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CHAPTER TWO

Angels of Deliverance, 1483–ca. 1543

There [in Mbanza Kongo] was my brother, who never wanted to convert to the faith of our Lord. And those who were there were all infidels, and adored idols, and wanted him to be king. We saw against us a great force of people together as many as inside the city were surrounding the outside [walls]. And since we did not have with us any more than the thirty-seven Christians, we remembered that with the strength of God our Lord we had no need for many people if that not be His will. And we trusted in Him, that we would with knowledge of the faith have help against those who were His enemies and who despised those whom He had received. We offered prayers. We determined that we must fight them. And [since they were] more numerous in arms than us, and [we wanted] more soldiers with spears and swords, we and those with us shouted for the bold apostle Santiago [Saint James]. Miraculously, soon all of our enemies turned and fled as fast as each could, without us knowing the cause of their despair, and we pursued them. And many [of their] people died without any of ours dying.

And after the victory, we learned from some who could not escape, that the cause of their flight was that when we called on Santiago, they all saw a white cross in the sky and a large number of cavalrymen, which gave them all such a fright they lost bodily control, or else they could have fled. By this we perceived a divine cause for the abundance of great favors and praise that our Lord gave us by granting mercy and compassion on us and all of ours.

—Afonso I of Kongo, “Letter of the King of Kongo to the Lords of the Kingdom,” 1512¹

THIS PASSAGE, dictated by Afonso I of Kongo in 1512, the central authority in a political system the Portuguese recognized as a sovereign “kingdom,” recalls his victory in an armed struggle that signaled his power and right to rule the large, densely populated polity located just south of the lower Congo River. The description of this struggle, portrayed in celestial terms, looks, at first glance, entirely Catholic and European. It is marked by a Catholic saint, the Christian God, and a villainous heathen half brother.

But other elements of this story are entirely Kongo.² Afonso claimed that none of his troops died in the fight, which expresses a common African trope of invincibility in warfare for combatants protected by ointments and other charms. Another common African trope suggests that charmed enemies become immobilized during a fight, just as the half brother’s forces claimed they could not control their terror and were frozen to the spot. The tension between what might have actually happened in Kongo in 1509, how the combatants involved in the incident experienced it, and Afonso’s own written description of the event in 1512 motivates this chapter and, really, this whole book. The book is devoted to seeing how we as historians can decide what we make of what happened in western-central Africa between 1509 and 1670 by reading complicated documents giving clues to what people—Europeans as well as Africans—made of it. Historians can’t always believe what their subjects claimed they saw.

This chapter follows the interweavings of these two separate worlds, intimately entwined in the Kongo polity between 1483 and 1568, each unintelligible to the other, while partisans on both sides thought they were being understood by the other. The text revolves around a Kongo polity built on premises all but radically opposed to the monarchy that the Portuguese saw, with features—notions of power, conceptions of time and change—alluded to in the text as the Kongo alternatives to a narrative told more or less in European terms familiar to readers, but concluding on the capacity of this working Kongo-Portuguese misunderstanding to generate the core of the “Jaga myth” that the rest of the book goes on to trace.

Of course, European and especially Catholic symbols and characters mentioned in Afonso’s 1512 letter were known to him only because he had integrated Portuguese representatives and priests into a new Kongo polity he was trying to create. The Portuguese had neither the technology nor the manpower to overwhelm this populous political system militarily. Any Europeans there lived as servants and paid laborers at the pleasure of aristocratic Kongo patrons as Kongo would have seen them. However, the Portuguese nonetheless pressed for religious and economic changes, probably without realizing how drastically the religious adaptations and trading they promoted would also alter Kongo political culture. In particular, Catholic priests sought to convert Kongo to Christianity and focused on baptisms and on burning whatever objects of devotion they saw as “idols,” which they condemned as evil temptations of the devil. European traders also tapped into the existing Kongo market for captives and began to purchase some of these slaves for export out of the Kongo region to serve as laborers in other locales on the West African coast. On their own, the Europeans would not likely have had a significant impact on Kongo politics. However, Afonso sponsored the priests; when his victory secured his central position in Kongo in 1509, both his conversion to Catholicism and the slaving were wedded to the highest levels of Kongo politics.

The marriage soon turned out not to be a happy one. Afonso’s victory and coronation as Catholic “king” of Kongo in 1509, and his political, economic, and social agenda over the following two and half decades as the head of the polity, created disorders that set the stage for the mysterious later cannibal protagonists in our story that people in Kongo very likely understood as an outbreak of uncontrollable witchcraft. To be clear, no primary sources record Africans of their day explicitly referring to the ailments of the sixteenth century as a “plague of witches,” although sources written by Africans—including Afonso I, as noted in other letters—frequently complained of the greed they associated with the imports the Europeans promoted and the violence of slaving to which they led, particularly when it targeted themselves or their communities. In African communities the dual maladies of violence and greed were widely accepted indicators of nefarious betrayals of the tight communities in which they lived or witchcraft.³ Both Europeans and Africans thought of and represented cannibals as perpetrators at the extreme end of the spectrum of these practices of evil, with the distinction being that “witches” were insiders targeting their own social networks (and therefore violating the integrity of their communities and families of trust), and “cannibals” were outsiders who devoured the communities by dispersing them and figuratively (and only very rarely literally) eating flesh and drinking blood.⁴

European success in conversion and slaving was minimal at the beginning of Afonso’s reign. But in a few decades they had grown pervasive and deeply disturbing, both by taking up the prestigious practice of Catholic preaching and by targeting whole communities as idolaters and sinners. They provided opportunities for the more entrepreneurial (greedy and unscrupulous, as they saw them) Africans to get into the lucrative business of handing people over to foreign slavers. During Afonso’s time, the disruptions instigated through such planned and unplanned Kongo and European collaborations might be thought of as a plague of witches, because they were associated with insiders’ overt appropriations of foreign peoples, ideas, and trade goods. As the tumult grew in scale and was intensified by people not associated with the highest levels of Kongo authority, later generations understood the chaos as perpetrated not only by witches but also by alleged cannibals seeking victims whom they made disappear forever for their own gain, or whom they effectively might have devoured.

Kongo Perspectives: Political Composites, Complementarity of Authorities, and Additive History

Let’s return to the beginning of Kongo encounters with the Portuguese and review the events that followed in the terms that the Kongo, as well as the Portuguese, understood them. In 1483, a Portuguese explorer named Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, where he and his crew were greeted by the people living in a region near the coast called Sonyo. The people of Sonyo were not quite sure what to make of the pale, hairy visitors from the sea. Just to be sure that they had disarmed all the ambient forces that must have aided these strange visitors floating on the water, the people of Sonyo performed ceremonies to honor spirits they saw as coming from the land of the dead—which lay beyond the ocean. They sent Cão and his crew on their way into the interior to a populous place called the Mbanza Kongo (the gathering place of Kongo). There the Europeans were directed to meet with the master, mani, of the place, Kongo. This authority’s personal name was Nzinga a Nkuwu. Their first meeting included the customary exchange of gifts, including persons, meant to consolidate future diplomatic contacts through mutual recognition of the other’s sovereignty.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were sending out ships to establish similar formal contacts with political authorities around the world. They acted on behalf of the Portuguese king in Lisbon. According to European protocol, a sovereign ruler, or king, could deal diplomatically only with sovereigns of equal rank—other kings or queens. Diogo Cão was expressly looking for “kings” in Africa, and he declared whoever seemed to be in charge as such. He likely would not have been able to imagine a political system other than the uniquely authoritative monarch in Lisbon he knew, his master. As a result, after 1483 the Portuguese dealing with Kongo represented the polity as a “kingdom” and the mani Kongo as a “king,” regardless of how authority and politics in Kongo were actually structured.

