Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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beyond the components of his polity meant that Tio supplies of slaves from Malebo Pool reduced the victimization of the Kongo people he was claiming as subjects. By 1540, Afonso could brag that the Kongo port of Mpinda at the mouth of the Congo River was producing more slaves than all of the ports where the Portuguese traded along Africa’s Atlantic Coast. Displacing the sources of slaves to the farther interior revealed that his 1526 condemnation of slaving was not a proto-abolitionist opposition to slaving in principle but rather a political move to protect his tenuous position and his Catholic faction within the Kongo political composite. He was explicit about the acceptable framework, however, which exempted Kongo: “[I] favor the trade, sustain it, open markets, roads, storehouses, and interior markets where the [slaves] are traded.”43 Unlike the Benin oba, he had protected himself from slaving without giving up gains from the trade. It was likely not a coincidence that the subjects of the following chapter, the alleged cannibals who attacked Kongo in 1568, were said to have originated in the area around Malebo Pool.
Afonso did not live to see his intended centralization of political power in Kongo in his own person, replacing the communities of the old confederation with Catholic monotheism and priests responsive to his directives. When he died in 1542 or 1543, in spite of his attempts to engage the vast Atlantic geopolitical scale in which he had inserted Kongo, the polity fell into armed clashes among the components like those of previous succession struggles, but this time the battles were intensified by the violence of slaving. The São Tomé islanders were a constant problem, and so, too, were the factions in the Sonyo areas between Mbanza Kongo and what had become the main Atlantic port of Mpinda. Sonyo had once been a part of the Kongo composite, but since the São Tomé traders had built up the Mpinda port to send captives to the Gold Coast and also to their own island, they often ignored Afonso’s wishes.
By the 1520s, São Tomé traders’ needs for slaves had lured them to venture also to the south, along the valley of the major river there, the Kwanza, beyond Kongo’s southern border (modern-day northern Angola), where they helped to fuel consolidation of a bellicose Ndongo regime among the same Mbundu whom Afonso had claimed in 1512 as vassals. The violence in Kongo even threatened Afonso personally; he survived an assassination attempt in 1540. Dissidents in Afonso’s court at Mbanza Kongo had hired mercenary musketeers from the royal garrison on São Tomé Island to murder him as he exited the doorway of the church he had built over the graves of his mani Kongo predecessors. The assassins failed. While there was some precedent in west-central Africa for ambitious prospective successors to usher aging titleholders to seats at the table with their ancestors, Afonso’s brush with death showed the desperation growing from the traumatizing violence in Kongo as slaving disrupted lives, scattered communities, and took away growing numbers of people. For the communities composing the Kongo polity, losses of personnel threatened their very existence and the enduring wrath of ancestors whom they would thus abandon.
The assassination attempt provides a clear statement of how terrifying life in Kongo had become under Afonso and Catholicism, disrupted by devoutly Catholic São Tomé slavers. The Kongo planners of the attack did not attempt to assassinate Afonso inside the church, where they likely considered him invulnerable to their local poisons or charms. To ensure the job was done, and to protect themselves from the possible wrath of powers they feared, whether Christian or Kongo, the plotters hired soldiers of the white man’s cult able to execute the mani Kongo who had gained so much authority from the Church. The attempt was made as Afonso emerged from this protected space into the exposed surrounding area. They thus respected the sanctity of the church that the Kongo planners feared and that the São Tomé soldiers honored as a sanctuary.
Prominent opponents of slaving within Kongo might hire slaver mercenaries to rescue them from their growing slippage into chaotic violence, but for most of the people of Kongo, not living in Mbanza Kongo and not privy to the intrigues of the Catholic faction there, the trauma and terror of incessant slaving needed to be calmed and, if possible, replaced by ambient powers other than the minkisi that they had lost and the Catholicism that had failed them. As the intensity of slaving increased, more and more people were sent toward the shoreline and into the waters of the dead, never to return. Like people in every other part of the continent, Kongo understood the upheavals of European-stimulated slaving in their own idioms of plagues and witches. People there, grasping for any cure for the disruption and cataclysmic immorality of witches within their communities, had first turned en masse to the baptisms offered by Afonso’s Catholic nganga in their search for protection. The cruel irony was that Afonso, in his quest to use the new cult to transcend it as king, was chiefly responsible for diluting the protective Kongo composite.
In the late 1560s, after nearly a half century of increasing slaving and the political centralization it funded, as well as a series of failed would-be successors after Afonso’s death, people in Kongo would be prepared to find perpetrators of their pervasive miseries worse than the witches they had felt were lurking among them. Not enough communities remained sufficiently intact to unite around searches for evil within them, and so they displaced the pervasive evils afflicting all as external to the whole. This positioning of blame on outsiders located the source of their afflictions precisely in the domain for which Afonso, as mani Kongo, had been responsible. Betrayal by leaders propped up by slaving and their failed healing cult produced a pervasive reaction—not just in terms of local community integrity but transcending the entire polity. They spoke of rumors of cannibals from unknown regions beyond.
CHAPTER THREE
Phantoms of the Kongo, 1568–1591
For there came unexpectedly to devastate the Kingdom of [K]ongo certain people living like Arabs, and ancient Nomads, who are called Jaggas, and have their dwellings near the first lake of the River Nile, in a province of the Empire of Monemugi. They are a cruel and murderous race, of great stature and horrible countenance, and eat human flesh, but are very courageous and valiant in battle. Their weapons are pavi[s]es, darts, and daggers. In their customs and everyday life they are very savage and wild, and go entirely naked. These people have no king, and live in huts in the forest, after the manner of shepherds. They went wandering up and down, putting to fire and sword, and spoiling and robbing every part of the country through which they passed, till they reached [K]ongo, which they entered through the province of [Mbata]. Overthrowing those who were first to resist them, they then went on to the City of Kongo, where the King was, and who had lost heart from the victory gained by his enemies in [Mbata].
—Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta, 15911
WHEN THE amateur Italian geographer Filippo Pigafetta published Relatione del Reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade tratta dalli in Rome in 1591 (hereafter Report), he launched the “cannibal Jaga” on their career of infamy. This “Report” about a Kongo kingdom and the surrounding countries was soon translated into Latin, German, French, and English and could be found in book repositories in London, Lisbon, Oxford, Ghent, Antwerp, Oporto, and Brussels.2 The details he provided about Kongo life, culture, politics, religion, and natural resources were revelations to most Europeans, who had virtually no other information about west-central Africa. Among the many important topics of the day that Pigafetta covered in his book, such as the mystery-shrouded font of the Nile River or the miraculous growth of a Catholic Church in Africa, the “Jaga” emerged as a new and arresting group of savage cannibals who might await Europeans traveling in that part of the world.
Pigafetta based his Report on the Jaga on what he had heard from a Portuguese man who had lived in the Kongo region from 1578 to 1584, an otherwise obscure slave trader named Duarte Lopes. Lopes had not himself met or seen any Jaga. He was rehearsing for Pigafetta’s benefit stories presumably told to him at the Kongo capital about an alleged invasion that had occurred in 1568, ten years prior to his arrival there. In publishing Lopes’s stories about the Jaga, Pigafetta helped entrench many Europeans’ predisposition to imagine Africans as cannibal savages. Further, by giving them a specific name—Jaga—Lopes provided a seemingly authentic language and set of horrific images by which Pigafetta’s readers could recognize seemingly similar savages whom they found, or heard about, in travels to other parts of the continent.
Lopes’s account, embroidered by the learned Pigafetta, thus was far from