The Kingdom Of The Kongo

[anansi]

I have posted a Video concerning the monster King Leopold II
egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=pav&action=display&thread=1378
destructive role in making the Kongo a heart of so-called darkness,and earlier yet had made a post about King Afonso. egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=hist&action=display&thread=1008
This post is about the Kingdom and it's developement as a whole drawn from various sources.



llustration of the ruler of Loango, from Dapper's Description of Africa (1668)


Earliest human settlement, in what is now the DRC, stretches back some 10 000 years. The earliest settlers were in all likelihood short statured hunter-gathers, now known (though controversially so) as pygmies. Some 1 300 years ago these Stone Age peoples were followed by Bantu and Nilotic speaking hunter-gatherer groups, who settled initially in the northern savannah areas. In time the new-comers adopted or developed the cultivation of tropical crops, cattle husbandry and iron working technology which enabled them to subdue and displace the original pygmy populations, gradually driving them into the mountains and the thicker parts of the rain forest.

In the Congo area a number of extensive and complex trading states emerged in the savannah; the Kongo kingdom, the Luba Empire, the Lunda kingdom, the Zande kingdoms, and the kingdom of Kuba. While chiefdoms did emerge within the rainforests, they never rivaled the savannah states for size and complexity.

The Kingdom of Kongo (1400– 1914)

The first of these, the Kongo kingdom, was founded by invaders from the north east who settled south of the Congo River in the late 1300s and grew to encompass the north of modern Angola and the western areas of the DRC (Library of Congress 1993)

Foundation of the Kingdom

The first king of the Kingdom of Kongo Dya Ntotila was Lukeni lua Nimi (circa 1280-1320).The name Nimi a Lukeni appeared in later oral traditions and some modern historians, notably Jean Cuvelier, popularized it. Lukeni lua Nimi or Nimi a Lukeni, became the founder of Kongo when he conquered the kingdom of the Mwene Kabunga (or Mwene Mpangala), which lay upon a mountain to his south. He transferred his rule to this mountain, the Mongo dia Kongo or "mountain of Kongo", and made Mbanza Kongo, the town there, his capital. Two centuries later the Mwene Kabunga's descendants still symbolically challenged the conquest in an annual celebration. The rulers that followed Lukeni all claimed some form of relation to his kanda or lineage and were known as the Kilukeni. The Kilukeni kanda or "house" as recorded in Portuguese documents would rule Kongo unopposed until 1567.

After the death of Nimi a Lukeni, his brother, Mbokani Mavinga, took over the throne and ruled until approximately 1367. He had two wives and nine children. His rule saw an expansion of the Kingdom of Kongo to include the neighbouring state of Loango and other areas now encompassed by the current Republic of Congo.

The Mwene Kongos often gave the governorships to members of their family or its clients. As this centralization increased, the allied provinces gradually lost influence until their powers were only symbolic, manifested in Mbata, once a co-kingdom, but by 1620 simply known by the title "Grandfather of the King of Kongo" (Nkaka'ndi a Mwene Kongo).

The high concentration of population around Mbanza Kongo and its outskirts played a critical role in the centralization of Kongo. The capital was a densely settled area in an otherwise sparsely populated region where rural population densities probably did not exceed 5 persons per square kilometer. Early Portuguese travelers described Mbanza Kongo as a large city, the size of the Portuguese town of Évora as it was in 1491. By the end of the sixteenth century, Kongo's population was probably close to half a million people in a core region of some 130,000 square kilometers. By the early seventeenth century the city and its hinterland had a population of around 100,000, or one out of every five inhabitants in the Kingdom (according to baptismal statistics compiled by Jesuit priests). This concentration allowed resources, soldiers and surplus foodstuffs to be readily available at the request of the king. This made the king overwhelmingly powerful and caused the kingdom to become highly centralized.



By the time of the first recorded contact with the Europeans, the Kingdom of Kongo was a highly developed state at the center of an extensive trading network. Apart from natural resources and ivory, the country manufactured and traded copperware, ferrous metal goods, raffia cloth, and pottery. The Kongo people spoke in the Kikongo language. The eastern regions, especially that part known as the Seven Kingdoms of Kongo dia Nlaza (or in Kikongo Mumbwadi or "the Seven"), were particularly famous for the production of cloth.

