Did the West bring civilisation to Africa as it claims or did it simply refuse to acknowledge the civilisations that were already there?
In this article, we take a look into the story of the Kingdom of Kongo, long before Portuguese ships graced the shores of Central Africa. History has it, and there is an abundance of evidence that Kongo was already a powerful and sophisticated state, with its own political institutions, systems of governance, trading networks and religious traditions. So it was that when the Portuguese arrived on its soil in the late fifteenth century, they encountered a kingdom with which they could negotiate, trade and even form diplomatic relations. The meeting of these two powers forged a relationship that would later take shape on the pages of history. Christianity entered the royal court and Portuguese merchants entered Kongo’s markets. Within a few decades, the reigning monarch over this Kingdom, Afonso I, would begin a direct line of communication directly to the Portuguese crown, protesting the gradual degeneration of their diplomatic relationship.
The Kingdom of Kongo or Congo, as it would later come to be called, was founded around 1390 CE in the western part of Central Africa. Its founding was the result of an arranged marriage between Nima a Nzima of the Mpemba Kasi and Luqueni Luansanze, the daughter of Nsa-cu-Clau, chief of the Mbata, a marriage that allied two separate kingdoms of Kikongo speaking people.
Located in today’s Angola, the Kingdom of Kongo gradually grew geographically as well as in power, sponsored by a series of conquests, diplomatic relations and voluntary inclusion of neighbouring states.
Kongo Encounters the Portuguese
In 1482, Portuguese explorers, particularly Diogo Cão of Portugal, reached the estuary of the Congo River, coming into first contact with the Kingdom of Kongo. By then, Kongo had become one of the largest and most centralised states in Central Africa, roughly a hundred thousand square kilometres, and was governed by a manikongo (or Mwene Kongo - the title of the ruler of Kongo), who governed through provincial dukes and counts, taxed a currency of nzimbu shells, and commanded weavers and ironworkers whose craft impressed the visitors.
Nzinga a Nukwu was the manikongo during this period and his contact with the Portuguese would eventually culminate in his conversion to Christianity eight years later. This conversion, followed by his baptism, would also lead to the Christianisation of the entire Kingdom of Kongo as well as to the adoption of the name Joao I by Nzinga a Nukwu as a Christian name modeled after the reigning monarch of Portugal. Similarly, nobles in Kongo would also begin to change their names to Portuguese variations and adopt European titles such as ‘Count,’ ‘Duke,’ and ‘King.’
Unlike forced conversions in other regions of Africa, the conversions in Kongo were voluntary and without issues. However, history has it that Nzinga a Nukwu eventually renounced Christianity in his later years, partly due to the conflict the religion brought to the native religion that preceded it within the region. Despite this, when Nzinga a Nukwu died around 1506, Afonso his son, also adopted Christianity just like his father, and against his brother’s wishes to retain their traditional religion. This stance would cause internal strife within Kongo from then and into the centuries that followed.
As time passed, Portugal’s hold on Kongo became stronger through religion and trade. Kingship and religion became closely tied, with Portuguese clergy denouncing Kongo Kings that either refused to or turned away from Christianity to the Roman Pope. For example, King Diogo I, who ruled Kongo between 1545 and 1561, was chastised by the clergy for turning away from the Church and for supporting an anti-Portuguese position. Decades later, King Álvaro III, who ruled from 1614 to 1622, would face similar opposition, this time over his attempts to exercise greater control over the local clergy.
However, there are arguments that the reports of the Portuguese clergy do not necessarily tell the whole story. Many historians have argued that Catholicism never became as dominant within Kongo as Portuguese missionaries claimed. Christianity was not simply accepted as a replacement for the religious traditions that had existed in Kongo for generations. Rather, it was understood by the Kongolese as another religious tradition existing alongside the many other cults, beliefs and practices already present within the kingdom. Over time, elements of Christianity were incorporated into existing Kongolese religious practices, producing a form of religious life that was neither entirely European nor entirely separate from the traditions that preceded it.
King Afonso I
Born in 1460, King Afonso I, also known as ‘the Apostle of Kongo’ was the sixth manikongo of Kongo, who ruled the kingdom between 1509 and 1543. He was born Mvemba a Nzinga but in 1491, he and his father, Nzinga a Nkukwu, were baptised into the Christian faith and adopted Christian names, Afonso and João, respectively.
