The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, continues to struggle with socioeconomic and political development. Culture and Customs of the Congo provides the full context of traditional culture and modern practices against a backdrop of a turbulent history. The volume opens up a land and peoples little known in the United States. Written expressly to meet the needs of students and the general audience, the work will inform about the geography, economy, political history, and history from the slave trade to dictatorship; ancestral religions and inroads of western faiths; ancestral literary heritage and communication; art, architecture, and housing; diet and dress; marriage, family, and women; lifestyles and life events, and traditional and modern music and dance.

A fascinating account of the effects of turbulent history on one of Africa’s most storied kingdoms, Kongo: Power and Majesty presents over 170 works of art from the Kingdom of Kongo (an area that includes present-day Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola). The book covers 400 years of Kongolese culture, from the fifteenth century, when Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian merchants and missionaries brought Christianity to the region, to the nineteenth, when engagement with Europe had turned to colonial incursion and the kingdom dissolved under the pressures of displacement, civil war, and the devastation of the slave trade. The works of art—which range from depictions of European iconography rendered in powerful, indigenous forms to fearsome minkondi, or power figures—serve as an assertion of enduring majesty in the face of upheaval, and richly illustrate the book’s powerful thesis.

The book helps readers to better understand human life in Congo. It is 1960. Almost all the black people of Congo are with great hope and joy. On June 30th they will receive Independence.

Despite its long history of encounters with colonialism, slavery, and neocolonialism, Panama continues to be an under-researched site of African Diaspora identity, culture, and performance. To address this void, Renée Alexander Craft examines an Afro-Latin Carnival performance tradition called "Congo" as it is enacted in the town of Portobelo, Panama--the nexus of trade in the Spanish colonial world. In When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama, Alexander Craft draws on over a decade of critical ethnographic research to argue that Congo traditions tell the story of cimarronaje, charting self-liberated Africans' triumph over enslavement, their parody of the Spanish Crown and Catholic Church, their central values of communalism and self-determination, and their hard-won victories toward national inclusion and belonging. When the Devil Knocks analyzes the Congo tradition as a dynamic cultural, ritual, and identity performance that tells an important story about a Black cultural past while continuing to create itself in a Black cultural present. This book examines "Congo" within the history of twentieth century Panamanian etnia negra culture, politics, and representation, including its circulation within the political economy of contemporary tourism.

What was it like to be colonized by foreigners? Highlighting a region in central Congo, in the center of sub-Saharan Africa, Being Colonized places Africans at the heart of the story. In a richly textured history that will appeal to general readers and students as well as to scholars, the distinguished historian Jan Vansina offers not just accounts of colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, but the varied voices of a colonized people. Vansina uncovers the history revealed in local news, customs, gossip, and even dreams, as related by African villagers through archival documents, material culture, and oral interviews. Vansina’s case study of the colonial experience is the realm of Kuba, a kingdom in Congo about the size of New Jersey—and two-thirds the size of its colonial master, Belgium. The experience of its inhabitants is the story of colonialism, from its earliest manifestations to its tumultuous end. What happened in Kuba happened to varying degrees throughout Africa and other colonized regions: racism, economic exploitation, indirect rule, Christian conversion, modernization, disease and healing, and transformations in gender relations. The Kuba, like others, took their own active part in history, responding to the changes and calamities that colonization set in motion. Vansina follows the region’s inhabitants from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, when a new elite emerged on the eve of Congo’s dramatic passage to independence.

A unique and forward-thinking book that sheds new light on the origins, dynamics, and cosmopolitan culture of the Kongo Kingdom from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the largest and most populous country in Central Africa. Its history has been marred by almost continuous war, and the Congolese people have long suffered through political tumult. Largely covered in dense rain forests, the country, also known as Congo-Kinshasa, is traversed by the Congo River, a lifeline that transports Congolese merchants with barges filled with fruit, grains, and bushmeat to local villages. Allow your readers to explore the vibrant culture and lush landscape of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in this book, which features informative sidebars and engaging color photographs.