under a single monarchical power with access to an exclusive Christian power of the past, invoking Afonso Henriques, Saint James, and Constantine as a panoply of his predecessors.
Afonso sent his priests out into the affiliated regions of Kongo to convert people to Catholicism, or—in Kongo terms—to enroll them in the new protective community of the Church. Populations everywhere turned out for baptisms in large numbers. He instructed his proselytizers, both European priests and Kongo catechists, to persecute the local nganga and especially to destroy their minkisi, as he proclaimed on his coat of arms. Since people in Kongo made no distinctions among psychological well-being, physical health, and community consensus, replacing the nganga with Catholic priests, who presented themselves as new nganga, may well have impressed the local people as no sort of upheaval at all, but simply another layer in an ongoing additive history.
When Afonso I forced the component communities of the Kongo polity to turn to his new regime built around the authority and sacraments of the Catholic Church, he was targeting inherited local beliefs and practices in ways similar to the efforts of contemporaneous monarchs in Europe. They were entrusted with protecting and patronizing Christianity, and so they persecuted folk healers as witches, imprisoning them in large numbers, forcing them to recant or admit their alleged sins under pain of torture, and even putting many to death. The sixteenth-century witch hunts in Germany and the Spanish Inquisition were relentless pursuits of perceived heretics. All these persecutions of subjects suspected of other loyalties imposed religious and social conformity as parts of the growing authority of European monarchies. Their efforts ran parallel to Afonso’s attempt to create a comprehensive Catholic domain of power in Kongo by persecuting nganga and destroying the old confederation. Afonso was earning the status he claimed as a zealous equal of his Catholic brethren in Europe, though without the cultural resources of a thousand years of the faith.
While Afonso dispersed his iron-bearing Catholic nganga throughout the polity to replace its components’ diverse minkisi, he imposed equally radical policies within the walls of Mbanza Kongo to eliminate the residues of the empowering past that it constituted and to channel all remaining power through himself as a Catholic king. Previous mani Kongo had assiduously maintained the grave cults of their predecessors that they harbored. They cared for a grove of palm trees that grew up over the burials and concealed the ceremonies conducted to contact the spirits of preceding mani Kongo hovering there in the dimness. Afonso had the palm grove cleared and built a stone cathedral over the sacred graveyard.
By placing the cathedral over the graves, he may have meant to continue the established practice of venerating his predecessors, setting the new Catholic communion in the proven site of communication with the past. The cathedral, and the prayers and masses conducted within it, were intended to commune with the Christian God just as Afonso’s predecessors had contacted the animating spirits of the polity on that spot.33 His destruction of the nkisi as “idols” may have meant that he was trying to replace the aggregated Kongo political order in a way that concentrated power in his own person through a cunning strategy of ambiguity that would allow doubting communities in the composite to feel that he was continuing to incorporate or respect them. On this interpretation, Afonso was adding another visual positioning of himself as Catholic king literally on top of the venerable legacy of past mani Kongo.
Afonso had hinted as early as the letters of 1512 that he intended to concentrate power in himself as a Catholic king. In so doing he would dominate the Kongo political confederation well beyond his momentary guardianship of the mani Kongo. He proclaimed this enduring monarchical authority in the titles of sovereignty that he assumed for himself. “King of mani Kongo and Lord of the Ambundos.” “King of mani Kongo” (in Portuguese, “Rei do Manicongo”) can be seen written out at both the top and the bottom of his coat of arms. Afonso’s assertion of his authority as “King of mani Kongo” situated the network authority of the mani Kongo under his personal control as a Christian monarch.
Under the usual interpretation of Kongo as a kingdom and the mani Kongo position as similar to that of a monarch in Europe, scholars have claimed that Afonso needed to do little more to effect the transition than translate the Portuguese wording of the “King and Lord” doublet, which was standard among monarchs in Europe, into Kikongo.34 According to the parallelisms in the contrasting Kongo and Catholic political theories, the theologically trained Portuguese priests around Afonso could have instructed him in the linguistic formulas recognizable to the Portuguese.35 Granting Afonso this sophistication in European diplomatic conventions suggests that “manikongo” referred to his predecessors in the Kongo polity and to the grove where they had been buried, first by the earlier custodians of the mani Kongo position and then under the foundations of his Catholic church. He presented this authority as a territorial domain parallel to the lands of the “King of Portugal” and distinct from the personal authority he asserted over areas neighboring the polity such 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,