Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

ON THE (SENSATIONAL) SURVIVAL OF KIKONGO
IN 20TH-CENTURY CUBA

Armin Schwegler
University of California, Irvine

As is well known, African ritual languages (e.g., Yoruba, Ewe, Efik) survive to this day in several countries of Latin America. Together with Brazil, Cuba is perhaps best known for the preservation of such languages and for the religious groups that use them in their ceremonies. In Cuba, one of these ritual languages — the so-called lengua congo — has always been characterized as a hybrid speech, supposedly the product of a convergence (syncretism) of multiple Bantu languages on Cuban soil. For this and other reasons, the lengua congo has, at times, also been called (habla) bantú (i.e., ‘Bantu tongue').1

The purpose of this Short Note is to draw attention to a forthcoming bipartite article (written in Spanish; see Schwegler, in press a and b) which demonstrates that the traditional typologization of the habla congo as essentially a mixture of multiple Bantu languages is fundamentally flawed. The African component of the hablacongo is shown to consist of straightforward Kikongo — a language long known to have played an important role in the transatlantic slave trade. Evidence for the claim comes from Lydia Cabrera's Vocabulario Congo (henceforth VC), a written source published in 1984 that lists approximately 3000 lexical items of African origin. (In several instances, the lexicon features extended Spanish/"Congo" phrases or sentences.)2 Originally collected by Cabrera around 1935–1940, the same data are used in my two-part study to advance the claim that in Cuba, Kikongo must have been a fluently-spoken language well into the 20th century. This conclusion in turn raises the possibility that Kikongo may survive on the island to this day.

The study also examines why scholars consistently misanalyzed the true nature and origin of the habla congo. It is shown, for instance, that investigators' complete unfamiliarity with African languages, false word segmentations, vague word definitions, and a blind — not to say "naive" — trust in informants, as well as several other factors, all contributed to the false conclusion that the habla congo resulted from the convergence of multiple African languages. Moreover, the fact that the Bakongo (speakers of Kikongo) were among the earliest slaves to arrive in Cuba and other parts of Latin America further fortified the false notion that their language and religious practices (santería) "naturally" underwent significant hybridization, thereby triggering a fairly rapid abandonment of Kikongo among Cuban Bozal speakers and their descendants.

more:
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/publications/jpcl/online/snotes/sn54.htm