The destruction of the Kingdom of Kongo

In 1482, the Portuguese navigator Diego Cao set sail from Lisbon harbor in search of a passage to the Indies. In a three-masted caravel, Cao traveled in a broad arc past the Canary, Savage, Madeira and Cape Verde Islands; rounded Cape St. Vincent and Cape Nao in the Maghreb; suffered his sailors" puns--"He who reaches Cape Nao will return or nao (not)"; revictualed at Arguin, a slave entrepot above the Senegal River, at Fort Mina, an armed post flush with gold dust from the trans-Saharan trade, and at Cape Santa Catarina below Africa's bulge, until then the outer limit of the known world. Then, trimming his lateen sails to navigate against the prevailing headwinds, he sailed into the Southern Hemisphere, in whose unfamiliar skies neither his astrolabe nor his almanacs availed him further. Soon he came to the effluence of a river whose discharge sent sweet red water and clumps of grass and bamboo for miles into the Atlantic, so he named it the Powerful River, or Rio Poderoso. Thinking it might lead him to the fabled realm of Prester John, he coasted into its mouth on an afternoon breeze. Crocodiles and hippopotamuses lay stunned by heat on banks of brilliant orchids. Flocks of parrots chattered at sunset from tangles of mangrove. Eagles wheeled overhead.

Like crabs crawling along a coastline, the Portuguese had been exploring the African littoral and the Atlantic islands for decades before Cao reached the Kingdom of Kongo. The Canaries were mentioned by the intrepid Roman geographer Pliny, who called them the "Fortunate Isles," and died observing the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The Canaries lingered in the European imagination, "patches of twilight in the Sea of Darkness," but it wasn't until 1339 that they were rediscovered and settled by the Portuguese. Thereafter, the pace of exploration quickened. In 1415, Prince Henry the Navigator, spurred on by his astrologer, skimmed the profits from his Lusophone soap monopoly, equipped an expedition, and seized the town of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar. In 1419, a Genoan captain in the pay of Prince Henry struck Madeira. Settlers named the first children born there Adam and Eve. The Azores and the Cape Verdes were discovered in mid-century as navigators inched down Africa's bulge. Everywhere they went, the Portuguese kidnapped a few of the locals, brought them to Portugal, taught them Christianity, and sent them back. Also, because they had heard from Jewish traders about the Mansa of Mali, a man so rich that on his hajj in 1324 he had single-handedly caused prices in Egypt to spiral, they asked about gold. Some historians wonder which motive was more important. Others say both:

   It was this mixture of the deeper passions--greed, wolfish,
   inexorable, insatiable, combined with religious passion, harsh,
   unassailable, death-dedicated--that drove the Portuguese
   remorselessly on into the torrid, fever-ridden seas that lapped
   the coasts of tropical Africa and beyond.

What historians know of the Kongo Kingdom is fragmentary. Sources include contemporary European accounts, private letters, church correspondence, bills-of-lading, papal bulls, missionary memoirs, slaver propaganda, embassy appointments, oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and a pirate's autobiography. Researchers have combed the archives of the Vatican, Rome, Florence, Milan, The Hague, Madrid, Lisbon, London, Paris, Brussels, and Sao Tome. On splint houses above the Congo River and in decaying hillside villages, anthropologists have sat down with tape recorder and note pad to sift the memories of old men. Despite these efforts, there's a lot that isn't known. Archives in Africa were destroyed by "cannibals" and fires. Sources contradict each other. Descriptions are vague or hostile. Parsing the old documents in the light of anthropological knowledge of present-day societies--a technique favored by many but not all researchers--is a bit like solving story problems by looking at the teacher's manual, with this punchline: the manual goes to a later edition of the problem book.

When the court and king of the Kongo first learned that a whale-colored people from a place called Mputu had arrived at the mouth of the Nzere, their sails "like knives in the sun," the kingdom was perhaps only six generations from its founding, late in the 13th century. Like the great empires of West Africa, the Kongo emerged by subjugating its neighbors through war and incorporating them into a broad-reaching trading zone. The wars of conquest were not remembered for their difficulty. One Kongo noble told a 17th-century chronicler that the original inhabitants of his region were small men with big heads, fat bellies, and short legs. When they fell down, he said, they had trouble getting up. At its peak, the kingdom formed a rough square stretching from the mouth of the river to Malebo (Stanley) Pool, and from Luanda Island into present-day Angola. It would have been slightly larger than Portugal, and nearly as populous.