It is worth dwelling on how this happened, because it is the opposite of the usual picture. No army forced it. A sovereign African king weighed the economic and spiritual offer in front of him and made a strategic decision from the top of his own power structure. His queen, remembered in Christian sources as Leonor, reportedly had to press her hesitant husband before the women of the court were permitted baptism too. Because the choice came from the crown, Christianity did not arrive as a foreign imposition the locals resented. Instead, it fused with what was already there. Both religions enjoyed a striking similarity: the cross. In Kongo cosmology, the cross was a symbol of the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors. As a result, what emerged over the following generations was a genuinely Kongolese Catholicism.
This fusion became even more pronounced during King Afonso’s reign, who had become even more passionate about his new found faith than his father. His faith would lead him to passionately advocate for the conversion of the entire Kongo population.
Under his father’s reign, Afonso had served in various political roles, including in an administrative capacity in the province of Nsundi. This meant that by the time he ascended the throne in 1506, right after his father’s death, he had already become well-versed in political affairs. His succession was not entirely straightforward. Following his father’s death, Afonso was involved in a struggle for the throne with his half-brother, Mpanzu a Kitima, before securing his position as king. Combining his faith, diplomatic relationship with Portugal and his political knowledge, Afonso’s reign decidedly brought a new season of cultural and economic prosperity to Kongo. Nobles in particular enjoyed the privilege of sailing to Portugal and back to Kongo. He also sent diplomatic missions to Portugal and maintained correspondence with European rulers and religious authorities, using these relationships to strengthen Kongo’s position abroad.
Afonso governed like a man building an institution. He founded schools for boys and, notably, for girls. He sent nobles and his own children to study in Europe. One of them, his son Henrique, was elevated to bishop by the Vatican around 1518 — the first Catholic bishop of sub-Saharan African birth, and, tellingly, the last from the region for two and a half centuries afterward.
Recognising the benefits the Portuguese could bring to building his nation, Afonso sought to make their relationship stronger. While he sought knowledge and skills that could strengthen his kingdom through craftsmen, teachers, physicians and priests, the Portuguese had completely different interests. On the island of São Tomé, Portuguese sugar plantations were expanding rapidly, creating an enormous demand for enslaved labour. Portuguese merchants increasingly looked to Kongo and neighbouring territories to meet this demand, placing pressure on a kingdom whose own rules already distinguished between people who could legitimately be enslaved and those who were freeborn.
This was where the relationship between Kongo and Portugal began to change. What Afonso had hoped would bring his kingdom knowledge, education, Christianity and closer diplomatic ties was increasingly being shaped by the demand for enslaved people.
The Beginning of Slavery in Kongo
Around the same period that Portugal encountered Kongo, it was also just discovering a new source of wealth: sugar. To facilitate a trade in sugar, the Portuguese moved to take over uninhabited islands along the coast, particularly São Tomé, where the climate proved well suited to growing sugarcane. But sugar demanded labour, so they also began using enslaved Africans to provide the needed labour. As production expanded, so did the demand for people to work the plantations and Kongo became one of the many sources from which this labour was obtained.
History documents very little about how slavery came to be in Kongo but we do know that slaves did already exist within its precincts as a result of conquests undertaken, especially during the 1400s. With the coming of the Portuguese, however, Kongo’s slave trade began to expand as Portuguese demand for enslaved labour grew, particularly as São Tomé’s plantation economy developed. King Afonso I was the reigning monarch of Kongo during this period. Together with King Manuel I of Portugal, an agreement was reached under which the Crown controlled the supply of slaves. This arrangement tightened the Crown's control over the lucrative trade in both slavery and sugar in the region, while Portuguese merchants operating from São Tomé sought to acquire captives from Kongo and neighbouring territories. This growing demand placed increasing pressure on the systems that Kongo had previously used to regulate who could be enslaved and who could not.
By the 1500s, trouble was already brewing in Kongo. The slave trade had expanded so much that King Afonso had a herculean task of protecting his subjects — the freeborn — from slavery. Slavery had also become such a thriving business that slaves were now being exported to Europe and the Americas. At first, the export rate was not a problem for Kongo. The kingdom itself was in the midst of a series of conquests and expansions that was providing a steady supply of slaves. As Kongo expanded through conquest, the kingdom was able to supply the growing trade with captives taken from outside its core population. This arrangement, however, became increasingly difficult to maintain as Portuguese demand grew.
