been rare luxuries in such quantities that they were able to “elevate themselves” beyond his ability to control them as a sovereign authority ought to do. From his perspective, Kongo who challenged his authority by amassing wealth in trade goods promoted “evil greediness.”41
Afonso, always alert to the sensibilities of his Catholic readers in Portugal, did not designate these wealthy challengers to his authority in Kongo terms as the witches they were, but in this letter and subsequent ones, he addressed the politically enabling effects of the goods the Tomista slavers brought, since his challengers distributed them to recruit clients. He asked the Catholic king João to send him “medicine” and “remedies” for the greed he saw as illness. These requests for a cure for disorder expressed a Kongo worldview that attributed dissension, in this case tendencies toward personal autonomy asserted through accumulating material wealth, as caused by witches, and curable by collective healing. The problem was not the slaving, which had long been a moderate component of politics in western-central Africa, but rather the imports arriving in quantities that Afonso could not control.
The second reason Afonso banned slaving in 1526 was because the violence hit too close to home. Afonso later made clear his distinction between slaving and Atlantic imports inflating conflicts within the Kongo polity and the Tomistas’ targeting the Christian faction in Kongo, presumably his own family and clients. Since it was illegal in Europe to enslave Catholics, his letters to King João III emphasized this affront to European legality. The issue was political, not moral. He made clear how attacking his Catholic followers undermined his personal authority. The slavers were exploiting the tensions inherent in Kongo, both among its component communities and against the Christian core he was trying to consolidate over it.
A contrasting example from West Africa in the same period highlights Afonso’s political weakness in Kongo. The oba (ruler) of Benin, a powerful polity there, faced Tomista slavers in a situation similar to Afonso’s. In contrast to Afonso’s helpless begging for intervention from Lisbon to deal with the troublesome traders from São Tomé who were taking Benin slaves also to the Mina Castle on the Gold Coast, the oba in 1516 issued an outright prohibition of further exports of captives. Slave purchases from Benin plummeted. Afonso’s pleading tone suggests the inherently tenuous grip of a central authority in a composite polity on economic activity among its component parties. His appeal to the king in Portugal invoked the commanding authority of the Catholic monarchy he was already failing to implement.
Catholic proselytization was bad for the Tomista slavers’ business. According to Catholic law, Christians could not enslave other Christians, and conversions to Catholicism in Kongo were decreasing the supply of heathens to enslave. Afonso may have limited slaving for a time after 1526, but not for long. By about 1530, Portuguese slavers and their Kongo collaborators secured access to new sources of captives from the far northeast around Malebo Pool where Afonso had been exiled and had first sponsored the Catholic priests, and thus beyond the Kongo composite. The Teke/Tio living there, who had formerly been victims of Kongo slaving, reorganized and stabilized the slave markets near the Pool by generating captives from farther into the interior. This new expanded geography of slaving enriched all the parties to the trade. The Tio were paid for their captives with nzimbu shells from the Atlantic Coast, which they often purchased in Kongo, and Afonso levied a tax on the strings of shells and chains of captives as they passed through Mbanza Kongo on their way from and to the coast. Whereas only about seventeen hundred slaves had been sent to São Tomé per year from 1500 to 1525, the reorganized, sustainable, and profitable trade to Malebo Pool produced as many as five to six thousand slaves in peak years after 1530.42
Afonso’s redirection of the slave trade beyond the components of his polity meant that Tio supplies of slaves from Malebo Pool reduced the victimization of the Kongo people he was claiming as subjects. By 1540, Afonso could brag that the Kongo port of Mpinda at the mouth of the Congo River was producing more slaves than all of the ports where the Portuguese traded along Africa’s Atlantic Coast. Displacing the sources of slaves to the farther interior revealed that his 1526 condemnation of slaving was not a proto-abolitionist opposition to slaving in principle but rather a political move to protect his tenuous position and his Catholic faction within the Kongo political composite. He was explicit about the acceptable framework, however, which exempted Kongo: “[I] favor the trade, sustain it, open markets, roads, storehouses, and interior markets where the [slaves] are traded.”43 Unlike the Benin oba, he had protected himself from slaving without giving up gains from the trade. It was likely not a coincidence that the subjects of the following chapter, the alleged cannibals who attacked Kongo in 1568, were said to have originated in the area around Malebo Pool.
Afonso did not live to see his intended centralization of political power in Kongo in his own person, replacing the communities of the old confederation with Catholic monotheism and priests responsive to his directives. When he died in 1542 or 1543, in spite of his attempts to engage the vast Atlantic geopolitical scale in which he had inserted Kongo, the polity fell into armed clashes among the components like those of previous succession struggles, but this time the battles were intensified by the violence of slaving. The São Tomé islanders were a constant problem, and so, too, were the factions in the Sonyo areas between Mbanza Kongo and what had become the main Atlantic port of Mpinda. Sonyo had once been a part of the Kongo composite, but since the São Tomé traders had built up the Mpinda port to send captives to the Gold Coast and also to their own island, they often ignored Afonso’s wishes.
By the 1520s, São Tomé traders’ needs for slaves had lured them to venture also to the south, along the valley of the major river there, the Kwanza, beyond Kongo’s southern border (modern-day northern Angola), where they helped to fuel consolidation of a bellicose Ndongo regime among the same Mbundu whom Afonso had claimed in 1512 as vassals. The violence in Kongo even threatened Afonso personally; he survived an assassination attempt in 1540. Dissidents in Afonso’s court at Mbanza Kongo had hired mercenary musketeers from the royal garrison on São Tomé Island to murder him as he exited the doorway of the church he had built over the graves of his mani Kongo predecessors. The assassins failed. While there was some precedent in west-central Africa for ambitious prospective successors to usher aging titleholders to seats at the table with their ancestors, Afonso’s brush with death showed the desperation growing from the traumatizing violence in Kongo as slaving disrupted lives, scattered communities, and took away growing numbers of people. For the communities composing the Kongo polity, losses of personnel threatened their very existence and the enduring wrath of ancestors whom they would thus abandon.
The assassination attempt provides a clear statement of how terrifying life in Kongo had become under Afonso and Catholicism, disrupted by devoutly Catholic São Tomé slavers. The Kongo planners of the attack did not attempt to assassinate Afonso inside the church, where they likely considered him invulnerable to their local poisons or charms. To ensure the job was done, and to protect themselves from the possible wrath of powers they feared, whether Christian or Kongo, the plotters hired soldiers of the white man’s cult able to execute the mani Kongo who had gained so much authority from the Church. The attempt was made as Afonso emerged from this protected space into the exposed surrounding area. They thus respected the sanctity of the church that the Kongo planners feared and that the São Tomé soldiers honored as a sanctuary.
Prominent opponents of slaving within Kongo might hire slaver mercenaries to rescue them from their growing slippage into chaotic violence, but for most of the people of Kongo, not living in Mbanza Kongo and not privy to the intrigues of the Catholic faction there, the trauma and terror of incessant slaving needed to be calmed and, if possible, replaced by ambient powers other than the minkisi that they had lost and the Catholicism that had failed them. As the intensity of slaving increased, more and more people were sent toward the shoreline and into the waters of the dead, never to return. Like people in every other part of the continent, Kongo understood the upheavals of European-stimulated slaving in their own idioms of plagues and witches. People there, grasping for any cure for the disruption and cataclysmic immorality of witches within their communities, had first turned en masse to the baptisms offered by Afonso’s Catholic nganga in their