The king's household, an enclosure a mile and a half around, contained walled paths, palisades, decorated huts, courtyards, and gardens. One early traveler compared it to the Cretan labyrinth. Trumpeters and soldiers stood guard at its entrance. Mbanza Kongo, the capital city, rose on a cliff overhanging a river and a narrow valley fringed with forest. On its fertile plateau two springs gave crystal-clear water. Estimates of the population vary: at the time the Portuguese arrived, 60,000 to 100,000 people were said to live in the capital; the only other town of note, the capital of the coastal province of Sonyo, had a population of about 15,000, and the various other provincial capitals were considerably smaller.

From his throne of ivory and sculpted wood, the king ruled through an elaborate network of councilors and governors, clan elders and local chieftains, priests and electors. He maintained that network through alliance, marriage, trade, and force. Of his 12 councilors, four by statute were women. In theory, the king could neither declare war nor open a road without the councilors' consent; in practice, the king's power depended on his political skills. A strong king, for example, could replace his governors at will; a weak one struggled to maintain their loyalty. No rule of primogeniture applied. Instead, clan elders picked the future king from among the sons of the dying king's lesser wives. Despite the fact that successions were sometimes bloody, it was a system that ensured continuity: anyone sharp enough to earn the clan elders' loyalty was usually savvy enough to rule. Sometimes border provinces tried to break away, and sometimes peasants led local tax revolts, but the benefits of trade, on the one hand, and the power of the king to levy an 80,O00-troop army, on the other, were usually enough to discourage rebellion.

When a man died, he was officially mourned for eight days. Then the man's principal wife led the relatives to the nearest river, cut the belt that her husband had worn in life, and threw it in. The river carried the belt away, "together with the sadness for the lost one." During that period, male kin wore white whenever they approached the corpse--white being the color of the dead. On the eighth day, women applied a mix of powdered charcoal to their faces and chests to signify the end of mourning, though a variety of rites and prohibitions were in effect for up to a year thereafter. The dead were buried in a special thicket. On their graves were placed objects indicating their status in life: chairs and cups on the tombs of title holders; baskets of roots and herbs on those of curers; hammers, bellows, and anvils on those of smiths. On the tombs of hunters were placed the skulls of wild beasts.

Besides the ancestors, there were gods of earth, water, and sky, with their accompanying cults, symbols, powers, and priestly castes. Some governed the fertility of the land; others the success of war or the acquisition of wealth and office. For the Kongo, a chance encounter with a peculiarly shaped twig or stone was loaded with meaning; whirlwinds incarnated the spirits of noble ancestors; grubs caused rain; albinos, dwarves, and twins could cure infertility, kill thieves, or prevent elephants from destroying the house; and disease was the invariable outcome of witchcraft. Fifteenth-century Christians brought with them a religion that had grown aggressive, doctrinaire, and remote; the landscape of the Kongo was charged with ambiguous significance, replete with signs and symbols of the sacred.

If, as many scholars now insist, the European explorers did not "discover" the world--it had, after all, been discovered by countless indigenous peoples already--they nevertheless inaugurated a global process of dis-enclavement, threading the first tenuous connections between the dispersed and disparate civilizations of the earth. For many non-Westerners that process would result in destruction, dispossession, or death. And because freedom emerged as a defining ideal of the West during an era in which the worst abuses of that freedom were routine, our vision of the past can take on a clarity it lacked in the event, obscuring how tentative, uncertain--in a word, explorative--those early oceanic adventures were. More medieval than modern, the explorers learned by going where they went. And in doing so, they not only redrew the map, they also discovered the countless ways people had devised of being human. That is what makes the European encounter with the Kongo--the first large-scale, previously unknown civilization the Europeans came upon--so riveting: one can see, in those early moments, how things might have turned out differently.

In 1491, King Joao of Portugal sent to "his royal brother" the king of the Kongo a richly provisioned expedition that included priests, carpenters, stone masons, and women, who were to instruct the Kongo in housekeeping. (An expedition the following year, to the nearby island of Sao Tome, included two German printers, with printing press.) Received with a jubilation that even they must have found astonishing, this first batch of colonizers went to work. Within months, the masons had built a stone church and the priests had baptized the king and most of the nobility.

For their part, the Kongo thought that the Europeans were water spirits, gods of fertility. Painted in white and naked to the waist, they had greeted the European colonizers in a ceremony that was, according to the historian Ann Hilton, "clearly an nkimba [fertility] cult assembly." Soon after the Europeans arrived, the brother of a traditional high priest discovered a black stone in the shape of a cross, proving to the Kongo that the newly introduced religion belonged, as they had suspected, to the dimension of water and earth spirits. (After all, the whites resembled albinos, who were thought to have special powers in this regard.) The Kongo king then insisted on being baptized before going off to war, because he wanted the protection that the European ritual might give him.