Meanwhile, the trade restriction in Kongo was proving unfavourable to Portuguese merchants in the area. So these settlers began to explore other locations for the purchase of slaves. One of the areas they found lay to the South of Kongo, along the Kwanza River, within a territory the Kongo claimed as part of its kingdom but where its actual control was limited. There, a new kingdom was emerging known as Ndongo. Both Kongo and Portugal called this region, ‘Angola,’ taking the name from its ruler’s title, ‘ngola.’ The rulers of Ndongo on the other hand, challenged Kongo’s claims to authority over the region, aided by merchants from São Tomé, who increasingly sought access to its supply of captives.
King Afonso’s Letters
In 1526, King Afonso started expressing concern about the trade agreements. He sent several letters to King João III of Portugal, laying complaints about how Portuguese merchants were failing to respect the restrictions imposed by the Kongo monarchy and were contributing to the illegal capture and sale of his subjects. In one of his letters, Afonso complained that Portuguese merchants were taking “our natives” as well as the sons of nobles, his relatives and other freeborn people and selling them to Portuguese traders. He warned that the kingdom was being severely damaged by the practice and asked João III to intervene. He further told the Portuguese king, as one Christian monarch to another, that he wanted no merchants in his kingdom at all, only priests and teachers, and nothing shipped in but what the Mass required: wine and flour. He asked that the slave traders be expelled.
Portugal’s reply was chillingly practical. There was, João III observed, an endless supply of Africans to be had elsewhere; and if Afonso insisted on choking off the trade, Portugal would simply cut its commerce with Kongo down to a single ship a year. To solve the problem, Afonso ordered that Portuguese buyers should first present the slaves they intended to purchase to officials of the Kongo court so that it could be established whether they were legitimately enslaved or were free people who had been unlawfully captured.
The Portuguese merchants were not the only ones contributing to the problem. Some Kongolese nobles also participated in the expanding trade, using their access to Portuguese goods and markets to acquire wealth and influence. The growing demand for enslaved people therefore began to undermine the monarchy's ability to control the trade within its own kingdom.
Between 1568 and 1570, during King Alvaro’s reign, Kongo became exposed to a number of internal wars. The Jaja invasion was one of the most prominent of these in which a group, referred to in historical sources as the Jaja invaded Kongo and captured its capital city, Mbaza Kogno. This invasion resulted in an economic situation that was so severe that the Kongolese resorted to selling members of their own families into slavery just to survive. As a result, quite a number of Kongolese were sold into slavery during this period. King Alvaro, who like all the other kings before him, had sworn during coronation to protect all of his subjects, would send emissaries to São Tomé, from time to time, to ransom his people.
After 1590, the situation within Kongo became even more difficult. The relationship Kongo had built with the Europeans was primarily reliant on slave trade, hence, enslaved people had become one of the few forms of wealth that could be traded for goods, weapons and other resources from Europe — in facts, slaves were the only commodity foreign powers were willing to trade for. For Kongo, this meant that the same trade that threatened its subjects, had also become indispensable to its economy. Slave trade had also become the only way Kongolese kings could keep their influence with Portugal, which they desperately needed to quell internal rebellions as well as to protect them from other colonial powers.
This created a contradiction at the heart of Kongo’s relationship with Europe. The monarchy needed access to European goods, weapons and military support, yet the trade that helped secure those relationships was increasingly dependent on the enslavement of the very people the king was expected to protect.
However, Kongo had stopped its ambitious conquests in the early 1600s which meant their steady supply of foreign slaves was running dry. By the middle of the 1600s, it had become quite normal for Kongolese to be sold as slaves. Infractions such as disrespecting nobles or rebelling against central authorities could earn one the status of a slave, creating a preeminent danger of slavery that resulted in further instability within the kingdom. During this period of instability, quite a number of Kongolese were captured and shipped across the Atlantic by Portuguese, British and Dutch slave traders.
By then, the problem Afonso had warned Portugal about had grown far beyond the actions of a few merchants. The slave trade had become woven into the political and economic life of Kongo itself, weakening the authority of the monarchy and placing more and more Kongolese at risk of enslavement.
Afonso’s letters therefore leave behind something unusual in the history of the early Atlantic trade: the written testimony of an African king who had welcomed Christianity, education and diplomatic ties with Europe, only to find himself confronting the consequences of the commercial relationship those ties had created. His protest did not stop the trade. But it left a record of Kongo’s attempt to resist the transformation of its people into commodities, written in the words of the king himself.
