For example, Afonso’s immediate successor, a son named Pedro, assumed this new position as the Catholic king of Kongo via hereditary succession. In contrast, the customary method for selecting a mani Kongo after the sitting one died was through highly regulated warfare where the winner was deemed to have demonstrated the full backing of the supernatural authorities, and the victor was then confirmed by a council of leading members of the Kongo composite. But as proof of the extent to which Afonso I had altered Kongo political practice, Pedro I assumed power without evidencing his authority by winning a succession struggle. He ruled for only a couple of years before being outmaneuvered politically by a grandson of Afonso’s named Diogo, who, in perhaps an echo of the composite politics of Kongo before Afonso, was installed after a coup in 1545 by his faction on the throne. Unlike Pedro I, Diogo I was a Catholic king of Kongo, in the Catholic idiom Afonso had left, and he also verified his right to rule via warfare as was required of a mani Kongo. During the violence of the overthrow, Pedro I fled into a church, where he claimed asylum. Diogo I respected the rules of asylum, perhaps seeing the Catholic sanctuary as a Kongo space of mystical invulnerability, and allowed Pedro to live. The scorned Pedro and his faction plotted against Diogo I to recapture the throne but were ultimately unsuccessful.4
The Tomistas, less bound by the heritage of Kongo political culture, proved to be more problematic for Diogo than Pedro had been. Recall that in the 1530s Afonso I had forged with the Tio5 slave producers near Malebo Pool and the Tomista slavers purchasing them at Mpinda on the Atlantic Coast, whose business had grown so lucrative by the 1540s that he was bragging about them. By the early 1550s the stable trading relationships were breaking down from their own successes.6 Kongo was exporting so many captives that the Tomista captains were overloading their boats, leading to increased numbers of revolts by the enslaved. Even more troublesome were other Tomista traders who had begun sailing up the Congo River to trade directly with the Tio to avoid the Kongo tax on slaves sold at the authorized port of Mpinda. In 1555, Diogo I grew so enraged with this subversion of the royal contract between Kongo and Portugal regulating these markets that he expelled nearly seventy Portuguese residents from Kongo, along with their wives and their children with African wives. The next year he made a political gamble to bring the rebellious Mbundu polity called Ndongo to the south, which the Tomistas were backing as an alternative source of slaves, back under royal Kongo control.7 But he lost this gambit, triggering Ndongo’s assertion of total independence, surely with Tomista backing. Even with these setbacks, however, Diogo I and his faction were strong enough to retain control over the fraying Kongo composite until his death in 1561.
A Kongo successor to Diogo I, whose name we do not know, was assassinated and replaced with one of Diogo’s illegitimate sons, which meant he took the position with no backing from any powerful recognized Kongo faction. However, this son, who claimed the legacy of his Catholic progenitor as Afonso II, supported the interests of the Tomistas who had backed his installation as mani Kongo. The people of Kongo resented this direct foreign intrusion into their politics and rioted throughout the region, killing many of the resident Portuguese and shuttering the authorized slave market in Mpinda, basically ending Kongo slave exports. Afonso II was also assassinated, only months after assuming the office. His successor, Bernardo I, maintained the boycott of slave exports, although he secretly tried to ease tensions with Lisbon before dying in 1567 in a military campaign against the Yaka, who lived east of Kongo and south of the Tio at Malebo Pool. Three claimants vied to fill the power vacuum after his death. The strongest contenders, two Christians named Rodrigo and Pedro, sent assassins to kill each other. The sources allege they were murdered at exactly the same time.8 The Kongo Christian nobility created by Afonso I, left with no other options, rallied around the weakest remaining candidate, named Henrique, and elected him mani Kongo in 1567, no doubt hoping to control him.
