floating on the water, the people of Sonyo performed ceremonies to honor spirits they saw as coming from the land of the dead—which lay beyond the ocean. They sent Cão and his crew on their way into the interior to a populous place called the Mbanza Kongo (the gathering place of Kongo). There the Europeans were directed to meet with the master, mani, of the place, Kongo. This authority’s personal name was Nzinga a Nkuwu. Their first meeting included the customary exchange of gifts, including persons, meant to consolidate future diplomatic contacts through mutual recognition of the other’s sovereignty.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were sending out ships to establish similar formal contacts with political authorities around the world. They acted on behalf of the Portuguese king in Lisbon. According to European protocol, a sovereign ruler, or king, could deal diplomatically only with sovereigns of equal rank—other kings or queens. Diogo Cão was expressly looking for “kings” in Africa, and he declared whoever seemed to be in charge as such. He likely would not have been able to imagine a political system other than the uniquely authoritative monarch in Lisbon he knew, his master. As a result, after 1483 the Portuguese dealing with Kongo represented the polity as a “kingdom” and the mani Kongo as a “king,” regardless of how authority and politics in Kongo were actually structured.
In fact, powers in Kongo were systematically plural rather than the singularity Europeans attributed to their monarchs, and Kongo distributed them among multiple specified domains assigned to different officials. Decades later this first misunderstanding of Kongo politics as equivalent to European monarchies was represented as truth and ultimately underlies the subsequent representations of cannibals in Kongo. The enterprising Nzinga a Nkuwu recognized the potential advantages for his polity, and himself, in seeking to make Kongo appear, at least to his unsuspecting Catholic collaborators, to be the sort of kingdom his new European allies imagined.
Nzinga a Nkuwu’s brief 1483 meeting with Diogo Cão’s men, as well as the resulting exchange of ambassadors, proceeded solidly within the political responsibility in a composite polity entrusted to the mani Kongo. The primary function of the central figure in a political composite—not unlike a confederation of recognized regional parties—was to represent the complex collectivity of Kongo-affiliated regions to outsiders as a whole. Other Portuguese returned to Kongo in 1491 to pursue the tentative relationship, and Nzinga a Nkuwu again welcomed them to his compound. This second and larger contingent of Portuguese included royal emissaries, soldiers, Portuguese priests to convert the Kongo people to Catholicism, and also masons, carpenters, and other artisans to construct churches for them to worship the Christian God. The Portuguese, few in numbers and hopelessly naive, displayed enormous wealth in their distant homeland and arrived armed with the powerful matchlock muskets that were then just becoming standard munitions in Europe but unheard of in central Africa. They must have seemed like promising partners from beyond the ocean. For the Kongo, “beyond the ocean” was the land of the dead, and they saw the Portuguese as possibly returning from the ancestors whom the mani Kongo, as a human embodiment of the whole, was responsible for engaging on behalf of his polity.
The Kongo composite network that the mani Kongo embodied was based on a sense of time and history incomprehensible to late medieval Portuguese, who saw the world as the sequential unfolding of an original and eternal divine dispensation, never to be changed or supplemented. The Kongo allowed for, and in fact prized, the discovery and mastery of new forms of power believed incipiently present among them, unseen to most but accessible to professionals skilled in the arcane arts of accessing them. For them, history was a compilation of momentous, and therefore memorable, events continuously unfolding. Kongo communities maintained all of these moments as still present, adding each to its predecessors to create the layered composite—in time as well as space—that by the late fifteenth century the mani Kongo embodied. Among the communities of the polity, the living carried on the legacies of their ancestors, ambiently present, and the mani Kongo at the center incorporated all of his predecessors and ruled by channeling their aggregated powers and deeds. Kongo history could be thought of as additive and accumulative, in contrast with modern ideas of time as change, in which we enter a present by leaving the past behind and move on toward a future that does not yet exist. The Kongo past was inherent in the present, and change was seen as supplementing it, not replacing it in the way that our past recedes quickly out of reach.
MAP 2.1 The Kongo composite in 1500. Note Mpemba Kasi in the upper center of the Kongo area. Mbata was a large region to its east, on the Inkisi River. Other locales mentioned later in this chapter include Nsundi (north of Mbata), near Malebo Pool, which is a natural lake where mountains dam the Congo River. (Map drawn by author. Based on map in John K. Thornton, “The Origins and Early History of the Kingdom of Kongo, c. 1350–1550,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 1 [2001]: 90.)
In this Kongo sense of time as additive and adaptive rather than substitutive, when the Catholic priests asked to baptize Nzinga a Nkuwu, he would have consented without feeling any need to abandon his predecessors or any other components of the Kongo history he personified. At first, he allowed a few of his closest male allies and family to join in this promising new cult. His designated chief wife (of the many he had, who were all vital to a political network in which political marriages marked the connections among its nodes) also demanded to be baptized, and so the number of Kongo Christians began to grow.5 Nzinga a Nkuwu took the baptismal name João in homage to his Portuguese counterpart in Lisbon, and probable patron or godparent, King João II (r. 1481–1495), who had sent the priests who baptized him. Kongo prided themselves on acquiring numerous names, as they denoted composite personal identities in Kongo that were multiple and used situationally. You became whomever you were with. Well-connected individuals might compile several names as they moved from one situation in which they had attained recognized standing to another. From Nzinga a Nkuwu’s and his counselors’ perspectives, they were doing nothing out of the ordinary when they added Christian names and the connections they implied to the personal names and political titles they already had accumulated to engage the Catholic priests and Portuguese patrons. They would have taken pride in adding another promising capacity to the collections they had spent their lives earning, and it would never have occurred to them to drop a lifetime’s assemblage of markers of their success to fall back on a single connection with connotations of dependency. This additive Kongo notion of time and change and even personality was completely lost on the Portuguese, who were our only witnesses to these circumstances and who understood baptism as transformative to a whole new life, an absolute conversion to the Catholic faith, leaving sinful things safely behind.
As mani Kongo and patron of foreigners, Nzinga a Nkuwu was responsible for providing the Europeans—whether they might be ancestors or merely visitors from beyond—with their day-to-day needs. For him, the foreigners represented a potentially significant gain in personal power, since, by the conventions of a composite political system, he had been required to give up all of his personal inherited connections within any of the components of the polity. In the service of making their central figures neutral among their components, they isolated them, like a slave, whose defining condition was isolation from (and hence vulnerability to) his predecessors, on behalf of the whole. The Portuguese were not slaves in the sense that they were individually isolated and thus entirely dependent on Nzinga a Nkuwu, but they were outsiders and so collectively subject to the authority of a properly installed mani Kongo responsible for dealing with and guarding against a presence not connected to the components of the polity, and thus uncontrollable and potentially dangerous.
This sudden appearance and containment of a powerful retinue of foreigners—soldiers, craftsmen with undreamed-of tools, and specialists representing an omnipotent monotheistic God—would have confirmed his standing above all others in the eyes of his counselors and the communities in the polity that they represented. Nzinga a Nkuwu evidently recognized the Europeans’ potential as a component, with whom he alone communicated, to strengthen his position in the Kongo political network. He put the masons and carpenters to work alongside a thousand Kongo
