Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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an armed response.20
Without knowing exactly which Kongo faction led the rebellion, it is impossible to verify that the attacks indeed originated northeast of Mbanza Kongo, near Malebo Pool, or if they passed through Mbata. In any case, the assailants converged on Mbanza Kongo. Álvaro I raised an army to defend his capital from the impending assault. However, the opposing forces, said to have numbered sixty thousand, soon overwhelmed Álvaro.21 As Pigafetta paraphrased Lopes, “In this encounter, the king being partly discomfited, retired into the city, where not feeling safe, but forsaken of God on account of his sins, for he lacked the same trust in Him which King Dom Afonso [I] had, he resolved to leave the city a prey to his enemies.”22 Álvaro, some of his notables, and the priests fled to seek refuge on a small island on the Congo River. In their absence, without any significant check to their depredations, the attackers sacked Mbanza Kongo and ravaged the rest of the Kongo countryside virtually unchecked for nearly three years, leading to widespread deaths from starvation.
Pigafetta described in detail Álvaro’s and his companions’ sufferings on the small island at the mouth of the Congo River, which the Report called the Isle of Hippos.23 They ended up trapped there for three years. Like any island in a massive river, Isle of Hippos was humid and marshy. The refugees were epidemiologically native to the higher and drier elevations around Mbanza Kongo, and they succumbed to the tropical diseases of the riverine environment. Their misery was intensified by lack of food, which would have left malnourished refugees vulnerable to bacterial and parasitic infestations. No one had had time to prepare to remain on the island for so long, and so supplies ran out. Lopes was told that a majority starved and died. Taking advantage of the intense hunger of the exiles, Tomista slavers arrived with food to sell in exchange for the cooperation of Álvaro’s supporters and hangers-on. The Report depicted the refugees’ desperation: “Thus, forced by necessity, the father sold his son, and the brother his brother, everyone resorting to the most horrible crimes to obtain food.”24
This forced bargain of food for slaves on the Isle of Hippos would have had to clear strict legal hurdles. Catholics were proscribed from enslaving fellow Christians, and those who had fled to the island were affiliated with Álvaro’s court and thus almost certainly known Kongo Catholics. But in the face of starvation necessity trumped legality, and the Kongo resorted to the unthinkable, selling their family members and clients. In the mortiferous context of famine and disease, both Álvaro’s people and the Tomistas could justify these transactions as saving lives. As mani Kongo, Álvaro would not have suffered from lack of food as much as those around him, but he contracted dropsy, which caused his legs to swell painfully, an affliction that he would deal with for the rest of his life. He blamed himself and his lack of devout Catholicism for his own suffering as well as the suffering of all his people. While on the island, Álvaro recommitted himself to the Catholic God and requested aid from King Sebastião.
The attacks were stopped three years after they began, when a Portuguese military expedition of six hundred soldiers under the command of Francisco da Gouveia Sottomaior sailed in 1571 from Lisbon, via São Tomé Island, to confront them. Sottomaior had been the royally appointed captain, the secular authority, on São Tomé from 1564 to 1567 and, as such, would have been well aware of Tomista slaving interests on the mainland, though he had likely returned to Lisbon and might not have been exactly up-to-date concerning the intrigue in Kongo surrounding Álvaro’s accession in 1568. The relative silence about Sottomaior’s mission to Kongo in the Portuguese sources gives the entire project an appearance of involving carefully concealed Portuguese strategic interest. A large and expensively equipped force of six hundred soldiers could not have been stationed on São Tomé, suggesting Lisbon saw major gains at stake in Mbanza Kongo worth equipping Sottomaior with hundreds of soldiers and munitions for a long voyage.25 He took on munitions and additional troops in São Tomé, most of whom were probably slaves, as well as supplies. While the primary documents establishing Sottomaior’s mission are unknown, accounts written after it was complete suggest Sottomaior and King Sebastião believed his mission was to reduce Álvaro, and Kongo, to a vassal of Portugal.26
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