The King is a Woman - Specialized Research AI at MIT

The King is a Woman
Shaping Power in Luba Royal Arts

Mary Nooter Roberts

all photos courtesy the r oyal MuseuM for c entral africa, tervuren,

except where otherwise noted

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Men are chiefs in the daytime, but women become chiefs at night.

—Luba proverb

Women have long been central to Luba

political practices in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), and they
are depicted prominently in royal arts
dating from the eighteenth to twentieth
centuries (cover).Luba possessed one
of central Africa’s most influential precolonial polities that con-
tinues to play a pivotal role in Katanga Province of southeastern
DRC. Kingship is rooted in notions of the person that are inte-
gral to Luba philosophy, namely through the concept of bumuntu
or humanity, as articulated by Luba scholar Mutombo Nkulu-
N’Sengha. 1 “Kingship is the people,” he tells us, “and the king’s
role is to protect the people, to ensure human flourishing, and to
serve the spirit.” At the investiture of a ruler, the titleholder Twite
reminded the king that he was not king for himself but rather for
all his people, including those who came before him. “At the cen-
ter of this is life, and women are the ones giving life. The founda-
tion of kingship is the women,” the professor adds.

The iconography and motifs on Luba insignia and related
articles of leadership are devised, owned, and deployed primar-
ily by men, yet they allude to women’s power both conceptually
and literally (Fig. 1). The visual record combined with Luba testi-
mony demonstrates that while men ruled in overt terms, women
constituted the covert side of sacred authority and played critical
roles in alliance-building, decision-making, succession disputes,
and investiture rites. Women also figured centrally in attracting
and securing the spiritual allegiance necessary for a state built on
the strength of tutelary spirits called bavidye.

As spirit mediums, certain women served as guardians of
and conduits to the most sacred dwellings of Luba spirits. Most
important, the memory of each deceased king was embodied by
a woman. The perpetuation of the Luba royal line was attributed
not just to conception through the king’s mother, but to the rein-
carnation of the king’s spirit in a woman who became the king
herself (Nooter 1991:271–75). Processes of exchange and commu-
nication between the new king and the spirit mediums of previ-
ous kings formed an important dimension of Luba royal practice
that will be considered in the final section of this article.

The institution of female spirit mediums created obstacles for
Belgian colonial authorities seeking to centralize their power as
they exerted hegemony over the Congo in the first two decades
of the twentieth century. In effect, spirit mediumship and the
entire royal apparatus founded upon the ambiguous gendering
of power became a quiet form of resistance in the early colo-
nial period.2 This article explores the ontological relationships
among power, gender, and spirituality to propose that ambigu-
ity is a deliberate and integral dimension of Luba politics and
artistic representation. Through a varied range of Luba male
and female perspectives and voices, combined with theoretical
models of “composite,” “fractal,” and “relational” forms of per-
sonhood, Luba sculpture can be more deeply understood in its
complexity and multireferentiality.

Cultural ConstruCtion of the Body
A purposeful ambiguity defines many institutions of Luba roy-
alty and Luba-related chieftaincy rituals that involve embodiment
and transcendence. All Luba rulers descend from the union of the
great culture hero, Mbidi Kiluwe, who brought refined kingship
practices to the Luba, with the sister of the tyrannical protagonist
of the Luba epic, Nkongolo Mwamba. The son of these two was

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1 anthropomorphic water pipe
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Ricinodendron rautoanemii); 61 cm x 14 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 73.73.1 (collected by comm. hennebert
between 1891 and 1900)

the female figure adorning this water pipe possesses the ultimate attributes of
luba beauty created through the elegance of her coiffure and the accumulation
of scarification marks. the gesture of hands to breasts alludes to the secret pro-
hibitions of kingship that are women’s responsibility to protect and uphold, and
her inward gaze is indicative of her role as a spirit receptacle.

Kalala Ilunga, who would become the first legitimate Luba king. Kalala Ilunga is consid-
ered the heir of all that is good in his father as the model of civilization and royal bear-
ing. Yet, being the son of Nkongolo’s sister means that he also incarnates the extremes of
power, and so is a constant reminder that the privileges of leadership can lead to excess
and must be contained and controlled, checked and balanced (Mudimbe 1996:246–47).3
In addition to the inherent paradox of power, kings possess qualities that set them apart
from others, intended to reinforce their semi-divine status.

In contexts ranging from gender to kinship and humanity (versus animality), the
ruler is constituted outside and beyond the categories of expected behavior. Transcen-
dence of social norms defines him as a semi-divine being. For example, the investiture
process of a Luba king requires that he undergo ritual incest in the presence of ancestral
relics so as to place him outside of ordinary prohibitions and other social limitations,
and to demonstrate his supernatural powers (Burton 1961:21–22). In another kind of
transcendence, songs and activities during investiture further suggest that the king is
being “smelted” and “forged” with reference to important precolonial technologies of
ironworking, affirming the idea that a king is the product of extraordinary metamor-
phosis (Womersley 1984:71, Dewey and Childs 1996). The king is also closely associated
with the Luba culture hero Mbidi Kiluwe, who possessed the stealth and solid qual-
ities of a buffalo. The most iconic object from the Royal Museum for Central Africa
merges human and buffalo attributes in a singular mask, reinforcing a ruler’s defiance of
anthropomorphic and zoomorphic categorization (A. Roberts 1995:22–25; cf. Ceyssens
2011) (Fig. 2). And finally, the death of a king is marked by a return to a human body—
yet it is that of a woman and her female successors through whom the king’s memory is
kept alive and his powers are preserved and wielded, thus further challenging fixed defi-
nitions of gender (Nooter 1991). Such dis-embodiment and trans-embodiment suggest
that Luba royal culture is intrinsically tied to complex understandings of personhood,
spirit possession, and body politics.

As Nkulu-N’Sengha explains, the ambiguous gendering of Luba rulership begins with
certain basic Luba practices. For example, when a child is born it acquires the name of
an ancestor who may have visited the pregnant mother in a dream or vision.4 Names are
not gendered in Luba culture, so a baby boy can be named after a grandmother, or a girl
could invoke the spirit of a male ancestor. Likewise, Luba observe patrilineal descent, and
yet when a king or chief died, it was not his son who became king but rather the son of
his sister, thus demonstrating vestiges of matrilineal logic still organizing the social lives
of neighboring peoples such as Hemba and Tabwa. In the professor’s words, “the king is
often referred to as the wife of a deity, and there is a certain element of women’s power
found in the personality of the king who embodies both male and female elements. Any-
thing in art that the king touches will always have a figure of a woman. When it comes to
life, women have a special connection with the ancestor and with the source of life itself.”
Similar statements were made by Luba individuals in the late 1980s, such as Nsenga
Ubandilwa, a Luba male descendent of a chief, who told me in 1988: “The chief will
put a female figure on the staff to prove that his kingdom comes from this woman. It
is like a sign or a memory of the woman who brought royalty to us.” And in another
eloquent commentary on the dual gendering of power, Banze Mukangala, a Luba male
officeholder, stated in 1989, “The power comes from women. Even if a man reigns on
the throne, one recognizes nevertheless the dignity of the woman as a source of power.
It is from her that power emanated.” These examples demonstrate that the deliberately

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ambiguous gendering of royal authority stems from cultur-
ally specific notions of the complementarity of the sexes and
transpersonal identity.