In fact, powers in Kongo were systematically plural rather than the singularity Europeans attributed to their monarchs, and Kongo distributed them among multiple specified domains assigned to different officials. Decades later this first misunderstanding of Kongo politics as equivalent to European monarchies was represented as truth and ultimately underlies the subsequent representations of cannibals in Kongo. The enterprising Nzinga a Nkuwu recognized the potential advantages for his polity, and himself, in seeking to make Kongo appear, at least to his unsuspecting Catholic collaborators, to be the sort of kingdom his new European allies imagined.

Nzinga a Nkuwu’s brief 1483 meeting with Diogo Cão’s men, as well as the resulting exchange of ambassadors, proceeded solidly within the political responsibility in a composite polity entrusted to the mani Kongo. The primary function of the central figure in a political composite—not unlike a confederation of recognized regional parties—was to represent the complex collectivity of Kongo-affiliated regions to outsiders as a whole. Other Portuguese returned to Kongo in 1491 to pursue the tentative relationship, and Nzinga a Nkuwu again welcomed them to his compound. This second and larger contingent of Portuguese included royal emissaries, soldiers, Portuguese priests to convert the Kongo people to Catholicism, and also masons, carpenters, and other artisans to construct churches for them to worship the Christian God. The Portuguese, few in numbers and hopelessly naive, displayed enormous wealth in their distant homeland and arrived armed with the powerful matchlock muskets that were then just becoming standard munitions in Europe but unheard of in central Africa. They must have seemed like promising partners from beyond the ocean. For the Kongo, “beyond the ocean” was the land of the dead, and they saw the Portuguese as possibly returning from the ancestors whom the mani Kongo, as a human embodiment of the whole, was responsible for engaging on behalf of his polity.

The Kongo composite network that the mani Kongo embodied was based on a sense of time and history incomprehensible to late medieval Portuguese, who saw the world as the sequential unfolding of an original and eternal divine dispensation, never to be changed or supplemented. The Kongo allowed for, and in fact prized, the discovery and mastery of new forms of power believed incipiently present among them, unseen to most but accessible to professionals skilled in the arcane arts of accessing them. For them, history was a compilation of momentous, and therefore memorable, events continuously unfolding. Kongo communities maintained all of these moments as still present, adding each to its predecessors to create the layered composite—in time as well as space—that by the late fifteenth century the mani Kongo embodied. Among the communities of the polity, the living carried on the legacies of their ancestors, ambiently present, and the mani Kongo at the center incorporated all of his predecessors and ruled by channeling their aggregated powers and deeds. Kongo history could be thought of as additive and accumulative, in contrast with modern ideas of time as change, in which we enter a present by leaving the past behind and move on toward a future that does not yet exist. The Kongo past was inherent in the present, and change was seen as supplementing it, not replacing it in the way that our past recedes quickly out of reach.

MAP 2.1 The Kongo composite in 1500. Note Mpemba Kasi in the upper center of the Kongo area. Mbata was a large region to its east, on the Inkisi River. Other locales mentioned later in this chapter include Nsundi (north of Mbata), near Malebo Pool, which is a natural lake where mountains dam the Congo River. (Map drawn by author. Based on map in John K. Thornton, “The Origins and Early History of the Kingdom of Kongo, c. 1350–1550,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 1 [2001]: 90.)

In this Kongo sense of time as additive and adaptive rather than substitutive, when the Catholic priests asked to baptize Nzinga a Nkuwu, he would have consented without feeling any need to abandon his predecessors or any other components of the Kongo history he personified. At first, he allowed a few of his closest male allies and family to join in this promising new cult. His designated chief wife (of the many he had, who were all vital to a political network in which political marriages marked the connections among its nodes) also demanded to be baptized, and so the number of Kongo Christians began to grow.⁵ Nzinga a Nkuwu took the baptismal name João in homage to his Portuguese counterpart in Lisbon, and probable patron or godparent, King João II (r. 1481–1495), who had sent the priests who baptized him. Kongo prided themselves on acquiring numerous names, as they denoted composite personal identities in Kongo that were multiple and used situationally. You became whomever you were with. Well-connected individuals might compile several names as they moved from one situation in which they had attained recognized standing to another. From Nzinga a Nkuwu’s and his counselors’ perspectives, they were doing nothing out of the ordinary when they added Christian names and the connections they implied to the personal names and political titles they already had accumulated to engage the Catholic priests and Portuguese patrons. They would have taken pride in adding another promising capacity to the collections they had spent their lives earning, and it would never have occurred to them to drop a lifetime’s assemblage of markers of their success to fall back on a single connection with connotations of dependency. This additive Kongo notion of time and change and even personality was completely lost on the Portuguese, who were our only witnesses to these circumstances and who understood baptism as transformative to a whole new life, an absolute conversion to the Catholic faith, leaving sinful things safely behind.

As mani Kongo and patron of foreigners, Nzinga a Nkuwu was responsible for providing the Europeans—whether they might be ancestors or merely visitors from beyond—with their day-to-day needs. For him, the foreigners represented a potentially significant gain in personal power, since, by the conventions of a composite political system, he had been required to give up all of his personal inherited connections within any of the components of the polity. In the service of making their central figures neutral among their components, they isolated them, like a slave, whose defining condition was isolation from (and hence vulnerability to) his predecessors, on behalf of the whole. The Portuguese were not slaves in the sense that they were individually isolated and thus entirely dependent on Nzinga a Nkuwu, but they were outsiders and so collectively subject to the authority of a properly installed mani Kongo responsible for dealing with and guarding against a presence not connected to the components of the polity, and thus uncontrollable and potentially dangerous.

This sudden appearance and containment of a powerful retinue of foreigners—soldiers, craftsmen with undreamed-of tools, and specialists representing an omnipotent monotheistic God—would have confirmed his standing above all others in the eyes of his counselors and the communities in the polity that they represented. Nzinga a Nkuwu evidently recognized the Europeans’ potential as a component, with whom he alone communicated, to strengthen his position in the Kongo political network. He put the masons and carpenters to work alongside a thousand Kongo assistants building a church. He sent the soldiers to the northeast toward the region called Nsundi. Raiders there, subsequently known as Teke or Tio, who spoke another language and were not affiliated with Kongo, had been attacking the Kongo of the area. The Portuguese soldiers and their firearms helped to repel the Tio, and during a decisive battle they took many captives, whom they claimed as prizes of war and then offered for sale as slaves to Portuguese traders, who were also turning up to explore the commercial potential of the region.

Unlike the carpenters, masons, and soldiers for whom Nzinga a Nkuwu had immediate uses, he found the priests problematic. He came under intense pressure from the communities in the confederation to reject these avatars of the Christian God, whose exclusivist monotheism dangerously ignored the ancestors with whose care they were entrusted. The Catholics’ insistent teachings against the polygynous marriages, through which Kongo consolidated affiliations on all levels of the polity, severely challenged its compositional framework, and not least their ties to the mani Kongo position itself, personified in the many wives they all sent to Mbanza Kongo, who gave the polity its coherence.⁶ Nzinga a Nkuwu rather soon yielded to these reservations, if not outright opposition, by denouncing Christianity in 1495 and expelling the priests from Mbanza Kongo.

