Bisimbi

A woman walks down to a pool with a jar on her head. The water is brown and still under the trees. She bends to dip the jar, and the surface moves. Foam spreads across it. The water begins to turn and twist as if something large had rolled over just below. She steps back, says what ought to be said, and waits until it is quiet before she fills the jar.

Something lives there. In the Kongo country of west-central Africa such a thing is called a simbi, and where there are many they are bisimbi. They are in the pools and the springs, in streams and gullies, and in certain rocks. Others keep to the forest. The word comes from a Kikongo verb, simba, which means to hold, to keep, to preserve. Bisimbi are the ones who hold the land. A village may have chiefs and elders and graves full of ancestors, and the ground it sits on still belongs to somebody older.

That is the heart of it. A family’s own dead look after the family. Bisimbi look after a place. Whether the rain comes, whether the gardens bear, whether the women of the village have children and the children live: all of this is in their hands. People who move into new country have no ancestors buried there yet. The spirits in the water are the first powers they have to come to terms with.

They do not have one shape. A simbi may be seen as a person. It may be a snake. It may be a bird, or a tree grown twisted in a way no tree should grow. It may show as a clay pot sitting where nobody left a pot, or as a calabash vine, or as a spark of fire. Odd things near water are best left alone, and this is the reason. Twins belong to them too. The first-born of a pair of Kongo twins is named Nsimba, and the name is the spirit’s own.

Nobody tells a story of how bisimbi were made. They are simply there, as the pools are. One Kongo account does offer an answer of a kind. It says they are the very old dead, people who lived so long ago that they passed on again in the land of the dead and came back out into the rocks and water. The living and the dead are divided by a great water, and bisimbi are the ones who cross it both ways.

Then the story moves, and it moves in chains. In the eighteenth century a great many Kongo people were shipped to the rice country of South Carolina. They had been torn away from the graves of their families and the ancestors could not follow them. The spirits of the land were another matter. Any country with water in it must have its keepers.

The country they were taken to is flat and wet and sits on limestone. Springs boil up cold out of holes in the rock and vanish again down sinks. On 25 March 1843 a Virginia planter named Edmund Ruffin, who was surveying the district, visited Woodboo plantation and wrote down what the enslaved people there told him. Each of the big springs had a spirit living in it. He spelled the word cymbee.

The Woodboo cymbee came out only when the sun stood straight overhead. The driver of the plantation said it was web-footed like a goose. An old man said he had seen one sitting on a plank laid across the water, and that long brown hair covered her whole body. At Pooshee, a few miles off, a boy had been sent to the spring for water late at night. He came back terrified. A cymbee had been running around and around the fountain, he said, and he would not go again.

There were rules. A person who saw a cymbee was not to speak of it for some weeks, and death was the price of talking too soon. A spring was not to be meddled with. When a fountain stopped flowing, people said the cymbee had died, or had been offended and had left her home. One owner had walled his spring with masonry. The people who drew water there were afraid the cymbee would take it badly, go away, and take the water with her.

Others were carried to Haiti, and there the name crossed over almost unchanged. Simbi is counted among the lwa, the spirits of Vodou, and still has to do with fresh water.

What bisimbi can do follows from what they are. They hold the land, so they hold what the land gives: water, harvest, health and children. They can also hold these things back. They cross between the living and the dead, and no chief or ancestor can do that for them. And they can leave. A spring with no simbi in it is a dry hole.

Their limits come from the same root. A simbi is tied to its place. It is the spirit of this pool or that rock, and it has no power over the next valley. It can be offended. It can be walled in, stared at, talked about, and driven off, and the Carolina accounts add that it can die. The record never shows one fighting back. It only goes, and the water goes after it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are bisimbi?

Bisimbi are the nature spirits of Kongo religion in west-central Africa. They live in pools, springs, streams, rocks and gullies and act as guardians of the land. One of them is called a simbi.

What does the word simbi mean?

Simbi comes from the Kikongo verb simba, which means to hold, keep or preserve. Bisimbi are the spirits who hold a piece of country. The first-born of Kongo twins is named Nsimba after them.

What do bisimbi look like?

Bisimbi have no single form. A simbi may appear as a person, a snake, a bird, a twisted tree, a clay pot, a calabash vine or a spark of fire. In South Carolina in 1843 one was described as web-footed like a goose and another as covered in long brown hair.

What is a cymbee?

A cymbee is the bisimbi tradition as it was kept by enslaved people in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Edmund Ruffin recorded the word in 1843 at Woodboo and Pooshee plantations, where each limestone spring was said to have its own spirit. People believed a spring would dry up if its cymbee died or was offended and left.

Are bisimbi dangerous?

Bisimbi are guardians, and the people who live near them depend on them for water, crops and children. They can withhold those things if they are offended. In the Carolina accounts a person who spoke too soon about seeing a cymbee was expected to die.

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