Yombe Erotic

The Yombe and their country share a name: Mayombe, the belt of steep, rain-soaked forest hills that runs inland from the Atlantic behind the mouth of the Congo River. That homeland ignores three borders. Yombe villages sit in Kongo Central in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, across the line in the Republic of the Congo, and north into Cabinda, the Angolan province separated from the rest of Angola. They are Kongo people, one branch of the wide BaKongo family, and they have never been interchangeable with the rest of it. Kiyombe belongs to the Kikongo cluster, Bantu by descent, and sits at the divergent end of it, close to its neighbors without being simply the same. Most Yombe also use Kituba, the trade Kikongo that became the region's working tongue, plus French or Portuguese depending on which side of a colonial line they ended up on. Descent runs through mothers. The kanda, the matriclan, decides inheritance and succession, and a man's mother's brother matters more than his father in the arrangements that count.

Two things from this corner of Central Africa are famous well beyond it, and most people who have seen them do not know where they came from. Yombe carvers produced the pfemba mother-and-child figures, and the nkisi nkondi, the standing figures bristling with driven nails and blades. Museums file them as sculpture. They worked closer to legal instruments: a nail went in to seal an oath, register a grievance, or rouse the figure to act, and the object accumulated the history of the disputes it had handled. The Mayombe was also the heartland of Lemba, an institution that resists a one-word translation, part healing society, part marriage alliance, part guild for the men who moved goods and captives along the caravan roads to Loango, Cabinda and Boma. That trade is the region's hinge. It made the merchant class Lemba served, and it emptied villages. Later the Belgians drove the Matadi railway through these hills at a cost in lives the builders did not much publicize, and the colonial partition put Yombe families under three administrations. Today most Yombe are Catholic, with Kimbanguist and independent prophetic churches strong on the Congolese side; the older understanding of the ancestors, the water barrier between the living and the dead, and the question of who caused a misfortune has been layered under that rather than erased. Cabinda's oil and its long separatist quarrel run through Yombe ground, and so does the logging thinning the forest they are named for.