African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 925
Central African peoples, influenced by the religion of the Kongo people, practiced a
healing, curing religion, promoted by priests who used symbolic art forms related to the
Kongo cosmogram, a circle, or a diamond with four points representing birth, life, death,
and rebirth in the world of the ancestors under the sea. The top of the circle can be
considered the noontime of life, the peak of power and potential. Its opposite, the midnight
sun at the bottom, represents the power and position of the ancestors below the sea.
To the left is the position of dusk, death, and transition from the land of the living to the
watery world of the ancestors. To the right is the position of the rising sun, or birth. The
horizontal axis represents the transition between air and water. The Kongo priest draws
the cosmogram on the earth, and Kongo and related peoples bury their dead chiefs in red
cloth mummies, often decorated with the sign of the cosmogram. Images like these red
mummies appear in African-Latin America arts, in Vodun dolls in the United States, and
in African American quilts.
New World Scripts
In the New World, various mixtures of West African (Vai, Fon) and Nigerian (Nsibidi)
scripts, the Yoruba concept of a crossroads, and the Kongo cosmogram, fuse to create
numerous new scripts, which are seen on folk arts, including textiles. African-Brazilian
signs, called marked “Points” (pontos riscados, or points drawn) can be found in ground
paintings, and on textiles for the Yoruba gods.
In Surinam the Maroon ideographic system, called Afaka, is embroidered by women
onto loincloths and capes for their men, and painted by men onto houses and paddles, as
well as carved on stools and houseparts.
Cuban Anaforuana signs are seen on contemporary banners that often feature four
eyes for real and for spiritual vision, and in the reappearance of the men’s secret society
costume featuring Nsibidi checks to represent leopard’s spots and power. Similar
costumes are now seen in Miami, and some of these signs continue in African American
quilt top designs.
Haitian ideographic signs, called Veve, derive from a mixture of Fon, Yoruba,
Ejagham, and Kongo traditions. People from all these cultures were taken to Haiti in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and gradually their religions and their graphic
forms merged with Catholicism into the Vodun religion. In Haitian art we see the
reappearance of the Kongo cosmogram, in textiles, groundpainting, cut steel sculptures,
and in paintings depicting marriages, ceremonies, life, death, the watery ancestral world,
and the rebirth of souls.
African American Signs
After Haitian independence in 1804, many free Africans came to New Orleans, and the
Vodun religion spread throughout the United States’ south. Vestiges of African American
protective writing traditions, often incorporating Masonic symbols also, occur in African
American folk arts. As in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Surinam, African American use
symbols on many levels. On one level symbols can be explained as Christian or Masonic,