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Family and Kinship among the Kongo South of the Zaïre River from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Extract

The article considers the changing pattern of kinship relations amongst the Kongo south of the Zaïre river and west of the plateau in the region once dominated by the nuclear Kongo kingdom. It argues that the normative pattern of kinship and family relationship was probably established in the early years of agricultural settlement by the ideology of the kanda, the exogamous matrilineal descent groups which controlled access to land. This ideology dominated family and kinship relationships as long as agricultural production was the dominant economic factor. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the evolution of the trade-based kingdom of Kongo modified the normative pattern established by the kanda, and in the late sixteenth century the acquisition of large numbers of slaves and the use of Christianity as a legitimating ideology effected more profound change. In particular, the elite developed a system of patrilineal descent categories which were used to control trade-based wealth and to organize political relationships. Freedom came to be related more to patrilineal descent category membership and less to kanda membership, whilst the economic and political position of all but the most eminent women deteriorated. When, in the late seventeenth century, changing patterns of trade caused the kingdom of Kongo to disintegrate, the Mwissikongo of the centre adopted a cognatic mode of descent which enabled them to control both agricultural and trade-based wealth. Certain eminent women seized the political opportunities afforded by the crumbling of male-dominated centres of power whilst the definition of slave and free became increasingly problematic. In the north-western province of Sonyo, increased trade-based wealth enabled the dominant patrilineal category to establish itself as a corporate group and to monopolize all positions of power. In the eighteenth century power disintegrated throughout the region and land again became the primary economic asset. The ruling elite sought legitimation in terms of the ideology and descent system of the kanda. The former slave groups sought to establish rights in the same way. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all groups legitimized their holding of land, primarily in terms of the ideology of the kanda and secondarily in terms of the concept of Mbanza Kongo.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

2 I use the term Kongo to refer only to the people of the area once controlled by the nuclear Kongo kingdom, a region roughly bounded by the rivers Zaïre, Nkisi and Dande and by the Atlantic Ocean. The term Mwissikongo is used to designate the ruling elite of the Kongo kingdom.

3 Today, as in the nineteenth century, individuals and groups scattered through Kongo who have the same categorical name but no corporate status are believed to be descended from the same mother, and the category is called mvila or kanda. The term mvila does not appear in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, although the concept does. I have followed MacGaffey, , Custom and GovernmentGoogle Scholar, in using the term kanda to designate the corporate groups, including within that term both the large matriclans which could still be mobilized in the sixteenth century and the smaller matrilineages which approximate to the contemporary kanda.

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30 Da Caltanisetta, Fra Luca, Diaire Congolais (1690–1701), ed. Bontinck, François (Louvain and Paris, 1970), 102.Google Scholar Cf. Van Reeth, P. P., De Rol van den Moederlijken Oom in de lulandische Familie (Brussels, 1935), 27.Google Scholar

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33 Anon, E.G.., ‘History of Kongo’ (late sixteenth century) in Cuvelier, and Jadin, , L'Ancien Congo, 117–21.Google Scholar For direct reference to slave settlements in the mid-seventeenth century see Cadornega, , História Geral, II, 133.Google Scholar

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64 See especially Jadin, , ‘Le Congo et la Secte des Antoniens’.Google Scholar

65 The principal sources for this period are: ‘Aperçu de la situation et rite d'election des rois en 1775 d'après le P. Cherubino da Savona, missionaire au Congo de 1759 a 1774’, Bulletin de l'Institut Historique Belge de Rome, XXXV (Brussels, 1963) 343419Google Scholar; ‘Relations sur le Royaume du Congo du P. Raimondo da Dicomano, missionaire de 1791 à 1798’, Bulletin des Séances de l'Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales, III, 2 (Brussels, 1957), 307–37.Google Scholar For a full discussion of economic developments on the Kongo coast in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Broadhead, Susan, ‘Trade and politics on the Congo coast 1770–1870’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Boston, 1971).Google Scholar

66 The principal sources for this period are: Bastian, Adolph, Ein Besuch in San Salvador der Haupstadt des Königreichs Congo (Bremen, 1859)Google Scholar; Bentley, W. Holman, Pioneering on the Congo (London, 1900)Google Scholar; Jeannest, Charles, Quatre Années au Congo (Paris, 1883)Google Scholar; Weeks, John, ‘Notes on some Customs of the Lower Kongo People’, Folklore, XIX, 4 (1908), 409–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weeks, John, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London, 1914).Google Scholar

67 For examples of these traditions see Van Wing, J., Etudes Bakongo, 2 vols. (Brussels 1922, 1938).Google Scholar The traditions are discussed in MacGaffey, , Custom and Government, 1735Google Scholar, on which the following statement is largely based.