who heals individuals of physical or emotional pain arising from dissension and immorality in their communities.29 Like modern doctors, nganga did their work as trained specialists bound by a professional code of ethics where malpractice could result in the loss of the community’s trust in them and, thus, of their powers as well as their livelihoods. An nganga seen to be doing harm would be prosecuted as an evil witch. Individuals used these powerful minkisi to draw on the ambient past for protection or intervention during times of stress in a manner not unlike Catholic devotion to images and statues of saints in similarly troubling circumstances.
The minkisi figures on Afonso’s coat of arms were broken at the waist, torsos hanging upside down next to the edges of the white field of the Portuguese crest. In Afonso’s 1512 letter to Pope Julius II, he claimed to have abstained from all things forbidden by the Church, which, for the Catholic priests in Kongo, above all banned polygyny and what they saw as worship of minkisi idols. Since Afonso allowed polygyny to continue to maintain the political composite even after his conversion, his coat of arms professed his abstention from evil in destroying the “idols” central to Kongo community life.30 Further, he later supported his Catholic priests in their attempts to discredit nganga in Kongo and destroy nkisi power figures, and to replace them with Christian baptism and crucifixes, rosaries, and other Catholic objects of devotion. As Afonso added Christian symbols and Portuguese Catholic advisers to the Kongo context, he endorsed the definition of broken minkisi figures as sinful idols worthy of extermination by Catholic clergy. In this daring destruction he defied powers unquestioned in the previous Kongo worldview—not least the ancestors invoked through the minkisi—and presented them as competing rather than complementary. The broken figures were a direct statement of monarchy, replacing rather than adding to the composite polity of the past. However, this direct statement of personal authority was only a small marginal image on the larger coat of arms. The very clear message of the broken figures can easily be made ambiguous, or entirely overlooked, in the other positive symbols of power with the shells of Saint James, the arms holding swords, or Constantine’s cross. The coat of arms ruined the old forms of nkisi, but now operated as an nkisi in its own right by providing local communities a tangible link to the Catholic powers that gave Afonso his victory.
Even as Afonso’s severed figures demonstrated a break with a past condemned as idolatrous, in the Kongo understanding of continuity, it was still necessary to placate ancestors, who could not be neglected. In a world where the past lived on through the present, and the ancestors lived on through their descendants, the minkisi had to be replaced by new objects with new powers that provided trust to replace what communities placed in their ancestral inheritance. The minkisi were often replaced with Catholic crucifixes reconfigured in local forms, in many cases hanging figures of Kongo ancestors on the crucifix.31 Afonso disabled the previous form of power (nkisi) in his own coat of arms by showing these figures of power as severed, or “disarmed,” suggesting his personal domination over remnants of the past. He was explicitly claiming to have conquered the local Kongo powers by excluding alternative beliefs and affirming monotheistic Christianity—centered on a singularity of revelation, of God, and of monarchy—that reinforced his personal monopoly on power: “And the broken black idols on the same shield as Portugal, signified that [God’s] will caused the change and their destruction.”32 The image was a step toward reconfiguring the composite political space of Kongo under a single monarchical power with access to an exclusive Christian power of the past, invoking Afonso Henriques, Saint James, and Constantine as a panoply of his predecessors.
Afonso sent his priests out into the affiliated regions of Kongo to convert people to Catholicism, or—in Kongo terms—to enroll them in the new protective community of the Church. Populations everywhere turned out for baptisms in large numbers. He instructed his proselytizers, both European priests and Kongo catechists, to persecute the local nganga and especially to destroy their minkisi, as he proclaimed on his coat of arms. Since people in Kongo made no distinctions among psychological well-being, physical health, and community consensus, replacing the nganga with Catholic priests, who presented themselves as new nganga, may well have impressed the local people as no sort of upheaval at all, but simply another layer in an ongoing additive history.
When Afonso I forced the component communities of the Kongo polity to turn to his new regime built around the authority and sacraments of the Catholic Church, he was targeting inherited local beliefs and practices in ways similar to the efforts of contemporaneous monarchs in Europe. They were entrusted with protecting and patronizing Christianity, and so they persecuted folk healers as witches, imprisoning them in large numbers, forcing them to recant or admit their alleged sins under pain of torture, and even putting many to death. The sixteenth-century witch hunts in Germany and the Spanish Inquisition were relentless pursuits of perceived heretics. All these persecutions of subjects suspected of other loyalties imposed religious and social conformity as parts of the growing authority of European monarchies. Their efforts ran parallel to Afonso’s attempt to create a comprehensive Catholic domain of power in Kongo by persecuting nganga and destroying the old confederation. Afonso was earning the status he claimed as a zealous equal of his Catholic brethren in Europe, though without the cultural resources of a thousand years of the faith.
While Afonso dispersed his iron-bearing Catholic nganga throughout the polity to replace its components’ diverse minkisi, he imposed equally radical policies within the walls of Mbanza Kongo to eliminate the residues of the empowering past that it constituted and to channel all remaining power through himself as a Catholic king. Previous mani Kongo had assiduously maintained the grave cults of their predecessors that they harbored. They cared for a grove of palm trees that grew up over the burials and concealed the ceremonies conducted to contact the spirits of preceding mani Kongo hovering there in the dimness. Afonso had the palm grove cleared and built a stone cathedral over the sacred graveyard.
By placing the cathedral over the graves, he may have meant to continue the established practice of venerating his predecessors, setting the new Catholic communion in the proven site of communication with the past. The cathedral, and the prayers and masses conducted within it, were intended to commune with the Christian God just as Afonso’s predecessors had contacted the animating spirits of the polity on that spot.33 His destruction of the nkisi as “idols” may have meant that he was trying to replace the aggregated Kongo political order in a way that concentrated power in his own person through a cunning strategy of ambiguity that would allow doubting communities in the composite to feel that he was continuing to incorporate or respect them. On this interpretation, Afonso was adding another visual positioning of himself as Catholic king literally on top of the venerable legacy of past mani Kongo.
Afonso had hinted as early as the letters of 1512 that he intended to concentrate power in himself as a Catholic king. In so doing he would dominate the Kongo political confederation well beyond his momentary guardianship of the mani Kongo. He proclaimed this enduring monarchical authority in the titles of sovereignty that he assumed for himself. “King of mani Kongo and Lord of the Ambundos.” “King of mani Kongo” (in Portuguese, “Rei do Manicongo”) can be seen written out at both the top and the bottom of his coat of arms. Afonso’s assertion of his authority as “King of mani Kongo” situated the network authority of the mani Kongo under his personal control as a Christian monarch.
Under the usual interpretation of Kongo as a kingdom and the mani Kongo position as similar to that of a monarch in Europe, scholars have claimed that Afonso needed to do little more to effect the transition than translate the Portuguese wording of the “King and Lord” doublet, which was standard among monarchs in Europe, into Kikongo.34 According to the parallelisms in the contrasting Kongo and Catholic political theories, the theologically trained Portuguese priests around Afonso could have instructed him in the linguistic formulas recognizable to the Portuguese.35 Granting Afonso this sophistication in European diplomatic conventions suggests that “manikongo” referred to his predecessors in the Kongo polity and to the grove where they had been buried, first by the earlier custodians of the mani Kongo position and then under the foundations of his Catholic church. He presented this authority as a territorial domain parallel to the lands of the
