Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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might have happened in 1568. Briefly narrating the 1568 event as told in the Report will help contextualize the historical narrative that dominates the chapter.3 According to the Report, King Álvaro I of Kongo began his rule in 1568 following nearly a decade of political turmoil and failed Kongo military ventures. Álvaro was the stepson of the previous mani (master) Kongo, meaning his claim to the throne in Mbanza Kongo was quite weak because royal authority passed through the patriline in Kongo at that time. Initially Álvaro was not particularly interested in retaining the Catholic laws and customs as instituted by Afonso I and carried on by his successors. This bent toward sinning caused a swift and divine reckoning. Soon after taking the throne, a mysterious group of militarized nomads who had a reputation as flesh-eaters invaded Kongo from the northeast, passing through the powerful region of Mbata before laying siege to Mbanza Kongo. Álvaro and his warriors rode out of the royal compound to meet the villainous Jaga on the flatland outside the walls, where Afonso I won his miraculous victory. But Álvaro I was soundly defeated. His faction fled many miles to a small island in the mouth of the Congo River. The Jaga, allegedly numbering sixty thousand, killed and terrorized the people of Kongo, as Álvaro and his besieged refugees suffered through extreme food shortages and painful symptoms resulting from tropical diseases on the island. Forced by necessity, the exiles decided to sell family members and other allies into slavery to buyers from São Tomé Island in exchange for food.
Álvaro petitioned King Sebastião of Portugal to send aid, and in 1571 a former governor of São Tomé Island, Francisco da Gouveia Sottomaior, arrived with six hundred soldiers. Sottomaior’s men defeated the immense Jaga forces primarily because the booming sounds of the European firearms terrified them. Álvaro was restored to Mbanza Kongo, which Sottomaior’s men reinforced with new fortifications. Many of the Portuguese stayed in Kongo, where they established themselves as wealthy merchants after the Jaga were expelled. Álvaro recommitted himself to the Catholic God, which secured his authority and prestige. This story of the 1568 violence and its aftermath set the tone for a chain of misunderstandings and misrepresentations from those in Europe’s growing publishing industry, rather less skeptical or scrupulous than most modern journalists, that attributed subsequent stories of other events elsewhere to similar African cannibals.
The reported Jaga devastation of 1568 was particularly worth repeating in Africa and Europe, because it originated in a fast-changing and complicated historical context in Kongo and in the adjoining regions to the south. There were Portuguese schemes to establish military occupation of the watershed of the Kwanza River, south of Kongo. In and around Kongo, sugar-growing São Tomé islanders were under increasing pressure to obtain slaves, thus dividing political factions there. Europe hungered for knowledge of almost any sort about the utterly unknown interior behind an enticingly familiar shoreline, where rich mineral resources and a man named Prester John, the legendary Christian ruler of a jewel-bedecked kingdom, were said to await discovery. In Africa, other schemers manipulated the Jaga story to provide cover for activities that might otherwise have appeared less clear-cut. This chapter illuminates how multiple interest groups in Africa and Europe all converged around the myth of a cannibal invasion into Catholic Kongo in 1568 because the story served their own purposes. This revision of history was so profound that the identities of the attackers, the so-called “Jaga,” are still a mystery, though it is now possible to claim with certainty that they were Kongo insiders and not an invading army. Perhaps more importantly, parsing out the various myths and fears that motivated the multiple interest groups who helped to construct the Jaga story in fact demystifies the alleged cannibals. They were never a shadowy group of man-eaters who attacked Kongo as Pigafetta reported; rather, they were a fictional amalgamation pieced together from figments of European legal codes regulating “just war,” Kongo royal attempts to reclaim the heritage of Afonso I, biblical redemption stories, and Africans’ fears of being captured and eaten by Europeans or taken onto their slave ships.
