Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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