Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2010

Par Charlotte Grand-Dufay, specialist in the arts of Gabon and northern Congo and has published extensively on the subject.

Introduction
The carved and painted panels associated with ritual possession by the nkita spirit are sculptural creations of the Teke-Tsaayi of the Republic of the Congo. They are used to decorate the beds of women who are possessed by this supernatural force while she is living in seclusion. The specifically Teke term nkita refers to a female spirit, a chthonian deity, “a genie of the waters and even the god of the sea”(Andersson, 1953: 285) among the Teke. A related concept is mukisi, “the male emanation of the spirits of nature” (Lehuard, 1996: 98), which is derived from the Kongo word nkisi, the spirit that possesses women. Both nkita and mukisi relate to associations of possessed women that have religious and therapeutic functions aimed at healing minor women’s ailments.
The popularity of nkita derives from its having once intervened in the healing of a serious epidemic. Ever since, this entity has been the object of popular belief anchored in the spirituality of the peoples throughout the Ogowe and Congo regions. It requires propitiatory offerings and imposes specific interdictions.
Nkita ritual panels were first identified for Western scholarship in 1960 by Sigfrid Södergren, son of Swedish pastor John Södergren. The examples he collected were initially exhibited at the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie in a show curated by Teke specialist Marie-Claude Dupré. Along with the kidumu mask, these panels clearly have specific meaning to the Teke-Tsaayi, but what do we really know about them?