The king of Kongo is baptised João: 3 May 1491

The friars chose the best room they could find in the king's palace. They set up altars, lit torches and candles, and laid tables with great basins of water. When everything was ready they sent word that the king could come whenever he wished.1 source1 source

He came at once, with six of the great lords of his kingdom. He stood before the altar while Frei João, the head of the friars, said the office. Then he was baptised. He took the name João, after the king of Portugal who had sent the friars, and his lords became Francisco, Gonçalo, Jorge, Lopo, Diogo and Rodrigo.2 sources2 sources

Rui de Pina, the Portuguese royal chronicler, dated the ceremony to the day of the Holy Cross, 3 May 1491. The place was the capital of Kongo, a kingdom of west-central Africa whose lands now lie in parts of Angola and the two Congos. Its capital, Mbanza Kongo, is today a town in northern Angola.3 sources3 sources

After the midday meal the courtyard filled with people. The new João I called for his bow and arrows and said he would celebrate the day himself. He went round the courtyard bow in hand, turning this way and that, Pina wrote, while some twenty noblemen moved around him on their knees, clearing pebbles and straw from where he was about to tread.1 source1 source

Then the lords who had not been chosen came before him to complain. What disloyalty had he found in them, they asked, that he had left them out?1 source1 source

Kongo was much older than its links with Portugal. UNESCO dates the kingdom from the fourteenth century, and Kongo tradition remembers its founder as Nimi a Lukeni, who brought a group of chiefdoms under one king. Its weavers made palm-fibre cloth that the Portuguese chroniclers praised for its fine weave and colours.3 sources3 sources

Its capital stood on a plateau 570 metres above sea level. UNESCO describes it as prosperous when the Portuguese arrived, a large town built of local materials, and as the political and spiritual centre of one of the largest states of southern Africa.1 source1 source

Caçuta's embassy reached João II at Beja early in 1489, Pina wrote. It brought ivory, carved ivory objects and palm cloths in fine colours, and a request. The king of Kongo asked for friars and priests and everything needed to baptise him and his people, for masons and carpenters to build churches, for farmers to tame oxen and teach his people to work the land, and for women to teach Kongo women to make bread.2 sources2 sources

He also sent boys to be baptised and taught to read and write, so that, knowing both languages, they could serve him at home. João II kept the Kongo party in Portugal until the end of 1490 to learn Portuguese and the faith.2 sources2 sources

João II had his own reasons. When the fleet left Kongo, some Portuguese stayed behind with orders to travel overland towards India and Prester John, the Christian king Europeans hoped to find somewhere in Africa or Asia.2 sources2 sources

The fleet sailed from Lisbon on 19 December 1490 under Gonçalo de Sousa, a nobleman of the royal household. With him went João da Silva, many Franciscan friars, and vestments, crosses, bells, organs and books enough for a cathedral. Plague was raging in Lisbon when they left.1 source1 source

Near the Cape Verde islands Gonçalo de Sousa died of it. João da Silva died after him, and so did another young Black Christian. Pina says the crews did not know what to do without their captain and their guide. They held a council at anchor, chose Gonçalo's cousin Rui de Sousa as captain-major and sailed on. João de Barros, writing about sixty years later, calls Rui a nephew and says the captains quarrelled over the command.3 sources3 sources

On 29 March 1491 they reached the river of the Padrão, named after the stone pillar Cão had left at its mouth. The land there belonged to the lord of Soyo, an uncle of the king, a man of about fifty, according to both chroniclers. He came down to the port with three thousand archers, asked to be baptised, and was, with his son, on Easter Sunday, 3 April. He took the name Manuel and his son António.2 sources2 sources

The chroniclers have him tell his people that no men in the world were as fortunate or as wise as the white men. It is a Portuguese account written for a Portuguese king, and should be read that way.2 sources2 sources

From the coast to the court was fifty leagues. Rui de Sousa went inland with two hundred porters. The king ordered that the Christians be given whatever they wanted, on pain of death, and sent a courtier with thousands of nzimbu, the small white shells Kongo used as money, and sheep, goats, hens, honey and palm wine. The journey took 23 days by Pina's count and 20 by Resende's.1 source1 source

