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Power Talk: from royal Kongo words to royal Kongo origins Koen Bostoen 1 , Birgit Ricquier 2 , Gilles-Maurice de Schryver 1 1KongoKing Research Group, Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University 2KongoKing Research Group, Service of Linguistics, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren The history of the Kongo Kingdom is exceptionally well known from 1500 onwards, thanks to its early involvement in the Trans-Atlantic trade and its early introduction to literacy. At the same time, very little is known about the origins and early history of the Kingdom. Gaining new insights on the growth of the Kongo Kingdom through an interdisciplinary approach combing archaeology and historical linguistics is the central aim of the interuniversity KongoKing research group (UGent, ULB, RMCA; http://kongoking.org). Central in the historical linguistic research is the study of cultural vocabulary as a source for early Kongo history. In this paper we focus on Kongo words revolving around royal titles and insignia as attested in the historical sources from the 16th to the 20th century. Preliminary research on the blacksmith term and royal Kongo title ngangula has been especially rewarding in this respect. It not only testifies to the old Central-African symbolic association between leadership and iron working, the so-called ‘smith’s myth’ (de Maret 1985), but also allows to reopen the debate on the origins of the Kongo Kingdom. This debate was more or less closed when Vansina (1963) argued in a short account on Kongo origins that its founders had their origin north of the Congo river in the current-day Mayombe region, and not east of the Inkisi river, as a number of scholars, such as Ravenstein (1901) and van Wing (1959), had argued before. Diachronic phonological evidence points out that the royal Kongo title ngangula can only have its origin in Kongo languages spoken east of the Inkisi river, giving new credibility to the earlier hypothesis that Kongo kingship originated in a region known as Kongo dia Nlaza between the Inkisi and Kwango rivers (Thornton 2001). However, ever since Trier (1934) introduced the Saussurian principles of contrast and inclusion into semantics, it has been accepted that individual words only acquire meaning through contrast with other words belonging to the same semantic field. As a consequence, it is necessary to look at sets of semantically related words to understand lexical meaning, not simply at words in isolation (Lehrer 1985). That is why we study the linguistic evidence with respect to the royal title ngangula in relation to other ‘royal Kongo vocabulary’ as found in the rich body of historical evidence on the Kongo Kingdom since the 16th century. References De Maret, P. 1985. The smith's myth and the origin of leadership in Central Africa. In R. Haaland & P. L. Shinnie (eds.), African iron working, ancient and traditional. Oslo; New York: Norwegian University Press; OUP. GS
Lehrer, A. 1985. The Influence of Semantic Fields on Semantic Change. In J. Fisiak (ed.), Historical Semantics, Historical Word formation, vol. 29 (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs), 283-96. Berlin-New York: Mouton Publishers. Ravenstein, E. G. (ed.) 1901. The strange adventures of Andrew Battell, of Leigh, in Angola and the adjoining regions. Reprinted from "Purchas his pilgrimes". London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society. Thornton, J. K. 2001. The origins and early history of the kingdom of Kongo, c.1350-1550. <strong>International</strong> Journal of African Historical Studies 34, 89-120. Trier, J. 1934. Das sprachliche Feld. In L. E. Schmidt (ed.), Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes, 428-49. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichte Buchgesellschaft. Van Wing, J. 1959. Études Bakongo : sociologie, religion et magie. Brugge: Desclée De Brouwer. Vansina, J. 1963. Notes sur l'origine du royaume de Kongo. Journal of African History 4, 33-8. GS
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