He also expelled a son named Mvemba a Nzinga, who was evidently a very early and devout—if not also ambitious—convert to Catholicism, and who in 1493 had taken the baptismal name Afonso.⁷ Afonso supported the priests’ teachings in Mbanza Kongo. Nzinga a Nkuwu quieted the grumblings among the leading Kongo affiliates around him by exercising his right to place members of his own family in the regional mbanzas, the nodes of the polity where the people in its components gathered to collect the tribute that each sent to the capital. He exiled the troublesome Afonso, advocate of the new and apparently contentious set of powerful beliefs and rituals, to Nsundi as part of his cleanup in 1495. However, this banishment was to a position of authority in a prestigious and strategic region within the Kongo network. The recent repulsion of the Tio had opened access to deposits of copper ores there that were refined and formed into small ingots and circulated within the Kongo network as tokens of political recognition, and hence also of the prestige of their holders. The repulsion also opened a new supply of slaves (war captives) of particular interest to the Portuguese.

Adding a Catholic Kingdom to the Kongo Polity

Nzinga a Nkuwu’s strategy of removing Afonso from Mbanza Kongo to let politics in the capital cool might have made sense among the influential Kongo families in the short term, but in the long run it served only to elevate Afonso in the eyes of the Portuguese as a champion of their interests in central Africa. Afonso did not monopolize European interests in the following decade, but he became their central point of access. He personally supported and fostered Catholicism, and he directly or indirectly oversaw flows of the few commodity exports the Portuguese were buying at this early date, first the copper and then the Tio slaves (in that order). Afonso funded the missionaries’ proselytization in Nsundi, where he developed a small retinue of followers devoted to himself and identifiable by their conversions to Catholicism.

While not much is known about this initial decade, 1495–1506, it is clear that Afonso studied Catholic doctrine and history, just as would be required of any aspiring member of a skilled guild in Kongo, with zeal and devotion.⁸ In 1516, the Portuguese vicar (the top prelate resident in Kongo, the local representative of a bishop) recalled how Afonso had studied the Bible and other religious books so late into the night that he often fell asleep over his texts.⁹

The people of Kongo regarded reading as an inherently magical act along the lines of dealing with spirits, and Afonso’s ability to read Latin and Portuguese texts would have validated his claim to being able to access the power of the Christian God. He gained such a command of complex Catholic doctrine that even the priests turned to him for guidance in their pastoral duties.¹⁰ The priests, of course, needed Afonso’s insight into local culture to help them adjust their proselytization strategies. Language would have been a significant barrier, and there is some scant evidence that under Afonso’s tutelage Portuguese priests worked with Kongo Christians to translate Catholic ideas into Kikongo words. In 1548, only a few years after Afonso’s death in ca. 1542–1543, we find the first examples of Catholic phrasings translated into Kikongo, and less than a decade after his death, in 1555, the first Catholic catechism in Kikongo was published.¹¹ Thus Afonso adopted Catholicism with an entirely Kongo sensibility that mandated that he, as the mani of these Catholics, be their master and expert. With Afonso’s sponsorship, the priests focused their conversion strategies in Nsundi first on baptizing their converts as souls saved individually and thus drawn out of their former loyalties to their communities. Then they hunted out and destroyed the artifacts the Kongo used to maintain these collective identities, which the priests identified as false idols sent by the devil of Christianity. By thus disrupting the strong Kongo ethos of community and calling individuals to stand off from their kin, the priests—and Afonso—were verging on appearing as what Kongo cosmology viewed as standoffish, greedy, traitorous witches.

Nzinga a Nkuwu appears to have reconciled with Afonso sometime before he died in 1506. His death set the stage for the usual struggle among the confederation’s contending factions to succeed him as mani Kongo, represented by the half siblings from his many wives. A few years later, in 1509, Afonso gathered his corps of personally devoted Kongo and Portuguese Catholics from Nsundi (Afonso later alleged, in the document beginning this chapter, that there were only thirty-seven of them, with their servants, or likely slaves, in numbers not specified) and marched on Mbanza Kongo, ostensibly to pay his respects to his father’s memory. Afonso’s small retinue managed to gain entrance inside the walls of Mbanza Kongo, but then they were surrounded by far greater numbers of warriors supporting one of his half brothers, named Mpanzu a Kitima, who had never accepted Catholicism. Facing the much larger force, including the full weight of the ideological heritage of the mani Kongo position, Afonso later recalled that his desperate men called out for divine help as they prepared to charge into battle on the plain outside the walls.¹² Mpanzu a Kitima’s vast forces froze and then turned and fled, offering almost no resistance. As they ran away, many were slain. Survivors captured in the pursuit claimed that they had no choice but to take flight when they saw a magnificent white cross appear in the sky, with angelic riders on horses charging to Afonso’s aid. In Kongo terms, this terrifying apparition was the omen that confirmed, in a starkly otherworldly form, the authenticity and power of Christianity and Afonso’s authority as mani Kongo.

Afonso’s victory over his principal rival was apparently not enough to satisfy Kongo’s many networks, whose representatives complained to the influential senior counselor mani Mbata that Afonso had seized the position illegitimately, presumably against the precedence of the prestigious council of electors called the Mwissikongo. As Nzinga a Nkuwu had died three years prior, it is certainly possible that the electors had already designated Mpanzu a Kitima as the next mani Kongo, even if he had yet to undergo official investiture in the position. The mani Mbata at that time was Afonso’s maternal uncle. He was, according to the matrilineal affiliations prevailing in Kongo, head of the familial network from which Afonso had descended. He was in a position of authority over his nephew, and his group presumably stood to gain from Afonso taking the mani Kongo position. The mani Mbata supported Afonso’s cause. With his military and ideological support added to that of the Portuguese, Afonso was invested as mani Kongo in 1509. Since his victory in battle had demonstrated (from a Kongo perspective) that his power derived from his ability to channel access to the new and exclusionary Catholic God, people in the communities composing the polity would have accepted Catholic rituals—particularly baptism—as entirely consonant with the process of adding to the spiritized charms that confirmed transitions from one mani Kongo to the next.

Crowned as a Catholic, in 1512 Afonso dictated a letter in Portuguese to his Catholic brother in Lisbon, King Manuel I (r. 1495–1521), to justify and legitimize his rule over a Kongo kingdom in the monarchical sense intelligible to his Portuguese sponsors and allies. He also wrote three other letters, arguably intended to begin reshaping the Kongo political composite into a European-styled monarchy with a single ruler who had direct personal power over individual subjects. These four documents explicate Afonso’s constitution of himself as both mani Kongo and Catholic king, in the additive style of building the novel out of the familiar. He did not share his Catholic sponsors’ views, in which Kongo thought and Christian faith were mutually exclusive. In the letter to King Manuel, he styled himself as a European monarch and equal of his Catholic, especially Portuguese, “brother kings.”

