Kingdom of Kongo

5 Key excerpts on "Kingdom of Kongo"

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  Real Lives in the Sixteenth Century

  A Global Perspective

  • Rebecca Ard Boone(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  From 1506 to 1543 Afonso I ruled Kongo, one of the most powerful kingdoms of its time in Africa. Inspired and strengthened by Portuguese churchmen and soldiers, he made Christianity the state religion throughout his domains. Remembered by some as the “Apostle of the Kongo,” Afonso blended Catholicism with elements of African religion to establish Kongo as a powerful Christian kingdom. His openness to aspects of a new and radically different culture combined with a sophisticated understanding of how to preserve the interests of his people allowed this African king to modernize his lands on his own terms. His political and religious legacy impacted millions of Africans dispersed throughout the Americas during the years of the Atlantic slave trade.

  The origins of the Kingdom of Kongo

  The domains of the sixteenth-century Kingdom of Kongo now lie divided between present day Angola, The Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central West Africa. An enormous continent, Africa is large enough to hold the entire United States, China, and most of Europe within its land mass. Throughout its long history, Africa had seen the rise and fall of numerous kingdoms and empires. In the far north and northeast, the states of Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Sudan boasted cities that belonged to the cultures of classical antiquity. By 700 CE, the peoples of these regions had converted to Islam and were integrated into growing Islamic empires. South of the Sahara, camel caravans full of luxury goods began to make their way across the desert to the West African states of Mali and Benin around 1000 CE. Another empire, Zimbabwe, flourished in Central East Africa in the fourteenth century. Nearly two thousand miles from any other African kingdom or empire, the Kongo had little if any contact with other states and developed independently.

  Figure 3.1 Olfert Dapper, Alvaro I of Kongo receiving the Dutch ambassadors, 1668. No contemporary image of Afonso I survives. This seventeenth-century woodcut portrays his grandson and heir, Alvaro I.

  Source: Private collection/Bridgeman Images

  The people of Kongo spoke Kikongo, one of around 500 Bantu languages spoken south of the Equator in Africa. Over the course of millennia, the people of this language group had come from the northwest to form settlements in the savannah region below the Congo River. Skilled in agriculture and ironworking, the ancestors of the Kongolese people grew prosperous by controlling trade between the coastal, plateau, and forest areas in the region. By 1350, six independent states had united to form the Kingdom of Kongo.

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  The Art of Conversion

  Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo

  • Cécile Fromont(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  The idea of fetishism, which would eventually become the prominent European descriptive and analytical term for African culture in the nineteenth century, encapsulated the perceived inability of the inhabitants of the region to produce elaborate forms of social organization, conduct rational economic transactions, or develop sophisticated religions. If European accounts of the Kongo could be very stark and critical, the objections they raised were not those encompassed by the newly developed term fetishism. Far from these prejudiced views, the numerous descriptions of the Kongo as an eminent realm of ancient wisdom testify to the success of Afonso’s cross-cultural invention. 25 Iron Kingdom and Iron King The Kongo Christian discourse that Afonso created functioned equally well in both European and African contexts owing in large part to the two visual and symbolic hinges that anchored it: the motif of iron and the image of the cross. Kongo myths of creation recorded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries associated the foundation of the kingdom with the arrival of a civilizing hero and founding king who brought with him knowledge of iron technology. Since ironworking had been practiced in the region for at least several centuries before the emergence of the kingdom, the association was not grounded in historical fact; rather, it reflected the fundamental significance of the link between kingship and the metal in the political worldview that the myths expressed. The mythical and ritual pairing of iron and leadership is a shared feature of many central African polities both in the past as well as in recent times. Twentieth-century Bakongo consultants from the region that once formed the core of the Kongo kingdom expressed the connection with the term ngangula a kongo, or “smith of the Kongo,” which they used as a royal title

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  The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa

  Fighting Their Way Home

  • Erik Kennes, Miles Larmer(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  made the state structures in Katanga—made it possible to practically envisage an independent Katanga, created the conditions for hostility toward Kasaian labor migration, and yet placed identifiable limits on the ultimate success of the secessionist project. While Katanga’s alliance with Belgian advisers and capital had the effect of preserving Katanga’s comparatively developed infrastructure development—and, ironically, making possible subsequent Zairianization measures—the practical impact of colonialism on Katanga made it impossible to effectively integrate the territory’s diverse population into a cohesive national project.

