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CHAPTER THREE

Phantoms of the Kongo, 1568–1591

For there came unexpectedly to devastate the Kingdom of [K]ongo certain people living like Arabs, and ancient Nomads, who are called Jaggas, and have their dwellings near the first lake of the River Nile, in a province of the Empire of Monemugi. They are a cruel and murderous race, of great stature and horrible countenance, and eat human flesh, but are very courageous and valiant in battle. Their weapons are pavi[s]es, darts, and daggers. In their customs and everyday life they are very savage and wild, and go entirely naked. These people have no king, and live in huts in the forest, after the manner of shepherds. They went wandering up and down, putting to fire and sword, and spoiling and robbing every part of the country through which they passed, till they reached [K]ongo, which they entered through the province of [Mbata]. Overthrowing those who were first to resist them, they then went on to the City of Kongo, where the King was, and who had lost heart from the victory gained by his enemies in [Mbata].

—Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta, 1591¹

WHEN THE amateur Italian geographer Filippo Pigafetta published Relatione del Reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade tratta dalli in Rome in 1591 (hereafter Report), he launched the “cannibal Jaga” on their career of infamy. This “Report” about a Kongo kingdom and the surrounding countries was soon translated into Latin, German, French, and English and could be found in book repositories in London, Lisbon, Oxford, Ghent, Antwerp, Oporto, and Brussels.² The details he provided about Kongo life, culture, politics, religion, and natural resources were revelations to most Europeans, who had virtually no other information about west-central Africa. Among the many important topics of the day that Pigafetta covered in his book, such as the mystery-shrouded font of the Nile River or the miraculous growth of a Catholic Church in Africa, the “Jaga” emerged as a new and arresting group of savage cannibals who might await Europeans traveling in that part of the world.

Pigafetta based his Report on the Jaga on what he had heard from a Portuguese man who had lived in the Kongo region from 1578 to 1584, an otherwise obscure slave trader named Duarte Lopes. Lopes had not himself met or seen any Jaga. He was rehearsing for Pigafetta’s benefit stories presumably told to him at the Kongo capital about an alleged invasion that had occurred in 1568, ten years prior to his arrival there. In publishing Lopes’s stories about the Jaga, Pigafetta helped entrench many Europeans’ predisposition to imagine Africans as cannibal savages. Further, by giving them a specific name—Jaga—Lopes provided a seemingly authentic language and set of horrific images by which Pigafetta’s readers could recognize seemingly similar savages whom they found, or heard about, in travels to other parts of the continent.

Lopes’s account, embroidered by the learned Pigafetta, thus was far from a straightforward historical description of what might have happened in 1568. Briefly narrating the 1568 event as told in the Report will help contextualize the historical narrative that dominates the chapter.³ According to the Report, King Álvaro I of Kongo began his rule in 1568 following nearly a decade of political turmoil and failed Kongo military ventures. Álvaro was the stepson of the previous mani (master) Kongo, meaning his claim to the throne in Mbanza Kongo was quite weak because royal authority passed through the patriline in Kongo at that time. Initially Álvaro was not particularly interested in retaining the Catholic laws and customs as instituted by Afonso I and carried on by his successors. This bent toward sinning caused a swift and divine reckoning. Soon after taking the throne, a mysterious group of militarized nomads who had a reputation as flesh-eaters invaded Kongo from the northeast, passing through the powerful region of Mbata before laying siege to Mbanza Kongo. Álvaro and his warriors rode out of the royal compound to meet the villainous Jaga on the flatland outside the walls, where Afonso I won his miraculous victory. But Álvaro I was soundly defeated. His faction fled many miles to a small island in the mouth of the Congo River. The Jaga, allegedly numbering sixty thousand, killed and terrorized the people of Kongo, as Álvaro and his besieged refugees suffered through extreme food shortages and painful symptoms resulting from tropical diseases on the island. Forced by necessity, the exiles decided to sell family members and other allies into slavery to buyers from São Tomé Island in exchange for food.

Álvaro petitioned King Sebastião of Portugal to send aid, and in 1571 a former governor of São Tomé Island, Francisco da Gouveia Sottomaior, arrived with six hundred soldiers. Sottomaior’s men defeated the immense Jaga forces primarily because the booming sounds of the European firearms terrified them. Álvaro was restored to Mbanza Kongo, which Sottomaior’s men reinforced with new fortifications. Many of the Portuguese stayed in Kongo, where they established themselves as wealthy merchants after the Jaga were expelled. Álvaro recommitted himself to the Catholic God, which secured his authority and prestige. This story of the 1568 violence and its aftermath set the tone for a chain of misunderstandings and misrepresentations from those in Europe’s growing publishing industry, rather less skeptical or scrupulous than most modern journalists, that attributed subsequent stories of other events elsewhere to similar African cannibals.

The reported Jaga devastation of 1568 was particularly worth repeating in Africa and Europe, because it originated in a fast-changing and complicated historical context in Kongo and in the adjoining regions to the south. There were Portuguese schemes to establish military occupation of the watershed of the Kwanza River, south of Kongo. In and around Kongo, sugar-growing São Tomé islanders were under increasing pressure to obtain slaves, thus dividing political factions there. Europe hungered for knowledge of almost any sort about the utterly unknown interior behind an enticingly familiar shoreline, where rich mineral resources and a man named Prester John, the legendary Christian ruler of a jewel-bedecked kingdom, were said to await discovery. In Africa, other schemers manipulated the Jaga story to provide cover for activities that might otherwise have appeared less clear-cut. This chapter illuminates how multiple interest groups in Africa and Europe all converged around the myth of a cannibal invasion into Catholic Kongo in 1568 because the story served their own purposes. This revision of history was so profound that the identities of the attackers, the so-called “Jaga,” are still a mystery, though it is now possible to claim with certainty that they were Kongo insiders and not an invading army. Perhaps more importantly, parsing out the various myths and fears that motivated the multiple interest groups who helped to construct the Jaga story in fact demystifies the alleged cannibals. They were never a shadowy group of man-eaters who attacked Kongo as Pigafetta reported; rather, they were a fictional amalgamation pieced together from figments of European legal codes regulating “just war,” Kongo royal attempts to reclaim the heritage of Afonso I, biblical redemption stories, and Africans’ fears of being captured and eaten by Europeans or taken onto their slave ships.

The Rising Costs of Ruling a Catholic Kingdom in Kongo

Afonso I’s death in 1542 or 1543 exacerbated the factionalism he had created by adding Catholicism to Kongo politics and by allowing slave exports to Portuguese, primarily via slavers from São Tomé Island (the Tomistas), thus redefining how his successors in Mbanza Kongo would claim and maintain authority. For example, Afonso’s immediate successor, a son named Pedro, assumed this new position as the Catholic king of Kongo via hereditary succession. In contrast, the customary method for selecting a mani Kongo after the sitting one died was through highly regulated warfare where the winner was deemed to have demonstrated the full backing of the supernatural authorities, and the victor was then confirmed by a council of leading members of the Kongo composite. But as proof of the extent to which Afonso I had altered Kongo political practice, Pedro I assumed power without evidencing his authority by winning a succession struggle. He ruled for only a couple of years before being outmaneuvered politically by a grandson of Afonso’s named Diogo, who, in perhaps an echo of the composite politics of Kongo before Afonso, was installed after a coup in 1545 by his faction on the throne. Unlike Pedro I, Diogo I was a Catholic king of Kongo, in the Catholic idiom Afonso had left, and he also verified his right to rule via warfare as was required of a mani Kongo. During the violence of the overthrow, Pedro I fled into a church, where he claimed asylum. Diogo I respected the rules of asylum, perhaps seeing the Catholic sanctuary as a Kongo space of mystical invulnerability, and allowed Pedro to live. The scorned Pedro and his faction plotted against Diogo I to recapture the throne but were ultimately unsuccessful.⁴

The Tomistas, less bound by the heritage of Kongo political culture, proved to be more problematic for Diogo than Pedro had been. Recall that in the 1530s Afonso I had forged with the Tio⁵ slave producers near Malebo Pool and the Tomista slavers purchasing them at Mpinda on the Atlantic Coast, whose business had grown so lucrative by the 1540s that he was bragging about them. By the early 1550s the stable trading relationships were breaking down from their own successes.⁶ Kongo was exporting so many captives that the Tomista captains were overloading their boats, leading to increased numbers of revolts by the enslaved. Even more troublesome were other Tomista traders who had begun sailing up the Congo River to trade directly with the Tio to avoid the Kongo tax on slaves sold at the authorized port of Mpinda. In 1555, Diogo I grew so enraged with this subversion of the royal contract between Kongo and Portugal regulating these markets that he expelled nearly seventy Portuguese residents from Kongo, along with their wives and their children with African wives. The next year he made a political gamble to bring the rebellious Mbundu polity called Ndongo to the south, which the Tomistas were backing as an alternative source of slaves, back under royal Kongo control.⁷ But he lost this gambit, triggering Ndongo’s assertion of total independence, surely with Tomista backing. Even with these setbacks, however, Diogo I and his faction were strong enough to retain control over the fraying Kongo composite until his death in 1561.

A Kongo successor to Diogo I, whose name we do not know, was assassinated and replaced with one of Diogo’s illegitimate sons, which meant he took the position with no backing from any powerful recognized Kongo faction. However, this son, who claimed the legacy of his Catholic progenitor as Afonso II, supported the interests of the Tomistas who had backed his installation as mani Kongo. The people of Kongo resented this direct foreign intrusion into their politics and rioted throughout the region, killing many of the resident Portuguese and shuttering the authorized slave market in Mpinda, basically ending Kongo slave exports. Afonso II was also assassinated, only months after assuming the office. His successor, Bernardo I, maintained the boycott of slave exports, although he secretly tried to ease tensions with Lisbon before dying in 1567 in a military campaign against the Yaka, who lived east of Kongo and south of the Tio at Malebo Pool. Three claimants vied to fill the power vacuum after his death. The strongest contenders, two Christians named Rodrigo and Pedro, sent assassins to kill each other. The sources allege they were murdered at exactly the same time.⁸ The Kongo Christian nobility created by Afonso I, left with no other options, rallied around the weakest remaining candidate, named Henrique, and elected him mani Kongo in 1567, no doubt hoping to control him.

Prior to Afonso I’s time as mani Kongo, viable victories to establish authority came over rivals from within the Kongo composite, which thus determined who could be installed successfully as mani Kongo. But Afonso had ignored the mystical favor from the mani Kongo predecessors (buried and revered in their graves at Mbanza Kongo) and turned to Saint James and the broader panoply of Catholic saints, celebrated in the church he built over the mani Kongo graves. Evidently, the line of contenders he spawned, all his male blood descendants, attempted to define their struggles in terms of patrilineal succession. They also refused to recognize the component networks of the polity by shifting the military requirements of establishing legitimacy to waging yearly wars against such outsiders as the Yaka to the east or the Mbundu to the south. This transition from controlled and occasional internal combat to annual external raiding to validate authority also, not inconveniently, satisfied the Tomistas’ hunger for slaves by producing reliably large numbers of war captives for export.

Their collaboration with the slavers underpinned Kongo regal authority until the Tomistas tried to avoid paying the fees and duties owed to Afonso’s agents. After Diogo I broke with the Tomistas in 1555, his successors resorted to increasingly risky military operations, probably needing to compensate for their loss of Tomista financial backing via expeditions of their own to capture slaves. Diogo I lost all claims to Ndongo in 1556. Bernardo I died in 1567 fighting the Yaka. And in 1568, shortly after assuming authority, Henrique I was wounded leading an assault against the Tio near Malebo Pool and died soon after. His stepson Álvaro was installed immediately as mani Kongo and Christian king, allegedly through “common consent.”⁹ Álvaro was technically outside the patriline initiated by Afonso I; however his mother, named Izabel, was a daughter of Afonso’s, and she may have used her connections in the highest circles of power in Mbanza Kongo (as a daughter of Afonso I and the wife of Henrique I) to secure Álvaro’s position.¹⁰ Álvaro I found himself in the vulnerable position of trying to calm widespread agitation and fears of the worst in Kongo after eight years of politics compromised by collaboration with Tomista slavers and spreading slaving.

Foreign Entanglements and Dissensions at Home

Álvaro I’s accession as mani Kongo coincided with escalating, and failing, military engagements along the borders of Kongo, clearly reverting to something like the confederation that Afonso I had tried to suppress beneath the overlay of Catholic monarchy. The Tio to the northeast posed a problem, since they had proved powerful enough to kill Henrique when he launched his forces against them earlier in 1568. In fact, the Tio had long posed a real danger for mani Kongo. The strong regional ruler in the east, the mani Mbata, usually held them at bay with an armed guard positioned to deal with occasional Tio incursions into lands of communities affiliated in the Kongo composite.¹¹ The people of Mbata were historically jealous of their strategic responsibility in the composite as guardians in both a martial and a metaphysical sense. While mani Kongo had the right to establish close allies as the rulers of most affiliated regions in the Kongo composite, they could not install the mani Mbata, who were instead chosen according to regional political customs that predated the establishment of the Kongo composite. This powerful component counted themselves as allied with the Kongo political confederation rather than obligated to abide by whatever political consensus otherwise prevailed. Their considerable autonomy was expressed in the Kongo language of politics as kinship, acknowledging the seniority of the mani Mbata at the group’s head as the “grandfather of Kongo.”¹² This reserved and conditional participation in the Kongo composite, which may have been emboldened by the military capacities they maintained, provided a check on the power of the mani Kongo while also allowing Mbata warriors to check any invaders from the east. The mani Mbata were also the only regional leaders whom Afonso I and the succeeding mani Kongo allowed to possess firearms, the recently introduced awe-inspiring, and in trained hands also lethal, weapons of the time. Prior to Henrique I’s death, the well-armed Mbata warriors adeptly defeated the aggressive and militarized, but relatively few, Tio.

Álvaro was also under military pressure along the confederation’s southern border from the growing power of the warlord called the ngola (the political title from which the Portuguese styled their military conquests there) heading a regime known as Ndongo. Asserting the language of vassalage, Afonso I had claimed authority over the ngola because he had previously claimed lordship over the Mbundu peoples living along the valley of the Kwanza River and in the elevated terrain north and east of it, and Ndongo was a regional political system within the broader Mbundu populations. The early Ngola were warriors who consolidated the Ndongo polity by developing military capacities to raid for captives, whom they sold to the São Tomé islanders to work as slaves on their thriving sugar plantations. This growing collaboration between the ngola and the Tomistas bypassed the mani Kongo’s claimed monopoly over slaving, just as the Tio and Tomista trade bypassed it to the north. Clearly, by the 1550s and 1560s, African authorities found themselves constrained to operating in parameters increasingly defined not by their local resources, including people, but by outsiders’ priorities for the same populations as slaves.

Unlike most continental Portuguese, who arrived in the Kongo area as emissaries of their king, the Tomistas were less likely to follow prescribed legal norms of either Kongo or Portugal. One major reason for the islanders’ autonomy was the lack of oversight, as Portuguese royal officials usually succumbed to tropical illnesses shortly after arrival or they refused to travel to the island altogether. Another disincentive for Tomista loyalty to either Kongo or Portugal legal codes was the fact that financial backing for Atlantic ventures in the 1500s often derived from Italian political and economic investors whose interests many times conflicted with either Portuguese or Kongo policies.¹³ Official Kongo correspondence throughout the 1500s complains of indiscriminate Tomista slaving, for example, purchasing Catholics of the royal household, routine avoidance of paying tolls, and other activities that hindered Catholic conversion. Afonso I had asked the king of Portugal to gift São Tomé Island to him as early as 1514 because Tomista traders were causing so much trouble, and—he added diplomatically—he thought the island would serve as a promising site to develop a Catholic school.¹⁴ Beyond these meddlings in Kongo, it was the Tomista dealings with the Mbundu to the south that are worth exploring in further detail because they resulted in Portuguese king Sebastião (r. 1554–1578) sending Paulo Dias de Novais and Francisco da Gouveia onto the scene in Angola. Dias would become the first captain of the military outpost of St. Paulo de Luanda, and Father Gouveia solidified the Jesuit mission in Ndongo.

In 1518 the ngola Kiluanje of Ndongo, then in the process of consolidating a warrior regime in the highlands above the middle Kwanza River, had sent ambassadors to Lisbon asking for missionaries to baptize him as a Christian and, surely following Afonso’s example, also to develop a Catholic kingdom among the Mbundu. All official correspondence from west-central Africa at that time was passed through Portuguese officials in São Tomé, the seat of both royal and papal authority over a vast region around the entire Gulf of Guinea that extended as far as Elmina on the Gold Coast. The islanders frequently delayed messengers or the delivery of letters addressed to Lisbon that they suspected would result in action against their local interests, particularly slaving. The Tomistas, who were serving the ngola as mercenaries in his slaving raids and stood to benefit from helping him to consolidate his power, allowed his 1518 mission to pass on to Portugal, even though the ngola’s conversion to Christianity would protect him and other converts in Ndongo from enslavement. However, at this early stage of military expansion, the ngola Kiluanje probably did not need to worry about slaving within Ndongo because he could still easily locate and capture nearby peoples.

The Portuguese Crown responded in 1520 by sending the missionaries requested.¹⁵ However, when the priests arrived, the ngola refused to convert and instead held them as hostages. From the 1520s to the 1540s, the ngola continued to build his military capacities, and more and more Tomistas and renegade Portuguese traders purchased the war captives he took from the territories to the west, downriver toward the mouth of the Kwanza River and the bay and island called Luanda. Kongo authorities had claimed Luanda as a source of small mollusk shells that they circulated in the confederacy as currency-like tokens of recognition and political standing.

The succeeding ngola, perhaps seeking to secure his position in a still-formative polity coalescing around conquests, sent another embassy asking the Portuguese king to send priests again to create an independent Catholic kingdom in Ndongo. This time the Tomistas held the 1550 embassy on their island for nine years before finally allowing it to continue on to Portugal in 1559. Unlike in 1518, in 1550 the Tomistas felt a Catholic Ndongo was not in their best interests. Their slavers had, after all, been expelled from Kongo in 1545 by Diogo I, so any slaving in the region was coming from lands in and around Ndongo. And further, Diogo I had actually gone on the attack in the 1550s, making Ndongo a primary target. The ngola of that moment had every reason to seek protection in the form of diplomatic support from Portugal and the nominal inviolability of Catholicism from intrusions by the sister Catholic regime in Kongo. Looking to take advantage of every potential avenue for generating the violence that ensnared humans as enslaved laborers, the Tomistas delayed the 1550 mission against their longtime collaborators in Ndongo.

Once the Tomistas finally allowed the Ndongo embassy to pass on to Lisbon, King Sebastião and the Portuguese court sent a second mission in 1560, this time headed by a military captain, Paulo Dias de Novais, accompanied by four Jesuit priests. Though the primary documents allege that Novais’s 1560 mission was purely to further Catholic conversions in Ndongo, the implication of a delegation led by a commissioned officer of the king is that the Portuguese Crown took the disturbances in west-central Africa seriously. There are at least two reasons why. First, for quite some time rumors had been drifting back to Lisbon about “mountains of silver” in the area. Given the Spaniards’ famous discovery of extensive deposits of silver in Potosí (modern-day Bolivia) in 1545, the Portuguese were inspired to imagine equally rich mineral deposits in Africa. And second, the Tomistas clearly needed to be brought under control. São Tomé planters were growing fabulously rich from their sugar plantations, because sugar at that time was a pricey luxury item in Europe that was also being used in medicines, and the labor costs on their slave-staffed plantations were profitably low.

Novais landed in 1561 at the mouth of the Kwanza River, to the south of Kongo territory, and made his way upriver to the ngola’s compound in the highlands above. Initially the primarily proselytizing mission went well; however, in 1562 Kongo king Bernardo I began writing letters to Ndongo claiming that the Portuguese were actually coming to take land and seek out silver and gold mines.¹⁶ In response the ngola, a successor to the one who had requested the mission in 1550, held Novais as a prisoner before sending him back to Portugal in 1565. He retained a Jesuit priest named Francisco da Gouveia, who apparently had some success converting members of the ngola’s retinue to Catholicism. Gouveia’s stay in Ndongo laid the groundwork for subsequent European visits to the ngola, particularly by the increased numbers of Jesuits who arrived in the early 1600s.

The politically and economically disruptive Tomistas also posed an existential threat in Kongo as the epitome of the disorder caused by their commercial or, by Kongo community standards, greedy, competitive, and acquisitive operations. To people in Kongo they represented the intrusion of a commercial culture of individual accumulation in an otherwise communal context like Kongo. Their pervasive presence in trading within Kongo disrupted the order of social and economic life. Afonso I had noted disorders introduced by Tomistas and quickly picked up by Kongo looking to enrich themselves. Recall his infamous threat in 1526 to end slaving in Kongo altogether because his own family and faction were being targeted and because the goods brought by the Portuguese fostered, in his words, greed. By 1568, slaving and capitalistic accumulation of wealth by individuals who got ahead as others worried about being swept into the slave caravans was entrenched in Kongo. Álvaro I could not dream of ending slave trading, but he would have to manage the military threats along his borders as well as decide whether or not to support Catholicism, which in practice was entwined with the development of slaving and the associated violence.

Salvation: The 1568 Event and Its Aftermath

The otherwise revealing paper trail from Portuguese and missionaries on the scene in São Tomé, Kongo, and Angola disappears around the time of the “Jaga” event of 1568, perhaps suspiciously. In the absence of other published accounts of the event, Lopes and Pigafetta’s narrative of the violence has dominated its historical reconstructions from the late 1500s until now. But in order to understand how and why the Report is chock-full of silences, myths, and half-truths about the alleged cannibals, it is necessary to first explain as best we can what really happened in Kongo. As we will see, the narrative thrust of the Jaga invasion story in the Report rehearses a triumphal narrative of biblical salvation, while the reality is far more mundane, with the salvation being experienced almost entirely by Álvaro and his political faction.

In the brief time between Álvaro’s installation in 1568 and the assault, he had routinely contradicted the precepts undergirding the Catholic monarchy proclaimed by Afonso I and maintained, though not without challenges, until Henrique I had failed in battle against the Tio in 1567. Most notably, he had yielded to a Kongo adviser named Francisco Bullamatare, who convinced him that he should reintroduce polygyny at the mani Kongo’s court.¹⁷ This cardinal Catholic sin was, however, the primary political strategy of the central figures in composite political systems like the historical Kongo. Throughout Africa centrality was created by accumulating as many wives as possible from the component reproducing communities. These multiple marriages both personified and consolidated the networks of reciprocal political obligations that constituted the polity itself. Pragmatically they linked the powerful families and regional networks to the center through the children produced from these connections: sons—in this case—of the mani Kongo and nephews of the brothers of his wives.

In striving to remodel matrilineal Kongo as a patrilineal Catholic regime, complete with hereditary succession by male primogeniture, the Catholic kings of Kongo took only a single consecrated wife (though they kept many slave wives). The exclusions of Catholic monogamy would have fragmented the components of the Kongo polity. Without the bonds of marriage, leading families lost a primary channel to press their interests with the uniting central figure, not to mention the prestige and children (i.e., potential heirs) that marriage alliances produced. By trying to establish a European-styled hereditary dynasty, Afonso and his Catholic successors effectively marginalized the networks and communities allied to the Kongo political system as it had been constituted prior to 1509.¹⁸ Álvaro I had initially planned to restore polygyny at Mbanza Kongo, thus acknowledging prestigious and populous factions in Kongo other than the narrow patriline linked to Afonso I by heredity, since he himself, as a stepson of Henrique I, was the first mani Kongo not linked through a patriline to Afonso. By offering the regional factions marginalized by monogamy the opportunity to produce a future mani Kongo, he would have been bartering for their acceptance of him as the mani Kongo regardless of the powerful political faction in Mbanza Kongo descended from Afonso, whom he simultaneously moved out of power.

According to details in the Report, the violence began when marauding cannibals named Jaga invaded Kongo from the east, laid waste to Mbata, and then proceeded to Mbanza Kongo. In fact, nearly every detail about the attackers is false or cannot be substantiated. There is simply no evidence to verify the claims of man-eating. And, as will be discussed in more detail, the villains in the story certainly did not call themselves “Jaga.” The most radical falsehood, or fake news as some might say, was to blame invaders for the violence. A Jesuit priest named João Ribeiro Gaio was on the ground in Kongo during the period of violence, unlike Lopes. Years later, in a petition that was never published, Gaio wrote to the Spanish Crown, at that time also ruler of Portugal and its overseas dominions under the Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640), and incidentally explained Sottomaior’s mission to pacify an internal Kongo rebellion. The forces were sent “against the Jaga, Jagas who were men who ate human flesh, almost sixty thousand of whom rose up in the Kingdoms of Kongo which they destroyed.”¹⁹ The key word in this passing reference—and hence unlikely to have been construed for any purpose—identifies the Jagas as those who had “risen up” (alevantados) within Kongo.

