a regional political system within the broader Mbundu populations. The early Ngola were warriors who consolidated the Ndongo polity by developing military capacities to raid for captives, whom they sold to the São Tomé islanders to work as slaves on their thriving sugar plantations. This growing collaboration between the ngola and the Tomistas bypassed the mani Kongo’s claimed monopoly over slaving, just as the Tio and Tomista trade bypassed it to the north. Clearly, by the 1550s and 1560s, African authorities found themselves constrained to operating in parameters increasingly defined not by their local resources, including people, but by outsiders’ priorities for the same populations as slaves.
Unlike most continental Portuguese, who arrived in the Kongo area as emissaries of their king, the Tomistas were less likely to follow prescribed legal norms of either Kongo or Portugal. One major reason for the islanders’ autonomy was the lack of oversight, as Portuguese royal officials usually succumbed to tropical illnesses shortly after arrival or they refused to travel to the island altogether. Another disincentive for Tomista loyalty to either Kongo or Portugal legal codes was the fact that financial backing for Atlantic ventures in the 1500s often derived from Italian political and economic investors whose interests many times conflicted with either Portuguese or Kongo policies.13 Official Kongo correspondence throughout the 1500s complains of indiscriminate Tomista slaving, for example, purchasing Catholics of the royal household, routine avoidance of paying tolls, and other activities that hindered Catholic conversion. Afonso I had asked the king of Portugal to gift São Tomé Island to him as early as 1514 because Tomista traders were causing so much trouble, and—he added diplomatically—he thought the island would serve as a promising site to develop a Catholic school.14 Beyond these meddlings in Kongo, it was the Tomista dealings with the Mbundu to the south that are worth exploring in further detail because they resulted in Portuguese king Sebastião (r. 1554–1578) sending Paulo Dias de Novais and Francisco da Gouveia onto the scene in Angola. Dias would become the first captain of the military outpost of St. Paulo de Luanda, and Father Gouveia solidified the Jesuit mission in Ndongo.
In 1518 the ngola Kiluanje of Ndongo, then in the process of consolidating a warrior regime in the highlands above the middle Kwanza River, had sent ambassadors to Lisbon asking for missionaries to baptize him as a Christian and, surely following Afonso’s example, also to develop a Catholic kingdom among the Mbundu. All official correspondence from west-central Africa at that time was passed through Portuguese officials in São Tomé, the seat of both royal and papal authority over a vast region around the entire Gulf of Guinea that extended as far as Elmina on the Gold Coast. The islanders frequently delayed messengers or the delivery of letters addressed to Lisbon that they suspected would result in action against their local interests, particularly slaving. The Tomistas, who were serving the ngola as mercenaries in his slaving raids and stood to benefit from helping him to consolidate his power, allowed his 1518 mission to pass on to Portugal, even though the ngola’s conversion to Christianity would protect him and other converts in Ndongo from enslavement. However, at this early stage of military expansion, the ngola Kiluanje probably did not need to worry about slaving within Ndongo because he could still easily locate and capture nearby peoples.
The Portuguese Crown responded in 1520 by sending the missionaries requested.15 However, when the priests arrived, the ngola refused to convert and instead held them as hostages. From the 1520s to the 1540s, the ngola continued to build his military capacities, and more and more Tomistas and renegade Portuguese traders purchased the war captives he took from the territories to the west, downriver toward the mouth of the Kwanza River and the bay and island called Luanda. Kongo authorities had claimed Luanda as a source of small mollusk shells that they circulated in the confederacy as currency-like tokens of recognition and political standing.
The succeeding ngola, perhaps seeking to secure his position in a still-formative polity coalescing around conquests, sent another embassy asking the Portuguese king to send priests again to create an independent Catholic kingdom in Ndongo. This time the Tomistas held the 1550 embassy on their island for nine years before finally allowing it to continue on to Portugal in 1559. Unlike in 1518, in 1550 the Tomistas felt a Catholic Ndongo was not in their best interests. Their slavers had, after all, been expelled from Kongo in 1545 by Diogo I, so any slaving in the region was coming from lands in and around Ndongo. And further, Diogo I had actually gone on the attack in the 1550s, making Ndongo a primary target. The ngola of that moment had every reason to seek protection in the form of diplomatic support from Portugal and the nominal inviolability of Catholicism from intrusions by the sister Catholic regime in Kongo. Looking to take advantage of every potential avenue for generating the violence that ensnared humans as enslaved laborers, the Tomistas delayed the 1550 mission against their longtime collaborators in Ndongo.
Once the Tomistas finally allowed the Ndongo embassy to pass on to Lisbon, King Sebastião and the Portuguese court sent a second mission in 1560, this time headed by a military captain, Paulo Dias de Novais, accompanied by four Jesuit priests. Though the primary documents allege that Novais’s 1560 mission was purely to further Catholic conversions in Ndongo, the implication of a delegation led by a commissioned officer of the king is that the Portuguese Crown took the disturbances in west-central Africa seriously. There are at least two reasons why. First, for quite some time rumors had been drifting back to Lisbon about “mountains of silver” in the area. Given the Spaniards’ famous discovery of extensive deposits of silver in Potosí (modern-day Bolivia) in 1545, the Portuguese were inspired to imagine equally rich mineral deposits in Africa. And second, the Tomistas clearly needed to be brought under control. São Tomé planters were growing fabulously rich from their sugar plantations, because sugar at that time was a pricey luxury item in Europe that was also being used in medicines, and the labor costs on their slave-staffed plantations were profitably low.
Novais landed in 1561 at the mouth of the Kwanza River, to the south of Kongo territory, and made his way upriver to the ngola’s compound in the highlands above. Initially the primarily proselytizing mission went well; however, in 1562 Kongo king Bernardo I began writing letters to Ndongo claiming that the Portuguese were actually coming to take land and seek out silver and gold mines.16 In response the ngola, a successor to the one who had requested the mission in 1550, held Novais as a prisoner before sending him back to Portugal in 1565. He retained a Jesuit priest named Francisco da Gouveia, who apparently had some success converting members of the ngola’s retinue to Catholicism. Gouveia’s stay in Ndongo laid the groundwork for subsequent European visits to the ngola, particularly by the increased numbers of Jesuits who arrived in the early 1600s.
The politically and economically disruptive Tomistas also posed an existential threat in Kongo as the epitome of the disorder caused by their commercial or, by Kongo community standards, greedy, competitive, and acquisitive operations. To people in Kongo they represented the intrusion of a commercial culture of individual accumulation in an otherwise communal context like Kongo. Their pervasive presence in trading within Kongo disrupted the order of social and economic life. Afonso I had noted disorders introduced by Tomistas and quickly picked up by Kongo looking to enrich themselves. Recall his infamous threat in 1526 to end slaving in Kongo altogether because his own family and faction were being targeted and because the goods brought by the Portuguese fostered, in his words, greed. By 1568, slaving and capitalistic accumulation of wealth by individuals who got ahead as others worried about being swept into the slave caravans was entrenched in Kongo. Álvaro I could not dream of ending slave trading, but he would have to manage the military threats along his borders as well as decide whether or not to support Catholicism, which in practice was entwined with the development of slaving and the associated violence.
Salvation: The 1568 Event and Its Aftermath
The otherwise revealing paper trail from Portuguese and missionaries on the scene in São Tomé, Kongo, and Angola disappears around the time of the “Jaga” event of 1568, perhaps suspiciously. In the absence of other published accounts of the event, Lopes and Pigafetta’s narrative of the violence has dominated its historical reconstructions from the late 1500s until now. But in order to understand how and why the Report is chock-full of silences, myths, and half-truths about the alleged cannibals, it
