This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A Portuguese mission first reached the Kingdom of Kongo in 1483 and returned in 1491 with a fuller company this time, priests among masons, carpenters and soldiers sent to build as well as to convert. On 3 May of that year the mission baptised King Nzinga a Nkuwu and his family, the king taking the Portuguese name Joao upon his conversion. His queen went further than the mission itself had planned, insisting on being baptised alongside him when the Portuguese had intended to convert only the king and his nobles.
The conversion did not hold. Four years later, in 1495, Joao abandoned Catholicism and returned to his kingdom's own religious practice. Part of the reason lay in a direct conflict between the church's requirement of monogamy and Kongo's own political structure, matrilineal and elective, in which a ruler's multiple wives secured the alliances that political power in the kingdom depended on. A faith that asked him to give up those marriages was asking him to give up the mechanism that held his rule together.
What this first mission changed for Christianity's spread in Kongo was more limited than the baptism itself might suggest: a king converted and then reverted within four years, leaving the deeper establishment of the faith in the kingdom to the next generation, carried out instead by his son.