To put these ideas into a broader frame of scholarly reference,
the cultural construction of the body has been the subject of
important contemporary studies. Comparative cases have demon-
strated that African and other non-Western concepts of the body
and related personhood are more “composite, multiply sourced,
and constituted through reciprocal engagement in a recursively
meaningful world” than is usual in Western ideologies (Boddy
1998:271; also see Blier 1995:133–70). Janice Boddy complicates
understandings of the body by presenting cultural perspectives
that challenge bounded notions of personhood. For example,
Nuer male fertility is considered to be “corporate” or communal,
and cattle and humans are “linked materially and imaginatively in
a plethora of ways” (Boddy 1998:270). As she writes,

in many Melanesian and African societies, dividual and relational
forms of personhood seem inextricable from conventional under-
standings of how bodies form from the bodies of others. Bod-
ies encompass and expel one another, corporeal substances move
between them. Movement may be continual or episodic as contexts
and cultures ordain. Such bodies are composites, not inherently
unique or autonomous entities (ibid., p. 263, my emphasis).

The notion of the “composite person” as “dividual” is evident
in the deep cultural complexities of the veneration of skulls. Lus-
inga, a Tabwa chief who emulated and adopted Luba royal prac-
tices, was decapitated by the men of the Belgian officer Émile
Storms in 1884 and his skull was borne off to Belgium as a tro-
phy of proto-colonial conflict (A. Roberts 2013:215–16). Had it
not been lost, Lusinga’s skull would have been kept by his suc-
cessor, even as his own body was buried under a diverted stream
with the skull of his predecessor that he had conserved and con-
sulted when in need of ancestral wisdom. Such “capital visions,”
as Julia Kristeva (2012) might have it, were integral to Luba and
Luba-related succession and ancestral veneration and find pow-
erful amplification in Alfred Gell’s theorizing of fractal or parti-
tive personhood, as he reflected upon the work of anthropologist
Roy Wagner in Melanesia: Any “dividual” person is

“multiple” in the sense of being the precipitate of a multitude of gene-
alogical relationships, each of which is instantiated in his/her per-
son … A genealogy is thus an enchainment of people …. Person as
human being and person as lineage or clan are equally arbitrary sec-
tionings or identifications of this enchainment, [and] different pro-
jections of this fractality.5

In addition to the literature on non-Western notions of the
partitive person, a number of Cultural Studies authors have
explored provocative spaces of embodied ambiguities, particu-
larly with regard to writing and performing gender in Western
contexts. Helen McDonald, for example, traces how artists and
feminist critics negotiate ambiguity and how art, as representa-
tion, “is a prosthetic, an extension of the body and a point of
intercession between one living body and another” (2001:4). This
and other works such as that of Amelia Jones and Andrew Ste-
phenson on performing the body (1999) and the many incisive
contributions to Thinking Bodies, edited by Julia Flower Mac-

70 | african arts autumn 2013 vol. 46, no. 3

2 Male mask
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Schinziophyton rautanenii); h: 39 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 23470 (collected by o. Michaux
in 1896)

a virtuoso work of luba sculpture, this mask’s regal eminence, horn-
like coiffure, and bird at the nape (now missing) may allude to the
powerful male buffalo associated with the luba culture hero Mbidi
Kiluwe. the mask blends human and animal attributes, just as a luba
king transcends categories, and its features bespeak the cool compo-
sure expected of a sacred ruler.

Connell and Laura Zakarin (1994), have broken new ground
in expanding definitions of personhood, the body, and gender.
The challenge remains to articulate and express the deliberate
ambiguities that define the body in cross-cultural contexts, and
to theorize the body through the understandings of indigenous
interlocutors. How can one move beyond essentializing catego-
ries that restrict and impede understanding of more fluid cross-
cultural experiences of dividual embodiment?

By exploring the constitution of networks in the “body politic,”
we may arrive at more culturally focused definitions and observa-
tions, for this latter implies both macrocosmic and microcosmic
levels of identification (Mirzoeff 1995:58–97). In Memory: Luba
Art and the Making of History (1996), Allen Roberts and I detailed
the ways that the Luba body politic is defined by Luba people as a
body with just such levels of meaning and association, as visually
expressed in the most important of all Luba mnemonic devices,
a lukasa memory board (Fig. 3).6 As a library of Luba knowledge
and esoteric royal principles, the lukasa simultaneously depicts
the emblematic royal tortoise, human anatomy, a blueprint of
the royal residence, and the entire Luba landscape (Roberts and
Roberts 1996:134, M.N. Roberts 2005). As Susan Stewart (1993:131)
writes, “forms of projection of the body—the grotesque, the min-

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3 Memory board: lukasa
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples,
19th century
wood, glass beads, acacia thorns; h: 34 cm
private collection
photo: courtesy of the MuseuM for a frican art, new

yorK

Memory boards called lukasa are the pivots of luba
culture. held in the hand, their configurations of
beads are “read” and narrated by court historians
versed in esoteric knowledge. By running one’s hand
over the surface of the board, the beads stimulate
story-telling and history-making in the present.

4 a luba court historian and high-ranking member
of the Mbudye association—which guards and trans-
mits the historical knowledge of the luba kingdom—
“reads” and interprets the esoteric signs on a lukasa
memory board. no two recitations of a lukasa are
ever the same as they depend on changing political
circumstances and are performances of memory in
the present.
photo: Mary n ooter roBerts, KatanG a province (then

shaB a), deMocratic repuB lic of the c onG o (then

Zaire), 1989

iature, and the microcosm—reveal the paradoxical status of the
body as both mode and object of knowing, and of the self con-
stituted outside its physical being and by its image.” Vast though
it may be, the body politic is only ever truly experienced by each
individual subject, just as the personhood of the ruler ultimately
defines the larger body politic (Fig. 4).

Through a range of examples from my field research and avail-
able literature on Luba political culture, I hope to illustrate that
Luba concepts of the body in the body politic are rooted in a
processual understanding of embodiment that transcends strict
dichotomies of male/female, living/dead, royal/non-royal. Each of
these dialectics is mediated without contradiction in the practices
and discourses of Luba royal experience whereby a new place of
identity emerges as a terrain of composite, fractal bodies consti-
tuted to ensure “enchainment,” as Roy Wagner put it, and so cul-
tural continuity and the perpetuation of memory for posterity.

