mani Kongo and Catholic king, in the additive style of building the novel out of the familiar. He did not share his Catholic sponsors’ views, in which Kongo thought and Christian faith were mutually exclusive. In the letter to King Manuel, he styled himself as a European monarch and equal of his Catholic, especially Portuguese, “brother kings.”
To understand the conflicting details within these letters, it is necessary to consider the details of their production. Scholars assume that the four letters from 1512—to Kongo nobles, to the people of Kongo, to Portuguese nobles residing in Kongo, and to the pope—derive from an earlier letter that Afonso had written and sent to King João of Portugal in 1508 or 1509. The 1509 letter, which is no longer extant, described Afonso’s victory in battle and the later years of his father’s rule.13 That letter was sent with a personal courier, a cousin of Afonso’s named Pedro de Sousa, who served as his ambassador.14 While the letter sent to a Portuguese king would have been written in the Portuguese of their 1512 supplements, it is tempting to think that Afonso dictated the letter in Kikongo to someone else, who then translated it. In fact, Afonso dictated most of his diplomatic correspondence to a Kongo scribe named João Teixeira. Considering that Afonso had been living with European clergy by 1509 for nearly fifteen years, and by 1516 was proficient enough in Latin to fall asleep reading theological texts, it certainly seems likely he could have dictated lengthy orations in Portuguese. Ultimately all such thoughts about the production of this original letter are speculation, however, since it was lost.
Some scholars think the four 1512 letters are based heavily on this 1509 letter and suggest that the later letters may have been drafted in Portugal and then sent to Afonso as templates for formal diplomatic correspondence.15 However, the drastic differences in details among the 1512 letters suggest that they were not written from a single account or even from a Portuguese Catholic worldview, as we might assume letters written in Lisbon by a Portuguese cleric would reveal. And, the letter written to Pope Julius II states explicitly that it was written in the “city of the mani Kongo,” so at least one of the four was produced in a Kongo context. As we will see, whoever produced the letters of 1512 was intimately aware of compositional Kongo politics and possessed an additive sense of time and change.
Although much about the production of the letters remains a mystery, an important clue about their intended audiences turns up in the repositories where the documents have been found. The letters addressed to the pope and to Portuguese lords, senhores, living in Kongo were deposited in royal archives in Lisbon, where one would expect to find copies of formal diplomatic correspondence. The other two letters, those directed to Kongo audiences, were found in equally telling places. The letter to Kongo lords (senhores) is housed in the National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal), rather than with the royal archive of the Torre do Tombo. We could speculate that the Kongo ambassadors and students whom Afonso routinely sent to live and study in Portugal brought this letter to Lisbon. These Kongo were guests of the Portuguese Crown, but their private correspondence with Afonso would not end up in official royal archives. Most interestingly, the letter written to everyday Kongo people, the povos, was found in the district archive for the city of Évora, which lies about eighty miles east of Lisbon. Afonso very carefully chose which Portuguese priests he invited to Kongo to aid in his attempts to make Kongo a Christian space. The priests he chose, colloquially known as Loios (or Loyos), came from a monastic house in Évora. That the letter to the Kongo povos was discovered there suggests that it was a sort of script meant to be read by the Loios when they proselytized among the Kongo people. Perhaps this Portuguese-language letter was a template for the Portuguese priests to learn Afonso’s vision of Catholic doctrine before preaching it among his people, an example of the guidance he was admired for providing.
The details in the four letters Afonso dictated in 1512 specify his methods for adding Catholic elements into the Kongo context. In these letters his representations of the Kongo as a European-style kingdom were more aspiration than attainment. Consider, for example, how, even after winning the battle against Mpanzu a Kitima, Afonso required the aid of his uncle, the mani Mbata, and the faction in the polity he represented, to override the opposition to installing him in Mbanza Kongo from the Mwissikongo, which undoubtedly represented the majority of the polity’s component collectivities. However, his four letters carefully rearranged details of his miraculous victory and the resulting claims to authority according to their intended audiences. The Portuguese supporters whom Afonso was courting, particularly those in the palace in Lisbon, would have known little, if anything, of this internal intrigue. Instead, they learned of Afonso’s authority only as he described it to them. In one of the letters, the one apparently crafted specifically for his patrons in Portugal, Afonso claimed that his father had designated him as his successor, since he was the firstborn. He asserted that primogeniture was the “ancient custom” in Kongo.16 Of course, this claim was a blatant contradiction of Kongo rotation of succession among the components of the polity. In fact, the Mwissikongo confirmed the mani Kongo after political struggles for the succession, even armed confrontations such as Afonso’s challenge to Mpanzu a Kitima, had played out among sets of half siblings and their respective factions. Kongo descent was matrilineal, that is, from a man to a sister’s son, not to a father’s own male offspring, who belonged to their mother’s kin and aligned in these terms to contest the succession. In another letter addressed generally to the people within the Kongo confederation, who would not have been convinced by Afonso’s assertion of patrilineal succession, he made no mention of claims to primogeniture.
The letter that turned up in the National Library archive, written in Portuguese, would have been a copy of a missive delivered to officials in the Kongo composite by couriers able to translate the European idiom into intelligible Kikongo, presented orally. Its oral dissemination in the Kongo polity would have informed the representatives of its components—the Mwissikongo and their counterparts in their home regions—of Afonso’s revolutionary reconceptualization of Kongo as a realm. Addressing it to these “lords” acknowledged the composition of the polity as a confederation of collectivities. The copy he dispatched to Europe would have alerted his patrons there—had they been able to interpret it—to the political duality he had created by adding Catholicism to the legacy of his predecessors as mani Kongo.
Afonso also adapted the details of his miraculous victory for the distinct intended recipients of the letters. His words (or the words attributed to him by Portuguese advisers and scribes) narrate the key moment of the battle—the prayer and subsequent divine intervention—and hint at his agile integration of Catholic symbols into the Kongo context. His letters assert that his men called out to Saint James (the iconic warrior of the Iberian wars, called the Reconquista, to recover the peninsula from centuries of Muslim rule) or to Christ (martyr and Savior, or culture founder). In the letter addressed to the local Kongo povos (peoples of the Kongo components), which is the letter most general in form and content and directed to a popular audience; and in a second more detailed letter addressed to local Kongo senhores (Portuguese “masters,” that is, the mani representing the components of the polity), his army prayed to Saint James.17
However, in a third letter, also addressed to unspecified senhores, who were probably the Portuguese present in Kongo, since it also invokes primogeniture and contains Catholic doctrine in the greatest detail and strongest insistence on Afonso’s Christian piety but little on local symbols, his men prayed to Jesus, who then sent Saint James to the rescue.18 These depictions, in which he called on different spiritual patrons, ancestors in Kongo terms and God’s own Son in its Catholic counterparts,19 hint at Afonso’s ability—indeed, obligation—as mani Kongo to represent the invisible forces relevant to each of the multiple components of the Kongo composite. The varied depictions were not contradictory, but complementary, as they were specified situationally to the different networks of relationships through which accomplished Kongo were accustomed to moving.
Afonso and his advisers also sought to affirm to European Catholic monarchs his right to rule by noting explicitly how his victory in 1509 made him heir to miraculous victories for Christ in the Catholic narrative of Christian civilization. Afonso’s rescue by Saint James would
