In Gesture and Power Yolanda Covington-Ward examines the everyday embodied practices and performances of the BisiKongo people of the lower Congo to show how their gestures, dances, and spirituality ...are critical in mobilizing social and political action. Conceiving of the body as the center of analysis, a catalyst for social action, and as a conduit for the social construction of reality, Covington-Ward focuses on specific flashpoints in the last ninety years of Congo's troubled history, when embodied performance was used to stake political claims, foster dissent, and enforce power. In the 1920s Simon Kimbangu started a Christian prophetic movement based on spirit-induced trembling, which swept through the lower Congo, subverting Belgian colonial authority. Following independence, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko required citizens to dance and sing nationalist songs daily as a means of maintaining political control.
What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to ...colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations.     Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.
The British and American Congo Reform Movement (ca. 1890-1913) has been praised extensively for its ›heroic‹ confrontation of colonial atrocities in the Congo Free State. Its commitment to white ...supremacy and colonial domination, however, continues to be overlooked, denied, or trivialised. This historical-sociological study argues that racism was the ideological cornerstone and formed the main agenda of this first major human rights campaign of the 20th century. Through a thorough analysis of contemporary sources, Felix Lösing unmasks the colonial and racist formation of the modern human rights discourse and investigates the ›historical work‹ of racism at a crossroads between imperial power and ›white crisis‹.
Written symbols, religious objects, oral traditions, and body language have long been integrated into the Kongo system of graphic writing of the Bakongo people in Central Africa as well as their ...Cuban descendants. The comprehensiveKongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Signprovides a significant overview of the social, religious, and historical contexts in which the Kongo kingdom developed and spread to the Caribbean.Author Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, a practitioner of the Palo Monte devotional arts, illustrates with graphics and rock art how the Bakongo's ideographic and pictographic signs are used to organize daily life, enable interactions between humans and the natural and spiritual worlds, and preserve and transmit cosmological and cosmogonical belief systems.Exploring cultural diffusion and exchange, collective memory and identity,Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Signartfully brings together analyses of the complex interconnections among Kongo traditions of religion, philosophy and visual/gestural communication on both sides of the African Atlantic world.
•Use of LA-ICP-MS to determine the trace element content in order to identify the main production regions of each glass bead type.•Determination of the fluxing agents, (de)coloring and opacifying ...agents used in the manufacture of each glass bead type.•Application of combined multi-analytical minimally invasive methodology, which includes hXRF, VP-SEM-EDS, micro-Raman spectroscopy and LA-ICP-MS to the study of several glass beads.
A collection of glass beads found in Lumbu (Mbanza Kongo, Angola) were analyzed by means of a multi-analytical minimally invasive methodology, which included handheld X-ray fluorescence (hXRF), variable pressure scanning electron microscope coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (VP-SEM-EDS), micro-Raman spectroscopy and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS).
Trace element analysis, and rare earth element pattern analysis in particular, was found to be essential to establish the provenance of the European trade beads in this study. The glass beads from types 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43 and 45 were found to have been produced in Venice, and the glass beads from types 26 and 28 have been assigned to the Bohemian glass industry.
While determining the provenance of each glass artefact was a major goal of this study, the process of glass coloring and opacification was also studied in an attempt to establish the technology employed in the production of these artefacts. Chemical data indicate that cobalt and copper were used to produce blue hues, while a combination of copper and iron ions was used to produce green glass. Black colored glass was obtained by the combined use of iron and manganese ions, whereas the iron-sulfur chromophore was used to impart a distinct amber hue to the glass. Red was produced using trace amounts of metallic gold particles (ruby red glass) and metallic copper nano-particles or cuprous oxide (brownish-red glass). Lead arsenates, calcium phosphate, and cassiterite were used as opacifying agents.
The use of both morphological and chemical analysis enabled the identification of distinct European production centers, allowing a glimpse into the consumption patterns and economic interactions in place between Europe and West-Central Africa throughout the 17th-19th centuries.
Display omitted
The glass bead assemblages recovered during the 2014 excavations of the ruins of Kulumbimbi located in Mbanza Kongo (Angola) were analyzed by means of a multi-analytical minimally invasive ...methodology, which includes handheld X-ray fluorescence (hXRF), variable pressure scanning electron microscope coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (VP-SEM-EDS), micro-Raman spectroscopy and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). Chemical data indicate that cobalt, copper, iron and manganese ions were used to produce the blue, green, reddish-brown and black hues, respectively. Lead arsenates, calcium phosphate, calcium antimonate, lead stannate, cassiterite and Pb-Sb-Sn oxide were used as opacifying agents. Chondrite-normalized trace element distribution and chondrite-normalized rare earth element patterns were used to determine the sand source used in the production of the different glass bead types. These distributions were also used to identify the manufacture location of the glass beads with previously unknown origin and production date. Based on the data collected, the glass beads from types 16, 20, 22, 24, 25, 46 and 47 have been assigned as Venetian.
•Application of multi-analytical minimally invasive methodology: hXRF, VP-SEM-EDS, micro-Raman spectroscopy and LA-ICP-MS.•Determination of the coloring and opacifying agents used in the manufacture of each glass bead type.•Use of trace element analysis to identify the main production regions of each glass bead type.
Display omitted
•A long-term trade-linked material flow analysis within 249 countries and regions for cobalt was conducted.•Cobalt production, trade and consumption have been through a rapid growth ...over the past twenty years.•International cooperation on the maturity of recycling system and substitute development of cobalt for sustainable utilization is essential.
Cobalt is an essential metal for next-generation clean technologies. In this study, a long-term trade-linked material flow analysis model is established to analyze cobalt flows throughout the metal's anthropogenic life cycle and across national boundaries during the 1995–2015 period. The results indicate that driven by more cobalt applications discovered and developed, global cobalt supply and demand have experienced rapid growth in recent decades. Global cobalt in-use stock reached 220 kilotons in 2015, which is mainly embodied in laptop computers. The major opportunity for secondary cobalt recovery exists in the cobalt stock contained in battery applications. Cutting the excess productivity of batteries is essential to improving cobalt utilization efficiency. A globally-distributed cobalt trade network has been established. Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States, China, and Japan are the major powers in the trade network. Countries with strong dependence on cobalt imports face a high risk of cobalt shortages. The establishment of domestic cobalt reserves and the development of cobalt substitutes are viable options for these countries. Besides, international coordination and governance through the whole value chain of cobalt should be under consideration. High attention need to be paid on harmonizing the extraction of cobalt and other companion metals, mostly copper and nickel.
Through a detailed case study of gold mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Disrupted Development in the Congo reveals the fragile foundations on which the African Mining Consensus rests. ...It documents how foreign mining corporations in the Congo have been prone to mismanagement and implicated in fuelling conflict and violence.
A positive demand shock for coltan, a mineral whose bulky output cannot be concealed, leads armed actors to create illicit customs and provide protection at coltan mines, where they settle as ...“stationary bandits.” A similar shock for gold, easy to conceal, leads to stationary bandits in the villages where income from gold is spent, where they introduce illicit mining visas, taxes, and administrations. Having a stationary bandit from a militia or the Congolese army increases welfare. These findings suggest that armed actors may create “essential functions of a state” to better expropriate, which, depending on their goals, can increase welfare.
