The Congo basin was the territory of the Kingdom of Kongo, whose ruler accepted baptism in 1491 after Portuguese contact, and what followed is one of the most instructive cases of religious encounter in African history.
Kongo cosmology is organised around a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, conventionally figured as a horizontal line with water at it, and around the sun's daily passage through four positions, rising, noon, setting and midnight, which map onto birth, maturity, death and the ancestral state. The diagram of that cycle, the dikenga, is a cross within a circle. When Christian missionaries arrived carrying crosses, the sign was already meaningful, and Kongo Christianity that developed over the following centuries was built by Kongolese for Kongolese purposes rather than administered from outside.
The nkisi, an object charged by a specialist with the power of the dead and activated to heal, protect or punish, remained central. Wyatt MacGaffey's work on the material argues that Kongo religion is best understood as a coherent system of ideas about power and its legitimate use, into which Christian elements were incorporated without dissolving it.
The kingdom's Christianity was therefore genuine and not European. Its kings corresponded with Rome, its nobles were educated in Portugal, and its people continued to consult the dead.