The Kongo Kingdom

Koen Bostoen is Professor of African Linguistics and Swahili at Ghent University. His research focuses on the study of Bantu languages and interdisciplinary approaches to the African past. He obtained an ERC Starting Grant for the KongoKing project (2012–16) and an ERC Consolidator's Grant for the BantuFirst project (2018–22). He is author of Des mots et des pots en bantou: une approche linguistique de l'histoire de la céramique en Afrique (2005) and co-editor of Une archéologie des provinces septentrionales du royaume Kongo (2018) and The Bantu Languages (2nd edition, 2018). Inge Brinkman is Professor of African Studies at Universiteit Gent, Belgium. Her research crosscuts the fields of African literature, popular culture and history with a focus on Kenya and Angola. For her Ph.D. dissertation at Leiden University, she examined literature, identity and gender in Central Kenya. During a post-doctoral project at Cologne University, she studied violence and exile through fieldwork with refugees from South-East Angola. At the Leiden African Studies Centre, she carried out historical research on communication technologies, mobility and social relations in Africa. She has published several books and contributed articles to various renowned journals of African studies.

'An interdisciplinary look at the history and culture of the Kingdom of Kongo, which flourished around the lower reaches of the Congo River, from c. 1250 through c. 1600, for a time having ties to the Vatican as well other western powers. … A very good work, this is primarily for the specialist in African history.' The NYMAS Review

• Introduction: cross-disciplinary approaches to Kongo history Koen Bostoen and Inge Brinkman; Part I. The Origins and Dynamics of the Kongo Kingdom: 1. The origins of Kongo: a revised vision John K. Thornton; 2. A central African kingdom: Kongo in 1480 Wyatt MacGaffey; 3. Seventeenth-century Kikongo is not the ancestor of present-day Kikongo Koen Bostoen and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver; 4. Soyo and Kongo: the undoing of the Kingdom's centralisation John K. Thornton; 5. The Eastern Border of the Kongo kingdom: on relocating the Hydronym Barbela Igor Matonda; Part II. Kongo's Cosmopolitan Culture and the Wider World: 6. From image to grave and back: multidisciplinary inquiries into Kongo Christian visual culture Cécile Fromont; 7. Ceramics decorated with woven motifs: an archaeological Kongo kingdom identifier? Els Cranshof, Nicolas Nikis and Pierre de Maret; 8. From America to Africa: how Kongo nobility made smoking pipes their own Bernard Clist; 9. 'To make book': a conceptual historical approach to Kongo book cultures (sixteenth–nineteenth c.) Inge Brinkman and Koen Bostoen; 10. Kongo cosmopolitans in the nineteenth century Jelmer Vos; 11. The making of Kongo identity in the American diaspora: a case study from Brazil Linda Heywood.