as those of the “Ambundos” (Mbundu), the non-Kikongo-speakers to the south, whom he claimed as vassals to himself personally as “lord.”
However, the title of “King of manikongo” did not equate to a European-model “King of Kongo,” because Afonso’s 1512 letters nearly always refer to the Christian realm he was extending out over the political composite as “Kongo,” not as “manikongo.”36 Given that the inherited authority of the mani Kongo related only to delineated domains within a polity composed of many carefully specified powers distributed among officers representing its components, Afonso’s repeated declarations of himself as king and lord overrode these checks and balances to create himself as a new sort of potentate personally in full control of the entire Kongo polity, far beyond the limited role of past mani Kongo in the composite. In this case, the linguistic formula articulating the singular power of the Portuguese monarch was appropriate to the intended recipients of his message in Portugal. Afonso, for example, adopted Portuguese feudal language of sovereignty and vassalage, and the doublet of “King and Lord,” and acknowledged European visual representations of nobility.37 With the words “King of manikongo,” Afonso situated himself as master of the aggregate mani Kongo, which no longer accumulated through time or had its own existence independent of the living holder of the trusteeship, that is, himself.
The personal authority that Afonso asserted over the entire history of mani Kongo—the very integrity of the Kongo network—resonated in the broken nkisi figures on his coat of arms. His predecessors in the mani Kongo were like human nkisi in their role as channels to the ambient past; their investitures had turned them into living embodiments of otherwise intangible power. As a grand nkisi, the incumbent mani Kongo was “a sacred object, in touch with the world of the dead, and thus subject to limitations on his physical powers.”38 Thus the images of broken figures would have had the same significance to Kongo that assertion of being “King of mani Kongo” had for the Portuguese. Afonso was acknowledging previous forms of power, in the Kongo idiom of additive change, but he was also ending time understood in those accumulating terms by asserting that his miraculous victory, and the apparition of Saint James, had endowed him with personal powers over earlier forms of authority as the eternally Catholic king in Kongo. In very powerful ways, he succeeded in establishing himself as a founder who could never be replaced. Over five hundred years later, people in Kongo today look back to Afonso as the founder of their culture.
Slaving, Baptisms, and a Plague of Witches: Stirrings of Revolt
Afonso’s four 1512 letters, written for the Portuguese king, the pope, the holders of titles in the Kongo composite, and its peoples, articulated his personal power and authority in Kongo situationally, in carefully varied language expressing multiple, or composite, identities, with differing selves for specific contexts or audiences. He represented himself as the center in this symbolic representation of his predecessors as mani Kongo and then as victor of the battle at Mbanza Kongo. He was simultaneously the blacksmith-founder–Catholic king, brother-in-arms, and comrade of Afonso Henriques in Christian favor; ruler in the image of Constantine, emperor of eternal Rome; and predecessor of the pope. The sophistication of this political strategy confirmed the erudition that admiring priests—even if themselves probably none too sophisticated—reported to their superiors.
We should not be surprised that Afonso encountered resistance among the people he was claiming as subjects. As mani Kongo, as he continued to consider himself, within the network his authority was constrained by the council members who surrounded him, and he performed only functions within Mbanza Kongo manifesting the past, or beyond its walls regarding outsiders as embodiment of the entire polity. For all of Afonso’s posing as the conduit to the powerful Catholic God, evidenced by his heaven-sent victory over Mpanzu a Kitima, the variations between elements of continuity and rupture in his 1512 letters suggest how tenuous he knew his position in Kongo was, not only in the polity’s constitution but also, and increasingly, in its politics of the day. His later assertive statements, like building his church over the graves of his predecessors or hunting down nkisi in the villages, confirm that impression. He had good reason to feel challenged, as it is possible, perhaps even probable, that the Kongo electors had seen his 1509 battlefield triumph in Mbanza Kongo as a coup, since they had tried to sway his uncle, the mani Mbata, away from helping him gain investiture in the office and had delayed the investiture for three years, until 1512. Only a Christian miracle had ended the impasse.
But above all, Afonso’s pretentions to authority were undermined by the violence and terror of Portuguese slaving, which increased sharply in intensity under his rule and moved from enemy areas beyond Kongo into the heart of the confederation. For Kongo, the proof of the mani Kongo’s authority was consensus and peace among the polity’s components. Whatever the promise of the power of Catholic Christianity, the practice stripped communities of their nkisi protective power, leaving them directly dependent on Afonso, whose access to the protective powers of his predecessors seemed to mean less and less as terror spread through the vulnerable population. In the personal power he sought, he alone was also responsible.
Portuguese slavers from São Tomé Island were working out the most effective methods of acquiring captives to send off to forced labor in the gold mines of the Akan areas of West Africa and on sugar plantations on the islands of the Gulf of Guinea at the same time that Afonso was undertaking these strategies of political consolidation and implicitly assuming personal responsibility for the welfare of his realm. Beyond whatever Kongo resentments may have been brewing in reaction to Afonso’s assault on their historic communities, Portuguese slavers interfered in their ongoing local politics. They exacerbated routine conflicts and harvested prisoners taken by all sides for sale as slaves. The growing disorder sowed the seeds of the desperation that moved a succeeding generation of people in Kongo to attribute the dissension and distress to evil beyond witchcraft, which the Portuguese would understand as cannibalism.
These “Portuguese” slavers from São Tomé Island were in fact often offspring of liaisons between earlier Portuguese settlers on the island and the first generation of Kongo women they had taken there as slaves, early in Afonso’s time. The slavers spoke their mothers’ Kikongo languages as well as Portuguese, which enabled them to broker commercial relations between the communities on the mainland—sometimes with their mothers’ own people—and the commercial economy of the Atlantic. The São Tomé slavers had originally purchased captives taken in violence against the Tio around Malebo Pool in the early 1500s, and then from the Mbundu peoples (the “Ambundos” in Afonso’s letter) to the south.39 Although a few criminals from the Kongo region convicted in judicial proceedings were also disposed of, as well as some survivors of droughts and famines, more slaves could be generated by provoking armed conflicts among the competing components of the polity. These losses violated the intense Kongo ethos of political integrity and set the stage for a collective reaction to their growing sense of helpless vulnerability to unseen betrayals from within, as well as the muskets of the Portuguese.
This cycle of violence, and enslavement throughout the polity, was attributable to the mani Kongo. By the early 1520s, the disruption, as well as the wealth that collaborators outside Afonso’s circle derived from it, became a political problem of pervasive proportions. In 1526 Afonso wrote a famous letter to the Portuguese king, begging his friend, ally, and protector in Lisbon for help to end uncontrolled slaving in Kongo. After noting the abuses of the Tomista slavers and recounting the depopulation of lands and illegal enslavements of Kongo Catholics, Afonso petitioned King João III to “send neither merchants nor merchandise, because our will is that in these kingdoms there is no trade in slaves nor outlet for them.”40
Afonso’s motives, viewed in the context of the Kongo polity, seem more complex than the modern proto-abolitionist reading usually given to this plea would indicate. Since Afonso had clearly tolerated—even encouraged—foreign slaving in Kongo prior to 1526, his entreaty for help begs the question of what changed his mind. He stressed two primary rationales. First, he lamented how the São Tomé slavers had flooded the Kongo market with imported trade goods, which drove their value down. Local people whom
