sponsors. He noted how closely his own victory resembled the 1139 triumph of Afonso Henriques that had created the first Christian dynasty of Portugal.20 In that foundational myth, Afonso Henriques had called on Christ, who appeared and helped defeat the Moors, unifying Portugal under the House of Burgundy. Additionally, although not mentioned explicitly in Afonso’s letters, the white cross in the sky that appeared to his adversaries was the same image that had appeared to the Roman emperor Constantine before his victory that established Rome as a Christian realm. Thus, Afonso’s narrative of Christian triumph over heathen forces linked Kongo on a footing equal to other, even paradigmatic, Christian kingdoms.21
Though some might think it a bit strained to believe Afonso was asserting his place with Constantine and the full Catholic brotherhood of kings, he used the language of familial bonds throughout his other correspondence with both Lisbon and Rome. For example, along with a 1512 letter he sent to Rome, he also sent ambassadors to Pope Julius II pointedly belaboring the obvious, “as is the custom, and in necessary obedience, like the other Christian kings do.” In the same letter he referred to King Manuel I of Portugal as “my much beloved brother,” a sign of their equivalent standings as siblings under their holy father, the pope.22 In the inclusive terms of the Kongo classes of kinship, brotherhood, the relationship of sibling equality, was social or political rather than biological.
King of Kongo over Master of Spirits
Afonso’s letter to the “lords” of the Kongo confederation similarly placed him in the worldwide brotherhood of Christ, but in a nuanced way that emphasized the power of the Catholic God and his own personal access to it, to the exclusion of the Mwissikongo, to whom he was no longer beholden. With this pointed letter to the Kongo titleholders, Afonso sent along a coat of arms that he had requested from the king of Portugal in his now-lost letter from 1509. He referred to this visual image of his thinking in three of the 1512 letters, and in the one addressed to Kongo senhores, he explained each of the heraldic elements composing it. The meanings he expressed in this assemblage of symbols, elements familiar to Europeans but not obvious to the senhores in Kongo, were a flamboyant representation of his 1509 victory over Mpanzu a Kitima, its authenticating value in Kongo political theory represented in a Christian format (see plate 1).
The blue field (the dark band at the top of the shield) represented the sky, or the Catholic heaven, and the white cross on it was that of Constantine. The shells flanking the white cross at the edges of the blue field represented Saint James. The five arms holding swords signified Saint James’s company of knights, and the swirling flows of red symbolized the blood that was spilled. At the bottom of the shield, a brace of Kongo “idols,” both broken at the waist, flanked the blue-and-gold emblem of Portugal. Finally, above the helmet of iron protecting all were an additional five arms with swords piercing into the margins, representing the five wounds of Christ.23
Although the symbolism in this emblem can appear entirely Portuguese, iron swords and crosses were also thoroughly familiar in Kongo. In fact, the five swords at the top of the composition, which stylistically were probably Portuguese in origin, were considered the principal components of the image by Kongo nobles, and over time became the insignia of Catholic royalty there. The composition of the coat of arms was another example of how Afonso joined parallel symbolic fields additively in a single compound image, at once Christian and Kongo, with neither register supplanting the other. The composite coat of arms expressed the continuity in Kongo political theory that Afonso attained by incorporating the unprecedentedly novel presence of the Portuguese within a local symbolic frame. The reconciliation of Kongo past and Catholic present and intended future was an exemplary execution of accomplishing radical change additively.
Since authority in Kongo derived from mastery of the power of the past and performance of it in the present, Afonso would have been expected to embody and enact the formulaic procedures that protected and empowered him as the guardian of the new Catholic spirit whose power he infused throughout the community. One of his most effective actions was to distribute objects allowing baptized individuals to access the Catholic saints. The iconography of the iron swords, displayed prominently on Afonso’s coat of arms, invoked Saint James’s miraculous intervention above Afonso’s men as they had rushed into battle, and the swords were simultaneously intelligible to Kongo audiences as objects powerful in themselves. Ironworking, especially smelting, as visualized in the helmet and the swords on the coat of arms, was seen throughout central Africa as the creation of power objects and thus considered a very potent and dangerous skill. Several political traditions, including Kongo’s, identified their mythologized founding and empowering heroes as blacksmiths.24 The association of iron with authority and power in European attributes of nobility, as expressed in images of swords or battle armor like helmets, paralleled practices in Kongo.25 Afonso’s genius was to add and integrate European ideas of political hierarchy into the Kongo context. With Catholicism, as he presented it, he had renewed Kongo, just as all his predecessors had reinvigorated and empowered the continuing and aggregating series of mani Kongo.
Afonso continued his strategy of presenting Catholicism as a renewed Kongo after 1512 by deploying or—as Kongo saw it—performing the symbols and institutions of the Catholic Church. As part of this carefully orchestrated campaign of embodying Catholicism in human forms, he strategically chose which orders of European priests he allowed into his domain. When Afonso’s father accepted baptism as a Catholic in 1491, the Portuguese priests in attendance included a balance of Franciscans, canons of Saint John the Evangelist (the Bons Homines), and perhaps Dominicans as well.26 Kongo remained open to multiple religious orders until 1512, but then Afonso associated himself further with European images of iron and ironworking by adopting the canons of Saint John the Evangelist as his priests of choice from their arrival in 1509 to 1532. Saint Eloi (Saint Eligius in English) was the patron saint of the primary house of the “Loios” in Portugal. Eloi was the patron saint of blacksmiths and wielded a smith’s hammer or other ironworking tools as prominent elements in his iconography.27 Coming from the Loios monastery in Évora, Afonso’s chosen priests would have carried images of Saint Eloi depicting iron objects like a blacksmith’s anvil or tongs for pulling hot, workable iron out of a fire. Since in Africa iron was a potent means of empowering political positions, European priests who traveled throughout the affiliated regions of Kongo on behalf of Afonso carrying images of a blacksmith could have served, even unwittingly, both as embodiments of his new Catholic Kongo and as the epitome of the mani Kongo predecessors entrusted to him.
To his European sponsors Afonso presented himself as a king. To the people of Kongo he was a mani Kongo. His duality was no contradiction in the additive Kongo cosmology, and the specific function of the mani Kongo as representative of the Kongo network to outsiders both visible and invisible, present and past, made his strategies for incorporating foreign visitors and their empowering objects a straightforward continuation of the inherited Kongo arrangements entrusted to him. The clear emphasis on continuity for the Kongo “lords” and povos was necessary to balance the radical changes he made. However, he also encouraged centralizing tactics that overrode the basic diversity of the Kongo political composite. He promoted Catholic baptism and the burning of “idols,” both of which removed the accumulated past of the Kongo components from the polity’s present and future, to leave Catholic power and authority centered on himself alone, as a king.
His coat of arms explicitly claimed personal authority as the monarch over a Kongo without the independent and mediating loyalties to the communities in the composite. The two broken figures at its bottom proclaimed a homogeneous and exclusionary Christian layer over the Kongo polity’s diverse components. Carved wooden figures like these, today called nkisi (singular; minkisi plural), can be manipulated as physical embodiments of hidden power.28 They are often wooden, human-shaped figures that an nganga, or a professional trained in fabricating instruments for contacting the intangible world, makes powerful by placing spiritually charged materials, often residuals of human energy such as woven cloth or fingernails, in a cavity in the figure, often in the stomach, the site of ravenous greed. Nganga is typically mistranslated as “witch,” but the term is better