To understand the conflicting details within these letters, it is necessary to consider the details of their production. Scholars assume that the four letters from 1512—to Kongo nobles, to the people of Kongo, to Portuguese nobles residing in Kongo, and to the pope—derive from an earlier letter that Afonso had written and sent to King João of Portugal in 1508 or 1509. The 1509 letter, which is no longer extant, described Afonso’s victory in battle and the later years of his father’s rule.¹³ That letter was sent with a personal courier, a cousin of Afonso’s named Pedro de Sousa, who served as his ambassador.¹⁴ While the letter sent to a Portuguese king would have been written in the Portuguese of their 1512 supplements, it is tempting to think that Afonso dictated the letter in Kikongo to someone else, who then translated it. In fact, Afonso dictated most of his diplomatic correspondence to a Kongo scribe named João Teixeira. Considering that Afonso had been living with European clergy by 1509 for nearly fifteen years, and by 1516 was proficient enough in Latin to fall asleep reading theological texts, it certainly seems likely he could have dictated lengthy orations in Portuguese. Ultimately all such thoughts about the production of this original letter are speculation, however, since it was lost.

Some scholars think the four 1512 letters are based heavily on this 1509 letter and suggest that the later letters may have been drafted in Portugal and then sent to Afonso as templates for formal diplomatic correspondence.¹⁵ However, the drastic differences in details among the 1512 letters suggest that they were not written from a single account or even from a Portuguese Catholic worldview, as we might assume letters written in Lisbon by a Portuguese cleric would reveal. And, the letter written to Pope Julius II states explicitly that it was written in the “city of the mani Kongo,” so at least one of the four was produced in a Kongo context. As we will see, whoever produced the letters of 1512 was intimately aware of compositional Kongo politics and possessed an additive sense of time and change.

Although much about the production of the letters remains a mystery, an important clue about their intended audiences turns up in the repositories where the documents have been found. The letters addressed to the pope and to Portuguese lords, senhores, living in Kongo were deposited in royal archives in Lisbon, where one would expect to find copies of formal diplomatic correspondence. The other two letters, those directed to Kongo audiences, were found in equally telling places. The letter to Kongo lords (senhores) is housed in the National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal), rather than with the royal archive of the Torre do Tombo. We could speculate that the Kongo ambassadors and students whom Afonso routinely sent to live and study in Portugal brought this letter to Lisbon. These Kongo were guests of the Portuguese Crown, but their private correspondence with Afonso would not end up in official royal archives. Most interestingly, the letter written to everyday Kongo people, the povos, was found in the district archive for the city of Évora, which lies about eighty miles east of Lisbon. Afonso very carefully chose which Portuguese priests he invited to Kongo to aid in his attempts to make Kongo a Christian space. The priests he chose, colloquially known as Loios (or Loyos), came from a monastic house in Évora. That the letter to the Kongo povos was discovered there suggests that it was a sort of script meant to be read by the Loios when they proselytized among the Kongo people. Perhaps this Portuguese-language letter was a template for the Portuguese priests to learn Afonso’s vision of Catholic doctrine before preaching it among his people, an example of the guidance he was admired for providing.

The details in the four letters Afonso dictated in 1512 specify his methods for adding Catholic elements into the Kongo context. In these letters his representations of the Kongo as a European-style kingdom were more aspiration than attainment. Consider, for example, how, even after winning the battle against Mpanzu a Kitima, Afonso required the aid of his uncle, the mani Mbata, and the faction in the polity he represented, to override the opposition to installing him in Mbanza Kongo from the Mwissikongo, which undoubtedly represented the majority of the polity’s component collectivities. However, his four letters carefully rearranged details of his miraculous victory and the resulting claims to authority according to their intended audiences. The Portuguese supporters whom Afonso was courting, particularly those in the palace in Lisbon, would have known little, if anything, of this internal intrigue. Instead, they learned of Afonso’s authority only as he described it to them. In one of the letters, the one apparently crafted specifically for his patrons in Portugal, Afonso claimed that his father had designated him as his successor, since he was the firstborn. He asserted that primogeniture was the “ancient custom” in Kongo.¹⁶ Of course, this claim was a blatant contradiction of Kongo rotation of succession among the components of the polity. In fact, the Mwissikongo confirmed the mani Kongo after political struggles for the succession, even armed confrontations such as Afonso’s challenge to Mpanzu a Kitima, had played out among sets of half siblings and their respective factions. Kongo descent was matrilineal, that is, from a man to a sister’s son, not to a father’s own male offspring, who belonged to their mother’s kin and aligned in these terms to contest the succession. In another letter addressed generally to the people within the Kongo confederation, who would not have been convinced by Afonso’s assertion of patrilineal succession, he made no mention of claims to primogeniture.

The letter that turned up in the National Library archive, written in Portuguese, would have been a copy of a missive delivered to officials in the Kongo composite by couriers able to translate the European idiom into intelligible Kikongo, presented orally. Its oral dissemination in the Kongo polity would have informed the representatives of its components—the Mwissikongo and their counterparts in their home regions—of Afonso’s revolutionary reconceptualization of Kongo as a realm. Addressing it to these “lords” acknowledged the composition of the polity as a confederation of collectivities. The copy he dispatched to Europe would have alerted his patrons there—had they been able to interpret it—to the political duality he had created by adding Catholicism to the legacy of his predecessors as mani Kongo.

Afonso also adapted the details of his miraculous victory for the distinct intended recipients of the letters. His words (or the words attributed to him by Portuguese advisers and scribes) narrate the key moment of the battle—the prayer and subsequent divine intervention—and hint at his agile integration of Catholic symbols into the Kongo context. His letters assert that his men called out to Saint James (the iconic warrior of the Iberian wars, called the Reconquista, to recover the peninsula from centuries of Muslim rule) or to Christ (martyr and Savior, or culture founder). In the letter addressed to the local Kongo povos (peoples of the Kongo components), which is the letter most general in form and content and directed to a popular audience; and in a second more detailed letter addressed to local Kongo senhores (Portuguese “masters,” that is, the mani representing the components of the polity), his army prayed to Saint James.¹⁷

However, in a third letter, also addressed to unspecified senhores, who were probably the Portuguese present in Kongo, since it also invokes primogeniture and contains Catholic doctrine in the greatest detail and strongest insistence on Afonso’s Christian piety but little on local symbols, his men prayed to Jesus, who then sent Saint James to the rescue.¹⁸ These depictions, in which he called on different spiritual patrons, ancestors in Kongo terms and God’s own Son in its Catholic counterparts,¹⁹ hint at Afonso’s ability—indeed, obligation—as mani Kongo to represent the invisible forces relevant to each of the multiple components of the Kongo composite. The varied depictions were not contradictory, but complementary, as they were specified situationally to the different networks of relationships through which accomplished Kongo were accustomed to moving.

Afonso and his advisers also sought to affirm to European Catholic monarchs his right to rule by noting explicitly how his victory in 1509 made him heir to miraculous victories for Christ in the Catholic narrative of Christian civilization. Afonso’s rescue by Saint James would have seemed plausible, and legitimating, to his devout Portuguese sponsors. He noted how closely his own victory resembled the 1139 triumph of Afonso Henriques that had created the first Christian dynasty of Portugal.²⁰ In that foundational myth, Afonso Henriques had called on Christ, who appeared and helped defeat the Moors, unifying Portugal under the House of Burgundy. Additionally, although not mentioned explicitly in Afonso’s letters, the white cross in the sky that appeared to his adversaries was the same image that had appeared to the Roman emperor Constantine before his victory that established Rome as a Christian realm. Thus, Afonso’s narrative of Christian triumph over heathen forces linked Kongo on a footing equal to other, even paradigmatic, Christian kingdoms.²¹

Though some might think it a bit strained to believe Afonso was asserting his place with Constantine and the full Catholic brotherhood of kings, he used the language of familial bonds throughout his other correspondence with both Lisbon and Rome. For example, along with a 1512 letter he sent to Rome, he also sent ambassadors to Pope Julius II pointedly belaboring the obvious, “as is the custom, and in necessary obedience, like the other Christian kings do.” In the same letter he referred to King Manuel I of Portugal as “my much beloved brother,” a sign of their equivalent standings as siblings under their holy father, the pope.²² In the inclusive terms of the Kongo classes of kinship, brotherhood, the relationship of sibling equality, was social or political rather than biological.

