Fetish is a word of European origin that was used to describe a multitude of objects whose value to indigenous people was not deemed rational. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, Dutch traders perceived the African valuation of inanimate objects to be the basis of a flawed economy. They promoted the notion of coins as an appropriate symbolic form derived from the abstract nature of God. Whenever the Dutch encountered people whose value system was not coin operated or involved devotion to objects, the term "fetish" was applied. During the nineteenth century, "fetish" began to be used by Europeans to describe their own habits. Karl Marx launched a theory about commodity fetishism, and into the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and others began to map a pathology of fixations on certain items of clothing (shoes, gloves, underwear) and parts of the body (feet, hair). While this use of fetish expanded to suit European needs, it was not much more than a word applied by outsiders to art that a Kongolese would describe in far more exacting language.

European and American illustrations reflect the history of the Kongo and the nkondi figure with varying approaches. In 1491, a Portuguese expedition was the first to see a king of the Kongo in his glory presiding over a vast country with a distinguished government. That king's conversion to Christianity led to the burning of Kongo art and to the eventual destructive force of the slave trade. In 1904, the fury surrounding a Belgian leader's actions in the Congo inspired artists to depict a nkondi as a protest statement. By the end of the twentieth century, a Kongo aesthetic was being recognized in American yards, graves and on the streets of New York.