This wearable piece is intended to convey African-based knowledge systems through aesthetics. Dikenga, also known as The Kongo Cosmogram and Four Moments of the Sun—which forms the basis of our logo designed by Zimbabwean graphic artist Saki Mafundikwa—represents the Kongo conception of what scholar Fu-Kiau-Bunseki described as the “route of the world, nature of existence.” Through iconographic writing known as bidimbu (pl.), the BaKongo communicate events, ideas and cosmological principles. Every significant concept is connected to the Four Moments of the Sun: birth, efflorescence, fading and dawn. Separated by the kalunga line (ocean-like, invisible doorway between realms), the Cosmogram expresses the principle of God and the essence of change, reminding us that “the dead are not dead.”
For further reference, see Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds; Fu-Kiau Bunseki, African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo and Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign.
This wearable piece is intended to convey African-based knowledge systems through aesthetics. Dikenga, also known as The Kongo Cosmogram and Four Moments of the Sun—which forms the basis of our logo designed by Zimbabwean graphic artist Saki Mafundikwa—represents the Kongo conception of what scholar Fu-Kiau-Bunseki described as the “route of the world, nature of existence.” Through iconographic writing known as bidimbu (pl.), the BaKongo communicate events, ideas and cosmological principles. Every significant concept is connected to the Four Moments of the Sun: birth, efflorescence, fading and dawn. Separated by the kalunga line (ocean-like, invisible doorway between realms), the Cosmogram expresses the principle of God and the essence of change, reminding us that “the dead are not dead.”
For further reference, see Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds; Fu-Kiau Bunseki, African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo and Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign.
