West Central Africa

Portuguese expansion continued along the coast of West Africa. In 1483, Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River in West Central Africa. Here, the Portuguese again developed relations with various local states, the largest states being the Kingdom of Kongo and the Kingdom of Ndongo.

The formation of the Kingdom of Kongo dates back to the thirteenth century. Located south of the Congo River, its territory roughly corresponds to today’s northern Angola and western Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time of the Portuguese arrival, the Kingdom of Kongo’s population was more than half a million inhabitants, most of whom were speakers of Kikongo, a language of the Bantu family. Like the societies of the Gold Coast, the Kingdom of Kongo was rich in mineral resources such as iron ore and copper. A centralized state like other African polities, Kongo was a stratified society, divided into nobility, commoners, and enslaved people.⁵¹ In the territories of the kingdom’s various provinces, its rulers appointed various agents who were in charge of collecting taxes. Also like other African societies, the kingdom had various currencies, including cowrie shells, or nzimbu. Its population was spread out to take advantage of the land’s multiple resources that could generate income to pay tributes. As a result, the generation of wealth was often, although not exclusively, associated with what historians and anthropologists have defined as “wealth-in-people,” meaning the ability to organize and control people, therefore transforming them into dependents through which to secure access to resources and increase production.⁵² To achieve this goal, Kongo engaged in wars against neighboring polities as a means not only to expand its territory but also and especially to acquire prisoners.

The encounter between Portugal and Kongo impacted both kingdoms.⁵³ After his arrival, Cão took several individuals as hostages to force them to learn Portuguese. As in previous encounters with African rulers, the two kingdoms exchanged embassies, with Kongo emissaries sent to Lisbon and Portuguese diplomats directed to the Kingdom of Kongo. As Portuguese priests hosted the emissaries, they learned the Kikongo language, and Kongo’s ambassadors learned to speak, read, and write in Portuguese. Literacy in Portuguese contributed to facilitating the potential conversion of the manikongo and other members of the noble class to Catholicism. Therefore, by 1490, as they did in other parts of Africa, the Portuguese engaged in imperial expansion by relying on the dictates bestowed on them by the papacy. Portuguese agents made an alliance with the Kingdom of Kongo, relying on the idea that West Central Africans were pagans and needed to be evangelized. The manikongo Nzinga a Nkuwu, along with his family and members of his court, embraced Catholicism. The ruler was baptized according to the Catholic doctrine by taking the name João I. Christian conversion provoked initial opposition from rival factions who supported other candidates to the throne, but eventually his son, Mvemba a Nzinga (baptized with the Portuguese Catholic name Afonso), was enthroned as his successor. During Afonso’s reign, the Portuguese armed him with weapons to wage war against neighboring states. Some of the Portuguese men, along with their mixed-race children, also integrated the kingdom’s army, capturing prisoners of war who were then sold into slavery.⁵⁴

We will never know the true motivations that led to the conversion of Kongo’s rulers to Catholicism, as most of the surviving written sources about these early exchanges were produced by the Portuguese.

As in other regions of West Africa and West Central Africa, the institution of slavery had existed in the Kingdom of Kongo at least since the fourteenth century, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese. Already in the fifteenth century in West Central Africa, resources and people that generated wealth were treated as capital.⁵⁸ By this same period, the Portuguese were already exporting enslaved Africans from the Kingdom of Kongo to labor on plantations on their islands off the African Atlantic coast. Portuguese traders also transported enslaved people to ports on the Iberian Peninsula. Although conversion to Christianity was part of the Portuguese colonial project, by the end of the fifteenth century the trade in enslaved Africans became a central element of the exchanges established with African polities along the Atlantic coast.

Kongo’s rulers increased their number of dependents by displacing residents from less populated regions and relocating them to densely occupied areas such as those surrounding the kingdom’s capital, where they engaged in agricultural activities.⁵⁹ In this early period, people were enslaved in a variety of ways, as we will see in greater detail in chapter 2. Overall, the gradual contact with the Portuguese led West Central African rulers to accumulate more dependents while acquiring foreign goods such as weapons, alcohol, and textiles. These products contributed to the power of the African potentates. However, as these sovereigns gradually became important players in Atlantic networks, they had to sell into slavery the newly acquired dependents to the same European traders from whom they imported commodities.⁶⁰ As the slave trade intensified, similar dynamics emerged in other parts of the coast of West Africa and West Central Africa, and new European players entered the competition for trade with African polities.