to use the new cult to transcend it as king, was chiefly responsible for diluting the protective Kongo composite.
In the late 1560s, after nearly a half century of increasing slaving and the political centralization it funded, as well as a series of failed would-be successors after Afonso’s death, people in Kongo would be prepared to find perpetrators of their pervasive miseries worse than the witches they had felt were lurking among them. Not enough communities remained sufficiently intact to unite around searches for evil within them, and so they displaced the pervasive evils afflicting all as external to the whole. This positioning of blame on outsiders located the source of their afflictions precisely in the domain for which Afonso, as mani Kongo, had been responsible. Betrayal by leaders propped up by slaving and their failed healing cult produced a pervasive reaction—not just in terms of local community integrity but transcending the entire polity. They spoke of rumors of cannibals from unknown regions beyond.
CHAPTER THREE
Phantoms of the Kongo, 1568–1591
For there came unexpectedly to devastate the Kingdom of [K]ongo certain people living like Arabs, and ancient Nomads, who are called Jaggas, and have their dwellings near the first lake of the River Nile, in a province of the Empire of Monemugi. They are a cruel and murderous race, of great stature and horrible countenance, and eat human flesh, but are very courageous and valiant in battle. Their weapons are pavi[s]es, darts, and daggers. In their customs and everyday life they are very savage and wild, and go entirely naked. These people have no king, and live in huts in the forest, after the manner of shepherds. They went wandering up and down, putting to fire and sword, and spoiling and robbing every part of the country through which they passed, till they reached [K]ongo, which they entered through the province of [Mbata]. Overthrowing those who were first to resist them, they then went on to the City of Kongo, where the King was, and who had lost heart from the victory gained by his enemies in [Mbata].
—Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta, 15911
WHEN THE amateur Italian geographer Filippo Pigafetta published Relatione del Reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade tratta dalli in Rome in 1591 (hereafter Report), he launched the “cannibal Jaga” on their career of infamy. This “Report” about a Kongo kingdom and the surrounding countries was soon translated into Latin, German, French, and English and could be found in book repositories in London, Lisbon, Oxford, Ghent, Antwerp, Oporto, and Brussels.2 The details he provided about Kongo life, culture, politics, religion, and natural resources were revelations to most Europeans, who had virtually no other information about west-central Africa. Among the many important topics of the day that Pigafetta covered in his book, such as the mystery-shrouded font of the Nile River or the miraculous growth of a Catholic Church in Africa, the “Jaga” emerged as a new and arresting group of savage cannibals who might await Europeans traveling in that part of the world.
Pigafetta based his Report on the Jaga on what he had heard from a Portuguese man who had lived in the Kongo region from 1578 to 1584, an otherwise obscure slave trader named Duarte Lopes. Lopes had not himself met or seen any Jaga. He was rehearsing for Pigafetta’s benefit stories presumably told to him at the Kongo capital about an alleged invasion that had occurred in 1568, ten years prior to his arrival there. In publishing Lopes’s stories about the Jaga, Pigafetta helped entrench many Europeans’ predisposition to imagine Africans as cannibal savages. Further, by giving them a specific name—Jaga—Lopes provided a seemingly authentic language and set of horrific images by which Pigafetta’s readers could recognize seemingly similar savages whom they found, or heard about, in travels to other parts of the continent.
Lopes’s account, embroidered by the learned Pigafetta, thus was far from a straightforward historical description of what might have happened in 1568. Briefly narrating the 1568 event as told in the Report will help contextualize the historical narrative that dominates the chapter.3 According to the Report, King Álvaro I of Kongo began his rule in 1568 following nearly a decade of political turmoil and failed Kongo military ventures. Álvaro was the stepson of the previous mani (master) Kongo, meaning his claim to the throne in Mbanza Kongo was quite weak because royal authority passed through the patriline in Kongo at that time. Initially Álvaro was not particularly interested in retaining the Catholic laws and customs as instituted by Afonso I and carried on by his successors. This bent toward sinning caused a swift and divine reckoning. Soon after taking the throne, a mysterious group of militarized nomads who had a reputation as flesh-eaters invaded Kongo from the northeast, passing through the powerful region of Mbata before laying siege to Mbanza Kongo. Álvaro and his warriors rode out of the royal compound to meet the villainous Jaga on the flatland outside the walls, where Afonso I won his miraculous victory. But Álvaro I was soundly defeated. His faction fled many miles to a small island in the mouth of the Congo River. The Jaga, allegedly numbering sixty thousand, killed and terrorized the people of Kongo, as Álvaro and his besieged refugees suffered through extreme food shortages and painful symptoms resulting from tropical diseases on the island. Forced by necessity, the exiles decided to sell family members and other allies into slavery to buyers from São Tomé Island in exchange for food.
Álvaro petitioned King Sebastião of Portugal to send aid, and in 1571 a former governor of São Tomé Island, Francisco da Gouveia Sottomaior, arrived with six hundred soldiers. Sottomaior’s men defeated the immense Jaga forces primarily because the booming sounds of the European firearms terrified them. Álvaro was restored to Mbanza Kongo, which Sottomaior’s men reinforced with new fortifications. Many of the Portuguese stayed in Kongo, where they established themselves as wealthy merchants after the Jaga were expelled. Álvaro recommitted himself to the Catholic God, which secured his authority and prestige. This story of the 1568 violence and its aftermath set the tone for a chain of misunderstandings and misrepresentations from those in Europe’s growing publishing industry, rather less skeptical or scrupulous than most modern journalists, that attributed subsequent stories of other events elsewhere to similar African cannibals.
The reported Jaga devastation of 1568 was particularly worth repeating in Africa and Europe, because it originated in a fast-changing and complicated historical context in Kongo and in the adjoining regions to the south. There were Portuguese schemes to establish military occupation of the watershed of the Kwanza River, south of Kongo. In and around Kongo, sugar-growing São Tomé islanders were under increasing pressure to obtain slaves, thus dividing political factions there. Europe hungered for knowledge of almost any sort about the utterly unknown interior behind an enticingly familiar shoreline, where rich mineral resources and a man named Prester John, the legendary Christian ruler of a jewel-bedecked kingdom, were said to await discovery. In Africa, other schemers manipulated the Jaga story to provide cover for activities that might otherwise have appeared less clear-cut. This chapter illuminates how multiple interest groups in Africa and Europe all converged around the myth of a cannibal invasion into Catholic Kongo in 1568 because the story served their own purposes. This revision of history was so profound that the identities of the attackers, the so-called “Jaga,” are still a mystery, though it is now possible to claim with certainty that they were Kongo insiders and not an invading army. Perhaps more importantly, parsing out the various myths and fears that motivated the multiple interest groups who helped to construct the Jaga story in fact demystifies the alleged cannibals. They were never a shadowy group of man-eaters who attacked Kongo as Pigafetta reported; rather, they were a fictional amalgamation pieced together from figments of European legal codes regulating “just war,” Kongo royal attempts to reclaim the heritage of Afonso I, biblical redemption stories, and Africans’ fears of being captured and eaten by Europeans or taken onto their slave ships.
The Rising Costs of Ruling a Catholic Kingdom in Kongo
Afonso I’s death in 1542 or 1543 exacerbated the factionalism he had created by adding Catholicism to Kongo politics and by allowing slave exports to Portuguese, primarily via slavers from São Tomé Island (the Tomistas), thus redefining how his successors in Mbanza Kongo