The Rising Costs of Ruling a Catholic Kingdom in Kongo
Afonso I’s death in 1542 or 1543 exacerbated the factionalism he had created by adding Catholicism to Kongo politics and by allowing slave exports to Portuguese, primarily via slavers from São Tomé Island (the Tomistas), thus redefining how his successors in Mbanza Kongo would claim and maintain authority. For example, Afonso’s immediate successor, a son named Pedro, assumed this new position as the Catholic king of Kongo via hereditary succession. In contrast, the customary method for selecting a mani Kongo after the sitting one died was through highly regulated warfare where the winner was deemed to have demonstrated the full backing of the supernatural authorities, and the victor was then confirmed by a council of leading members of the Kongo composite. But as proof of the extent to which Afonso I had altered Kongo political practice, Pedro I assumed power without evidencing his authority by winning a succession struggle. He ruled for only a couple of years before being outmaneuvered politically by a grandson of Afonso’s named Diogo, who, in perhaps an echo of the composite politics of Kongo before Afonso, was installed after a coup in 1545 by his faction on the throne. Unlike Pedro I, Diogo I was a Catholic king of Kongo, in the Catholic idiom Afonso had left, and he also verified his right to rule via warfare as was required of a mani Kongo. During the violence of the overthrow, Pedro I fled into a church, where he claimed asylum. Diogo I respected the rules of asylum, perhaps seeing the Catholic sanctuary as a Kongo space of mystical invulnerability, and allowed Pedro to live. The scorned Pedro and his faction plotted against Diogo I to recapture the throne but were ultimately unsuccessful.4
The Tomistas, less bound by the heritage of Kongo political culture, proved to be more problematic for Diogo than Pedro had been. Recall that in the 1530s Afonso I had forged with the Tio5 slave producers near Malebo Pool and the Tomista slavers purchasing them at Mpinda on the Atlantic Coast, whose business had grown so lucrative by the 1540s that he was bragging about them. By the early 1550s the stable trading relationships were breaking down from their own successes.6 Kongo was exporting so many captives that the Tomista captains were overloading their boats, leading to increased numbers of revolts by the enslaved. Even more troublesome were other Tomista traders who had begun sailing up the Congo River to trade directly with the Tio to avoid the Kongo tax on slaves sold at the authorized port of Mpinda. In 1555, Diogo I grew so enraged with this subversion of the royal contract between Kongo and Portugal regulating these markets that he expelled nearly seventy Portuguese residents from Kongo, along with their wives and their children with African wives. The next year he made a political gamble to bring the rebellious Mbundu polity called Ndongo to the south, which the Tomistas were backing as an alternative source of slaves, back under royal Kongo control.7 But he lost this gambit, triggering Ndongo’s assertion of total independence, surely with Tomista backing. Even with these setbacks, however, Diogo I and his faction were strong enough to retain control over the fraying Kongo composite until his death in 1561.
A Kongo successor to Diogo I, whose name we do not know, was assassinated and replaced with one of Diogo’s illegitimate sons, which meant he took the position with no backing from any powerful recognized Kongo faction. However, this son, who claimed the legacy of his Catholic progenitor as Afonso II, supported the interests of the Tomistas who had backed his installation as mani Kongo. The people of Kongo resented this direct foreign intrusion into their politics and rioted throughout the region, killing many of the resident Portuguese and shuttering the authorized slave market in Mpinda, basically ending Kongo slave exports. Afonso II was also assassinated, only months after assuming the office. His successor, Bernardo I, maintained the boycott of slave exports, although he secretly tried to ease tensions with Lisbon before dying in 1567 in a military campaign against the Yaka, who lived east of Kongo and south of the Tio at Malebo Pool. Three claimants vied to fill the power vacuum after his death. The strongest contenders, two Christians named Rodrigo and Pedro, sent assassins to kill each other. The sources allege they were murdered at exactly the same time.8 The Kongo Christian nobility created by Afonso I, left with no other options, rallied around the weakest remaining candidate, named Henrique, and elected him mani Kongo in 1567, no doubt hoping to control him.
Prior to Afonso I’s time as mani Kongo, viable victories to establish authority came over rivals from within the Kongo composite, which thus determined who could be installed successfully as mani Kongo. But Afonso had ignored the mystical favor from the mani Kongo predecessors (buried and revered in their graves at Mbanza