Given the odd ideas they had about each other--the Portuguese, to give one example, thought that if they traveled too far inland the moon's rays would swell their heads--it's not surprising that the Kongo and the Portuguese often found each other baffling. What is surprising is how quickly the Kongo were able to take advantage of their contact with Europe. Fruit from Asia, the Americas, and the Mediterranean--orchards of guava, lemon, orange, papaya, papaw, mango, kumquat, and pineapple--throve in the Kongo's tropical soil. The American cassava, or manioc tuber, replaced millet, sorghum, and luco as the starch of choice. Pineapple wine, sugarcane beer, English rum, and Indian ganja all joined palm wine on the shelf of local intoxicants. The Kongo quickly adapted European technology that they found useful: the Kongo king substituted an exotic horse tail for the elephant tail he had used as his own personal fly whisk. The nobility saw the benefits of literacy and sent their sons--and sometimes their daughters--to missionary schools early on. In the mid-17th century, paper was in such demand that it cost a hen per sheet, and a common missal cost a slave.

More surprising than the Kongo adoption of European crops and technical skills is the kingdom's acceptance of some aspects of Christianity and Portuguese political organization. Like Kemal Ataturk or the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, the kings who ruled the Kongo in the 16th and 17th centuries responded with astonishing enterprise and creativity to the European challenge. "Not until our own time," asserts the historian Jan Vansina, "would such an attempt at massive but free and selective acculturation be seen again." The Kongo kings embraced elements of Catholicism to give their role a stronger ideological basis; they struggled to secure their succession along Portuguese lines. And yet, despite these ingenious, sometimes heroic efforts, the Kingdom of Kongo was destroyed, as completely as the empires of the Aztecs or the Incas. By 1678, a visitor to Mbanza Kongo reported that the capital had been sacked, and that elephants were roaming in the ruins, eating bananas off the abandoned trees.

In a word, the reason for the Kongo's demise was sugar. Sugar had been known to Europe from about the 10th century. Fulcher of Chartres, who accompanied the army of the First Crusade and chronicled their hardships, is one of the first Europeans to mention it:

   In those cultivated fields through which we passed during our
   march there were certain ripe plants which the common folk
   called "honey-cane" and which were very much like reeds.... In
   our hunger we chewed them all day because of the taste of
   honey. However, this helped but little.

But it was not until the late 15th and early 16th centuries that sugar replaced honey as the sweetener of choice, and thereafter it gradually became a staple. On that appetite the great sugar plantations of the Atlantic islands and Brazil flourished. And in their fields and mills, the institution of chattel slavery, which since Roman times had been all but extinguished, flickered back to life. One historian has written that the sugar plantations prefigured the transformation of European society, "a total remaking of its economic and social basis." For Africa, that transformation would be a bitter one: it was largely in order to meet the labor demands of the Atlantic island and Brazilian cane sugar plantations that the slave ships first came to Africa, leaving in their crowded wake a subdued and chastened continent. Four centuries of slavery had their genesis in the cane fields outside Jerusalem.

In the history of this period there is no more pivotal or enigmatic figure than Mvemba Nzinga. Known to generations of Africans by his Christian name, Afonso I, he ruled as king of the Kongo from 1506 to 1543. So little is known about him that he reflects to every age something of its own image: to contemporary Portuguese he was a figure of miracles, a soldier saint, a Christian scholar who knew more of the Bible than the priests who came to instruct him. Here is how one priest described him in a letter to King Manuel of Portugal:

   May Your Highness be informed that his Christian life is such
   that he appears to me not as a man but as an angel sent by the
   Lord to this kingdom to convert it, especially when he speaks
   and when he preaches. For I assure Your Highness that it is he
   who instructs us; better than we he knows the prophets and
   the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all the lives of the
   saints and all things regarding our Mother the Holy Church,
   so much that if Your Highness could observe him yourself,
   you would be filled with admiration. He expresses things so
   well and with such accuracy that it seems to me that the Holy
   Spirit speaks always through his mouth. I must say, Lord, that
   he does nothing but study and that many times he falls asleep
   over his books; he forgets what time it is to dine, when he is
   speaking of the things of God.

