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5 th November, Plenary Lecture:
6pm: Plenary Lecture - Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (University of Capetown)
‘ Kongo Art and the Rethinking of Civilisation’
Gordon Street (25) E28 Harrie Massey Lecture Theatre
The lecture will focus on agency in Kongo society, exploring a complex state of social development in which legal, political, religious and visual systems motivate responses to and interpretations of Kongo cultural principles in the Atlantic world. Martinez-Ruiz will argue that the myriad forms of communication known as Ndinga i Sinsu seamlessly integrate into a wide range of audio and visual communicative techniques that he terms ‘graphic writing systems’. Such systems also include proverbs, mambos, syncopated rhythms, a large variety of written symbols, and oral traditions that are rich sources of cultural and social histories, religious beliefs, myths, and other expressions of the shared Bakongo worldview. The lecture will incorporate key examples gathered through fieldwork among the Kongo people in northern Angola, southern Democratic Republic of the Congo and within Kongo-based religious traditions in the Americas.
Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz is an art historian with research interests in African and Caribbean artistic, visual, and religious practices. His books include Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the
Sign (2013), Faisal Abdu’Allah: On the Art of Dislocation (2012) and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac
Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (2007). He has also curated exhibitions on African art and presented his own multimedia work in the United States.
7:45-8:30pm: Reception in Gordon House Room 106
8:30pm: Speakers’ Dinner
6 th November, Symposium:
Deep Pasts, Deep Cultures: Mande, Yoruba and Kongo
Symposium Convenor: Kevin MacDonald (UCL African Studies/ Institute of Archaeology)
Discussants: Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (UCT), Michael Rowlands (UCL)
Over the past two millennia African civilizations, with unique political traditions, artistic corpora, musical styles and oral literatures have grown and flourished along the valleys of the Niger, the Congo River basin and elsewhere in the Sub-Sahara. Often placed to one side by Afrocentrists in favour of Egypt/Kemet, or dismissed as insignificant by the criteria of Eurocentrists, these Deep Cultures have played a profound role in forming the basis of long-lived and enduring African civilisations. A challenge for African Studies today is both to capture the uniqueness of these civilisations and to disentangle the multiple traditions, ideas and histories which have shaped them. Ultimately, a plurality of understandings must come together to comprehend their idealised worlds and their continuing work in making the continent a better place. In this symposium we invite scholars to explore the historical depth configuring the Mande, Yoruba and
Kongo civilizations: in the past and the present.

0915
Welcome (Professor Mike Rowlands)
0925
Introduction to the Symposium (Professor Kevin MacDonald)
0930 – 1230
1 st Session: Deep Time Traditions of Civilization: Mande and Kongo

Kevin MacDonald (UCL) The Mande Political Tradition: Identity, Castes and Political Forms

Jan Jansen (Leiden) From Termite Hill to Empire – “Deep Mande” Notions of Cosmology and Power
** Short Coffee Break from 10:45 to 11:00 **

Wyatt McGaffey (Haverford) Deep political structure: Central Africa and beyond

Koen Bostoen (Ghent) Kongo – Decentering Kongo History: Recent Archaeological and Linguistic
Insights from the Lower Congo Province of the Congo
1230 – 1330 Lunch
1330 – 1500
2 nd Session: Deep Time Traditions of Civilization: Yoruba

Akin Ogundiran (North Carolina) – The Yoruba Path : Knowledge Capital, Regional Integration, and the Birth of a Community of Practice, ca. 800-1400 AD.

John Picton (SOAS) – When was Yoruba Art?
1500-1600
Coffee
Film by Marc Coulibaly
1600-1800
3 rd Session: African Civilization and Memory

Cecile Fromont (Chicago) – Common Threads: Cloth and Color between Past and Present in Early
Modern Kongo and Angola

Karin Barber (Birmingham) – The Vitality of the Past in Yoruba Praise Poetry

Ramon Sarro (Oxford) – How to dig in an ancestral forest: The cultural work of Kongo prophets
1800-1815
Response by Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz