Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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