To later missionaries, reading these accounts in what appeared to them a lapsed and impenitent era, the age of Afonso was a gilded moment, the focus of a consoling nostalgia that was distinctly Christian in its location of an unredeemed present enfolded in a grace past and future. In the 1960s and 1970s, the image of Afonso underwent another sea change: to liberals, he appeared as a "forest Othello," too innocent and trusting to understand that his dream of bringing European civilization to Africa was doomed by European duplicity--by priests eager to swap missals for slaves. To pan-African nationalists, he became one of the first great figures of resistance, the black king of legend who straggled to save his people from bondage.

The most recent scholars to have studied the early history of the Kongo, parsing the few contemporary documents with sophisticated textual and analytic tools, present a more prosaic, complex picture. And perhaps it is because we see something of ourselves in the canny and prismatic spirit who emerges that the portrait seems at once more ambiguous and more realistic than earlier ones.

Afonso seized power in 1506, upon the death of his father, King Joao I. As the firstborn son of the king's principal wife, Afonso was ineligible for succession. By tradition, that right belonged to sons of the king's lesser wives. But Afonso had the Portuguese in his silk tabard pocket. As the governor of Nsundi, the north-easternmost province, Afonso had developed close ties with Europeans searching for Prester John. And as the firstborn, he was seen as the only legitimate heir by Portuguese priests, a perception he did much to encourage. Unlike his father and brothers, who had quickly lost interest in the mundele's religion because of its stricture against polygamy, Afonso maintained his commitment to Christianity. Accounts of the battle by which he won accession to the throne show how helpful that commitment was. Greatly outmanned, Afonso met his half-brother Mpanzu a Kitima outside the capital. A Portuguese priest described what happened next:

   Here Dom Afonso, and his handful of men, were ranged
   against the pagans and his brother; but before the latter had
   come face to face with the king, he was suddenly and entirely
   routed, and put to flight.... Being overcome by fright,
   Mpanzu rushed headlong into the ambush covered with
   stakes, which he himself had prepared for the Christians, and
   there, almost maddened with pain, the points of the stakes
   being covered with poison, ended his life.

Afonso and the early chroniclers tended to ascribe his victory to the Virgin Mary and St. James, "sent from God to his aid." But the presence of Portuguese guns and cavalry in the ranks probably didn't hurt Afonso, either. (In other accounts, Afonso had his brother put to death after the battle was won.)

Once in power, Afonso borrowed aggressively from Europe. He sent his sons to be educated in Portugal. One was consecrated Bishop of Uttica by Pope Leo X--Africa's first and only bishop for 400 years--and another became a professor of humanities at the University of Lisbon. Afonso himself seems to have studied everything. After reading five thick volumes of Portuguese law lent to him by a certain Balthasar de Castro, he quipped: "Castro, what is the punishment, in Portugal, for those whose feet touch the ground?" Afonso established schools in Mbanza Kongo and in the provincial capitals and sent the sons of hundreds of nobles to them. To prevent the boys from sneaking away during their lessons, he built high wooden fences around the schools. In 1526, he wrote to the king of Portugal asking for more grammarians.

Though he never wavered in his profession of faith, Afonso seems to have used Christianity like one of those foreground-background pictures that let you see two figures in profile or, alternatively, a vase. To missionaries, he appeared a devout Catholic; to Kongo, the beneficiary of a powerful new cult. He cleared the ancient thickets where the graves of the ancestors lay, and on them built churches. He called the new churches mbila, meaning tombs. He appointed the traditional high priest of the water dimension to be in charge of the maintenance of the churches and the provision of holy water for baptismal rites. The priest, who had initially opposed Christianity, became an ally. Afonso took the traditional domain of witchcraft, with its concern for worldly success, and onto it grafted Catholicism--a religion whose prayers and relics were understood as European spells and fetish objects. Then he gave the new cult prominence as his own personal spiritual realm and used it to legitimize his rule. Soon there were kingly cults, with their respective (Catholic) churches, in "every lordship and province" in the land. He destroyed the fetishes of his opponents, and though he presented himself to Europeans as a "married Christian monarch," he contrived to leave behind 300 grandchildren.

