The Kongo is in a galloping academic expansion. Every year new books and art exhibitions are being offered on that fascinating ethno-linguistic Central African domain. Emerging research projects are investigating its history and geography. People across the Atlantic are connecting with their Kongo roots. Yet, despite this refreshing Kongo rediscovery or reinvention, we still lack detailed ethnographic accounts of how local dwellers in the Kikongo-speaking areas of Central Africa actually live their everyday lives. Ethnographic studies of the quality of the classic studies by Wyatt MacGaffey, John Janzen and some others have been very rare. Luckily, some promising scholars have recently been conducting fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) and Angola. It is expected that more case studies will soon emerge, and it will be very good indeed if they all are of the quality of the one reviewed here.
Scholars interested in Kongo themes will remember that one of the most important milestones in the scholarship was the magnificent collective volume Le Geste Kongo (2002), based on an art exhibition at the Dapper Foundation. The book under review, Gesture and Power, could in some ways be regarded as an updated ethnographic follow-up to that classic volume. Focusing on gesture is most unusual in cultural anthropology and in the anthropology of religion. We all know that most people around the world kneel to pray, but if you wanted to know why that bodily position in particular has acquired such strong religious connotations cross-culturally and you thought you were going to find the answer in your usual library's social sciences database, you would end up being disappointed (I know because I have tried!). This absence of interest in position and gesture is particularly strange given how present the body in general has been in social sciences after the influence of works by Bourdieu, Foucault and other scholars who built on Marcel Mauss's initial insights. The body has caught our imagination, but the position of the body has not.
Scholars working in the Kongo areas have noticed how relevant bodily positions are in relation to religious affiliation. Walking, dancing and greeting positions, as well as spiritual bodily manifestations, are perceptibly different from church to church. A myriad of body gestures, some minuscule, shape identities and transmit spiritual values and cosmographic notions. Doing fieldwork among several churches, instead of focusing on one single church (I wish more researchers in the anthropology of religion followed that method!), Yolanda Covington-Ward has explored the different usages of gesture in some prophetic religions of the Lower Congo Province, not far from where MacGaffey was interviewing prophets belonging to some of the same churches fifty years ago. She has done so in constructive dialogue with the anthropology of the body, but also, most importantly, in close dialogue with local individuals in the field. It is particularly welcome that she has managed to get quite detailed information inside the Bundu dia Kongo, a religious and pro-Kongo nationalist group normally reluctant to welcome Western researchers into their circles. The way in which the author manages to respect and even honour their views and opinions while at the same time expressing honest disagreement with some aspects of their worldview should be commended, both from methodological and from ethical points of view.
The book has updated debates about spirit possession too, especially in relation to Kimbanguism. Because Kimbanguists today reject spirit possession, some scholars have argued that the recent phenomena of spiritual seizure found among Kimbanguists in Kinshasa and other urban centres must be due to influence from Pentecostal churches. But if we carefully read Covington-Ward, we may find clues to develop a different hypothesis. Spiritual seizure is as old as (and probably much older than) Kimbanguism. Kimbangu and his early followers were described as trembleurs (‘shakers’) as early as 1921 (when Kimbangu was taken to prison by Belgian authorities), as shaking was for them (as for so many spiritually oriented people in the world) a powerful manifestation of the spirit. It has been only recently that Kimbanguism has become a non-possessive religion, one in which only severely disciplined and acutely ordered body gestures are to be accepted. Only by understanding their theology and combining it with a post-Foucauldian anthropology of body and power is it possible to judge the full implications of a history in which the body has been the main protagonist, as well as to understand today's ambivalence towards possessed bodies in that church (but not in other ones, where possession is sought after). I focus on that aspect in particular because of my own interest in Kimbanguism, but in this book the church of Simon Kimbangu is only one of several institutions under study.
By digging in missionary archives, conducting oral history, analysing images of dances and performances in Mobutu's Zaire, and, very importantly, by inscribing her own body and persona into the picture (moving her African-descended body ‘from the Bronx to the Congo’), the author has been able to masterfully reconstruct an entangled history in which the body and its gestures have had a central agency, as loci either of power or resistance. It is not good enough to repeat the mantra that societies remember and that the body is central to technologies of postcolonial remembrance. This is a good hypothesis, but we need specific ethnographic studies to prove that this is the case, and this is what this book offers. With her very original angle on the burgeoning field of the anthropology of the body, and in an up-to-date ethnographic account of the prophetic churches of the Bakongo, Covington-Ward has produced a very detailed account of colonial and postcolonial trajectories and bodily memories in contemporary Central Africa.
