Ethnographic notes on Kongo musical instruments

African Arts, Summer, 2002 by Wyatt MacGaffey

(MacGaffey 1991:135)

Whistles are also used, at least in some minkisi, to summon the dead and incorporate them in the charm. Mayimbi is a formidable nkisi "that eats above and below and is greatly respected." It is carved in a very large statue together with its wife and children. "It is a male witch for whom a mbambi whistle is sounded at his grave, na-le-le-le! Then the ghost is carried off" (Konda Jean, Cahier 118). (4)

The components of minkisi, the "medicines," are mnemonics of the powers attributed to them and signs of the rules and procedures to be followed in activating them. Whistles and other musical instruments, or models of them, may be included, whether or not they are actually to be played. (5)

   The body of Mwe Mbuku is a figurine and a bag. The names of the things
   inside the bag are: yellow ochre, nkiduku, luyala, nsansi rattle, mpanzi
   fruit, copal resin, palm nut, a Lemba drum (mukonzi lemba), pangolin scale,
   stones from the water, fish, tonda mushroom, charcoal, lusaku-saku, knots
   on the outside, and white clay.

(Kionga, Cahier 90)

Instruments may have medicines added to them, so that although they are rendered unplayable they still function as amulets, reduced versions of the nkisi in question. After listing the medicines necessary to compose Makwende, which include hair and nails of those participating in the ritual, the text says, "Next they seal the compound into little mbambi horns that they may carry with them wherever they go" (Makundu, Cahier 254). A mbambi, like many much larger minkisi, may even have a small mirror attached to it. (6)

Like whistles, dog bells, or madibu (sing. dibu), are specifically associated with hunting, whether hunting game in the forest or witches in the obscurity of their sinister activities. (Dogs wear them around their middles to reveal where they are, since they do not bark.) They are made from borassus pods or carved from the wood of a tree which is itself called mumpala madibu, "for carving dog bells," and which is said in one text to be able "to put witches to flight."

Wooden bells are carved with handles, often in the form of miniature sculptures, sometimes very beautifully; these sculptures seem to be purely ornamental rather than representations of proverbs. (7) Such a bell was much too fine and too expensive to hang on a dog. Some examples are decorated with textile patterns, whose significance will be examined below (Fig. 1). Another example has as its handle a man and woman tied by their hands, back to back (Fig. 2); they may represent the nganga and his initiated wife, but their Janus-like pose surely evokes the divided worlds of the seen and the unseen, also represented by a cosmographic sign on the bell proper (DjeDje 1999:266).

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

Londa, an nkisi that requires dibu bells, comes in two forms: one is male, associated with the forest and with the pursuit of wealth; the other is female, associated with the savanna and with women and children. The male version is composed in the forest, in a party that lasts three days. On the fourth day, madibu, called "the voices of Londa,' are tied to the nkisi, whose amulets also carry them (MacGaffey 1991:44). The dibu pod may also be used as a container for medicines. In one example of nkisi Nduda, the principal medicines are stuffed into a dibu pod which is carried in a knitted bag. On the outside of the bag, among the stalks filled with gunpowder ("night guns"), there is a single iron bell (MacGaffey 1991:108).