There are many predatory words, phrases and buzzwords being used in the spiritual landscape and social media today, most of which go unchecked because the people who really know are largely being dismissed in favor of those who know nothing but speak with confidence. It has been an ongoing trend for years now, the elders continue to get ignored and restricted while those who are not even authorized to teach build, grow and share platforms with others who are not authorized to teach as well. This growing trend has been creating problems in terms of preserving history for years that only continues to get worse. In this specific article we will touch on the Westernization and Erasure of Kongo identity and concepts due to this very problem and some others.
First of all, we must dismantle the ideology that Kongo is West African in any way. There is an enormous amount of scholars and professionals as well as people that claim to practice and come from these regions while making this very assertion. The data to look over is made public and available to everyone at slavevoyages.org. The regions of Africa are also freely available on the internet but for the sake of this article:
It should now be made abundantly clear that modern Congo is nowhere near West Africa. We will further add that a huge portion of what is modern day Central Africa was considered Kongo, see below for example.
Due to slavery deciding to lump everyone from a general region together as one and geopolitics, a huge portion of our ancestors that were Loango or Angolan also identified as Kongo. Now overlap the two images and you will see, Kongo was vast but it was still always Central African. Yet we still see all too often the Kongo identity being erased in favor of West African. There is so much to be said about this. First we have to dismantle the whole ideology that most of us are West African in origin with the following infographic that just visualizes the data offered on slavevoyages.org:
As you can see, almost half of all people taken during the TransAtlantic Slave Trade were in fact, Kongo. The other half was a mixture of many different West African countries. This leaves the majority of descendants being of Kongo origin. Due to how we were forcefully bred, these other regions show up as more recent in our DNA tests but the single largest contributor is indeed Kongo and its still over there… In Central Africa.
The term “Niger-Congo” was coined in the 1950’s by Joseph Greenberg (pictured below), who believed that African languages from different regions and ethnicities were somehow related because they sounded similar. This very person went on to receive various awards for their research but their research has been questioned for validity several times.
This is the basis many use in modern times to lump West African and Central African together. There is also another issue in that Kongo people are Bantu people which is an Ethnic group that spans Central, Eastern and South Africa but not West Africa as depicted on the Bantu Zones below.
Now that we have established that there is a clear difference in ethnicity, identity, and region as well as establishing where this terminology comes from that lumps them together, we can continue speaking on the other issues at hand which are the westernization and erasure. Everywhere we turn, there is this constant attribution to everything cultural of the African continent being labeled as West African and mostly Yoruba out of Nigeria. This has been an ongoing trend for years that has only intensified as people who are not qualified to teach spiritual traditions continue to platform others who are not qualified to teach traditions, among other things. There are thousands of examples of this taking place but to keep the article easy to read, we will only display a few below.
As previously mentioned, there are also predatory practices in place. For example, when someone uses the term “African Spirituality” when they are only speaking of one specific African Traditional Religion. This is a strategic move that cements their own African Traditional Religion in search results when people walk away from Abrahamic faiths and start searching… and only find THAT specific African Traditional Religion. When in reality, there are many African Traditional Religions and all of them are valid but because that specific one keeps being referenced when people mention “African Spirituality”, when people who don’t know better search this term, the algorithm of search engines assume they are searching for that one and not the others, leaving them largely unknown and unmentioned. This creates an erasure by way of predatory practices and this is only one such example of many practices. For visuals see below
In using the term “African Spirituality” instead of using what they are actually talking about, IFA, they are erasing all others from the conversation and training search engines and people who do not know better that African Spirituality = IFA.
There is more to be said on this subject and if I am asked to go further down this rabbit hole I will do so at that time. Appreciate you reading until the end.
Note: If the largest group of people taken were Central Africans… Why is the most common African Traditional Religion West African and why is everything attributed to West Africa?
