A Christian Kingdom, and What Crossed the Atlantic

The kingdom of Kongo accepted Christianity at the end of the fifteenth century by the decision of its own ruler and not by conquest. Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised in 1491, and his son Afonso I made Catholicism the religion of the state, corresponded with Lisbon and Rome, and sent his son Henrique to be consecrated a bishop in 1518. Kongo was therefore a Christian kingdom of Africa in its own right, with a literate elite writing in Portuguese, for centuries before the colonial partition.

That Christianity was read through Kongo categories from the beginning. John Thornton's study of Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a young noblewoman who in 1704 declared herself possessed by Saint Anthony and led a movement to reoccupy the ruined capital and restore its kingship, shows how far the fusion had gone. She was burned as a heretic in 1706 and her movement outlived her.

The Atlantic slave trade carried the same religious vocabulary to the Americas on a very large scale. Kongo minkisi practice underlies Palo Monte in Cuba, the cosmogram appears in African American grave decoration and in the ring shout, and Kongo words are embedded in several Afro-Atlantic religions. A number of those are living traditions entered by closed initiation, and the atlas names them as closed rather than describing what is held inside them.