Kingdom of Kongo

Portuguese ships reached the mouth of the Congo in 1483, and in 1491 the king Nzinga a Nkuwu accepted baptism. His son, who took the throne in 1509 as Afonso I and ruled for more than thirty years, made Catholicism the religion of the state: churches were built at the capital, which was renamed Sao Salvador, Kongolese students went to Lisbon and Rome, and in 1518 Afonso's son Henrique was consecrated a bishop, the first from sub-Saharan Africa. Afonso's surviving letters to the Portuguese crown, written in his own chancery, are among the earliest African documents of their kind and include repeated protests at the traders who were depopulating his kingdom.

The Christianity that resulted was Kongolese. Wyatt MacGaffey's work on BaKongo religion sets out the cosmology it met: a world divided between the living and the dead by a boundary often figured as water, a cross of four moments through which the sun and the soul pass, and objects charged for particular purposes. Kimpwanza, the cross form, was already meaningful before a crucifix arrived, and Kongolese crucifixes cast in brass, with an African Christ, were used as emblems of chiefly office as well as of faith.

Whether this was Christianity understood in Kongolese terms or Kongo religion reorganised around Christian symbols is argued, and Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau's writing from inside the tradition emphasises the coherence of the older cosmology.

The kingdom broke apart after its defeat by the Portuguese at Mbwila in 1665. Rival claimants fought for four decades, Sao Salvador stood abandoned, and the country was raided for captives throughout. Into that ruin, in 1704, came a young noblewoman of about twenty, baptised Beatriz and known as Kimpa Vita, who fell ill, appeared to die, and announced on recovering that Saint Anthony had entered her and now spoke through her.

Her preaching was direct. The saints and Christ himself, she said, had been born in Kongo, at Sao Salvador; the country's misery came from its divisions; the ruined capital must be reoccupied and the kingdom made one. Thousands followed her there, and she sent out women preachers of her own. John Thornton's reconstruction from the Capuchin records shows a movement that was neither a rejection of Catholicism nor a simple return to older religion, but an argument that the church belonged to Kongo as much as to Rome.

She was arrested by one of the claimants, tried by Capuchin missionaries as a heretic, and burned in 1706 with her infant son. Sao Salvador was reoccupied shortly afterwards, largely as she had urged. The kingdom survived in reduced form until Portugal abolished it in 1914, and the memory of a Kongolese prophet condemned by foreign clergy runs on into the twentieth century, most visibly in the movement founded by Simon Kimbangu in 1921.