King of Kongo over Master of Spirits

Afonso’s letter to the “lords” of the Kongo confederation similarly placed him in the worldwide brotherhood of Christ, but in a nuanced way that emphasized the power of the Catholic God and his own personal access to it, to the exclusion of the Mwissikongo, to whom he was no longer beholden. With this pointed letter to the Kongo titleholders, Afonso sent along a coat of arms that he had requested from the king of Portugal in his now-lost letter from 1509. He referred to this visual image of his thinking in three of the 1512 letters, and in the one addressed to Kongo senhores, he explained each of the heraldic elements composing it. The meanings he expressed in this assemblage of symbols, elements familiar to Europeans but not obvious to the senhores in Kongo, were a flamboyant representation of his 1509 victory over Mpanzu a Kitima, its authenticating value in Kongo political theory represented in a Christian format (see plate 1).

The blue field (the dark band at the top of the shield) represented the sky, or the Catholic heaven, and the white cross on it was that of Constantine. The shells flanking the white cross at the edges of the blue field represented Saint James. The five arms holding swords signified Saint James’s company of knights, and the swirling flows of red symbolized the blood that was spilled. At the bottom of the shield, a brace of Kongo “idols,” both broken at the waist, flanked the blue-and-gold emblem of Portugal. Finally, above the helmet of iron protecting all were an additional five arms with swords piercing into the margins, representing the five wounds of Christ.²³

Although the symbolism in this emblem can appear entirely Portuguese, iron swords and crosses were also thoroughly familiar in Kongo. In fact, the five swords at the top of the composition, which stylistically were probably Portuguese in origin, were considered the principal components of the image by Kongo nobles, and over time became the insignia of Catholic royalty there. The composition of the coat of arms was another example of how Afonso joined parallel symbolic fields additively in a single compound image, at once Christian and Kongo, with neither register supplanting the other. The composite coat of arms expressed the continuity in Kongo political theory that Afonso attained by incorporating the unprecedentedly novel presence of the Portuguese within a local symbolic frame. The reconciliation of Kongo past and Catholic present and intended future was an exemplary execution of accomplishing radical change additively.

Since authority in Kongo derived from mastery of the power of the past and performance of it in the present, Afonso would have been expected to embody and enact the formulaic procedures that protected and empowered him as the guardian of the new Catholic spirit whose power he infused throughout the community. One of his most effective actions was to distribute objects allowing baptized individuals to access the Catholic saints. The iconography of the iron swords, displayed prominently on Afonso’s coat of arms, invoked Saint James’s miraculous intervention above Afonso’s men as they had rushed into battle, and the swords were simultaneously intelligible to Kongo audiences as objects powerful in themselves. Ironworking, especially smelting, as visualized in the helmet and the swords on the coat of arms, was seen throughout central Africa as the creation of power objects and thus considered a very potent and dangerous skill. Several political traditions, including Kongo’s, identified their mythologized founding and empowering heroes as blacksmiths.²⁴ The association of iron with authority and power in European attributes of nobility, as expressed in images of swords or battle armor like helmets, paralleled practices in Kongo.²⁵ Afonso’s genius was to add and integrate European ideas of political hierarchy into the Kongo context. With Catholicism, as he presented it, he had renewed Kongo, just as all his predecessors had reinvigorated and empowered the continuing and aggregating series of mani Kongo.

Afonso continued his strategy of presenting Catholicism as a renewed Kongo after 1512 by deploying or—as Kongo saw it—performing the symbols and institutions of the Catholic Church. As part of this carefully orchestrated campaign of embodying Catholicism in human forms, he strategically chose which orders of European priests he allowed into his domain. When Afonso’s father accepted baptism as a Catholic in 1491, the Portuguese priests in attendance included a balance of Franciscans, canons of Saint John the Evangelist (the Bons Homines), and perhaps Dominicans as well.²⁶ Kongo remained open to multiple religious orders until 1512, but then Afonso associated himself further with European images of iron and ironworking by adopting the canons of Saint John the Evangelist as his priests of choice from their arrival in 1509 to 1532. Saint Eloi (Saint Eligius in English) was the patron saint of the primary house of the “Loios” in Portugal. Eloi was the patron saint of blacksmiths and wielded a smith’s hammer or other ironworking tools as prominent elements in his iconography.²⁷ Coming from the Loios monastery in Évora, Afonso’s chosen priests would have carried images of Saint Eloi depicting iron objects like a blacksmith’s anvil or tongs for pulling hot, workable iron out of a fire. Since in Africa iron was a potent means of empowering political positions, European priests who traveled throughout the affiliated regions of Kongo on behalf of Afonso carrying images of a blacksmith could have served, even unwittingly, both as embodiments of his new Catholic Kongo and as the epitome of the mani Kongo predecessors entrusted to him.

To his European sponsors Afonso presented himself as a king. To the people of Kongo he was a mani Kongo. His duality was no contradiction in the additive Kongo cosmology, and the specific function of the mani Kongo as representative of the Kongo network to outsiders both visible and invisible, present and past, made his strategies for incorporating foreign visitors and their empowering objects a straightforward continuation of the inherited Kongo arrangements entrusted to him. The clear emphasis on continuity for the Kongo “lords” and povos was necessary to balance the radical changes he made. However, he also encouraged centralizing tactics that overrode the basic diversity of the Kongo political composite. He promoted Catholic baptism and the burning of “idols,” both of which removed the accumulated past of the Kongo components from the polity’s present and future, to leave Catholic power and authority centered on himself alone, as a king.

His coat of arms explicitly claimed personal authority as the monarch over a Kongo without the independent and mediating loyalties to the communities in the composite. The two broken figures at its bottom proclaimed a homogeneous and exclusionary Christian layer over the Kongo polity’s diverse components. Carved wooden figures like these, today called nkisi (singular; minkisi plural), can be manipulated as physical embodiments of hidden power.²⁸ They are often wooden, human-shaped figures that an nganga, or a professional trained in fabricating instruments for contacting the intangible world, makes powerful by placing spiritually charged materials, often residuals of human energy such as woven cloth or fingernails, in a cavity in the figure, often in the stomach, the site of ravenous greed. Nganga is typically mistranslated as “witch,” but the term is better defined as “healer” or “doctor” in the Kongo holistic sense of a person who heals individuals of physical or emotional pain arising from dissension and immorality in their communities.²⁹ Like modern doctors, nganga did their work as trained specialists bound by a professional code of ethics where malpractice could result in the loss of the community’s trust in them and, thus, of their powers as well as their livelihoods. An nganga seen to be doing harm would be prosecuted as an evil witch. Individuals used these powerful minkisi to draw on the ambient past for protection or intervention during times of stress in a manner not unlike Catholic devotion to images and statues of saints in similarly troubling circumstances.

