The Kongo civil wars had run for nearly forty years by 1704. The capital, São Salvador, stood empty; rival claimants held fortified positions in the countryside; the Capuchin mission was small and stretched. In that year a woman in her early twenties, of noble family and trained as a ritual specialist, fell ill, and announced on recovering that she had died and that Saint Anthony had taken possession of her body. What she preached was specific.
The holy family had been Kongolese and the events of the gospel had happened in Kongo, with São Salvador as Bethlehem. God cared about the intention of the heart, not about the sacraments the missionaries controlled, and the imported devotional objects held no power in themselves. And, above all, the kingdom must be reunited: the claimants were to stop fighting and reoccupy the abandoned capital. Her followers did exactly that, moving into São Salvador in numbers and reviving it. She sent out emissaries, called Little Anthonys, to carry the teaching. It was a religious movement and a political programme at once, and it very nearly worked, which is why it was dealt with as it was. She was about twenty when the visions began and dead before she was twenty five, and in that time she moved a kingdom's abandoned capital back into occupation, which is a fair measure of how much authority a Kongo ritual specialist could carry.