This entry records that Kongo religion, the traditional religious system of the Kongo people of Central Africa, centered on a supreme creator, Nzambi, alongside ancestral spirits and nature spirits, and organized ritually in significant part around sacred objects called minkisi and their specialist keepers, nganga, involved extensive prayer and invocation, without reproducing specific Kongo ritual or prayer content here.
Kongo religious concepts and practice, carried to the Americas by enslaved Kongo and other Bantu-speaking Central Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, contributed very substantially to the formation of several New World Afro-diasporic religious traditions, most directly Palo Monte in Cuba, whose central ritual vessel, the nganga, takes its name and much of its underlying conceptual structure directly from Kongo tradition, as well as contributing important elements to Haitian Vodou and other Caribbean and Brazilian traditions alongside the more widely recognized Yoruba influence documented in several other entries in this atlas. Because Kongo religious knowledge was and remains transmitted through specialist nganga and community elders rather than published text, this entry limits itself to recording its general character and its documented historical importance as a source tradition for several religions catalogued elsewhere in this atlas.