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Angola Kongo Kingdom
In the middle of the fifteenth century, the Kongo
Kingdom was
the most powerful of a series of states along Africa's
west coast
known as the Middle Atlantic kingdoms. Kongo evolved in
the late
fourteenth century when a group of Bakongo (Kongo people)
moved
south of the Congo River into northern Angola, conquering
the
people they found there and establishing Mbanza Kongo (now
spelled
Mbanza Congo), the capital of the kingdom. One of the
reasons for
the success of the Bakongo was their willingness to
assimilate the
inhabitants they conquered rather than to try to become
their
overlords. The people of the area thus gradually became
one and
were ruled by leaders with both religious and political
authority.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, the
manikongo
(Kongo king) ruled the lands of northern Angola and the
north bank
of the Congo River (present-day Congo and Zaire). Kongo
was the
first kingdom on the west coast of central Africa to come
into
contact with Europeans. The earliest such contact occurred
in 1483
when the Portuguese explorer Diogo C o, reached the mouth
of the
Congo River. After the initial landing, Portugal and Kongo
exchanged emissaries, so that each kingdom was able to
acquire
knowledge of the other. Impressed by reports from his
returning
subjects, Nzinga Nkuwu, the manikongo, asked the
Portuguese
crown for missionaries and technical assistance in
exchange for
ivory and other goods.
The ruler who came to power in 1506 took a Christian
name,
Afonso. He too admired European culture and science, and
he called
on Portugal for support in education, military matters,
and the
conversion of his subjects to Christianity. Many
historians, in
fact, maintain that Afonso behaved more like a "Christian"
than
most of his teachers. Afonso, therefore, soon came into
conflict
with Portuguese bent on exploiting Kongo society. The most
insidious and lasting aspect of this exploitation was the
slave
trade.
Not long after Afonso became king, Portugal began to
turn its
attention to the exploration of Asia and the Americas. As
Portugal's interest in another of its colonies, Brazil,
increased,
its interest in Africa declined. Over time, the Portuguese
crown
came to view Kongo primarily as a source of slaves. Slaves
were
used first on the sugar plantations on nearby
Portuguese-claimed
islands but later were sent mainly to Brazil. Once Kongo
was opened
to the slave trade, halting or limiting it became
impossible.
Afonso's complaints to the Portuguese crown about the
effects of
the trade in his lands were largely ignored. By the 1520s,
most of
the missionaries had returned to Portugal, and most of the
remaining whites were slave traders who disregarded the
authority
of the manikongo's.
In addition to the slave trade, Kongo faced other
challenges in
the sixteenth century. After the death of Afonso in the
1540s, the
kingdom endured a period of instability that culminated in
an
upheaval in 1568. This rebellion was long attributed by
Portuguese
sources and others to the invasion by a group of unknown
origin
called the Jaga. Others, however, believed that the attack
was
probably launched by a Bakongo faction opposed to the king
that may
have been joined or aided by non-Bakongo seeking to gain
control
over the Kongo slave trade and other trading routes. In
any case,
the assault on the capital (which had been renamed São
Salvador)
and its environs drove the king, Alvaro I, into exile. The
Portuguese governor of São Tomé, responding to pleas from
Alvaro I,
fought the invaders from 1571 through 1573, finally
ousting them
and occupying the area until the mid-1570s.
A few years earlier, Sebastião, the Portuguese king,
had
granted the area south of the Bakongo as a proprietary
colony to
Paulo Dias de Novais, an associate of Portuguese Jesuits
and an
experienced explorer of the West African coast. In 1576,
in
effective control of the countryside and facing no
organized Kongo
opposition, the Portuguese founded the town of Luanda, in
effect
establishing the colony of Angola. Other African leaders,
however,
continued to resist the Portuguese, and the Europeans only
managed
to establish insecure footholds along the coast. Concerned
that
African attacks might impede the stream of slaves to
Brazil and
Portugal, in 1590 the crown assumed direct control of the
colony.
Alvaro I and his successor, Alvaro II, brought
stability to the
Kongo Kingdom by expanding the domain of their royal
authority
while keeping at bay encroachment by the Portuguese, whose
colony
during the late years of the sixteenth century remained
confined to
the area south of Kongo. But after the death of Alvaro II
in 1614,
conflicts over access to cultivable land between Kongo and
the
Portuguese colony of Angola soured formerly amicable
relations, and
in 1622 the Portuguese governor of Angola launched an
attack on
Kongo. Although not entirely successful from the
Portuguese point
of view, the war had a number of lasting effects. First,
the colony
captured a large number of slaves, which demonstrated how
rewarding
slave raiding could be. Second, the Portuguese came out of
the war
convinced of the existence of silver and gold mines in
Kongo, a
belief that encouraged a series of conflicts between the
colonists
and the Kongo Kingdom for the next half century. The war
also
created a xenophobia among the Bakongo of the interior,
who drove
away many Portuguese. Because the trading system depended
largely
on the Bakongo, commerce was greatly disrupted, with
effects on the
Angolan colony as great as those on the Kongo Kingdom.
Adding to Kongo's troubles in the early 1600s was a
general
dissatisfaction among the Bakongo with their rulers, some
of whom
were greedy and corrupt. Consequently, conflicts arose
over
succession to the throne, and more and more sections of
the kingdom
gained substantial degrees of autonomy and established
local
control over the trade that had so enriched the monarchy
in earlier
years.
Data as of February 1989
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