In 1507, a year after seizing power, Afonso sent to Portugal a shipload of copper and ivory. By 1511, however, he was already complaining of the behavior of certain Europeans living in his realm. In the first of 22 surviving letters between Afonso and successive Portuguese kings, he asked Manuel--the Portuguese king--to send an ambassador to the Kongo capable of restraining them. In 1512, responding in a lengthy regimento (a sort of protocol), Manuel specified the kinds of military, technical, and religious assistance Portugal was prepared to give Afonso. Accompanying the missive were an ambassador and a contingent of priests, soldiers, and technicians. The regimento asked about the prospects for acquiring slaves: "This expedition has cost us much," it concluded; "it would be unreasonable to send it home with empty hands." There were, in fact, few slaves available for purchase in the Kongo, but Afonso raided a neighboring kingdom after a border skirmish and acquired 600 prisoners. These slave captains probably sold to the plantation owners of Sao Tome and to the king of Akan, in West Africa, whose realm at that time produced roughly 10 percent of the world's annual gold output. (In the early 1500s, gold and sugar were, pound for pound, nearly equally valuable.)

Soon thereafter, settlers on the tiny island of Sao Tome, apparently impatient with the trickle of slaves Afonso was willing or able to export, opened their own slave depots at the mouth of the Congo River. Under Kongo law, only criminals and prisoners of war could be sold as slaves, so the Tomistas, many of whom were themselves exiled Portuguese criminals, bribed chiefs, encouraged crime, incited rebellions, and instigated wars. They also blackballed priests, killed messengers, refused to ship Afonso's other products (chiefly copper and ivory), defied the Portuguese king, and, along the way, introduced Africans to venereal disease. In 1515, Afonso wrote to Manuel asking that he be allowed to take over the island. In 1517, he asked to purchase a boat, so that he could at least trade with the Portuguese without interference from the Tomistas. "Most powerful and high prince and king my brother, it is due to the need of several things for the church that I am importuning you," wrote Afonso. "And this I probably would not do if I had a ship, since having it I would send for them at my own cost." In 1526, he wrote to Manuel's successor, King Joao III:

   The excessive freedom given by your factors and officials to
   the men and merchants who are allowed to come to this
   Kingdom ... is such ... that many of our vassals, whom we
   had in obedience, do not comply. We cannot reckon how
   great the damage is, since the above-mentioned merchants
   daily seize our subjects.... Thieves and men of evil conscience
   take them because they wish to possess the things and wares
   of this Kingdom.... They grab them and cause them to be
   sold; and so great, Sir, is their corruption and licentiousness
   that our country is being utterly depopulated ... to avoid this,
   we need from your Kingdoms no other than priests and people
   to teach in schools, and no other goods but wine and flour
   for the holy sacrament; that is why we beg your Highness to
   help and assist us in this matter, commanding the factors that
   they should send here neither merchants nor wares, because
   it is our will that in these kingdoms there should not be any
   trade in slaves nor market for slaves.

When this letter went unanswered Afonso tried to block the slave trade himself, but this was impractical and maybe impossible. The Kongo king's power derived from being the apex of the trading system. "If Afonso [had] ejected the Portuguese traders," writes the historian Anne Hilton, "the tributary governors would certainly have welcomed them and hastened the disintegration of the state." Instead, Afonso established a commission of three royal officials to examine the slaves and determine whether they were "truly war captives or kidnapped free men." The commission had little effect. Afonso continued to complain of the "inordinate covetousness" the slave trade had induced in his kingdom, spoke of slavery as "that great evil," and protested that "under cover of night" nobles and freemen were still being stolen from their homes. And in a letter Afonso wrote to accompany five of his nephews and a grandson on their journey to Portugal, he wrote:

   We beg of Your Highness to give them shelter and boarding and
   to treat them in accordance with their rank, as relatives of ours
   with the same blood ... and if we are reminding you of this and
   begging of your attention it is because ... we sent from this Kingdom
   to yours ... with a certain Antonio Veira ... more than
   twenty youngsters, our grandsons, nephews and relations who
   were the most gifted to learn the service of God ... The above
   mentioned Antonio Veira left some of these youngsters in the
   land of Panzamlumbo, our enemy, and it gave us great trouble
   later to recover them; and only ten of these youngsters were
   taken to your Kingdom. But about them we do not know so far
   whether they are alive or dead, nor what happened to them, so
   that we have nothing to say to their fathers and mothers.

Joao replied in 1529. He opened on a solicitous note. Did Afonso no longer want to trade with Portugal? If that was his wish, so be it. But he should know that to refuse to engage in trade was "contrary to the customs of all nations." Here Joao plunged his knife: "It would be no honor to Afonso or to his kingdom ... if it were said that the Kongo had nothing to trade and it were visited by only one ship per year. What glory, on the other hand, attended a kingdom capable of exporting 10,000 slaves annually!" Twisting the knife, Joao concluded, "If one of your nobles were to revolt against you, rich with merchandise from Portugal, what then would become of your glory and your power?"

