The working religious specialist is the nganga: a healer, diviner and ritual expert who diagnoses misfortune, mediates with the ancestors and the bisimbi, and treats the harm done by kindoki. A nganga is made through apprenticeship and initiation rather than by office, and the knowledge is transmitted person to person under discipline.
The nganga's characteristic instruments are the minkisi (singular nkisi): consecrated containers, a gourd, a bundle, a shell, or a carved wooden figure, that hold spiritual force gathered from the land of the dead and directed to a purpose, whether healing, protection, the sealing of contracts or the pursuit of wrongdoers. The best known are the minkondi (singular nkondi), the nail-and-blade figures into which oaths and grievances are driven. What the minkisi contain, how they are charged and how they are made to act is initiatory knowledge; it is noted here only as part of the tradition, without operative detail.
The tradition was pressed hard from the outside. The Kingdom of Kongo adopted Catholicism from 1491, producing centuries of overlap and negotiation rather than replacement; in 1704-1706 the prophet Kimpa Vita (Dona Beatriz) led an Antonian movement that fused Kongo and Christian ideas before her execution. Colonial and missionary campaigns under Portuguese and Belgian rule burned minkisi and outlawed the banganga, yet the tradition persisted and, where suppressed, went quiet rather than dying.
Above all it crossed the Atlantic. West-central Africans were a majority of the people carried into large parts of the Americas, and Kongo religion is the direct root of Cuban Palo Monte, whose central nkisi survives as the nganga or prenda; of the hot Petwo spirits of Haitian Vodou; of the inquices served in the Angola nation of Brazilian Candomble; and of Kongo forms in the African American South, the ring shout, the bottle tree, and cosmogram-marked grave goods. In its homelands and its diaspora alike it is a living religion.