The minkisi figures on Afonso’s coat of arms were broken at the waist, torsos hanging upside down next to the edges of the white field of the Portuguese crest. In Afonso’s 1512 letter to Pope Julius II, he claimed to have abstained from all things forbidden by the Church, which, for the Catholic priests in Kongo, above all banned polygyny and what they saw as worship of minkisi idols. Since Afonso allowed polygyny to continue to maintain the political composite even after his conversion, his coat of arms professed his abstention from evil in destroying the “idols” central to Kongo community life.³⁰ Further, he later supported his Catholic priests in their attempts to discredit nganga in Kongo and destroy nkisi power figures, and to replace them with Christian baptism and crucifixes, rosaries, and other Catholic objects of devotion. As Afonso added Christian symbols and Portuguese Catholic advisers to the Kongo context, he endorsed the definition of broken minkisi figures as sinful idols worthy of extermination by Catholic clergy. In this daring destruction he defied powers unquestioned in the previous Kongo worldview—not least the ancestors invoked through the minkisi—and presented them as competing rather than complementary. The broken figures were a direct statement of monarchy, replacing rather than adding to the composite polity of the past. However, this direct statement of personal authority was only a small marginal image on the larger coat of arms. The very clear message of the broken figures can easily be made ambiguous, or entirely overlooked, in the other positive symbols of power with the shells of Saint James, the arms holding swords, or Constantine’s cross. The coat of arms ruined the old forms of nkisi, but now operated as an nkisi in its own right by providing local communities a tangible link to the Catholic powers that gave Afonso his victory.

Even as Afonso’s severed figures demonstrated a break with a past condemned as idolatrous, in the Kongo understanding of continuity, it was still necessary to placate ancestors, who could not be neglected. In a world where the past lived on through the present, and the ancestors lived on through their descendants, the minkisi had to be replaced by new objects with new powers that provided trust to replace what communities placed in their ancestral inheritance. The minkisi were often replaced with Catholic crucifixes reconfigured in local forms, in many cases hanging figures of Kongo ancestors on the crucifix.³¹ Afonso disabled the previous form of power (nkisi) in his own coat of arms by showing these figures of power as severed, or “disarmed,” suggesting his personal domination over remnants of the past. He was explicitly claiming to have conquered the local Kongo powers by excluding alternative beliefs and affirming monotheistic Christianity—centered on a singularity of revelation, of God, and of monarchy—that reinforced his personal monopoly on power: “And the broken black idols on the same shield as Portugal, signified that [God’s] will caused the change and their destruction.”³² The image was a step toward reconfiguring the composite political space of Kongo under a single monarchical power with access to an exclusive Christian power of the past, invoking Afonso Henriques, Saint James, and Constantine as a panoply of his predecessors.

Afonso sent his priests out into the affiliated regions of Kongo to convert people to Catholicism, or—in Kongo terms—to enroll them in the new protective community of the Church. Populations everywhere turned out for baptisms in large numbers. He instructed his proselytizers, both European priests and Kongo catechists, to persecute the local nganga and especially to destroy their minkisi, as he proclaimed on his coat of arms. Since people in Kongo made no distinctions among psychological well-being, physical health, and community consensus, replacing the nganga with Catholic priests, who presented themselves as new nganga, may well have impressed the local people as no sort of upheaval at all, but simply another layer in an ongoing additive history.

When Afonso I forced the component communities of the Kongo polity to turn to his new regime built around the authority and sacraments of the Catholic Church, he was targeting inherited local beliefs and practices in ways similar to the efforts of contemporaneous monarchs in Europe. They were entrusted with protecting and patronizing Christianity, and so they persecuted folk healers as witches, imprisoning them in large numbers, forcing them to recant or admit their alleged sins under pain of torture, and even putting many to death. The sixteenth-century witch hunts in Germany and the Spanish Inquisition were relentless pursuits of perceived heretics. All these persecutions of subjects suspected of other loyalties imposed religious and social conformity as parts of the growing authority of European monarchies. Their efforts ran parallel to Afonso’s attempt to create a comprehensive Catholic domain of power in Kongo by persecuting nganga and destroying the old confederation. Afonso was earning the status he claimed as a zealous equal of his Catholic brethren in Europe, though without the cultural resources of a thousand years of the faith.

While Afonso dispersed his iron-bearing Catholic nganga throughout the polity to replace its components’ diverse minkisi, he imposed equally radical policies within the walls of Mbanza Kongo to eliminate the residues of the empowering past that it constituted and to channel all remaining power through himself as a Catholic king. Previous mani Kongo had assiduously maintained the grave cults of their predecessors that they harbored. They cared for a grove of palm trees that grew up over the burials and concealed the ceremonies conducted to contact the spirits of preceding mani Kongo hovering there in the dimness. Afonso had the palm grove cleared and built a stone cathedral over the sacred graveyard.

By placing the cathedral over the graves, he may have meant to continue the established practice of venerating his predecessors, setting the new Catholic communion in the proven site of communication with the past. The cathedral, and the prayers and masses conducted within it, were intended to commune with the Christian God just as Afonso’s predecessors had contacted the animating spirits of the polity on that spot.³³ His destruction of the nkisi as “idols” may have meant that he was trying to replace the aggregated Kongo political order in a way that concentrated power in his own person through a cunning strategy of ambiguity that would allow doubting communities in the composite to feel that he was continuing to incorporate or respect them. On this interpretation, Afonso was adding another visual positioning of himself as Catholic king literally on top of the venerable legacy of past mani Kongo.

Afonso had hinted as early as the letters of 1512 that he intended to concentrate power in himself as a Catholic king. In so doing he would dominate the Kongo political confederation well beyond his momentary guardianship of the mani Kongo. He proclaimed this enduring monarchical authority in the titles of sovereignty that he assumed for himself. “King of mani Kongo and Lord of the Ambundos.” “King of mani Kongo” (in Portuguese, “Rei do Manicongo”) can be seen written out at both the top and the bottom of his coat of arms. Afonso’s assertion of his authority as “King of mani Kongo” situated the network authority of the mani Kongo under his personal control as a Christian monarch.

Under the usual interpretation of Kongo as a kingdom and the mani Kongo position as similar to that of a monarch in Europe, scholars have claimed that Afonso needed to do little more to effect the transition than translate the Portuguese wording of the “King and Lord” doublet, which was standard among monarchs in Europe, into Kikongo.³⁴ According to the parallelisms in the contrasting Kongo and Catholic political theories, the theologically trained Portuguese priests around Afonso could have instructed him in the linguistic formulas recognizable to the Portuguese.³⁵ Granting Afonso this sophistication in European diplomatic conventions suggests that “manikongo” referred to his predecessors in the Kongo polity and to the grove where they had been buried, first by the earlier custodians of the mani Kongo position and then under the foundations of his Catholic church. He presented this authority as a territorial domain parallel to the lands of the “King of Portugal” and distinct from the personal authority he asserted over areas neighboring the polity such as those of the “Ambundos” (Mbundu), the non-Kikongo-speakers to the south, whom he claimed as vassals to himself personally as “lord.”

However, the title of “King of manikongo” did not equate to a European-model “King of Kongo,” because Afonso’s 1512 letters nearly always refer to the Christian realm he was extending out over the political composite as “Kongo,” not as “manikongo.”³⁶ Given that the inherited authority of the mani Kongo related only to delineated domains within a polity composed of many carefully specified powers distributed among officers representing its components, Afonso’s repeated declarations of himself as king and lord overrode these checks and balances to create himself as a new sort of potentate personally in full control of the entire Kongo polity, far beyond the limited role of past mani Kongo in the composite. In this case, the linguistic formula articulating the singular power of the Portuguese monarch was appropriate to the intended recipients of his message in Portugal. Afonso, for example, adopted Portuguese feudal language of sovereignty and vassalage, and the doublet of “King and Lord,” and acknowledged European visual representations of nobility.³⁷ With the words “King of manikongo,” Afonso situated himself as master of the aggregate mani Kongo, which no longer accumulated through time or had its own existence independent of the living holder of the trusteeship, that is, himself.