Given the immensity of what followed--9 to 11 million Africans shipped to the New World in the next three centuries, millions more dead from wars fomented to secure slaves or from the horrors of the middle passage, an enduring legacy of hatred and grief--a novelist might be tempted to portray Afonso in the labyrinth of his palace, weighing the imponderable future of his kingdom against a trade whose sorrows he himself had experienced. Unfortunately, all we know for sure is that by the late 1520s, a thriving slave trade had evolved at Malebo Pool in the northeastern corner of the Kongo, and that this was a trade Afonso could--and did--profit from. For one thing, the slaves came from distant lands, so that the Kongo were themselves no longer subject to the depredations of the slavers. For another, the route the caravans took on their way to the slave ships passed through the capital, allowing Afonso to tax and regulate the trade. By the 1530s, 4,000 to 5,000 slaves were leaving Kongo shores each year, and the Milky Way, which traced the axis of their movement, was nicknamed Nzila Bazombo--the Road of the Slavers--for the men who drove them to the coast. In 1540, Affonso could boast to Joao of his kingdom's importance to the transatlantic trade: "Put all the Guinea countries on one side and only Kongo on the other and you will find that Kongo renders more than all the others put together ... no king in all these parts esteems Portuguese goods so much or treats the Portuguese so well as we do. We favor their trade, sustain it, and open markets and roads to Mpumbu where the slaves are traded."

After reading Afonso's eloquent and well-tempered letters protesting the trade, it is, of course, dismaying to come across a letter like this one. The transatlantic slave trade was so manifestly cruel that one wants to believe that from the start there was abundant resistance to it. This much can be said for Afonso: in an era in which slavery was universally accepted, he did everything in his power to see that his own people were safe; he resisted Portuguese slavers for 20 years, and only cooperated with them when he was faced with the prospect of his country's imminent collapse; in dire circumstances he managed not only to ensure his nation's survival, but saw to its prosperity. There is, as well, some evidence that Afonso may never have been as cooperative as the slavers would have liked, even after he had established the slave markets. In 1539, for example, eight Portuguese, led by a priest, burst into the cathedral where Afonso was attending High Mass (it was Easter Sunday) and sprayed the chancel with musket fire.

Ultimately, however, a letter like the one of 1540 shows how sentimental it may be to imagine that Afonso felt any qualms about the trade itself. Few nations made out better than the Kongo in the early years of slavery. "Through his monopoly on European products," writes Hilton, "Afonso was able to draw many of the neighboring groups into tribute and to create a greater Kongo which far exceeded the nuclear kingdom of the late 15th century and which added to his wealth, prestige, and power." By the late 1520s, the kingdoms of Ngola a Kiluanje in the south and Matamba in the southeast had sent tribute. In the next decade, several states north of the Zaire, including a prime copper-producing region, had also sent presents, and so had groups from the eastern plateau and the southern mountains. By the time Afonso died, sometime in the early 1540s, the Kongo was one of the most powerful kingdoms in Africa, its people among the wealthiest, and its position seemingly unassailable. It would not be so for long.

In 1568, a mysterious ethnic group from Central Africa attacked the Kongo, and like barbarians at the gates of Rome, laid waste to the countryside and sacked the capital. They attacked with such speed that the king of Kongo had hardly any warning of the invasion or time to raise his troops. The court, assorted European merchants and missionaries, and thousands of ordinary citizens of Mbanza Kongo fled to an island on the Congo River, where they suffered from chronic hunger and the bubonic plague. For three years, crocodiles feasted on the hundreds of dead and dying who were cast into the surrounding waters, and the Kongo king sent one SOS after another to his royal brother in Portugal. Eventually a 600-man contingent of Portuguese soldiers arrived via Sao Tome, rallied the remnants of the Kongo army, and routed the invaders. It turned out, comic book style, that the sound of gunfire frightened the "cannibals" half to death.