This research has parallels with earlier studies of the politico-
spiritual roles of women in leadership and royal arts of Africa. For
example, Flora Edouwaye S. Kaplan has explored the history and
importance of the Iyoba Queen Mother of the Benin Kingdom,
and “both the complementarity and ambiguity of sex and gender
roles in Benin” (1997:101). Another useful parallel is the work of
Jacob Olupona, who writes of the Ondo-Yoruba people of Nige-
ria. “Not only do the Ondo themselves insist that the ‘source of
ultimate value’ is portrayed as female or a woman-king, political
authority and power wielded by a male king is not absolute and
is not seen in isolation from an equally significant ritual author-
ity and power which women control” (1997:315–16). Andrew
Apter (1992:97–116) also addresses the role of female power in the
Yemoja Festival in the Yoruba Ekiti town of Ayede, during which
women become chiefs and a Yoruba king is revitalized by being
ritually “consumed by priestesses, only to be reproduced with
greater power.” Apter’s work demonstrates the multilayered and
polysemic meanings inherent to the ritual language of power, and

analyzes the perilously close associations and blurred boundar-
ies between female deities, witches, and kings. These comparative
examples inform and extend the Luba case, and offer a wider eth-
nographic and historical lens for understanding the complex gen-
dering of authority in African contexts.

the Body as a PlaCe of Passage
On a more philosophical level, Edward Casey’s phenom-
enological studies of place, memory, and the body offer useful
conceptual paradigms for consideration of the Luba processual
body. Place aids remembering by being “well suited to contain
memories—to hold and preserve them” (Casey 1987:186; cf.
Bachelard 1969, Yates 1966, and Roberts and Roberts 1996:84–
115). Place memory provides a model for understanding how
Luba mnemonics—from scarifications on the human body
to royal emblems, choreographies, and narratives of the Luba
epic—generate the semantic dynamism and social construction
of Luba historical thought. As Pierre Nora has discussed (1989), a
locus of memory or lieu de mémoire is a landmark around which
past events structure present memory. As both actual and imag-
ined places, lieux de mémoire can be topoi—that is, “both places
and topics, where memories converge” (Blok 1991:125). Recol-
lection, as understood by Luba, is never a fixed account nor a
pedigree, but a meaningful configuration of selected, negotiated
events around “loci of memory,” as the narrative exegesis of the
lukasa memory boards so clearly demonstrates (M.N. Roberts
1996:116–49, Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe 1993:10).

The ultimate container for holding memories is the body itself,
as the vehicle through which the intimate relationship between
memory and place is realized. Through the lived body, place and
memory are actively joined. Casey discusses the conventional
yet misplaced emphasis on memory as a procedure contained
within the mind. Yet, as he points out, memory always lies on the
border between self and other. The body constitutes the frontier

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perform spirit mediumship, and in the person of the king him-
self, whose very life, says Professor Nkulu N’Sengha, “is held in
the hands of the women who surround him.”

the amBiguous gendering of Power
In the context of precolonial Luba kingship practices, the body
politic was performed in ambiguously gendered terms. Male and
female categories were deliberately blurred to foster transforma-
tion and transcendence in the person of the king. It should be
noted that the use of the term “king” is inaccurate to describe
what Luba call mulopwe, a word that is not gendered and has no
basis in either male or female categories or attributes, but rather
refers to the one who possesses the sacred blood of investiture.
Furthermore, over the course of my research in the DRC of the
late 1980s, statements were made by diverse individuals about
the female attributes of the various institutions of royalty that
appeared to be male.7

Luba royal culture was composed of circulating centers of
power (cf. Arens and Karp 1989)—that is, institutions that were
linked by a common semantic literacy but whose roles were spe-
cialized and served to check and balance one another. These
included the institution of kingship (Bulopwe), titleholders
(Bamfumu), the Mbudye association (a historical association
that guarded the interdictions of royalty and whose court histo-
rians mastered the lukasa memory boards), and the Bilumbu, or
royal diviners who interceded regularly to offer guidance in the
affairs of state and to heal, protect, and litigate. In discussions
of politics in the late 1980s, it was common to hear people pro-
claim that “the king is a woman”; or that Mbudye, whose highest
ranking members are men, is a “woman,” and that her husbands
are the king and the diviner; or that Mijibu wa Kalenga—the
first royal diviner—was a woman (in spite of the fact that Mijibu
is usually described as a man). Furthermore, the king himself
was incarnated as a woman after death. “When I die,” said Chief
Kabongo, “I will be replaced by one of my sons, but at the same
time, I will be incarnated by a woman” (Orban 1916:1).

What factors contributed to this transgendering of power?
Why was it established and how did it affect political dynamics
throughout the colonial period? The deliberate blurring of cat-
egories was not restricted to verbal allusions. It also influenced
practices during investiture, during the course of a king’s reign,
and following his death; and it impacted production, ownership,
and interpretation of royal insignia.

Luba kings and client chiefs of the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries validated their claims to power through posses-
sion of treasuries consisting of thrones, staffs, spears, bowstands,
axes, adzes, bowls, cups, and headrests, all made from wood,
iron, and copper (Figs. 5–7).8 The emblems of Luba sovereignty
constitute a remarkable corpus of forms, styles, and visions by
artists of many distinct backgrounds, regions, and political affili-
ations, but one thing characterizes them all: Though owned by
male rulers and made by male artists, such objects share a visual
grammar based upon the female image. Both figurative elements
in the round (including full figures and janus heads) and two-
dimensional incised geometric designs are derived from the
female body and its attributes. Whether they take the form of a
staff of office, a throne, a ceremonial axe, or an ornamental bow

5 caryatid stool
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Ricinodendron spp.), fiber; 50 cm x 31 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 23137 (ex-collection f. Michel, acquired
between 1898 and 1900)

stools were and are potent emblems of luba royal power. the female figure sup-
porting the stool attracted and contained the spirits of luba kingship through
marks of luba identity and physical perfection, including scarification, an elabo-
rate hairstyle, gleaming black skin, and a serene, composed attitude.

of difference and sameness, and is a sieve through which histori-
cal facts are negotiated, reconfigured, and re-presented. Mem-
ory is intrinsic to “how we remember in and by and through the
body” (Casey 1987:147).

These concepts are essential to understanding Luba notions
of the body—and particularly the female body—in the body
politic. Here we shall consider perspectives on the ways that the
female body, as simultaneous container and surface, undergoes
processes of emplacement, inscription, and embodiment as it
maps critical and sometimes profoundly esoteric cultural and
political phenomena. We shall also investigate personal and spir-
itual dimensions of the performative body and its metaphorical
and actual links to the body politic, to the denizens of the spirit
world, and even to the secrets of life itself. The evidence of these
roles lies in the artistic emblems of office-holders and their exe-
geses by Luba people, in ritual practices whereby certain women

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6 anthropomorphic bowstand
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples,
19th century
wood (Crossopterix febrifuga), metal; 65 cm x 33 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 456 (collected
before 1907)

luba bowstands evoke the foundations of king-
ship and the culture hero’s hunting prowess. this
object once owned by a male ruler is supported by
a female figure holding the secrets of power within
her breasts. the bowstand’s three branches are
incised with female scarification marks, for women’s
bodies were considered the ultimate receptacles for
the spirits of luba kingship.

7 ceremonial axe
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples,
19th century
wood (Pterocarpus tinctorius), locally smelted and
forged iron; 37 cm x 26 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 16887 (regis-
tered in 1914)

axes with incised designs on their iron blades and
sculpted heads on their handles belong to high-
ranking members of society and are worn over the
shoulder during ceremonials of the royal court. the
sculpted head may hold a female spirit and suggests
the ambiguities of power, as kings transcend gender
and other human limitations.

