Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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other elements of this story are entirely Kongo.2 Afonso claimed that none of his troops died in the fight, which expresses a common African trope of invincibility in warfare for combatants protected by ointments and other charms. Another common African trope suggests that charmed enemies become immobilized during a fight, just as the half brother’s forces claimed they could not control their terror and were frozen to the spot. The tension between what might have actually happened in Kongo in 1509, how the combatants involved in the incident experienced it, and Afonso’s own written description of the event in 1512 motivates this chapter and, really, this whole book. The book is devoted to seeing how we as historians can decide what we make of what happened in western-central Africa between 1509 and 1670 by reading complicated documents giving clues to what people—Europeans as well as Africans—made of it. Historians can’t always believe what their subjects claimed they saw.
This chapter follows the interweavings of these two separate worlds, intimately entwined in the Kongo polity between 1483 and 1568, each unintelligible to the other, while partisans on both sides thought they were being understood by the other. The text revolves around a Kongo polity built on premises all but radically opposed to the monarchy that the Portuguese saw, with features—notions of power, conceptions of time and change—alluded to in the text as the Kongo alternatives to a narrative told more or less in European terms familiar to readers, but concluding on the capacity of this working Kongo-Portuguese misunderstanding to generate the core of the “Jaga myth” that the rest of the book goes on to trace.
Of course, European and especially Catholic symbols and characters mentioned in Afonso’s 1512 letter were known to him only because he had integrated Portuguese representatives and priests into a new Kongo polity he was trying to create. The Portuguese had neither the technology nor the manpower to overwhelm this populous political system militarily. Any Europeans there lived as servants and paid laborers at the pleasure of aristocratic Kongo patrons as Kongo would have seen them. However, the Portuguese nonetheless pressed for religious and economic changes, probably without realizing how drastically the religious adaptations and trading they promoted would also alter Kongo political culture. In particular, Catholic priests sought to convert Kongo to Christianity and focused on baptisms and on burning whatever objects of devotion they saw as “idols,” which they condemned as evil temptations of the devil. European traders also tapped into the existing Kongo market for captives and began to purchase some of these slaves for export out of the Kongo region to serve as laborers in other locales on the West African coast. On their own, the Europeans would not likely have had a significant impact on Kongo politics. However, Afonso sponsored the priests; when his victory secured his central position in Kongo in 1509, both his conversion to Catholicism and the slaving were wedded to the highest levels of Kongo politics.
The marriage soon turned out not to be a happy one. Afonso’s victory and coronation as Catholic “king” of Kongo in 1509, and his political, economic, and social agenda over the following two and half decades as the head of the polity, created disorders that set the stage for the mysterious later cannibal protagonists in our story that people in Kongo very likely understood as an outbreak of uncontrollable witchcraft. To be clear, no primary sources record Africans of their day explicitly referring to the ailments of the sixteenth century as a “plague of witches,” although sources written by Africans—including Afonso I, as noted in other letters—frequently complained of the greed they associated with the imports the Europeans promoted and the violence of slaving to which they led, particularly when it targeted themselves or their communities. In African communities the dual maladies of violence and greed were widely accepted indicators of nefarious betrayals of the tight communities in which they lived or witchcraft.3 Both Europeans and Africans thought of and represented cannibals as perpetrators at the extreme end of the spectrum of these practices of evil, with the distinction being that “witches” were insiders targeting their own social networks (and therefore violating the integrity of their communities and families of trust), and “cannibals” were outsiders who devoured the communities by dispersing them and figuratively (and only very rarely literally) eating flesh and drinking blood.4
European success in conversion and slaving was minimal at the beginning of Afonso’s reign. But in a few decades they had grown pervasive and deeply disturbing, both by taking up the prestigious practice of Catholic preaching and by targeting whole communities as idolaters and sinners. They provided opportunities for the more entrepreneurial (greedy and unscrupulous, as they saw them) Africans to get into the lucrative business of handing people over to foreign slavers. During Afonso’s time, the disruptions instigated through such planned and unplanned Kongo and European collaborations might be thought of as a plague of witches, because they were associated with insiders’ overt appropriations of foreign peoples, ideas, and trade goods. As the tumult grew in scale and was intensified by people not associated with the highest levels of Kongo authority, later generations understood the chaos as perpetrated not only by witches but also by alleged cannibals seeking victims whom they made disappear forever for their own gain, or whom they effectively might have devoured.
Kongo Perspectives: Political Composites, Complementarity of Authorities, and Additive History
Let’s return to the beginning of Kongo encounters with the Portuguese and review the events that followed in the terms that the Kongo, as well as the Portuguese, understood them. In 1483, a Portuguese explorer named Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, where he and his crew were greeted by the people living in a region near the coast called Sonyo. The people of Sonyo were not quite sure what to make of the pale, hairy visitors from the sea. Just to be sure that they had disarmed all the ambient forces that must have aided these strange visitors floating on the water, the people of Sonyo performed ceremonies to honor spirits they saw as coming from the land of the dead—which lay beyond the ocean. They sent Cão and his crew on their way into the interior to a populous place called the Mbanza Kongo (the gathering place of Kongo). There the Europeans were directed to meet with the master, mani, of the place, Kongo. This authority’s personal name was Nzinga a Nkuwu. Their first meeting included the customary exchange of gifts, including persons, meant to consolidate future diplomatic contacts through mutual recognition of the other’s sovereignty.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were sending out ships to establish similar formal contacts with political authorities around the world. They acted on behalf of the Portuguese king in Lisbon. According to European protocol, a sovereign ruler, or king, could deal diplomatically only with sovereigns of equal rank—other kings or queens. Diogo Cão was expressly looking for “kings” in Africa, and he declared whoever seemed to be in charge as such. He likely would not have been able to imagine a political system other than the uniquely authoritative monarch in Lisbon he knew, his master. As a result, after 1483 the Portuguese dealing with Kongo represented the polity as a “kingdom” and the mani Kongo as a “king,” regardless of how authority and politics in Kongo were actually structured.
In fact, powers in Kongo were systematically plural rather than the singularity Europeans attributed to their monarchs, and Kongo distributed them among multiple specified domains assigned to different officials. Decades later this first misunderstanding of Kongo politics as equivalent to European monarchies was represented as truth and ultimately underlies the subsequent representations of cannibals in Kongo. The enterprising Nzinga a Nkuwu recognized the potential advantages for his polity, and himself, in seeking to make Kongo appear, at least to his unsuspecting Catholic collaborators, to be the sort of kingdom his new European allies imagined.
Nzinga a Nkuwu’s brief 1483 meeting with Diogo Cão’s men, as well as the resulting exchange of ambassadors, proceeded solidly within the political responsibility in a composite polity entrusted to the mani Kongo. The primary function of the central figure in a political composite—not unlike a confederation of recognized regional parties—was to represent the complex collectivity of Kongo-affiliated regions to outsiders as a whole. Other Portuguese returned to Kongo in 1491 to pursue the tentative relationship, and Nzinga a Nkuwu again welcomed them to his compound. This second and larger contingent of Portuguese included royal emissaries, soldiers, Portuguese priests to convert the Kongo people to Catholicism, and also masons, carpenters, and other artisans to construct churches for them to worship the Christian God. The Portuguese,