The new, post-restoration Kongo resumed its role as a primary exporter of slaves to the New World. But the lesson of the Portuguese repulsion of the invaders was clear: Europeans might not yet be able to invade and occupy African states, but they held the balance of power among them. That lesson was not lost on the powers emerging on the African scene in the early 17th century. By now, the trade had grown so lucrative that both the Portuguese and the Kongolese found themselves competing for business. (The volume of the African slave trade tripled from 1500 to 1575, and doubled again in the next quarter century.) French and British pirates, like Andrew Battell and Sir John Hawkins (who was knighted for his piracy by Queen Elizabeth I), raided the Portuguese cargo ships. The Dutch, nearing their moment of global ascendancy, waged war on Portugal in Europe and abroad. Meanwhile, kingdoms to the north and south of the Kongo emerged as major slave-producing regions, and innumerable tiny ports along the West African coast hung out the slaver shingle as well. Most of these places could sell slaves for less than the Kongo because slaves elsewhere didn't have as long a march to arrive at the coastal depots, and weren't as heavily taxed as those that passed through Mbanza Kongo. (Prices for slaves varied dramatically over the years, but tended to fall during the 17th century and rise again in the 18th.)

Pushed out of the slave trade, the Kongo staved off decline for a half century by producing cloth that the Portuguese exchanged for slaves up and down the African coast, but eventually lost even this advantage to European and other African weavers. Gradually, the authority of the Kongo state frittered away. In 1615, the Portuguese colonized the shell-producing island of Luanda, which for two centuries had been the source of the Kongo's nzimbu money, and also began importing shells from Brazil and India. In four years, the value of the Kongo currency plummeted by 80 percent. Sensing the Kongo's weakness, Queen Nzinga of Angola annexed the Kongo's southern provinces and siphoned off slaves from the interior. By the early 17th century, Angola was furnishing a quota of 12,000 slaves per year, most of them Kongolese subjects, to European merchants.

In addition, the Portuguese began distributing guns more widely, which altered the balance of power away from the capital and toward the provinces. The Kongo's coastal province of Sonyo declared independence, and neighboring states that had once formed part of the greater Kongo broke free as well. Battles for succession harrowed the Kongo; eight kings ruled in the period between 1614 and 1641.

In 1665, a bitter dispute over mineral rights with the Portuguese governor of Luanda, led to a final, disastrous conclusion. In a Manifesto of War dated July 13, 1665, the then-Kongolese king, Antonio I, ordered all able-bodied Kongo men to enlist in a fight to protect their "lands, possessions, women and children, their lives and their liberties." According to later Portuguese estimates, 100,000 Kongo, 190 musket-bearing mulattos, and 29 Portuguese answered his call. On October 30, Antonio and his troops met the combined forces of Luanda and Portugal in fields outside Mbwila, a market town in north-central Luanda. It was drizzling and Antonio hoped the rain would dampen the Portuguese guns. It did not. The Kongo lost 5,000 men, including Antonio, his two sons and two nephews, four of the seven governors, various court officials, 95 title holders, and 400 other nobles. Portuguese losses were minimal.

The Kingdom of Kongo never recovered. It splintered into hundreds of competing chieftainships, all led by infantes claiming descent from Afonso I, all variously cooperative or mercenary, and all dependent on the slave trade for their survival. Soon there seemed to be a slave factory in every village in the land, and the trade fed, and fed off of, a civil war that verged on complete anarchy. Over the years, visitors to the capital Mbanza Kongo reported that the population there varied from 100 to 5,000 people, depending on the transitory success of the local chief in reviving the idea of the kingdom. But as a legitimate, viable political entity, the Kongo died in 1665.

Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Kongo, no longer a state on a map, became, as it had been before Cao, wholly a place of the imagination. Once, Africa was a land of a million strange shadows, known only by the stories travelers overheard in distant marketplaces and repeated in tallow-lit taverns far from home. Citied and peopled by countless Scheherazades, the continent the medieval cartographers drew recalls a time when the words "wondrous" and "awful" were synonymous: on the ancient maps, the places labeled terra incognita were never blank, but populated residences of the imagination. The explorers who plotted the continent's profile and sounded its coastlines expected to be astonished, and were. Imagine what a giraffe, or an elephant, or a manatee looked like to the first Europeans to see them. Imagine Bartolomeu Dias rounding the Cape of Good Hope and seeing the African coast stretch northward--after traveling 5,000 miles in a ship no larger than the average American house. Imagine feeling the warmth of the Indian Ocean, and seeing the dhows of Mombassa and Zanzibar that even then had sailed as far as India. But behind the explorers came the missionaries and the slavers (who were often the same person), and with no more than the usual dose of arrogance and greed they shriveled the continent to the size of their hearts. "Africans being the most lascivious of all human beings," wrote one slaver, "may it not be imagined that the cries they let forth at being torn from their wives, proceed from the dread that they will never have the opportunity of indulging their passions in the country to which they are embarking?"