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and arrow stand, all these regalia are gendered as women. Cary-
atid thrones are supported by female figures, and staffs are sur-
mounted by one or sometimes two women standing, seated, or,
occasionally, arm-in-arm.

narrating the amBiguity of gender
When chiefs and titleholders offer exegeses concerning their
emblems, it is common for them to assign male identities to the
sculpted female figures. Staffs of office, for example, serve as his-
torical documents whose hierarchical composition of two- and
three-dimensional forms is intended as a text (Figs. 8–9). Narra-
tions reaffirm connections between verbal and visual arts and lend
insight into the ways that individual power-holders view their
roles and validate their authority. For example, Chief Ngeleka
explained the complex iconography of his staff of office to me and
to his family over the course of several days in 1987. He alluded
to the female figure at the top of the staff gesturing to her breasts
as the spirit of all Luba kings. He proceeded to recount the story
of how the king made his voyage through the open lands of the
savanna (represented by the unadorned shaft) through a number
of critically important administrative centers (shown as lozenge-
shaped sections). Janus heads near the top of his staff depict the
paired female spirit mediums who embody the Luba tutelary spir-
its named Mpanga and Banze and represent the king’s spirit wives.
Ngeleka explained that the gesture of hands to breasts seen on
many Luba works of art refers to the bizila, or royal prohibitions,
of which certain women are the ultimate guardians. Women
guard such secrets within their breasts. The patterns on the fig-
ure’s abdomen and those on the staff ’s broad sections (at the top
of Fig. 9) replicate women’s scarifications. They take this form
to signify the secret of the state’s success, namely the bringing
of power from the royal capital to outlying chieftainships (often

through strategic marriages) such as Ngeleka’s own. He added
that the scarifications are those of the king’s first wife and were
often emulated by ordinary women seeking the high fashions of
royalty. When people worshipped in the past, he explained, they
always removed their clothes. “All the women had scarifications,
and spirits responded above all to women; they were more favor-
able to women than to men.”

Other cases further underscore how Luba people speak of gender
in deliberately ambiguous terms with regard to royal emblems. A
renowned diviner named Bwana Kudie identified his bowl-bear-
ing figure—a carved wooden sculpture of a woman bearing a bowl,
used to hold chalk and beads (Fig. 10)—as Mijibu wa Kalenga, the
first Luba diviner who, by most narrative accounts, was a man.
When asked why Mijibu was depicted as a woman, Bwana Kudie
explained in 1989 that “women are represented in sculpture more
than men because they are superior: they brought us into the world,
and they have an intelligence, a power that supercedes that of men.
Women have power.”13 Indeed, a bowl-bearing figure of this type
was a multireferential symbol, for while it embodied the spirit of the
first Luba diviner for Bwana Kudie, another diviner said that it rep-
resented the wife of his possessing spirit.

One must never assume the gender of an anthropomorphic
emblem, then, even if it seems to be obvious. As a female divination
specialist named Keuzi asserted in 1987, what appears to be a wom-
an’s head could well be a depiction of the king himself. Kings were
known to don women’s coiffures on the days of their investitures,
since for the rest of their reigns they would occupy a status that
transcended gender as well as human limitations. Carved wooden
cups used in investiture rites by the king and his entourage to drink
palm wine and sacred substances may have been shaped as human
heads with women’s coiffures for this same reason (Fig. 11).

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8 staff of office
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Pterocarpus tinctorius); 163 cm x 16 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 80.2.150 (ex-collection J.
walschot, registered in 1980)

9 staff of office
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Pterocarpus tinctorius), copper; 140 cm x 14 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 34585 (registered in 1932)

for luba rulers and titleholders, staffs affirm and convey status and
hold sacred powers that can heal and promote positive transforma-
tions. staffs are also memory maps, provoking accounts of migra-
tion, genealogy, and land rights, and the female figure at the top
may signify the king himself or a founding female ancestor.

feminizing the sPirit Vessel
In Luba culture, femininity was constituted through the stages of a woman’s
life. Through scarifications, coiffures, the filing of teeth, and the elongation of
the genital labia,9 the body was a vessel to be created and beautified as a work of
art. Traditionally, only by fulfilling this process of beautification did a woman
become attractive and marriageable. Likewise, royal insignia became effective
spirit vessels through their embellishment. During my research, Luba inter-
locutors asserted that beauty was not innate, but rather was created over the
course of a lifetime. A woman was judged not by her natural-born features, but
by those that had been culturally enhanced, as when teeth were filed to points
and the skin was oiled, or one demonstrated one’s beauty through the manner
of walking, dance, and ritual performance.

In addition to the many ways that Luba women were deemed beautiful,
bodily transformations such as scarifications and elaborate hairstyles rendered
them effective vessels to capture and hold potent spiritual energies and so
establish communication with the other world. Luba were renowned for their
intricate coiffures that could take days to complete and last for over a month.
Not only were hairstyles indicative of a person’s identity and status, but they
also could serve as repositories for protective amulets. The head as a locus of
power was enhanced and the face was beautified by the enveloping crown of a
virtuoso coiffure. As Ngoi Ilunga stated in 1988, “In our ancestors’ days, women
were always expected to tress their hair in order to make the face radiant; a
woman with a beautiful hairdo was married quickly.” And in order to protect
such adornments, some high-ranking Luba individuals used carved wooden
headrests as pillows for the neck. The figures portrayed in sculpturally dynamic
headrests by the artist known in the West as the “Master of the Cascade Head-
dress,” reflect one of the most popular styles of the latter part of the nineteenth
century, called the “step” coiffure and worn in the Shankadi region around the
towns of Kamina and Kabondo Dianda (see de Maret et al. 1973, Vogel 1980).
It is conceivable that the persons using such headrests, which were extremely
intimate personal belongings, may have worn a coiffure similar to the type
depicted in the sculptures (Figs. 12–13).10

Every detail of the sculpted female figure was inscribed, whether through the
artful arrangement of the hair or the embellishing of the body with scarifica-
tion patterns that were both pleasing to the eye and stimulating to the touch.11
Luba consider these not only ideal features in a woman, but attractive and
meaningful to the spirit world. A Luba verb used with reference to scarification
is kutapa, “to pierce or incise”; another is kulemba, “to draw, paint, or inscribe,”
but extended since the colonial period to mean “to write” (Van Avermaet and
Mbuya 1954:678, 169, 349; Roberts and Roberts 1996:102; A. Roberts 1988:41).
Luba scarification was an efficacious “writing,” though, as achieved through
the act of inscription (kulemba), as well as meanings assigned to and associated

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10 Bowl-bearing figure
democratic republic of the congo, luba-hemba peoples, 19th century
wood (Ricinodendron rautanenii); 44 cm x 22 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 14358 (collected between 1891 and 1912, gift of a. h. Bure)

Bowl-bearing figures are central to luba divination, for their placement next to the medium provides spiri-
tual presence, while their bowls contain white chalk applied to the diviner’s face to instigate enlightenment
through the symbolism of moonlight and the beneficence of the ancestors. the expressive quality of this
figure from northeastern luba-related peoples is characteristic of works by the so-called Buli Master, the first
identified workshop and still among the most celebrated in all of africa.

