In both high school history classes and through mass media, we learn about sub-Saharan Africa in a way that suggests that it’s a strange and backwards place that unfortunate things just keep happening to. The region is treated as a passive actor in its own history—a history that, to most Westerners, always seems to begin with colonialism, ignoring the vast treasures and accomplishments that pre-dated European knowledge of the continent.
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But even those unfamiliar with African history—which, unfortunately, includes most of us in the West—may have heard of the Kingdom of Kongo, a powerful kingdom that ruled much of west-central central Africa from the end of the 14th through 19th centuries. It’s the creations of this kingdom that are featured at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit, Kongo: Power and Majesty, traces the history of the Kindom of Kongo through the works of some of its most talented artists.
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