narrative thrust of the Jaga invasion story in the Report rehearses a triumphal narrative of biblical salvation, while the reality is far more mundane, with the salvation being experienced almost entirely by Álvaro and his political faction.
In the brief time between Álvaro’s installation in 1568 and the assault, he had routinely contradicted the precepts undergirding the Catholic monarchy proclaimed by Afonso I and maintained, though not without challenges, until Henrique I had failed in battle against the Tio in 1567. Most notably, he had yielded to a Kongo adviser named Francisco Bullamatare, who convinced him that he should reintroduce polygyny at the mani Kongo’s court.17 This cardinal Catholic sin was, however, the primary political strategy of the central figures in composite political systems like the historical Kongo. Throughout Africa centrality was created by accumulating as many wives as possible from the component reproducing communities. These multiple marriages both personified and consolidated the networks of reciprocal political obligations that constituted the polity itself. Pragmatically they linked the powerful families and regional networks to the center through the children produced from these connections: sons—in this case—of the mani Kongo and nephews of the brothers of his wives.
In striving to remodel matrilineal Kongo as a patrilineal Catholic regime, complete with hereditary succession by male primogeniture, the Catholic kings of Kongo took only a single consecrated wife (though they kept many slave wives). The exclusions of Catholic monogamy would have fragmented the components of the Kongo polity. Without the bonds of marriage, leading families lost a primary channel to press their interests with the uniting central figure, not to mention the prestige and children (i.e., potential heirs) that marriage alliances produced. By trying to establish a European-styled hereditary dynasty, Afonso and his Catholic successors effectively marginalized the networks and communities allied to the Kongo political system as it had been constituted prior to 1509.18 Álvaro I had initially planned to restore polygyny at Mbanza Kongo, thus acknowledging prestigious and populous factions in Kongo other than the narrow patriline linked to Afonso I by heredity, since he himself, as a stepson of Henrique I, was the first mani Kongo not linked through a patriline to Afonso. By offering the regional factions marginalized by monogamy the opportunity to produce a future mani Kongo, he would have been bartering for their acceptance of him as the mani Kongo regardless of the powerful political faction in Mbanza Kongo descended from Afonso, whom he simultaneously moved out of power.
According to details in the Report, the violence began when marauding cannibals named Jaga invaded Kongo from the east, laid waste to Mbata, and then proceeded to Mbanza Kongo. In fact, nearly every detail about the attackers is false or cannot be substantiated. There is simply no evidence to verify the claims of man-eating. And, as will be discussed in more detail, the villains in the story certainly did not call themselves “Jaga.” The most radical falsehood, or fake news as some might say, was to blame invaders for the violence. A Jesuit priest named João Ribeiro Gaio was on the ground in Kongo during the period of violence, unlike Lopes. Years later, in a petition that was never published, Gaio wrote to the Spanish Crown, at that time also ruler of Portugal and its overseas dominions under the Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640), and incidentally explained Sottomaior’s mission to pacify an internal Kongo rebellion. The forces were sent “against the Jaga, Jagas who were men who ate human flesh, almost sixty thousand of whom rose up in the Kingdoms of Kongo which they destroyed.”19 The key word in this passing reference—and hence unlikely to have been construed for any purpose—identifies the Jagas as those who had “risen up” (alevantados) within Kongo.
Identifying Álvaro’s attackers as insiders helps to settle a decades-long scholarly debate about the identity of the so-called “Jaga” of 1568, but unfortunately not much more can be said of the uprising itself. The details in the Report are, of course, unhelpful, since they pin the blame on outsiders, and Gaio’s account merely mentions the incident. Perhaps following the logic of Occam’s razor, that the theory with the fewest possible assumptions is the most likely to have occurred, clarifies the situations as much as possible. We know Álvaro acceded in a sort of political vacuum after his stepfather, Henrique I, was killed. And we know that his mother, Izabel, played on her connections at court to have him installed. Given the series of sometimes violent infighting among political factions in Kongo in the twenty-five years after Afonso I’s death in 1542 or 1543, it seems most reasonable that the 1568 violence was in response to Álvaro’s accession. And, considering the circumstances by which he came to power and how quickly after his accession the violence occurred, it also seems reasonable to assert—as one historian did long ago—that a rival political faction viewed Álvaro’s rise to power as a usurpation, which triggered an armed response.20
Without knowing exactly which Kongo faction led the rebellion, it is impossible to verify that the attacks indeed originated northeast of Mbanza Kongo, near Malebo Pool, or if they passed through Mbata. In any case, the assailants converged on Mbanza Kongo. Álvaro I raised an army to defend his capital from the impending assault. However, the opposing forces, said to have numbered sixty thousand, soon overwhelmed Álvaro.21 As Pigafetta paraphrased Lopes, “In this encounter, the king being partly discomfited, retired into the city, where not feeling safe, but forsaken of God on account of his sins, for he lacked the same trust in Him which King Dom Afonso [I] had, he resolved to leave the city a prey to his enemies.”22 Álvaro, some of his notables, and the priests fled to seek refuge on a small island on the Congo River. In their absence, without any significant check to their depredations, the attackers sacked Mbanza Kongo and ravaged the rest of the Kongo countryside virtually unchecked for nearly three years, leading to widespread deaths from starvation.
Pigafetta described in detail Álvaro’s and his companions’ sufferings on the small island at the mouth of the Congo River, which the Report called the Isle of Hippos.23 They ended up trapped there for three years. Like any island in a massive river, Isle of Hippos was humid and marshy. The refugees were epidemiologically native to the higher and drier elevations around Mbanza Kongo, and they succumbed to the tropical diseases of the riverine environment. Their misery was intensified by lack of food, which would have left malnourished refugees vulnerable to bacterial and parasitic infestations. No one had had time to prepare to remain on the island for so long, and so supplies ran out. Lopes was told that a majority starved and died. Taking advantage of the intense hunger of the exiles, Tomista slavers arrived with food to sell in exchange for the cooperation of Álvaro’s supporters and hangers-on. The Report depicted the refugees’ desperation: “Thus, forced by necessity, the father sold his son, and the brother his brother, everyone resorting to the most horrible crimes to obtain food.”24
This forced bargain of food for slaves on the Isle of Hippos would have had to clear strict legal hurdles. Catholics were proscribed from enslaving fellow Christians, and those who had fled to the island were affiliated with Álvaro’s court and thus almost certainly known Kongo Catholics. But in the face of starvation necessity trumped legality, and the Kongo resorted to the unthinkable, selling their family members and clients. In the mortiferous context of famine and disease, both Álvaro’s people and the Tomistas could justify these transactions as saving lives. As mani Kongo, Álvaro would not have suffered from lack of food as much as those around him, but he contracted dropsy, which caused his legs to swell painfully, an affliction that he would deal with for the rest of his life. He blamed himself and his lack of devout Catholicism for his own suffering as well as the suffering of all his people. While on the island, Álvaro recommitted himself to the Catholic God and requested aid from King Sebastião.
The attacks were stopped three years after they began, when a Portuguese military expedition of six hundred soldiers under the command of Francisco da Gouveia Sottomaior sailed in 1571 from Lisbon, via São Tomé Island, to confront them. Sottomaior had been the royally appointed captain, the secular authority, on São Tomé from 1564 to 1567 and, as such, would have been well aware of Tomista slaving interests on the mainland, though he had likely returned to Lisbon and might not have been exactly up-to-date concerning the intrigue in Kongo surrounding Álvaro’s accession in 1568. The relative silence about Sottomaior’s mission