11 royal cup
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Trichilia emetica), pigments, copper pins; 15 cm x 19 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 23439 (collected by o. Michaux between 1890 and 1897)

anthropomorphic double-chambered royal cups were used in investiture ceremonies and other rites to honor
luba ancestral spirits. the gender of the cup is not fixed, as a king sometimes wore a woman’s coiffure during
his enthronement ceremonies as he was transformed into a sacred ruler.

might describe using the verb kununenya adorn and create
order on and through the body, so “cosmetic” alludes to prepara-
tions “designed to beautify the body” as derived from the Greek
kosmētikos, “skilled at arranging,” which in turn is ultimately
from kosmos, or “order” itself (Morris 1969:301). Following such
comparative logic, scarification and the “skin-scapes” produced
through it are therefore cosmological by definition (Nooter
1991:262–63, 2007:55).

Among Luba-related peoples, complex interrelationships exist
between corporeal semantics, social identity, physical perfection,
and cosmological principles. Analysis of the Luba pattern called
nkaka shows how scarification functioned (as it still does to an
extent) as a cognitive cuing structure that triggers a barrage of
associations, contexts, and meanings. Nkaka consists of a row of
isosceles triangles and is similar in form to the ubiquitous Tabwa
balamwezi pattern, which refers to “the rising of the new moon”
(A. Roberts 1985). The pattern is often located across the chest
above a woman’s breasts. In nature, an nkaka is the scaly anteater
or pangolin. Pangolins are sacrificed for ritual and magical use of
their scales, which are considered resistant, durable, and strong
(Nooter 1991:255; cf. A. Roberts 1990, 1995:83–87).

The nkaka pattern appears on objects whose purpose is to con-
tain power. For example, it adorns the rims of ceramic vessels that
potters describe as “female bodies” and would not think of leaving
“unscarified.” Pots may house ancestral spirits in the family shrine,
where they are worshiped every month at the rising of the new
moon. The pattern also decorates virtually all Luba royal emblems
in which the ruler’s possessing spirit resides: the rims of stools,
the backs of lukasa memory boards, the branches of bowstands,
the handles and blades of axes, and the edges of headrests serving
as conduits to inspired dreams (Fig. 13). Nkaka is also the name
of the beaded headdress worn by Bilumbu diviners and Mbudye
Society members when they enter a state of spirit possession, “to
catch and hold the spirit within” (Fig. 4).

Significantly, the nkaka pattern of scarification is often located in
the same place where certain women wear a special cord encircling
their chest called lukuka when they are “in the taboos.” This emblem
signals that women hold the bizila, or prohibitions of royalty within
their breasts. As Mwema Kapanda explained to me in 1988, “to wear
the lukuka carries great power: it is a powerful sign, indicating that
she who wears it carries the goodness and the greatness of the spirit.”

vol. 46, no. 3 autumn 2013 african arts | 75

with the resulting patterns (M.N. Roberts 2007:69).12 The body’s
interior meanings and exterior communications were joined
with a tactile dimension adding to the aesthetic impact. Indeed,
inscription of significance led to what Jean-Luc Nancy has called
“exscription,” insofar as the medium extended the person to
those privileged to “read” the skin’s signs and symbols (Nancy
1994:24, M.N. Roberts 2007:59).

The full implications of female transfiguration and spirit
embodiment emerge when one learns that the Kiluba verb
kunenenya not only means “to embellish and beautify,” but “to
render harmony, order, rank, and hierarchy,” and a synonym is
“to decorate, adorn, arrange, order” (Van Avermaet and Mbuya
1954:352). In other words, the fashioning of the female body is
an act of civilization that superimposes order, form, and mean-
ing over superficial realities (cf. Rubin 1988). One is reminded
of the word “cosmetic” in English. Just as practices that Luba

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The multivalent meanings of the triangular nkaka design inform the enigmatic signs of
the most esoteric of all Luba emblems, the lukasa memory device. As the key to Luba polit-
ical organization, the lukasa embodies the principles and precepts upon which the state
was founded. The “inside” of a lukasa is studded with tiny glass beads of different colors, or
sometimes incised with motifs; in either case, the device is “scarified” through processes of
“exscription” just considered (Fig. 14). Complex data sets are assigned to particular beads
as well as configurations, and when memorized, this information can be recalled during
narrative performances. In this way, a lukasa serves as an archive for the topographical
and chronological mapping of political history. Incised on the back or “outside” of every
lukasa are incised nkaka triangles that refer to the shell of a tortoise, a secretive animal that
the Luba equate with the kingdom itself (Fig. 15). The scales (or “scutes,” in herpetological
terminology) of the tortoise’s carapace symbolize the sacred villages of the kingdom’s most
important rulers, and the striations within each of these refer to the deeds of the king,
and even more specifically to the taboos and restrictions of his office. These interdictions,
called bizila and protected, as we have seen, within the breasts of royal women, lie at the
very root of Luba power, for the paradox of power is that supernatural agency can be har-
nessed only through strict abstinence and observance of ritual procedures. As Luba water
healer Ngoi Ilunga told me in 1988–89, “scarifications have interdictions: that is why they
signify the title and rank of chieftaincy”; and as a man named Papa Laza added in 1989,
“the scarified designs found on the royal emblem indicate that it belongs to a chief, and
that this chief is invested, owns this land, and has this rank.”

female ePiCenters of Power
Luba entrust women to be the stewardesses of these interdictions, to ensure that male
officials strictly adhere to them. This is evidenced by the crucial roles they played as
political and religious mediators in Luba royal history. This delegation of enormous
responsibility to women at the court meant that the king’s person became enveloped
in their vast web of duties. The boundaries between his roles and theirs were so inter-
twined and interdependent that the institution of kingship was itself regarded as femi-
nine. As Papa Laza stated, the culture hero “Mbidi Kiluwe was discovered by women;
women divulged the hiding place of Nkongolo (the cruel, tyrannical despot), leading to
his demise; and women keep the secret of life.” The king’s mother, called Mfyama or “the
hidden one,” and his first wife were critically important advisors and counselors at the
court. They were paid homage as one would to a king, and the first wife often acted as a
surrogate in the king’s absence:

The wife of a chief has bizila (prohibitions) and mikishi (power objects), for example, she can-
not talk while collecting water or preparing food because she is working with the spirits in the
sacred dining house called mbala. The wife of a chief is respected even more than a man (Ngoi
Zaina, 1989).

The cooking fire is sacred. It is given by the king to a chief or titleholder at the moment of inves-
titure, and he is never allowed to view it—on pain of death. That is why a woman does all the
food preparation. There are all kinds of prohibitions: changing the position of the wood, col-
lecting water, which must be done at night, without looking behind or talking. There is a special
salutation for a chief ’s wife, and they touch the earth (Mfumu Inabanza, 1987).

When a chief takes office, he will have sculpted representations made of his first wife. She is highly
respected. The sculptures are intended to protect the chief against his enemies. The day a chief trav-
els, his first wife takes a mat outside and sits with his figures to protect them until his return (Ngoi
Ilunga, 1988).