The personal authority that Afonso asserted over the entire history of mani Kongo—the very integrity of the Kongo network—resonated in the broken nkisi figures on his coat of arms. His predecessors in the mani Kongo were like human nkisi in their role as channels to the ambient past; their investitures had turned them into living embodiments of otherwise intangible power. As a grand nkisi, the incumbent mani Kongo was “a sacred object, in touch with the world of the dead, and thus subject to limitations on his physical powers.”³⁸ Thus the images of broken figures would have had the same significance to Kongo that assertion of being “King of mani Kongo” had for the Portuguese. Afonso was acknowledging previous forms of power, in the Kongo idiom of additive change, but he was also ending time understood in those accumulating terms by asserting that his miraculous victory, and the apparition of Saint James, had endowed him with personal powers over earlier forms of authority as the eternally Catholic king in Kongo. In very powerful ways, he succeeded in establishing himself as a founder who could never be replaced. Over five hundred years later, people in Kongo today look back to Afonso as the founder of their culture.

Slaving, Baptisms, and a Plague of Witches: Stirrings of Revolt

Afonso’s four 1512 letters, written for the Portuguese king, the pope, the holders of titles in the Kongo composite, and its peoples, articulated his personal power and authority in Kongo situationally, in carefully varied language expressing multiple, or composite, identities, with differing selves for specific contexts or audiences. He represented himself as the center in this symbolic representation of his predecessors as mani Kongo and then as victor of the battle at Mbanza Kongo. He was simultaneously the blacksmith-founder–Catholic king, brother-in-arms, and comrade of Afonso Henriques in Christian favor; ruler in the image of Constantine, emperor of eternal Rome; and predecessor of the pope. The sophistication of this political strategy confirmed the erudition that admiring priests—even if themselves probably none too sophisticated—reported to their superiors.

We should not be surprised that Afonso encountered resistance among the people he was claiming as subjects. As mani Kongo, as he continued to consider himself, within the network his authority was constrained by the council members who surrounded him, and he performed only functions within Mbanza Kongo manifesting the past, or beyond its walls regarding outsiders as embodiment of the entire polity. For all of Afonso’s posing as the conduit to the powerful Catholic God, evidenced by his heaven-sent victory over Mpanzu a Kitima, the variations between elements of continuity and rupture in his 1512 letters suggest how tenuous he knew his position in Kongo was, not only in the polity’s constitution but also, and increasingly, in its politics of the day. His later assertive statements, like building his church over the graves of his predecessors or hunting down nkisi in the villages, confirm that impression. He had good reason to feel challenged, as it is possible, perhaps even probable, that the Kongo electors had seen his 1509 battlefield triumph in Mbanza Kongo as a coup, since they had tried to sway his uncle, the mani Mbata, away from helping him gain investiture in the office and had delayed the investiture for three years, until 1512. Only a Christian miracle had ended the impasse.

But above all, Afonso’s pretentions to authority were undermined by the violence and terror of Portuguese slaving, which increased sharply in intensity under his rule and moved from enemy areas beyond Kongo into the heart of the confederation. For Kongo, the proof of the mani Kongo’s authority was consensus and peace among the polity’s components. Whatever the promise of the power of Catholic Christianity, the practice stripped communities of their nkisi protective power, leaving them directly dependent on Afonso, whose access to the protective powers of his predecessors seemed to mean less and less as terror spread through the vulnerable population. In the personal power he sought, he alone was also responsible.

Portuguese slavers from São Tomé Island were working out the most effective methods of acquiring captives to send off to forced labor in the gold mines of the Akan areas of West Africa and on sugar plantations on the islands of the Gulf of Guinea at the same time that Afonso was undertaking these strategies of political consolidation and implicitly assuming personal responsibility for the welfare of his realm. Beyond whatever Kongo resentments may have been brewing in reaction to Afonso’s assault on their historic communities, Portuguese slavers interfered in their ongoing local politics. They exacerbated routine conflicts and harvested prisoners taken by all sides for sale as slaves. The growing disorder sowed the seeds of the desperation that moved a succeeding generation of people in Kongo to attribute the dissension and distress to evil beyond witchcraft, which the Portuguese would understand as cannibalism.

These “Portuguese” slavers from São Tomé Island were in fact often offspring of liaisons between earlier Portuguese settlers on the island and the first generation of Kongo women they had taken there as slaves, early in Afonso’s time. The slavers spoke their mothers’ Kikongo languages as well as Portuguese, which enabled them to broker commercial relations between the communities on the mainland—sometimes with their mothers’ own people—and the commercial economy of the Atlantic. The São Tomé slavers had originally purchased captives taken in violence against the Tio around Malebo Pool in the early 1500s, and then from the Mbundu peoples (the “Ambundos” in Afonso’s letter) to the south.³⁹ Although a few criminals from the Kongo region convicted in judicial proceedings were also disposed of, as well as some survivors of droughts and famines, more slaves could be generated by provoking armed conflicts among the competing components of the polity. These losses violated the intense Kongo ethos of political integrity and set the stage for a collective reaction to their growing sense of helpless vulnerability to unseen betrayals from within, as well as the muskets of the Portuguese.

This cycle of violence, and enslavement throughout the polity, was attributable to the mani Kongo. By the early 1520s, the disruption, as well as the wealth that collaborators outside Afonso’s circle derived from it, became a political problem of pervasive proportions. In 1526 Afonso wrote a famous letter to the Portuguese king, begging his friend, ally, and protector in Lisbon for help to end uncontrolled slaving in Kongo. After noting the abuses of the Tomista slavers and recounting the depopulation of lands and illegal enslavements of Kongo Catholics, Afonso petitioned King João III to “send neither merchants nor merchandise, because our will is that in these kingdoms there is no trade in slaves nor outlet for them.”⁴⁰

Afonso’s motives, viewed in the context of the Kongo polity, seem more complex than the modern proto-abolitionist reading usually given to this plea would indicate. Since Afonso had clearly tolerated—even encouraged—foreign slaving in Kongo prior to 1526, his entreaty for help begs the question of what changed his mind. He stressed two primary rationales. First, he lamented how the São Tomé slavers had flooded the Kongo market with imported trade goods, which drove their value down. Local people whom Afonso claimed as vassals could purchase these goods that had previously been rare luxuries in such quantities that they were able to “elevate themselves” beyond his ability to control them as a sovereign authority ought to do. From his perspective, Kongo who challenged his authority by amassing wealth in trade goods promoted “evil greediness.”⁴¹

Afonso, always alert to the sensibilities of his Catholic readers in Portugal, did not designate these wealthy challengers to his authority in Kongo terms as the witches they were, but in this letter and subsequent ones, he addressed the politically enabling effects of the goods the Tomista slavers brought, since his challengers distributed them to recruit clients. He asked the Catholic king João to send him “medicine” and “remedies” for the greed he saw as illness. These requests for a cure for disorder expressed a Kongo worldview that attributed dissension, in this case tendencies toward personal autonomy asserted through accumulating material wealth, as caused by witches, and curable by collective healing. The problem was not the slaving, which had long been a moderate component of politics in western-central Africa, but rather the imports arriving in quantities that Afonso could not control.