In 1508, when a young black woman arrived in Scotland (off a wrecked pirate ship, possibly), King James IV held and won a royal joust in honor of "that ladye with the mekle lippis." A century later, Shakespeare and Rembrandt gave to their portraits of Africans an intelligence and dignity that later centuries would scarcely credit, and dozens of lesser painters of the Italian and Northern Renaissance sprinkled their canvases with images of blacks that were no more or less condescending than their image of Europeans. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the pope and the secular kings of Europe welcomed African potentates to their courts, and treated them with all the deference due royalty. But slavery needed a myth to sustain and justify it. So in the bedrooms of the Brazilian sugar estates, where oriental drapery wilted from balustrades in the humid air, and from the lecterns of the cathedrals that the missionaries built, stories took root of the African as a tom-tom player and a devil-worshiper, an uncivilized savage, a sex-fiend and cheerful submissive. "The people of Guinea," wrote one German scientist in the 18th century, "are more insensible than others towards pain and natural evils, as well as towards injurious and unjust treatment. In short, there are none so well adapted to be the slaves of others, and who therefore have been armed with so much passive obedience." And Thomas Carlyle proclaimed, dizzily, "Before the West Indies could grow a pumpkin for any Negro, how much European heroism had to spend itself in obscure battle; to sink, in mortal agony, before the jungles, the putrescences and waste savageries could become arable, and the Devils in some measure chained up!"

In this ideological transformation the Kingdom of the Kongo played a pivotal role. For it was with the discovery and exploitation of the Kongo, coming hard upon the establishment of the Atlantic sugar plantation, that the European demand for slaves was rekindled, and the identification of slavery and race made explicit. In the century prior to 1482, the number of black slaves taken annually from Africa numbered, at most, in the hundreds. Most worked in Mediterranean Europe as household servants, hospital orderlies, garbage collectors, or in similar menial positions. Color at that time was no bar to servitude: Greeks, Turks, Russians, Slavs, and Cretans were also enslaved, and most of the very first slaves shipped to Brazil were white. But after 1482, the number of slaves coming from Africa rose dramatically. By 1550, a Portuguese ditty could sum up Europe's changing perception of Africa, and of the Kongo in particular:

   uns aos outros se vendem
   & ha muitos merdadores
   que nisso somente entemdem
   & hos enganam & prendem
   & trazem aos tratadores.

   (They sell each other
   there are many merchants
   whose specialty it is
   to trick and capture them
   and sell them to the slavers.)

Thus the question of who could enslave whom, and under what conditions, which had been a topic of lively debate in the early years of the European discovery and conquest of the New World, received a decisive answer. The die was cast: even today--some 300 years after the Battle of Mbwila--thriller novels and college bars still borrow the Kongo's name for its suggestion of the primitive. The old kingdom, its territory neatly bisected by the border between present-day Angola and Zaire, continues to exert an atavistic attraction, like an out-of-the-way theater in a once-fashionable neighborhood, where, on sporadic afternoons, the lights darken and the silent films still run.

In the decades and centuries that followed, neither war nor peace would succeed in reuniting the kingdom. And yet, however degraded, the idea of resurrecting the Kongo never entirely died. In the 1950s, F. Clyde Egerton, a visitor to Mbanza Kongo, reported of the former capital:

   It has completely lost any romantic character it ever had, and
   is now no more than a straggling village. The walled cities
   have disappeared and the eleven churches with them. What is
   left of the Cathedral is unimposing, just the chancel arch and
   some low remains of chocolate-coloured walls. It is surrounded
   by the unkempt grass which is everywhere to be seen
   in the dry season; and the graves of the early kings of the
   Congo, rough, obelisk-like monuments in an untidy churchyard,
   look unkempt and neglected also.

Egerton wrote that he had spoken to an "old man of nearly seventy who sported a magnificent white mustache and who called himself Dom Pedro VII, the last king of Congo, but he was rumoured to be an impostor." He lived in an unpretentious house near the ruins of the cathedral. Around the walls of his house hung copies of paintings of Portuguese royalty. Egerton was shown the "regalia," which he described as a "royal robe trimmed with white fur, which looked more like rabbit than ermine, a silver crown, a sceptre, and miscellaneous utensils, none of which looked more than a hundred years old." The king, who died in 1955, was given a small subsidy by the Portuguese authorities, which he supplemented by growing a little coffee and rice.

DAVID LOPES IS A FREELANCE WRITER LIVING IN LAWRENCE, KANSAS.

COPYRIGHT 2002 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group