Prior to Afonso I’s time as mani Kongo, viable victories to establish authority came over rivals from within the Kongo composite, which thus determined who could be installed successfully as mani Kongo. But Afonso had ignored the mystical favor from the mani Kongo predecessors (buried and revered in their graves at Mbanza Kongo) and turned to Saint James and the broader panoply of Catholic saints, celebrated in the church he built over the mani Kongo graves. Evidently, the line of contenders he spawned, all his male blood descendants, attempted to define their struggles in terms of patrilineal succession. They also refused to recognize the component networks of the polity by shifting the military requirements of establishing legitimacy to waging yearly wars against such outsiders as the Yaka to the east or the Mbundu to the south. This transition from controlled and occasional internal combat to annual external raiding to validate authority also, not inconveniently, satisfied the Tomistas’ hunger for slaves by producing reliably large numbers of war captives for export.
Their collaboration with the slavers underpinned Kongo regal authority until the Tomistas tried to avoid paying the fees and duties owed to Afonso’s agents. After Diogo I broke with the Tomistas in 1555, his successors resorted to increasingly risky military operations, probably needing to compensate for their loss of Tomista financial backing via expeditions of their own to capture slaves. Diogo I lost all claims to Ndongo in 1556. Bernardo I died in 1567 fighting the Yaka. And in 1568, shortly after assuming authority, Henrique I was wounded leading an assault against the Tio near Malebo Pool and died soon after. His stepson Álvaro was installed immediately as mani Kongo and Christian king, allegedly through “common consent.”9 Álvaro was technically outside the patriline initiated by Afonso I; however his mother, named Izabel, was a daughter of Afonso’s, and she may have used her connections in the highest circles of power in Mbanza Kongo (as a daughter of Afonso I and the wife of Henrique I) to secure Álvaro’s position.10 Álvaro I found himself in the vulnerable position of trying to calm widespread agitation and fears of the worst in Kongo after eight years of politics compromised by collaboration with Tomista slavers and spreading slaving.
Foreign Entanglements and Dissensions at Home
Álvaro I’s accession as mani Kongo coincided with escalating, and failing, military engagements along the borders of Kongo, clearly reverting to something like the confederation that Afonso I had tried to suppress beneath the overlay of Catholic monarchy. The Tio to the northeast posed a problem, since they had proved powerful enough to kill Henrique when he launched his forces against them earlier in 1568. In fact, the Tio had long posed a real danger for mani Kongo. The strong regional ruler in the east, the mani Mbata, usually held them at bay with an armed guard positioned to deal with occasional Tio incursions into lands of communities affiliated in the Kongo composite.11 The people of Mbata were historically jealous of their strategic responsibility in the composite as guardians in both a martial and a metaphysical sense. While mani Kongo had the right to establish close allies as the rulers of most affiliated regions in the Kongo composite, they could not install the mani Mbata, who were instead chosen according to regional political customs that predated the establishment of the Kongo composite. This powerful component counted themselves as allied with the Kongo political confederation rather than obligated to abide by whatever political consensus otherwise prevailed. Their considerable autonomy was expressed in the Kongo language of politics as kinship, acknowledging the seniority of the mani Mbata at the group’s head as the “grandfather of Kongo.”12 This reserved and conditional participation in the Kongo composite, which may have been emboldened by the military capacities they maintained, provided a check on the power of the mani Kongo while also allowing Mbata warriors to check any invaders from the east. The mani Mbata were also the only regional leaders whom Afonso I and the succeeding mani Kongo allowed to possess firearms, the recently introduced awe-inspiring, and in trained hands also lethal, weapons of the time. Prior to Henrique I’s death, the well-armed Mbata warriors adeptly defeated the aggressive and militarized, but relatively few, Tio.
Álvaro was also under military pressure along the confederation’s southern border from the growing power of the warlord called the ngola (the political title from which the Portuguese styled their military conquests there) heading a regime known as Ndongo. Asserting the language of vassalage, Afonso I had claimed authority over the ngola because he had previously claimed lordship over the Mbundu peoples living along the valley of the Kwanza River and in the elevated
