Afonso I of Kongo

Somewhere over a couple of dozen letters from Afonso to the kings of Portugal survive in the Torre do Tombo and other archives, dictated in Kikongo and written out in Portuguese by his secretaries. They are the earliest substantial body of writing by a sub-Saharan African ruler that reaches us in something close to his own voice, and their subject matter is relentlessly practical. He wants priests, teachers, masons and physicians. He wants his students in Lisbon properly looked after. He wants his nephews and sons trained. And, from the 1520s onward, he wants the trade in his people stopped. The letter of 1526 is the one usually quoted: Portuguese merchants and their agents, he writes, are taking free Kongolese, including members of noble families, and shipping them out, and the kingdom is emptying. He proposes controls, then asks that only clergy and craftsmen be sent at all.

The Portuguese Crown replied with regret and did nothing that mattered, since the trade was by then the reason for the relationship. Reading the letters as an African critique of the Atlantic slave trade written at its very beginning is legitimate. Reading them as evidence that Kongo stood outside the trade is not; the kingdom sold captives too, and the argument was over who could be taken.

Kongo did not become Christian because missionaries overcame it. The court adopted the religion deliberately in the 1490s and Afonso made it the framework of royal authority, and for the next two centuries Kongo was a Christian kingdom with its own clergy, its own confraternities and its own saints' days, at a time when Portuguese presence on the ground was thin and often absent for years. What made that possible was that the new vocabulary mapped onto an existing one. Kongo religion already held that the living and the dead occupy two worlds divided by water, that the dead retain power over the living, and that certain objects and specialists mediate between them.

The word chosen for the Christian God, Nzambi a Mpungu, was already in use. The word for a priest, nganga, was the word for a ritual specialist. Holy water, relics and the crucifix entered a category the culture already had for empowered objects. Wyatt MacGaffey argued that what happened is best described as a translation in which both sides believed they were being understood, and each was partly wrong. That analysis is now standard, and it is also what makes the Antonian movement of Kimpa Vita two centuries later intelligible rather than aberrant.