"Kavuna Simon was an evangelist and leading member of the Swedish Protestant Mission in Lower Congo at the turn of the century. He was one of a number of members of the newly emergent literate class who undertook ethnographic research in collaboration with the missionary K.E. Laman between 1916 and 1917, when he may have been about 35 years old (MacGaffey 1991:1-7). The project, as Laman put it, was intended to record Kongo culture for future generations of the people (Janzen 1972:12-28; MacGaffey 1986:263-79). It resulted in 10,000 manuscript pages, in Kikongo, of which a digest appeared in English as the four volumes of Laman's The Kongo (Uppsala, 1953-1967). The manuscripts repose in the National Archives of Sweden.(1)
Little is known about any of the authors, except that they were leading evangelists in the pioneering expansion of Protestantism and that they wrote in a spirit of enthusiasm for an ancestral culture whose transformation they were experiencing. We know that in 1910 Kavuna wrote an article in the mission bulletin on the nationalistic theme of respect for the Kikongo language. His writing is often extraordinarily vivid in its evocation of Kongo culture as it was at the beginning of this century. In the text that follows he writes about the form and composition of two well-known and related types of Northern Kongo art, muzidi (pl. mizidi) and the much larger kimbi (also bimbi), generally known in the ethnographic literature as niombo.(2) The text shows that the smaller was prepared by an expert, nganga (pl. banganga), in a dramatic ritual performance, when a family believed itself to be in need of protection; kimbi, whose construction Kavuna does not dwell on, was a huge bundle of red blankets and other materials containing the remains of a chief or other wealthy person whose body had been smoke-dried for several months. Each was deemed to contain and be empowered by the spirit or ghost, called nkuyu in this dialect (pl. bankuyu), of the individual in question." (https://www.proquest.com/docview/220957207?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals)
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