  “Katanga” before the Congo Free State

  The social and political formations present in the area of central Africa that ultimately formed Katanga had for centuries been significantly shaped by their trade-based interactions with the wider world. Metalworking, in iron but also in copper, was central to the growing economies of the region. The area around Lake Kisale was an important center for metalworking, and its prosperous inhabitants produced a food surplus, including dried fish, which they traded for, among other goods, copper mined to the south in the modern Copperbelt. In the fourteenth century a centralized kingdom, under the Kongolo dynasty, developed among a people known as the Luba. The origins of the Luba political aristocracy can be traced back to three clans: one Songye, one Kanyoka, and one Lunda. The oral tradition clearly refers to a link between the Lunda and the Luba: around 1400, the female ruler of the Lunda, the Lueji/Ruej, married Tshibinda Ilunga/Cibind Irung, a member of the Luba aristocracy. Luba political principles were incorporated into the Lunda political system, thereby creating an element of unity between what was later southern and northern Katanga.4

  Several waves of westerly out-migration from the core Luba area (located, according to oral tradition, in a place called Nsanga a Lubangu) took place during the early stages of Luba consolidation, commonly associated with intra-aristocratic conflict and the need to address population concentration at a time of famine, probably around the fifteenth century. This led to the distinction between the Luba Katanga (or Lubakat, also known as Luba Shankadi, probably meaning “faithful”) and the Luba Lubilanji in Kasai, a distinction which became increasingly rigid in the subsequent period and which has direct relevance for this history.5

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  How Societies Are Born

  Governance in West Central Africa before 1600

  • Jan Vansina(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  Its name is a straightforward derivation from *- kóda “to become strong.” 96 Local oral traditions associate it with the rise of the Kingdom of Ndongo and imply that it is as old as that kingdom was, i.e., the late fifteenth century. The kings of Ndongo were called ngola, after the charm, and the Portuguese derived Angola from the title. The ngola 9/10 was a piece of iron, in the shape of a hammer, a bell, a hoe, or a knife, kept in a shrine with a guardian, as is still the case among the Holo. 97 Once invented, this charm was adopted not just in Ndongo but spread far into the western corridor southwest of the Cuanza basin, as well as on the planalto, and even as far as Huila. 98 Here, as on the planalto, the essential glue holding principalities or kingdoms together was the notion of a common ruler rendered concrete in the shape of a person. The existence of a ruler created the consciousness among the subjects of belonging to a common realm. 99 The larger the realm, the more exalted the king had to be. Thus the Portuguese considered the ruler of Ndongo to be a divine king, for did not the inhabitants of the realm declare that what God was to the Portuguese, their king was to them? 100 And the idea that their king was imbued with the highest supernatural spirit remained common even after a century of Christianization. It was the ruler who was held responsible for the very life of his subjects through his or her power over rain and all forms of fertility, and government consisted in managing the supernatural in such a way that prosperity reigned. Rulers rarely appeared in public, but when they did, it usually was to be shown to promote fertility and prosperity. They solemnly presided over sowing and first-fruit rituals, they initiated the rituals to obtain rain, to end an epidemic, and they declared war. In these essentially spiritual tasks, the most exalted rulers, such as those of Ndongo, were assisted by a special group of diviners, the shingila 1n/2

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  The Palgrave Handbook of African Politics, Governance and Development

  • Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola, Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  48

  The Luba kingdom of West Central Africa had emerged by about 1500, and according to oral traditions achieved its political structure during the reign of Kalala Ilungu who overthrew his uncle, the purported founding king Kongolo. The Luba king held absolute authority over subordinate chiefs and titleholders. The basic administrative structure of the kingdom was hierarchical and rested on lineage -based homesteads, villages under headmen, chiefdoms each under a territorial chief (kilolo ), and provinces. The central government comprised the king and titleholders; territorial and provincial chiefs had titles, as did counselors and officials at the capital, such as the war leader, the head of the officer corps , and the keeper of the sacred emblems. Usually titleholders were relatives of the king, and when the king died they were replaced by relatives of the new king . The only legitimate claimants to the kingship were those who were believed to have a sacred quality, bulopwe , believed to be vested in the blood and transmissible only through males. Bulopwe gave kings the right and the supernatural means to rule; all bulopwe stemmed from Kongolo or Kalala Ilunga, hence the king ruled by divine right and had supernatural powers, and challenges to the king could only come from other descendants from these two rulers . The organization of the kingdom was perpetuated by two devices: perpetual succession and positional kinship. Each successor to any given office took the title and name of the original holder of the office, hence all rulers had the same name even though they were not necessarily father and son; anyone who took over a position also took the earlier titleholder’s name, even if they were unrelated. If the original titleholder was a relative of another titleholder, then that relationship between the two positions became permanent in a fictitious relationship. The relations between different offices were made permanent based on fictional, positional kinship. Earth priests were usually the head of the original family lineage which founded their village, and because of this connection with the ancestral founders they had highly respected religious powers. The priests had the authority to regulate land use and they allocated land for settlement indirectly by supervising lineage heads, who regulated access to hunting land , fishing streams, and fruit trees in the forest. Sometimes the priests took on direct political roles of leadership; usually, however, they worked with a chief who needed the earth priest’s approval in order to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The chief would recognize the powers of the earth priest through gifts and tribute , and political rituals such as the investiture of a new chief involved sacred symbols and the participation of the priest.49

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