Region
Art of Central Africa
Central Africa — the two Congos, Angola, Gabon, Cameroon and their neighbours — produced some of the most celebrated sculpture in the world: Kongo power figures, Luba royal stools, Fang and Kota reliquary guardians, Chokwe and Punu masks, and the raffia textiles and royal masks of the Kuba kingdom. In the twentieth century Kinshasa and Brazzaville gave Africa Congolese rumba and a school of popular painting led by Chéri Samba.
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Kingdoms and their arts
Central Africa was home to powerful kingdoms whose courts commissioned art. The Kongo kingdom, on the lower Congo River, made contact with Portugal in the 1480s, and its rulers adopted Christianity; Kongo carvers and metalworkers made crucifixes alongside power figures. The Kuba kingdom of the Kasai region became famous for raffia textiles, carved cups and boxes, and royal masks. The Luba kingdom in the south-east created royal stools, staffs and lukasa memory boards. In the Grassfields of Cameroon, the Bamum and Bamileke kingdoms made beaded thrones and masks; King Njoya of Bamum (who ruled from the 1880s to 1931) even invented a script for his language.
Sculpture
Many of the most famous works of African sculpture come from the region. Kongo nkisi nkondi figures, studded with nails and blades, were used to seal oaths and resolve disputes. The Fang of Gabon, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea carved guardian figures for reliquaries holding ancestors' bones, and the Kota of Gabon covered theirs in sheets of brass and copper. The Songye made power figures and striated kifwebe masks. See African sculpture.
Masks
The region's masks include the white-faced okuyi of the Punu of Gabon, danced on stilts; the mwana pwo of the Chokwe of Angola and the DR Congo, an idealised young woman; Kuba royal masks; and the beaded elephant masks of the Cameroon Grassfields. See African masks.
Cloth and beads
Kuba raffia cloth, woven by men and embroidered and cut into velvet-like pile by women, is one of the great textile traditions of the world; raffia cloth once circulated as money in the Kongo kingdom. See African textiles and African beadwork.
Modern art
In 1946 the French painter Pierre Romain-Desfossés founded a workshop known as Le Hangar in Élisabethville, today's Lubumbashi, and in 1951 Pierre Lods founded the Poto-Poto school of painting in Brazzaville — the same Lods who later helped found the École de Dakar. From the 1970s, Kinshasa's popular painters, led by Chéri Samba, painted the life and politics of the city. Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948–2015) built his visionary cities in paper and card, and today artists such as the photographer Sammy Baloji, from Lubumbashi, work with the region's colonial and mining history. Lubumbashi has hosted a biennale since 2008. See our lists of Congolese artists, Congolese painters and Cameroonian artists.
Music
Central Africa's great gift to the continent's dance floors is Congolese rumba, born in Kinshasa and Brazzaville and recognised by UNESCO in 2021. Angola's semba, the ancestor of kizomba, is included here because Angola sits with Central Africa in this guide.
Restitution
Belgium's AfricaMuseum near Brussels holds one of the largest collections from the region, and since 2018 has rethought how it presents its colonial origins. See where to see African art.