Angola

Angola holds one of the oldest Christian histories in sub Saharan Africa. When Portuguese ships reached the Kongo kingdom's coast in the 1480s, its king chose baptism, and in 1491 the court at Mbanza Kongo, in today's northern Angola, became Christian; his successor Afonso I made Catholicism a royal religion with Kongolese priests, letters to Lisbon and Rome, and a cathedral whose ruins still stand in the city UNESCO listed in 2017.

Kongo Christianity was no simple import: it grew around older understandings of the dead, of minkisi power objects and of a cosmos divided by water from the land of the ancestors, and it produced its own prophets, most famously Kimpa Vita. The colonial centuries layered Portuguese Catholicism along the coast while Baptist, Methodist and Congregational missions in the north, centre and south educated the very elites who would lead the rival independence movements.

The Marxist state after 1975 was officially atheist and confiscated church property, but faith outlasted the doctrine, and the long civil war made congregations the strongest surviving social fabric. Since peace in 2002 the map has diversified fast, with Brazilian Pentecostal churches, Angolan prophetic movements such as the Tocoists, and a Catholic Church still influential enough that the state negotiates with it as a public power.

By 1700 the kingdom of Kongo had been Catholic for two centuries and broken by civil war for one. Into that ruin stepped Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a young Kongolese noblewoman trained as an nganga marinda, a medium of the spirit world, who announced in 1704 that she had died and been restored as the vessel of Saint Anthony of Padua. Possessed each week by the saint, she preached a Kongolese Christianity with breathtaking claims: that Jesus, Mary and the founding saints had been born in Kongo, that Europeans painted heaven's citizens the wrong colour, and that God cared about intention, not the sacramental apparatus of the missionaries. Her movement, remembered as Antonianism, drew thousands to reoccupy the abandoned capital of Mbanza Kongo, which she promised to restore along with a reunited kingdom. Her prayer, the Salve Antoniana, rewrote the Salve Regina into a manifesto. The threatened powers closed ranks; captured with her infant son, she was tried under Kongolese law with Capuchin friars advising, condemned as a heretic and witch, and burned in July 1706.

The movement's embers travelled far: enslaved Kongolese Catholics carried its memory across the Atlantic, and historians such as John Thornton have made her one of the best documented religious visionaries of the early modern Atlantic world, a prophet of an African church answering colonial Christianity in its own language.