Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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with Afonso would not end up in official royal archives. Most interestingly, the letter written to everyday Kongo people, the povos, was found in the district archive for the city of Évora, which lies about eighty miles east of Lisbon. Afonso very carefully chose which Portuguese priests he invited to Kongo to aid in his attempts to make Kongo a Christian space. The priests he chose, colloquially known as Loios (or Loyos), came from a monastic house in Évora. That the letter to the Kongo povos was discovered there suggests that it was a sort of script meant to be read by the Loios when they proselytized among the Kongo people. Perhaps this Portuguese-language letter was a template for the Portuguese priests to learn Afonso’s vision of Catholic doctrine before preaching it among his people, an example of the guidance he was admired for providing.
The details in the four letters Afonso dictated in 1512 specify his methods for adding Catholic elements into the Kongo context. In these letters his representations of the Kongo as a European-style kingdom were more aspiration than attainment. Consider, for example, how, even after winning the battle against Mpanzu a Kitima, Afonso required the aid of his uncle, the mani Mbata, and the faction in the polity he represented, to override the opposition to installing him in Mbanza Kongo from the Mwissikongo, which undoubtedly represented the majority of the polity’s component collectivities. However, his four letters carefully rearranged details of his miraculous victory and the resulting claims to authority according to their intended audiences. The Portuguese supporters whom Afonso was courting, particularly those in the palace in Lisbon, would have known little, if anything, of this internal intrigue. Instead, they learned of Afonso’s authority only as he described it to them. In one of the letters, the one apparently crafted specifically for his patrons in Portugal, Afonso claimed that his father had designated him as his successor, since he was the firstborn. He asserted that primogeniture was the “ancient custom” in Kongo.16 Of course, this claim was a blatant contradiction of Kongo rotation of succession among the components of the polity. In fact, the Mwissikongo confirmed the mani Kongo after political struggles for the succession, even armed confrontations such as Afonso’s challenge to Mpanzu a Kitima, had played out among sets of half siblings and their respective factions. Kongo descent was matrilineal, that is, from a man to a sister’s son, not to a father’s own male offspring, who belonged to their mother’s kin and aligned in these terms to contest the succession. In another letter addressed generally to the people within the Kongo confederation, who would not have been convinced by Afonso’s assertion of patrilineal succession, he made no mention of claims to primogeniture.
The letter that turned up in the National Library archive, written in Portuguese, would have been a copy of a missive delivered to officials in the Kongo composite by couriers able to translate the European idiom into intelligible Kikongo, presented orally. Its oral dissemination in the Kongo polity would have informed the representatives of its components—the Mwissikongo and their counterparts in their home regions—of Afonso’s revolutionary reconceptualization of Kongo as a realm. Addressing it to these “lords” acknowledged the composition of the polity as a confederation of collectivities. The copy he dispatched to Europe would have alerted his patrons there—had they been able to interpret it—to the political duality he had created by adding Catholicism to the legacy of his predecessors as mani Kongo.
Afonso also adapted the details of his miraculous victory for the distinct intended recipients of the letters. His words (or the words attributed to him by Portuguese advisers and scribes) narrate the key moment of the battle—the prayer and subsequent divine intervention—and hint at his agile integration of Catholic symbols into the Kongo context. His letters assert that his men called out to Saint James (the iconic warrior of the Iberian wars, called the Reconquista, to recover the peninsula from centuries of Muslim rule) or to Christ (martyr and Savior, or culture founder). In the letter addressed to the local Kongo povos (peoples of the Kongo components), which is the letter most general in form and content and directed to a popular audience; and in a second more detailed letter addressed to local Kongo senhores (Portuguese “masters,” that is, the mani representing the components of the polity), his army prayed to Saint James.17
However, in a third letter, also addressed to unspecified senhores, who were probably the Portuguese present in Kongo, since it also invokes primogeniture and contains Catholic doctrine in the greatest detail and strongest insistence on Afonso’s Christian piety but little on local symbols, his men prayed to Jesus, who then sent Saint James to the rescue.18 These depictions, in which he called on different spiritual patrons, ancestors in Kongo terms and God’s own Son in its Catholic counterparts,19 hint at Afonso’s ability—indeed, obligation—as mani Kongo to represent the invisible forces relevant to each of the multiple components of the Kongo composite. The varied depictions were not contradictory, but complementary, as they were specified situationally to the different networks of relationships through which accomplished Kongo were accustomed to moving.
Afonso and his advisers also sought to affirm to European Catholic monarchs his right to rule by noting explicitly how his victory in 1509 made him heir to miraculous victories for Christ in the Catholic narrative of Christian civilization. Afonso’s rescue by Saint James would have seemed plausible, and legitimating, to his devout Portuguese sponsors. He noted how closely his own victory resembled the 1139 triumph of Afonso Henriques that had created the first Christian dynasty of Portugal.20 In that foundational myth, Afonso Henriques had called on Christ, who appeared and helped defeat the Moors, unifying Portugal under the House of Burgundy. Additionally, although not mentioned explicitly in Afonso’s letters, the white cross in the sky that appeared to his adversaries was the same image that had appeared to the Roman emperor Constantine before his victory that established Rome as a Christian realm. Thus, Afonso’s narrative of Christian triumph over heathen forces linked Kongo on a footing equal to other, even paradigmatic, Christian kingdoms.21
Though some might think it a bit strained to believe Afonso was asserting his place with Constantine and the full Catholic brotherhood of kings, he used the language of familial bonds throughout his other correspondence with both Lisbon and Rome. For example, along with a 1512 letter he sent to Rome, he also sent ambassadors to Pope Julius II pointedly belaboring the obvious, “as is the custom, and in necessary obedience, like the other Christian kings do.” In the same letter he referred to King Manuel I of Portugal as “my much beloved brother,” a sign of their equivalent standings as siblings under their holy father, the pope.22 In the inclusive terms of the Kongo classes of kinship, brotherhood, the relationship of sibling equality, was social or political rather than biological.
King of Kongo over Master of Spirits
Afonso’s letter to the “lords” of the Kongo confederation similarly placed him in the worldwide brotherhood of Christ, but in a nuanced way that emphasized the power of the Catholic God and his own personal access to it, to the exclusion of the Mwissikongo, to whom he was no longer beholden. With this pointed letter to the Kongo titleholders, Afonso sent along a coat of arms that he had requested from the king of Portugal in his now-lost letter from 1509. He referred to this visual image of his thinking in three of the 1512 letters, and in the one addressed to Kongo senhores, he explained each of the heraldic elements composing it. The meanings he expressed in this assemblage of symbols, elements familiar to Europeans but not obvious to the senhores in Kongo, were a flamboyant representation of his 1509 victory over Mpanzu a Kitima, its authenticating value in Kongo political theory represented in a Christian format (see plate 1).
The blue field (the dark band at the top of the shield) represented the sky, or the Catholic heaven, and the white cross on it was that of Constantine. The shells flanking the white cross at the edges of the blue field represented Saint James. The five arms holding swords signified Saint James’s company of knights, and the swirling flows of red symbolized the blood that was spilled. At the bottom of the shield, a brace of Kongo “idols,” both broken at the waist, flanked the blue-and-gold emblem of Portugal. Finally, above the helmet of iron protecting all were an additional five arms with swords piercing into the margins, representing the five wounds of Christ.23
Although the symbolism in this emblem can appear entirely Portuguese, iron swords and crosses were also thoroughly familiar in Kongo. In fact, the five swords at the top of the composition, which stylistically were probably Portuguese