Kingdon, Zachary. "Subtracting the Narrative: Trade, Collecting, and Forgetting in the Kongo Coast Friction Zone during the Late Nineteenth Century," Museum Worlds, Vol. 3, 2015.
Notes
[1] Alisa LaGamma, Kongo: Power and Majesty (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 294.
[2] Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 153.
[3] Simon Kavuna, Cahier 58, quoted in Wyatt MacGaffey, "The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi." In Astonishment and Power, Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 21.
[4] Arthur Clare to Ben Mullen, 1 April 1904. Manchester Museum history file for 1898.56.
[5] Oscar Sonnenberg, note on Mangaaka figure, 25 September 1901. Manchester Museum Archives (file for Mangaaka 0.9321/1).
[6] Wyatt MacGaffey, Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented By Themselves: Minkisi From the Laman Collection (Stockholm: Folkens Museum-Etnografiska, 1991), 4.