Kongo-Vili Kneeling Female Figure, Democratic Republic of the Congo

John J. Klejman, New York
Edwin and Cherie Silver, Los Angeles, acquired from the above on May 19, 1972

Raoul Lehuard, Arts Bakongo. Les centres de style, Arnouville, 1989, vol. 1, pp. 232-233, fig. D 3-3-4 and detail

Female strength and beauty have a special place in the highly refined art of the Kongo Kingdom. Kongo power figures, or minkisi (sing. nkisi), took many different human and animal forms, including powerful female subjects which project virtues of stability, fecundity, physical beauty, and the propagation of family lineage. These were carved by a professional sculptor, and then activated to their full function by a diviner (nganga) through the addition of magical materials taken from the natural world. The present figure once bore a charge on the abdomen, which has since been removed, as is the case with many examples now in Western collections - either by deliberate de-consecration, or by a European collector most interested in the sculptural form.  he eyes, which also contain magical substances, are covered with glass. These serve as a window onto the world of spirits, to which this figure acts as intermediary.

The highly refined, fleshy naturalistic style of this kneeling female nkisi relates closely to another fine kneeling figure in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Lehuard identifies this as substyle "D 3" of the Kongo-Vili, noting that this group of female figures shares in common a distinctive cone-shaped form atop the summit of the head. Notably, the elbows are in an unusual position, slightly inverted, which probably had specific symbolic meaning, now unknown. Lehuard considers the point atop the head to be a coiffure, representative of one actually worn by Vili women, and made of a twisted braid of hair. Comparison with larger scale Kongo nkisi figures such as the famous Mangaaka corpus of nail power figures suggests that this could also represent a cap called mpu (see LaGamma, Kongo, 2015, p. 241), also actually worn by Vili people. In either case, the conical element is another locus of magical potency; the twisted spiral form of the point on the present figure recalls that of a gastropod shell.