Religious and Social Backgrounds of the Zulus -- Rise of the Independent Church Movement -- Government Policy -- Church and Community -- Leader and Follower -- Worship and Healing -- New Wine in Old Wineskins.

Reconstructing Bantu histories of expansion -- Historicizing social values and structures over the longue durée: lineage, belonging, and heterarchy -- Knowledge: educating the generations -- Inventions of technology and art -- Hospitality

"Life is fundamentally a process of perpetual and mutual communication; and to communicate is to emit and to receive waves and radiations (minika ye minienie). This process of, receiving and releasing or passing them on (tambula ye tambikisa) is the key to human beings game of survival. A person is perpetually bathed by radiations' weight, (zitu kia minienie). The weight (zitu/demo) of radiations may have a negative as well as positive impact on any tiny being, for example a person who represents the most vibrating: "kolo" (knot) of relationships." "The following expressions are very common among the Bantu, in general, and among the Kongo in particular, which prove to us the antiquity of these concepts in the African continent; Our businesses are waved/shaken; our health is waved/shaken; what we possess is waved/shaken; the communities are waved/shaken: Where are these (negative) waves coming from (Salu bieto bieti nikunwa; mavimpi nikunwa; biltuvwidi nikunwa; makanda nikunwa: Kwe kutukanga minika miami)?" "For the Bantu, a person lives and moves within an ocean of waves/radiations. One is sensitive or immune to them. To be sensitive to waves is to be able to react negatively or positively to those waves/forces. But to be immune to surrounding waves/forces, is to be less reactive to them or not at all. These differences account for varying degrees in the process of knowing/learning among individuals" --BOOK Cover.

First Published in 1968. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bantu Art and Culture is a book about how the East, Central, and South African cultures have merged from the precolonial period until the late twentieth century. Fled from the north of Africa after the great kingdom of Egypt fell apart, these civilizations settled themselves around the Nile to create new nations known as the Kongo, Bamoun, Kuba, Lunda, Bamileke, Monomotapa, Ngola-Dongo-Matamba, and Zulu kingdoms. In this book, the reader will explore the settings of each empire through its politics, art, music, customs, as well as the role of each individual living in the African society.

Gerard Philippson is Professor of Bantu Languages at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and is a member of the Dyamique de Langage research team of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon II University. He has mainly worked on comparative Bantu tonology. Other areas of interest include Afro-Asiatic, general phonology, linguistic classification and its correlation with population genetics.