Kongo Kingdom

Kongo Kingdom, African kingdom in the area of modern Angola, founded in the 14th century, with its capital at Mbanza Kongo, 160 km (100 mi) inland from the Atlantic coast of central Africa between the Congo, Loge, and Kwango rivers, north-east of modern Luanda. The kings controlled the ecological borderland between forest and savannah resources, and had access to adequate local supplies of iron ore, as well as controlling the trade in copper from mines north of the Zaïre River. Trade was intimately associated with a system of tribute and taxation by which provincial princes received political legitimacy by sending regional products to the royal court. Salt and currency shells were sent from the coast to the interior, and woven cloths and tapestries of palm raffia were sent from the forest to the savannah towns. The major food crops were the vegetable banana, and various millet and sorghum cereals, all of which were also brewed for beer. Unlike most of the kingdoms of eastern and western Africa, Kongo had no long-distance foreign relations in the medieval period, and only in 1483 did overseas diplomatic contacts begin to evolve.

Religion was the most significant foreign influence of the early modern period in Kongo. One faction of the ruling class clung tightly to a concept of political legitimacy that was tied to the local gods, the care of the ancestral shrines, and the rituals performed by earth priests and rainmakers. Another faction, however, was attracted by the power and prestige of Christianity, and commissioned Portuguese masons to build a Christian-style chapel as the central shrine of the kingdom. In 1506 the pro-Christian faction defeated the other faction in battle, and crowned one of their own as king with the Europeanized title of Afonso. He ruled for nearly 40 years, but his policy of transforming the kingdom into a cultural satellite of Christendom was never wholly successful. His aristocracy adopted Westernized titles of nobility, but his peasantry remained resistant to change, and it was not until the 17th century that Roman Catholic missionaries began to convert the villages of Kongo.

The great crisis of the Kongo kingdom turned on the terms of trade that developed as the Atlantic was opened to long-distance navigation. The first foreign traders were from the Portuguese Empire and had hoped to find precious metals in the Kongo kingdom, as they had done in western Africa, but were gradually disappointed as their search for silver mines proved fruitless. Kongo royal merchants were thereafter persuaded to pay for their imports of exotic textiles, fine glassware, church ornaments, and pious books with slave labour that European merchants bought and set to work planting sugar on the offshore islands of Africa (especially São Tomé and Príncipe), and later on the northern mainland of Brazil. The search for orphans, debtors, aliens, and convicts who could be deprived of their freedom and sold into slavery put great strains on the social fabric of the kingdom, and some 15 years after the death of Afonso I in 1543, revolution and invasion by an unknown people from the east called the Jaga destroyed the capital and drove aristocrats and merchants out of the royal city. The kingdom was restored by an expeditionary regiment of some 600 European musketeers, who drove out the rebels and formed an armed merchant class that surrounded the reinstated king (Alvaro I), and fathered a generation of African-Portuguese Creoles which dominated the growing trade in slaves.

In the 17th century Kongo became one of the battlegrounds between the Portuguese Empire and the Dutch Empire. The Dutch initially paid Kongo merchants good prices for copper and ivory, but as their Atlantic empire grew to include the carrying trade of the Americas they began to compete with the Portuguese in the slave trade. Warfare between foreign entrepreneurs led to warfare between Kongo provincial factions. In 1665 the royal court was once more destroyed, the king killed, and his treasure, archives, and regalia taken as trophies by Portuguese forces who had by then established a military colony in Angola on the southern border of Kongo. For a generation the kingdom was fragmented between three rival claimants to dynastic legitimacy. Only in the early 18th century was the capital rebuilt and the court restored, thanks to the inspiration of a female oracle whom the Church subsequently burnt as a heretic. The restored kingdom survived until the mid-19th century, when yet another Portuguese military expedition burnt the city and again destroyed the royal archives. Eventually, Kongo was incorporated into Portuguese Angola, and its people provided one of the distinctive cultural strands of the nation.