Crowds met them at the capital with ivory trumpets and drums. The king of Kongo received Rui de Sousa sitting on a raised dais in a courtyard of his palace. He was bare from the waist up, with a cap of palm cloth on his head, a horse's tail mounted in silver over his shoulder, an ivory bracelet on his left arm, and below the waist damask that João II had sent him.2 sources2 sources

The captain kissed his hand in the Portuguese manner. The king answered in his own. He took up earth in his hands and rubbed it on the captain's chest and then on his own, which, the chronicler explained, was the greatest courtesy a Kongo king could show.2 sources2 sources

Then came the gifts: the masons and carpenters with their tools, the farmers with their implements, the women with their basins and cauldrons, a horse, brocades and silks. The king, Pina says, told his lords that the king of Portugal alone deserved to be called lord of the world.2 sources2 sources

Work on a stone church began at once. A thousand men carried the stone on their backs from two or three leagues away, singing as they went. The king meant to wait for it before being baptised. One afternoon, according to Pina, he summoned the friars and asked them a question.1 source1 source

To the lords who had been left out, the king gave an answer. They would be baptised, he said, once his wife, his son and his brother had been, since they ranked above them. The lords touched the earth with their hands and put it on their faces in thanks. In Pina's telling, baptism at the Kongo court was something to be granted in order of rank, and the nobles treated it as an honour.1 source1 source

The queen pressed to be baptised too. The king put her off, waiting for the church and for the prince, who was away in his own lands. Then Frei João died and the other friars fell ill, and the king asked Frei António to baptise the queen at once. On Saturday 4 June she became Leonor, after the queen of Portugal. Two days later, when the friars explained the articles of faith to her, she laid out small stones on her dais to remember each one, which Pina calls her art of memory.2 sources2 sources

That same day the Portuguese handed the king a banner with the cross, sent by João II. Vassals on islands in the river had risen against him, and he set out to fight them, barefoot, with the banner carried ahead. The chroniclers credit the victory to the cross and claim an army of 800,000 men, a figure no historian needs to take literally.2 sources2 sources

Rui de Sousa then took the fleet home, reaching Lisbon in 1492. Four friars stayed in Kongo with the church furnishings, along with the craftsmen and the women. So did a Kongolese Christian who could read and write and had begun teaching the sons of the great lords at court.2 sources2 sources

The king's son Mvemba a Nzinga was then governor of the province of Nsundi, according to the Belgian church historian Mgr J. Cuvelier, who dated his baptism, as Afonso, to 4 June 1491. Pina does not record it. For what came next, the main source is Afonso himself.2 sources2 sources

In 1512 Afonso sent a letter to the lords of his kingdom telling the story. It survives in more than one version. In the one the chronicler Damião de Góis printed, Afonso wrote that his father had made a good start in the faith but had been turned away from it, through the envy of the Devil. Afonso, by his own account, held to it and fell into disfavour with his father and the great men of the kingdom, and his father sent him into exile far away.1 source1 source

When João I died, the great lords and most of the people, who were still pagan, backed another son, who had refused baptism. Afonso hurried to the capital with 37 Christian followers (36 in the other version). His brother came against him with a great army from the city and beyond. Afonso said that as the arrows fell on his men they called on St James, and the enemy turned and fled. The Góis version adds that the brother was captured and put to death. It is the winner's account.2 sources2 sources

Sources disagree on the date of the battle: Cuvelier put it in 1506, others as late as 1509. His brother is remembered as Mpanzu a Kitima, or Mpanzu a Nzinga. Afonso reigned until his death, which Cuvelier placed, probably, in 1541 and other writers in 1542.3 sources3 sources

The miracle went into Afonso's coat of arms, which the Góis version says King Manuel I of Portugal sent him. In the letter Afonso described it piece by piece: a red field for the blood shed in the battle, a blue chief with a silver cross for the cross seen in the sky, scallop shells for St James, five armed arms with swords for the horsemen, who were angels, and a small shield of Portugal flanked by two broken black idols.1 source1 source