Identifying Álvaro’s attackers as insiders helps to settle a decades-long scholarly debate about the identity of the so-called “Jaga” of 1568, but unfortunately not much more can be said of the uprising itself. The details in the Report are, of course, unhelpful, since they pin the blame on outsiders, and Gaio’s account merely mentions the incident. Perhaps following the logic of Occam’s razor, that the theory with the fewest possible assumptions is the most likely to have occurred, clarifies the situations as much as possible. We know Álvaro acceded in a sort of political vacuum after his stepfather, Henrique I, was killed. And we know that his mother, Izabel, played on her connections at court to have him installed. Given the series of sometimes violent infighting among political factions in Kongo in the twenty-five years after Afonso I’s death in 1542 or 1543, it seems most reasonable that the 1568 violence was in response to Álvaro’s accession. And, considering the circumstances by which he came to power and how quickly after his accession the violence occurred, it also seems reasonable to assert—as one historian did long ago—that a rival political faction viewed Álvaro’s rise to power as a usurpation, which triggered an armed response.²⁰

Without knowing exactly which Kongo faction led the rebellion, it is impossible to verify that the attacks indeed originated northeast of Mbanza Kongo, near Malebo Pool, or if they passed through Mbata. In any case, the assailants converged on Mbanza Kongo. Álvaro I raised an army to defend his capital from the impending assault. However, the opposing forces, said to have numbered sixty thousand, soon overwhelmed Álvaro.²¹ As Pigafetta paraphrased Lopes, “In this encounter, the king being partly discomfited, retired into the city, where not feeling safe, but forsaken of God on account of his sins, for he lacked the same trust in Him which King Dom Afonso [I] had, he resolved to leave the city a prey to his enemies.”²² Álvaro, some of his notables, and the priests fled to seek refuge on a small island on the Congo River. In their absence, without any significant check to their depredations, the attackers sacked Mbanza Kongo and ravaged the rest of the Kongo countryside virtually unchecked for nearly three years, leading to widespread deaths from starvation.

Pigafetta described in detail Álvaro’s and his companions’ sufferings on the small island at the mouth of the Congo River, which the Report called the Isle of Hippos.²³ They ended up trapped there for three years. Like any island in a massive river, Isle of Hippos was humid and marshy. The refugees were epidemiologically native to the higher and drier elevations around Mbanza Kongo, and they succumbed to the tropical diseases of the riverine environment. Their misery was intensified by lack of food, which would have left malnourished refugees vulnerable to bacterial and parasitic infestations. No one had had time to prepare to remain on the island for so long, and so supplies ran out. Lopes was told that a majority starved and died. Taking advantage of the intense hunger of the exiles, Tomista slavers arrived with food to sell in exchange for the cooperation of Álvaro’s supporters and hangers-on. The Report depicted the refugees’ desperation: “Thus, forced by necessity, the father sold his son, and the brother his brother, everyone resorting to the most horrible crimes to obtain food.”²⁴

This forced bargain of food for slaves on the Isle of Hippos would have had to clear strict legal hurdles. Catholics were proscribed from enslaving fellow Christians, and those who had fled to the island were affiliated with Álvaro’s court and thus almost certainly known Kongo Catholics. But in the face of starvation necessity trumped legality, and the Kongo resorted to the unthinkable, selling their family members and clients. In the mortiferous context of famine and disease, both Álvaro’s people and the Tomistas could justify these transactions as saving lives. As mani Kongo, Álvaro would not have suffered from lack of food as much as those around him, but he contracted dropsy, which caused his legs to swell painfully, an affliction that he would deal with for the rest of his life. He blamed himself and his lack of devout Catholicism for his own suffering as well as the suffering of all his people. While on the island, Álvaro recommitted himself to the Catholic God and requested aid from King Sebastião.

The attacks were stopped three years after they began, when a Portuguese military expedition of six hundred soldiers under the command of Francisco da Gouveia Sottomaior sailed in 1571 from Lisbon, via São Tomé Island, to confront them. Sottomaior had been the royally appointed captain, the secular authority, on São Tomé from 1564 to 1567 and, as such, would have been well aware of Tomista slaving interests on the mainland, though he had likely returned to Lisbon and might not have been exactly up-to-date concerning the intrigue in Kongo surrounding Álvaro’s accession in 1568. The relative silence about Sottomaior’s mission to Kongo in the Portuguese sources gives the entire project an appearance of involving carefully concealed Portuguese strategic interest. A large and expensively equipped force of six hundred soldiers could not have been stationed on São Tomé, suggesting Lisbon saw major gains at stake in Mbanza Kongo worth equipping Sottomaior with hundreds of soldiers and munitions for a long voyage.²⁵ He took on munitions and additional troops in São Tomé, most of whom were probably slaves, as well as supplies. While the primary documents establishing Sottomaior’s mission are unknown, accounts written after it was complete suggest Sottomaior and King Sebastião believed his mission was to reduce Álvaro, and Kongo, to a vassal of Portugal.²⁶