The second reason Afonso banned slaving in 1526 was because the violence hit too close to home. Afonso later made clear his distinction between slaving and Atlantic imports inflating conflicts within the Kongo polity and the Tomistas’ targeting the Christian faction in Kongo, presumably his own family and clients. Since it was illegal in Europe to enslave Catholics, his letters to King João III emphasized this affront to European legality. The issue was political, not moral. He made clear how attacking his Catholic followers undermined his personal authority. The slavers were exploiting the tensions inherent in Kongo, both among its component communities and against the Christian core he was trying to consolidate over it.

A contrasting example from West Africa in the same period highlights Afonso’s political weakness in Kongo. The oba (ruler) of Benin, a powerful polity there, faced Tomista slavers in a situation similar to Afonso’s. In contrast to Afonso’s helpless begging for intervention from Lisbon to deal with the troublesome traders from São Tomé who were taking Benin slaves also to the Mina Castle on the Gold Coast, the oba in 1516 issued an outright prohibition of further exports of captives. Slave purchases from Benin plummeted. Afonso’s pleading tone suggests the inherently tenuous grip of a central authority in a composite polity on economic activity among its component parties. His appeal to the king in Portugal invoked the commanding authority of the Catholic monarchy he was already failing to implement.

Catholic proselytization was bad for the Tomista slavers’ business. According to Catholic law, Christians could not enslave other Christians, and conversions to Catholicism in Kongo were decreasing the supply of heathens to enslave. Afonso may have limited slaving for a time after 1526, but not for long. By about 1530, Portuguese slavers and their Kongo collaborators secured access to new sources of captives from the far northeast around Malebo Pool where Afonso had been exiled and had first sponsored the Catholic priests, and thus beyond the Kongo composite. The Teke/Tio living there, who had formerly been victims of Kongo slaving, reorganized and stabilized the slave markets near the Pool by generating captives from farther into the interior. This new expanded geography of slaving enriched all the parties to the trade. The Tio were paid for their captives with nzimbu shells from the Atlantic Coast, which they often purchased in Kongo, and Afonso levied a tax on the strings of shells and chains of captives as they passed through Mbanza Kongo on their way from and to the coast. Whereas only about seventeen hundred slaves had been sent to São Tomé per year from 1500 to 1525, the reorganized, sustainable, and profitable trade to Malebo Pool produced as many as five to six thousand slaves in peak years after 1530.⁴²

Afonso’s redirection of the slave trade beyond the components of his polity meant that Tio supplies of slaves from Malebo Pool reduced the victimization of the Kongo people he was claiming as subjects. By 1540, Afonso could brag that the Kongo port of Mpinda at the mouth of the Congo River was producing more slaves than all of the ports where the Portuguese traded along Africa’s Atlantic Coast. Displacing the sources of slaves to the farther interior revealed that his 1526 condemnation of slaving was not a proto-abolitionist opposition to slaving in principle but rather a political move to protect his tenuous position and his Catholic faction within the Kongo political composite. He was explicit about the acceptable framework, however, which exempted Kongo: “[I] favor the trade, sustain it, open markets, roads, storehouses, and interior markets where the [slaves] are traded.”⁴³ Unlike the Benin oba, he had protected himself from slaving without giving up gains from the trade. It was likely not a coincidence that the subjects of the following chapter, the alleged cannibals who attacked Kongo in 1568, were said to have originated in the area around Malebo Pool.

Afonso did not live to see his intended centralization of political power in Kongo in his own person, replacing the communities of the old confederation with Catholic monotheism and priests responsive to his directives. When he died in 1542 or 1543, in spite of his attempts to engage the vast Atlantic geopolitical scale in which he had inserted Kongo, the polity fell into armed clashes among the components like those of previous succession struggles, but this time the battles were intensified by the violence of slaving. The São Tomé islanders were a constant problem, and so, too, were the factions in the Sonyo areas between Mbanza Kongo and what had become the main Atlantic port of Mpinda. Sonyo had once been a part of the Kongo composite, but since the São Tomé traders had built up the Mpinda port to send captives to the Gold Coast and also to their own island, they often ignored Afonso’s wishes.

By the 1520s, São Tomé traders’ needs for slaves had lured them to venture also to the south, along the valley of the major river there, the Kwanza, beyond Kongo’s southern border (modern-day northern Angola), where they helped to fuel consolidation of a bellicose Ndongo regime among the same Mbundu whom Afonso had claimed in 1512 as vassals. The violence in Kongo even threatened Afonso personally; he survived an assassination attempt in 1540. Dissidents in Afonso’s court at Mbanza Kongo had hired mercenary musketeers from the royal garrison on São Tomé Island to murder him as he exited the doorway of the church he had built over the graves of his mani Kongo predecessors. The assassins failed. While there was some precedent in west-central Africa for ambitious prospective successors to usher aging titleholders to seats at the table with their ancestors, Afonso’s brush with death showed the desperation growing from the traumatizing violence in Kongo as slaving disrupted lives, scattered communities, and took away growing numbers of people. For the communities composing the Kongo polity, losses of personnel threatened their very existence and the enduring wrath of ancestors whom they would thus abandon.

The assassination attempt provides a clear statement of how terrifying life in Kongo had become under Afonso and Catholicism, disrupted by devoutly Catholic São Tomé slavers. The Kongo planners of the attack did not attempt to assassinate Afonso inside the church, where they likely considered him invulnerable to their local poisons or charms. To ensure the job was done, and to protect themselves from the possible wrath of powers they feared, whether Christian or Kongo, the plotters hired soldiers of the white man’s cult able to execute the mani Kongo who had gained so much authority from the Church. The attempt was made as Afonso emerged from this protected space into the exposed surrounding area. They thus respected the sanctity of the church that the Kongo planners feared and that the São Tomé soldiers honored as a sanctuary.

Prominent opponents of slaving within Kongo might hire slaver mercenaries to rescue them from their growing slippage into chaotic violence, but for most of the people of Kongo, not living in Mbanza Kongo and not privy to the intrigues of the Catholic faction there, the trauma and terror of incessant slaving needed to be calmed and, if possible, replaced by ambient powers other than the minkisi that they had lost and the Catholicism that had failed them. As the intensity of slaving increased, more and more people were sent toward the shoreline and into the waters of the dead, never to return. Like people in every other part of the continent, Kongo understood the upheavals of European-stimulated slaving in their own idioms of plagues and witches. People there, grasping for any cure for the disruption and cataclysmic immorality of witches within their communities, had first turned en masse to the baptisms offered by Afonso’s Catholic nganga in their search for protection. The cruel irony was that Afonso, in his quest to use the new cult to transcend it as king, was chiefly responsible for diluting the protective Kongo composite.

In the late 1560s, after nearly a half century of increasing slaving and the political centralization it funded, as well as a series of failed would-be successors after Afonso’s death, people in Kongo would be prepared to find perpetrators of their pervasive miseries worse than the witches they had felt were lurking among them. Not enough communities remained sufficiently intact to unite around searches for evil within them, and so they displaced the pervasive evils afflicting all as external to the whole. This positioning of blame on outsiders located the source of their afflictions precisely in the domain for which Afonso, as mani Kongo, had been responsible. Betrayal by leaders propped up by slaving and their failed healing cult produced a pervasive reaction—not just in terms of local community integrity but transcending the entire polity. They spoke of rumors of cannibals from unknown regions beyond.