José Mateus Francisco, writing in a Brazilian history journal in 2021, reads the story as political as well as religious. In his view Afonso used the new faith to legitimise his rule, and the alliance that Portugal hoped would make Kongo a vassal ended up strengthening the Kongo monarchy instead.1 source1 source

Afonso sent his son Henrique to be educated in Portugal. On 3 May 1518 Pope Leo X wrote to King Manuel I agreeing, not without difficulty, to make the son of the king of Kongo a bishop, and on 5 May Henrique was named titular bishop of Utica, a see in North Africa, with leave to act as a bishop in the diocese of Funchal.2 sources2 sources

By the 1520s Portuguese ships were buying people in Kongo, many of them for the sugar plantations of São Tomé, a Portuguese island colony in the Gulf of Guinea. In 1526 Afonso wrote to King João III of Portugal about it. His letters were written out by a scribe, Dom João Teixeira, signed by the king and sent to Lisbon. The originals are now in the Torre do Tombo national archive.2 sources2 sources

On 6 July he complained that João III's officials let merchants set up shops all over his kingdom, so that vassals who had more goods than their king no longer obeyed him. Worse was the trade in people.1 source1 source

Kongo needed nothing from Portugal, he went on, except priests, a few people to teach in the schools, and wine and flour for the Mass. He asked the king to stop sending merchants, “because it is our will that in these kingdoms there should be no trade in slaves nor outlet for them”.1 source1 source

By 18 October his position had shifted. Free people, including noblemen and the king's relatives, were being seized and smuggled to the white men, some of them at night, then branded with hot irons. Afonso now passed a law that any white man in Kongo who bought slaves had first to show them to three officials of his court, who would check whether they were captives or free. Only those cleared could be shipped. He allowed this, he wrote, for the sake of João III's share of the trade.1 source1 source

João III replied at length late in 1529. He believed, he wrote, that Afonso said this because of the grievances the Portuguese gave him, for he heard that Kongo was so populous that no slave ever seemed to leave it, and that Afonso had slaves bought outside the kingdom, married them and made them Christians. The same letter asked Afonso to help the Portuguese priests in Kongo buy slaves whenever they had the money.1 source1 source

The kingdom stayed Christian, in its own way. UNESCO notes that Kongo adopted Christianity while keeping elements of its earlier customs. Stone churches rose in the capital, which came to be known as São Salvador. A Jesuit college there was where the first catechism in Kikongo was written, in 1624, and in 1608 the Pope accredited an ambassador from Kongo in Rome, the first from a state south of the Sahara.2 sources2 sources

Kongo's own lords took part in the slave trade too. In the 1640s the lord of Soyo, the coastal province where the 1491 embassy had landed, quarrelled with the king of Kongo and sent an envoy, Dom Miguel de Castro, to seek support from the Dutch. As part of the mission, the National Gallery of Denmark notes, he gave 200 enslaved people to the governor of Dutch Brazil.2 sources2 sources

The decisive blow came from Luanda, the Portuguese base on the coast to the south. On 29 October 1665 a Portuguese force met the army of King António I at Ambuíla. The Kongo army was beaten, António was killed and beheaded, and his crown and sceptre were sent to Portugal. The kingdom sank into civil war.2 sources2 sources

Angola today remembers the battle as an act of resistance. In 2015 its government classified the battlefield, in the municipality of Kitexe in Uíge province, as a national historic site, describing it as an important testimony of resistance to the occupation of the kingdoms that existed at the start of Portuguese colonisation.1 source1 source

Afonso can still be heard in his own words. His letters reached Lisbon and stayed in the royal archive, and they are the main source for his reign. They show a Christian African king arguing with his Portuguese counterpart about a trade that, as UNESCO puts it, made Kongo the centre of the most important route for enslaved people taken to the Americas and the Caribbean.3 sources3 sources

The town where João I was baptised is now Mbanza Kongo, in Angola's Zaire province. In 2017 UNESCO inscribed its historic centre on the World Heritage List, citing documents that cover five centuries, from 1483 to the present. Its customary court, which settles disputes, has been reinstated after four decades of war.1 source1 source