whether anyone ever ate anyone else in the clichéd sense or even exactly what cannibalism meant to any specific group in any particular place or time, but rather to acknowledge that the myth of cannibals was a historical outcome of the creation of our shared modern world.
CHAPTER TWO
Angels of Deliverance, 1483–ca. 1543
There [in Mbanza Kongo] was my brother, who never wanted to convert to the faith of our Lord. And those who were there were all infidels, and adored idols, and wanted him to be king. We saw against us a great force of people together as many as inside the city were surrounding the outside [walls]. And since we did not have with us any more than the thirty-seven Christians, we remembered that with the strength of God our Lord we had no need for many people if that not be His will. And we trusted in Him, that we would with knowledge of the faith have help against those who were His enemies and who despised those whom He had received. We offered prayers. We determined that we must fight them. And [since they were] more numerous in arms than us, and [we wanted] more soldiers with spears and swords, we and those with us shouted for the bold apostle Santiago [Saint James]. Miraculously, soon all of our enemies turned and fled as fast as each could, without us knowing the cause of their despair, and we pursued them. And many [of their] people died without any of ours dying.
And after the victory, we learned from some who could not escape, that the cause of their flight was that when we called on Santiago, they all saw a white cross in the sky and a large number of cavalrymen, which gave them all such a fright they lost bodily control, or else they could have fled. By this we perceived a divine cause for the abundance of great favors and praise that our Lord gave us by granting mercy and compassion on us and all of ours.
—Afonso I of Kongo, “Letter of the King of Kongo to the Lords of the Kingdom,” 15121
THIS PASSAGE, dictated by Afonso I of Kongo in 1512, the central authority in a political system the Portuguese recognized as a sovereign “kingdom,” recalls his victory in an armed struggle that signaled his power and right to rule the large, densely populated polity located just south of the lower Congo River. The description of this struggle, portrayed in celestial terms, looks, at first glance, entirely Catholic and European. It is marked by a Catholic saint, the Christian God, and a villainous heathen half brother.
But other elements of this story are entirely Kongo.2 Afonso claimed that none of his troops died in the fight, which expresses a common African trope of invincibility in warfare for combatants protected by ointments and other charms. Another common African trope suggests that charmed enemies become immobilized during a fight, just as the half brother’s forces claimed they could not control their terror and were frozen to the spot. The tension between what might have actually happened in Kongo in 1509, how the combatants involved in the incident experienced it, and Afonso’s own written description of the event in 1512 motivates this chapter and, really, this whole book. The book is devoted to seeing how we as historians can decide what we make of what happened in western-central Africa between 1509 and 1670 by reading complicated documents giving clues to what people—Europeans as well as Africans—made of it. Historians can’t always believe what their subjects claimed they saw.
This chapter follows the interweavings of these two separate worlds, intimately entwined in the Kongo polity between 1483 and 1568, each unintelligible to the other, while partisans on both sides thought they were being understood by the other. The text revolves around a Kongo polity built on premises all but radically opposed to the monarchy that the Portuguese saw, with features—notions of power, conceptions of time and change—alluded to in the text as the Kongo alternatives to a narrative told more or less in European terms familiar to readers, but concluding on the capacity of this working Kongo-Portuguese misunderstanding to generate the core of the “Jaga myth” that the rest of the book goes on to trace.
Of course, European and especially Catholic symbols and characters mentioned in Afonso’s 1512 letter were known to him only because he had integrated Portuguese representatives and priests into a new Kongo polity he was trying to create. The Portuguese had neither the technology nor the manpower to overwhelm this populous political system militarily. Any Europeans there lived as servants and paid laborers at the pleasure of aristocratic Kongo patrons as Kongo would have seen them. However, the Portuguese nonetheless pressed for religious and economic changes, probably without realizing how drastically the religious adaptations and trading they promoted would also alter Kongo political culture. In particular, Catholic priests sought to convert Kongo to Christianity and focused on baptisms and on burning whatever objects of devotion they saw as “idols,” which they condemned as evil temptations of the devil. European traders also tapped into the existing Kongo market for captives and began to purchase some of these slaves for export out of the Kongo region to serve as laborers in other locales on the West African coast. On their own, the Europeans would not likely have had a significant impact on Kongo politics. However, Afonso sponsored the priests; when his victory secured his central position in Kongo in 1509, both his conversion to Catholicism and the slaving were wedded to the highest levels of Kongo politics.
The marriage soon turned out not to be a happy one. Afonso’s victory and coronation as Catholic “king” of Kongo in 1509, and his political, economic, and social agenda over the following two and half decades as the head of the polity, created disorders that set the stage for the mysterious later cannibal protagonists in our story that people in Kongo very likely understood as an outbreak of uncontrollable witchcraft. To be clear, no primary sources record Africans of their day explicitly referring to the ailments of the sixteenth century as a “plague of witches,” although sources written by Africans—including Afonso I, as noted in other letters—frequently complained of the greed they associated with the imports the Europeans promoted and the violence of slaving to which they led, particularly when it targeted themselves or their communities. In African communities the dual maladies of violence and greed were widely accepted indicators of nefarious betrayals of the tight communities in which they lived or witchcraft.3 Both Europeans and Africans thought of and represented cannibals as perpetrators at the extreme end of the spectrum of these practices of evil, with the distinction being that “witches” were insiders targeting their own social networks (and therefore violating the integrity of their communities and families of trust), and “cannibals” were outsiders who devoured the communities by dispersing them and figuratively (and only very rarely literally) eating flesh and drinking blood.4
European success in conversion and slaving was minimal at the beginning of Afonso’s reign. But in a few decades they had grown pervasive and deeply disturbing, both by taking up the prestigious practice of Catholic preaching and by targeting whole communities as idolaters and sinners. They provided opportunities for the more entrepreneurial (greedy and unscrupulous, as they saw them) Africans to get into the lucrative business of handing people over to foreign slavers. During Afonso’s time, the disruptions instigated through such planned and unplanned Kongo and European collaborations might be thought of as a plague of witches, because they were associated with insiders’ overt appropriations of foreign peoples, ideas, and trade goods. As the tumult grew in scale and was intensified by people not associated with the highest levels of Kongo authority, later generations understood the chaos as perpetrated not only by witches but also by alleged cannibals seeking victims whom they made disappear forever for their own gain, or whom they effectively might have devoured.
Kongo Perspectives: Political Composites, Complementarity of Authorities, and Additive History
Let’s return to the beginning of Kongo encounters with the Portuguese and review the events that followed in the terms that the Kongo, as well as the Portuguese, understood them. In 1483, a Portuguese explorer named Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, where he and his crew were greeted by the people living in a region near the coast called Sonyo. The people of Sonyo were not quite sure what to make of the pale, hairy visitors from the sea. Just to be sure that they had disarmed