Another key female actor in the theater of kingship was Mwanana, often the sister of
the king who became a princess. Nkulu-N’Sengha asserts that the ruler’s first wife, his
sister, and his mother were all very powerful and together played critical roles in deci-
sion-making. In 1989, titleholder Kioni of Kabongo offered this account of Mwanana:

It is she who enters the kobo ka malwa [an enclosed house in which the king was required to
have incest with a female relative during the investiture rituals]. The chief ’s mother or aunt may
also enter. When the sister exits from the house, she becomes Mwanana. If there is no sister,

12 anthropomorphic headrest
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples,
19th century
wood (Crossopterix febrifuga), beads; 14 cm x 12 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 54.77.5 (regis-
tered in 1954)

13 anthropomorphic headrest
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples,
19th century
wood (Crossopterix febrifuga); 17 cm x 12 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 23473 (col-
lected by o. Michaux between 1890 and 1897)

sculpted headrests preserve intricate coiffures and
keep the head comfortable in sleep. these headrests
were most likely carved by the same artist or a work-
shop active in the nineteenth century, referred to in
the west as the Master of the cascade headdress.
headrests were sometimes conduits to messages
from the ancestors as conveyed through the proph-
ecy of dreams.

76 | african arts autumn 2013 vol. 46, no. 3

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details of the lukasa memory board shown in figure 3.

14–15
the beaded bumps on the “inside” or front of the lukasa convey the
tactility of women’s scarifications that are both erotic and autobio-
graphical, even as they elicit historical knowledge of the kingdom
and serve to map sacred sites. on the back, or “outside,” the
scarification patterns of isosceles triangles are associated with the
most secret royal prohibitions called bizila, and link luba concepts of
beautification with notions of arrangement, order, and cosmological
perfection. photo: Mary n ooter roBerts, 1989.

16 royal bowl: kiteya
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Ricinodendron rautanenii); 28 cm x 44 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 3861 (registered in 1911)

the most important tutelary spirits of luba kingship are twins called
bavidye. this remarkable bowl used in investiture rites of a ruler is
held by two figures, possibly twinned spirit guardians of luba royal
knowledge and sacred authority. lizards depicted on the lid refer to
earth spirits and arcane powers a king must master.

of considerable power, for these natural resources constituted
the economic foundation of the Luba state. Since Luba spir-
its become manifest as twins, mediums often live in pairs, and
are frequently depicted that way in art (Fig. 16). There are cer-
tain Luba sculptures made as pairs that represent the twinned
bavidye spirits, such as those seen in Figures 17 and 18, in which
the female figure is shown with her body inverted so that the
head and feet face one way while the rest of her body faces the
other. This highly unusual iconographic innovation may indicate
that this is a representation of a spirit and her twin, able to see in
both directions simultaneously. And the addition of medicinally
charged horns in cavities at the top of the further supports the
probability that these figures are representations of spirits.

Twins hold an important place in Luba culture, where they are
called “children of the moon” (M.N. Roberts 2011, Theuws 1968).
The moon, for all Luba and Luba-related peoples of this region,
harkens hope and rejuvenation, and each month on the night
of the new moon, family shrines are cleansed and offerings are
made while participants sing the sacred songs for twins in defer-
ence to the twinned spirits of Luba kingship. Not only are twins
felt to have extraordinary powers that connect them to spirits
in a special way, but so are their mothers. Called Kapamba, the

then a niece may enter. When Mwanana exits, she is enthroned just
like her brother, and begins to reign also. The mother is responsible
for overseeing the king and if she determines that he has an infirmity
that might interfere with his ability to rule, then it is Mwanana who
rules in his place. In the old days, Mwanana stayed at the king’s side
just like his wife. It was not until Ilunga Kabale’s reign that the king
began to send the Mwanana to distant regions to rule because he had
had many daughters. Mfyama [the mother] and Mwanana stay at the
king’s side and they are delegated portions of land where they receive
their own tribute. The Mfyama lived outside the royal compound, but
near it. The women who were sent away were sisters, acting in the
role of Mwanana in other zones, but none were the Mwanana of the
kobo ka malwa.

Historian Thomas Reefe (1981) recorded numerous accounts
of the roles of royal sisters and daughters sent as emissaries to
foreign chiefdoms. There they settled alliances, intermarried
with client chiefs, and perpetuated the royal line in distant terri-
tories. Reefe asserts that the intermarrying of these women from
the royal Luba line with chiefs from outlying matrilineal poli-
ties was one of the most important mechanisms of Luba expan-
sion. These founding ancestresses are often remembered by
name and are commemorated on royal staffs. Several are said to
have become influential and autonomous leaders and warriors in
their own right, reflected in a few cases in which a woman sur-
mounts rather than supports the royal stool.

In the religious sphere, spirit mediums were almost always
women in the past. As diviners, healers, and custodians of sacred
sites, they devoted their lives to the guardianship of the great spir-
its of Luba kingship. The two spirits most frequently incarnated
are Mpanga and Banze: As Vincent Mukangala stated in 1988,

When a woman takes possession of a spirit, she arrives at a lake cry-
ing and plunges in. She stays underwater for four days, at the end of
which she emerges holding a ball of chalk. One knows then that it is
the spirit of Mpanga and Banze who possess her. Mpanga and Banze
were twin sisters (mwanana) of Mbidi Kiluwe’s lineage.

Such spirits often inhabited important fishing places and salt
springs, the exploitation of which required the spirits’ consent.
That women were the conduits to this authorization was a source

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vol. 46, no. 3 autumn 2013 african arts | 77

their presence as healing and/or other activities are performed.
The association between mothers of twins and the diviner’s wife
is purposeful, both representing exceptional abilities vis à vis the
spirit world, which in turn render them politically and socially
efficacious (M.N. Roberts 2011) (Fig. 19).

emPlaCing sPirit
One form of female spirit mediumship became a veritable politi-
cal institution and a power to be reckoned with by colonial authori-
ties in the early twentieth century. From the nineteenth century,
and possibly earlier, deceased Luba kings were incarnated by female
spirit mediums who took custody of the insignia and perpetuated
the reigns of the dead. The appointment was sanctioned by the spirit
world: at some point following the king’s death, a woman would
enter a state of dissociation, exhibiting convulsions and fits of hys-
teria and intoning the dead king’s name. If deemed legitimate, the
woman was officially bestowed the title of Mwadi and was installed
in the deceased king’s former residence with his entourage of titled
officials at her service. Since the Mwadi was seen as the king himself,
she never married or bore children, and like the king, she had her
own coterie of wives to care for her and prepare her food. She cared
for the deceased king’s stools, staffs, bowstands, and other insignia,
and most important, she preserved the dikumbo basket holding his
skull and other most powerful relics and devices (Nooter 1991:272).
Two photographs taken by Thomas Reefe show the last Mwadi of a
Luba king who died in 1931 (Figs. 20–21).13

The king maintained a ritual relationship through gifts given
to the Mwadi as his father incarnate. She took these to a grove
so sacred that only she could enter, and even then, she wore
an iron bell on a long cord fastened to her waist that she rang
to announce that she had reached the site of offerings and the
king’s spirit had accepted the gifts. If no one heard the bell, it was
known that the mission had failed and the Mwadi had died from
the king’s wrath. Her body would be pulled from the grove using
the rope around her waist (Nooter 1991:280).

