Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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