Kingdom of Kongo

A central African kingdom that dealt with Portugal as a sovereign equal, and was destroyed by the trade that relationship became. Kongo was established south of its namesake river by the fourteenth century, governed from Mbanza Kongo through appointed officials rather than hereditary chiefs, with a currency of nzimbu shells and a taxation system. When Portuguese ships arrived in 1483 the king converted, took the name Joao I, and his son Afonso I built a Christian kingdom that exchanged ambassadors with Lisbon and the Vatican and sent students to Europe - one of whom was consecrated a bishop in 1518. Afonso's letters to the Portuguese king survive and include repeated protests that the slave trade was depopulating his country and that his own nobles were being seized. The trade continued regardless. Defeat by Portuguese forces at Mbwila in 1665, where the king was killed, broke central authority, and the kingdom fragmented into civil war. Kimpa Vita, a young noblewoman preaching a Kongolese Christianity, tried to reunify it and was burned as a heretic in 1706. Kongo Christianity crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved. Mbanza Kongo, now in northern Angola, is a World Heritage site. The kingdom's territory covered parts of modern Angola, the two Congos and Gabon. Kikongo is still spoken by several million people. The kingdom survived nominally until Portugal abolished it in 1914. Its royal archive correspondence with Lisbon is a rare African diplomatic record from the period, written by the kingdom itself rather than about it. Portugal recognised Kongo as a Christian kingdom for over a century.

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