The Mwadi and her village maintained their independence
from the king’s successor. She was exempted from all tribute
and the king was forbidden to set foot in her territory. At the
onset of colonialism in the early 1900s, there were at least four
Mwadis still governing their respective principalities and wield-
ing greater authority than their male counterparts. Each of their
residences was referred to as a “spirit capital,” or kitenta, and was
represented on the lukasa memory boards as the most sacred of
sites. Accounts from my field and archival research describe the
many roles and attributes of the Mwadis, and demonstrate the
critically important part they played in perpetuating the mem-
ory and person of the king for posterity.

The presence of these autonomous sacred village groupings
bewildered Belgian colonial authorities as they struggled to
impose their regime upon the mystical attributes of these women
leaders and the people they nurtured. In the early part of the
twentieth century, colonial officers were charged with the task of
consolidating chiefdoms under administrative centers. As they
became more familiar with Luba political practices, they realized
the complexity of the indigenous structure, which emphasized
circulating centers of power. An unpublished colonial document
in the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervu-

17 female figure: nkisi
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Vitex madiensis), cloth, beads, duiker horn; h: 50 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 53.85.4 (registered 1912)

18 Male figure: nkisi
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples, 19th century
wood (Ricinodenron spp.), cloth, beads, duiker horn; h: 38 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 53.85.5 (registered in 1912)

luba twin spirit figures possess features that signal their connec-
tion to the other world. the female figure’s body is reversed from
her head and arms, and both bear tiny antelope horns packed
with medicinal substances to enable healing and problem-solving.
these spirit figures are nkisi power objects that not only see into
the beyond, but may go there as well.

mother of twins is regarded as an omnipotent force. Her excep-
tional fertility and strength give her a special status in the royal
court whereby, as Nkulu N’Sengha explains, she is given the
opportunity to openly critique the king. When she expresses
herself to the king, it is considered to be the spirit communicat-
ing directly with the ruler, and opens up a space of critical dis-
course as an institutionalized form of regulating the behavior of
a king in much the same way that the Mbudye association has
the right to dethrone a king should he transgress the royal prohi-
bitions and codes of conduct.

Kapamba is also the title given to the wife of a male diviner,
and one of her roles is to sing the sacred “songs for twins” in
order to summon the bavidye spirits for the duration of her hus-
band’s consultation with a client. Diviners can be male or female,
and their possessing spirits may assume the same or oppo-
site gender. Some diviners have as many as five spirits who can
“mount their head,” but if the diviner is male prior to possession,
then his wife is instrumental in calling the spirits and sustaining

78 | african arts autumn 2013 vol. 46, no. 3

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19 (far left) the wife of a male Bilumbu diviner
is called Kapamba, the same name given to the
mother of twins who is considered to possess
extraordinary fertility and capacity. the woman sum-
mons the spirits by singing the “songs for twins”
and sounding an iron bell to ensure that the spirits
are present through the course of the diviner’s
consultation. photo: Mary n ooter roBerts, KatanGa
province (then s haB a), deMocratic repuB lic of the

conG o (then Zaire), 1989.

20–21
(near left, bottom) the last Mwadi spirit
medium is shown in these photographs taken in the
mid-1970s. she sits on a stool with an axe over her
shoulder and a flywhisk, surrounded by her “wives”
and several titleholders who serve her as the living
embodiment of king Kasongwa niembo who died in
1931. the Mwadi spirit medium was ordinarily suc-
ceeded by another woman in her lineage, in order
to perpetuate the king’s memory for posterity in
the body of a woman. photo: courtesy of t hoM as Q.
reefe.

mand, particularly when he himself, by observance of tradition and
belief, willingly imposes on himself the obligation to honor these
female chiefs and their cachet of independence? (Ramoiseaux 1915).

This extraordinary account reveals the power that Mwadis
wielded, both for local rulers and for the Belgian administrators
who witnessed the strength of their influence. Although we do
not have records of how Ramoiseaux’s plea was answered by his
superiors, it reflects the degree to which bitenta spirit capitals
formed places of quiet resistance, not only to the overt power
of living Luba kings, but also to colonial rule. By the time of my
doctoral research in the late 1980s, there were no longer any liv-
ing Mwadis, for the last known one, possessed of the spirit of
King Kasongwa Niembo who ruled in the early twentieth cen-
tury, had passed away in the mid-1980s.

enVoi
The ultimate container for memories is the body itself, as
the vehicle through which the intimate relationship between
memory and place is realized (Casey 1987). Earlier generations
of Luba perceived kingship to be feminine, and though kings
were men, the source of royal authority resided in the fluid bor-
der zones between maleness and femaleness, life and death, this
world and the other, and the tenuous extremes of power embod-
ied by the protagonists of the Luba epic. Royal arts and practices
preserved and perpetuated the secrets of sacred rule by virtue
of this purposeful blurring and blending of gender, and by their
ability to join place and memory through the vehicle of the lived
body and the transcendent identity of the king. Luba arts reify
constructions of gender that transcend any closed or limited def-
initions and provide an indigenous paradigm for understanding
the body in composite and multiply sourced ways. Among the
most powerful evocations of this idea can be seen in overtly her-
maphroditic sculptures, however rare they may be (Fig. 22).

Dr. Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha stresses that in Luba culture it
is women who are the givers of life. If a child has a quarrel with

vol. 46, no. 3 autumn 2013 african arts | 79

ren, Belgium) conveys a sense of the Mwadi’s roles in the period
prior to the eventual discontinuity of this political institution:

The study of power organisms in the Territory of Kabongo gives rise
to the following considerations, which … are in opposition to the
administration’s instructions for the maintenance of a single chief-
dom. Therefore, I submit the problem to the highest deliberation of
the District Commissioner …. As the histories of various indepen-
dent chieftaincies reveal, there exist in the Territory of Kabongo four
completely distinct authorities, who are free of all obligations of vas-
salage to Chief Kabongo …. These four principalities are governed
by female chiefs invested by the spirits of the forebears of the ruling
dynasty …. What gives even more credence and force to these insti-
tutions is the complete recognition on the part of the grands chefs of
these women whom they view as the very incarnation of their fore-
bears, and to whom they refer as “father” or “grandfather.” The result
is that these female authorities are called mulopwe [a title carried nor-
mally only by those of the ruling dynasty], and of a degree superior to
that of the two ruling male chiefs.

How, then, given the incompatibility of this situation with that of an
obligatory dependence, can we submit these principalities that are
completely and exclusively independent of Kabongo, to his com-

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African463_68-81_CS6.indd 79

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22 hermaphrodite figure: nkisi
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples,
19th century
wood (Crossopterix febrifuga); 22 cm x 8 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 520 (registered
1908)

Male figures are rare in luba art, yet here one is
shown with mixed attributes, reflecting a luba sense
that gender and power are inherently ambiguous.
Male and female elements merge in leadership as
men wield overt authority and women assert secret
sides of the same processes.

23 female figure: nkisi
democratic republic of the congo, luba peoples,
19th century
wood (Lannea discolor); h: 29 cm
royal Museum for central africa, rG 26633 (regis-
tered in 1922)

luba ritual specialists use an array of figures for divi-
nation, healing, initiation, and litigation, empowered
by medicinal ingredients held in cavities in the tops
of their heads to address particular tasks through
arcane powers. this figure was carved by the cel-
ebrated warua Master, an artist whose deft hand can
be seen in a constellation of luba royal emblems.

