The dikenga, also called the yowa cross, is the central diagram of Kongo thought: a cross enclosed in a circle, sometimes drawn simply as a cross with small discs or suns at its four tips. It is at once a map of the cosmos and a map of a life, and it gives the flagged doctrine of the Kongo cosmogram its home in this tradition.
The horizontal arm is the Kalunga line, the watery boundary between the living above and the dead below. The vertical arm is the axis of power that joins the two worlds, the road along which prayer rises and the ancestors answer. The circle is the course the sun travels and, with it, the course of the soul, which does not stop at death but continues around the ring.
The four points are the four moments of the sun, each a station of that circuit. Musoni, before dawn, is conception and the gathering of a life in the world below. Kala, sunrise, is birth and the entry into the world of the living. Tukula, noon, is maturity, mastery and the fullness of a person's strength. Luvemba, sunset, is death and the passage back beneath the Kalunga line, from which the cycle turns again toward Musoni. The scheme is commonly given the colours black, red and white for the earth, the noon and the world of the dead, though usage varies by region and teacher.
Drawn on the ground, the cosmogram consecrates a space and seals an oath: to stand at its centre and take a vow is to swear before the whole ordered universe and the ancestors who witness from below. Scholarship has documented the sign in detail, Robert Farris Thompson traced its survival across the Kongo-Atlantic world, and the Kongo scholar Fu-Kiau expounded its four moments from within the tradition, and versions of it recur wherever Kongo people were carried, from Cuban and Brazilian ritual grounds to inscribed bowls and grave goods in the United States.