Origin from 1491
A Portuguese mission that had first reached the Kingdom of Kongo in 1483 returned in 1491 with priests, masons, carpenters and soldiers, and on 3 May that year baptised King Nzinga a Nkuwu and his family, the king taking the Portuguese name Joao. His queen had insisted on being baptised alongside him, when the mission had planned to convert only the king and his nobles. The conversion did not last: four years later, in 1495, Joao abandoned Catholicism, in part because the church's requirement of monogamy conflicted with a matrilineal, elective Kongo political structure in which multiple wives secured political alliances.
Facts
Dates
Start YearSourced to the subject's own account3 May 1491, the baptism of King Nzinga a Nkuwu as Joao I, following a Portuguese mission that had first arrived in 1483. End YearSourced to the subject's own account1495, Joao I's own abandonment of Catholicism, an honest reversal this atlas names rather than smooths over; his son Afonso I would re-establish Christianity durably from 1509. StatusSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
How Portugal's Missionaries Baptized the King of Kongo
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A Portuguese mission first reached the Kingdom of Kongo in 1483 and returned in 1491 with a fuller company this time, priests among masons, carpenters and soldiers sent to build as well as to convert. On 3 May of that year the mission baptised King Nzinga a Nkuwu and his family, the king taking the Portuguese name Joao upon his conversion. His queen went further than the mission itself had planned, insisting on being baptised alongside him when the Portuguese had intended to convert only the king and his nobles.
The conversion did not hold. Four years later, in 1495, Joao abandoned Catholicism and returned to his kingdom's own religious practice. Part of the reason lay in a direct conflict between the church's requirement of monogamy and Kongo's own political structure, matrilineal and elective, in which a ruler's multiple wives secured the alliances that political power in the kingdom depended on. A faith that asked him to give up those marriages was asking him to give up the mechanism that held his rule together.
What this first mission changed for Christianity's spread in Kongo was more limited than the baptism itself might suggest: a king converted and then reverted within four years, leaving the deeper establishment of the faith in the kingdom to the next generation, carried out instead by his son.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Occurred In
The Kingdom of Kongo's core territory corresponds to modern Angola.
Spread Event Of
Sources
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