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its father, such a moment can be tolerated; but if the same child
should insult or in any way be rude to its mother, repercussions
could last a lifetime. The spirits will ensure that such behavior
is never permitted, just as they ensure that a king is abiding by
royal prohibitions and exhibiting the most important qualities of
dignity, which includes a good heart (muchima muyampe) and a
spirit of generosity. Only in the deliberate merging of male and
female qualities can the ruler attain these ideals, for it is through
the women of his world that he rules with balanced authority and
equanimity (Fig. 23). In the realm of Luba royal culture, then, and
its epistemological underpinnings, the king remains a woman.

Mary Nooter Roberts is Professor in UCLA’s Department of World Arts
and Cultures/Dance and Consulting Curator for African Art at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art. She is the author and curator of thematic
books and exhibitions that explore the philosophical dimensions of African
visual arts and expressive culture, such as secrecy, memory, writing and
inscription, as well as topics of the body and female representation, arts of
divination and healing, and theories of exhibiting. Together with Allen F.
Roberts, she produced the award-winning works Memory: Luba Art and
the Making of History (1996) and A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban
Senegal (2003). In 2007, she was decorated by the Republic of France as a
Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for her promotion of francophone
African artists. proberts@arts.ucla.edu

Notes

Dissertation field research was carried out from
1987–1989 in Katanga Province (then known as Shaba)
in southeastern DRC (formerly Zaire), and was further
informed by archival work in 1982 and 1988 at the Royal
Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium (see
Nooter 1991). All field quotes from Luba participants are
from interviews conducted during this time. Support
from the American Association of University Women, the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the
Belgian-American Educational Foundation, a Smithsonian
Institution Predoctoral Fellowship, and a Wittkower Fellow-
ship from Columbia University’s Department of Art History
and Archaeology is gratefully acknowledged. The project cul-
minated in a major traveling exhibition and book funded by
the US NEH and NEA entitled Memory: Luba Art and the
Making of History (Roberts and Roberts 1996), organized
by the Museum for African Art, New York. Thanks to Allen
Roberts for editing assistance in preparing this paper, and
Elaine Sullivan for help with object captions. For my parents,
Nancy and Robert Nooter.

The photographs of works of art illustrating this

article have been generously provided by colleagues at the
Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium,
as a component of our collaboration on an exhibition
entitled “Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the

80 | african arts autumn 2013 vol. 46, no. 3

Royal Museum for Central Africa” on view at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from July 7,
2013 to January 5, 2014. I wish to thank Dr. Anne-Marie
Bouttiaux, Chief Curator of the Section of Ethnography
and my co-curator for the exhibition, as well as RMCA
Director General Guido Gryseels and his staff for making
this project possible. I also wish to thank LACMA Direc-
tor Michael Govan, Deputy Director Nancy Thomas,
and my other LACMA colleagues for their support and
creative contributions to this project that inaugurates the
museum’s new African gallery and related programming.
1 Dr. Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha is a professor of

Religious Studies at California State University, North-
ridge, who hails from Kabongo, a seat of Luba authority.
Sincere thanks are extended for our ongoing collabora-
tion. All quotes from Dr. Nkulu-N’Sengha are from an
interview conducted by the author on January 25, 2013
and filmed by Agnes Stauber.

2 Research conducted on my behalf in 2003 by

Mutonkole Milumbu Kennedy, my research associate from
the late 1980s, offers an extraordinary glimpse of the roles
of women during the past twenty years of civil strife in the
DRC. Indeed, details of twenty-first century conflict in the
Collectivity of Kinkondja portray the intricately complex
dynamics of women in contemporary Luba politics and
ongoing modes of political representation.

3 V.Y. Mudimbe (1996:246–47) writes that “the
contemporary institutions of Bulopwe (imported sacred
royalty) and Bufumu (indigenous social order) reenact
in their architecture the complementary yet conflic-
tual inheritance of founding fathers Mbidi Kiluwe and
Nkongolo Mwamba, an inheritance symbolized in
Kalala Ilunga and actualized in the body of a Luba king
…. A more telling illustration is the third category that
fuses masculine and feminine, elder and junior beings
and elements, and transmutes these primary ordering
into absolutely new concepts.”

“It” as used here reflects the fact that central

Bantu languages such as Kiluba do not determine gen-
der through pronouns or prefixes that otherwise denote
human being and agency. At issue here is “nominal
reincarnation” as studied for many years among central
African peoples; see Stefaniszyn 1954:131 and passim.

5 Again, “dividual” is from Boddy 1998: 263. Gell
1998:140, citing Wagner 1991:163, as cited and discussed
in A. Roberts 2013:215; cf. Fowler 2004.

I wish to thank the owners of this remarkable
lukasa memory board for their willingness to lend the
work to the “Shaping Power” exhibition at LACMA
and for permission to include it in this article, and the
Museum for African Art in New York for granting me
ongoing permission to publish its photograph.

African463_68-81_CS6.indd 80

5/16/13 3:21 AM

7 The present article reflects lectures and confer-

cal Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

ence papers I have given over the years and is based
upon the fifth chapter of my dissertation (Nooter
1991) on “Female Transfiguration and the Aesthetics of
Power.” While much of Memory: Luba Art and the Mak-
ing of History (Roberts and Roberts 1996) is also based
on my doctoral dissertation and elements of this argu-
ment further appear in a subsequent book (Roberts and
Roberts 2007), I have preserved the particular thrust of
this research for a future publication for which the pres-
ent paper serves as an overview.

For detailed analyses and descriptions of these

object types, see Roberts and Roberts 1996 and 2007.
For information about this latter practice, see

Nooter 1991:247-50. The elongation of labia is a process
that prepares a woman for marriage and is intended to
enhance sexual pleasure for both partners. There is no
surgery involved, only the use of herbs and the bark of
a root called kimami. It is a quality that can be seen in
some Luba sculptures as one of many forms of female
beautification.

10 For more information on Luba hairstyling, see

Nooter 1991: 251–54.

11 While some Luba women continue scarifica-
tion and related practices meant to perfect the body,
they generally do not do so in the evident ways of earlier
generations, and many have ceased altogether due to mis-
sionary and other social pressures of contemporary life.
See Roberts and Roberts 1996:98–112; cf. A. Roberts 1988.
12 Scarification was achieved by creating small
incisions in the skin with a locally forged razor and then
inserting medicinal herbs into the wound. The propen-
sity to form keloids—that is, overproduction of scar tis-
sue—would lead to bumps on the skin, created to form
beautifully rendered motifs with specific names and
allusions; see Nooter 1991:244–47, Roberts and Roberts
1996:98–115, A. Roberts 1988.

I wish to thank Thomas Q. Reefe for sharing

these images with me early in my academic career,
and for granting me permission to publish them in my
work. His encounters with the last known Mwadi spirit
medium in the 1970s represent a powerful moment in
the history of an important institution that is crucial to
understanding the nuances of Luba political practice,
ideology, and aesthetics.

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