The Luba state coalesced some 100 years after the Kongo and to the east of it, in the upper reaches of the Lualaba River, around lakes Upemba and Kisale. The Lunda kingdom emerged 15th century through the unification of its composite chiefdoms in the south west on the patterns laid down by their Luba neighbours. In the sixteenth century its territory was overrun by the expanding Luba empire, and, unable to resist the invaders, some of the Lunda migrated to Angola where they founded new states.

The kingdom of Kuba was founded to the north of the Kasai River, and of its tributary the Sankura, by invaders from the west in about 1600. The complex forest-river-savannah ecology of its territory enabled it to develop into a vigorous trading state that was able to maintain its integrity until it fell to the advance of Belgian colonial expansion (Giblin 1999)

Capuchin Missionary Celebrating Mass, Sogno, Kingdom of Kongo.
In the late fifteenth century Portuguese explorers established contact with the Kongo kingdom, and traders and missionaries followed on their heels. Initial friendly relations between the Kongo and the Portuguese soured as a result of Portuguese rapacity and especially their insatiable demand for slaves. In later years the expansion of the Portuguese coastal enclaves brought control over land as a new focus of conflict (Library of Congress 1989, 1993, Columbia Encyclopedia 2001).

Catholic Priest Burning Idol House, Sogno, Kingdom of Kongo.
In the early 1600s, weakened by conflicts with the Portuguese and other neighbours, internal struggles for power and the ravages of the slave trade, the kingdom progressively disintegrated. Over time it lost control over its constituent parts and the trade routes that had been the source of its wealth and power. By 1700 the kingdom was a spent force (Library of Congress 1993).

The Lunda experienced a resurgence of their fortunes with the establishment of the Zembe kingdom in Katanga and northern Zambia in about 1740. The state's wealth and expansion was fueled by trade in slaves and ivory with the Portuguese on the coast. In the mid-nineteenth century the kingdom came close to collapse as it fended off penetration by Swahili slave traders from the east. The kingdom was saved by cooperation with the British South African Company, only to be partitioned between the Belgians and the British (Gordon 2004).

The Luba kingdom, in the meanwhile, had become increasingly unstable and was wracked by internal dynastic struggles. Its expansion was checked by the rise of Lunda polities to the south and west, the Kuba kingdom to the north. The weakened state was not able to resist the penetration of slave traders from east Africa and the state disintegrated in the late nineteenth century.
www.africafederation.net/Kongo_History.htm
wysinger.homestead.com/loango.html

[anansi]

Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I), Letters to the King of Portugal (1526)
The Portuguese were the first European power to begin actively exploring the coastline of Africa. In their quest to reach the valuable trade routes of the Indian Ocean, they established a number of fortified bases and trading outposts southward along the western coast of Africa in the late 15th century. Contact between Portugal and the west African kingdom of Kongo began in 1483; for several decades ambassadors, trade goods, and ideas flowed in both directions between the two states. However, over time the increasing presence and eventual dominance of Europeans, their products, and their promotion of slavery severely disrupted Kongolese society. In 1526, the king of the Kongo, Nzinga Mbemba (who by this time had adopted the Christian name of Afonso I) began writing a series of letters to the Portuguese King Jo�o III, appealing for an end to the slave trade. Twenty-four letters were written in all -- three are reproduced here.

Sir, Your Highness should know how our Kingdom is being lost in so many ways that it is convenient to provide for the necessary remedy, since this is caused by the excessive freedom given by your agents and officials to the men and merchants who are allowed to come to this Kingdom to setup shops with goods and many things which have been prohibited by us, and which they spread throughout our Kingdoms and Domains in such an abundance that many of our vassals, whom we had in obedience, do not comply because they have the things in greater abundance than we ourselves; and it was with these things that we had them content and subjected under our vassalage and jurisdiction, so it is doing a great harm not only to the service of God, but the security and peace of our Kingdoms and State as well.

And we cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the mentioned merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them wishing to have the things and wares of this Kingdom which they are ambitious of, they grab them and get them to be sold; and so great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and Your Highness should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service. And to avoid it we need from those Kingdoms no more than some priests and a few people to reach in schools, and no other goods except wine and flour for the holy sacrament, That is why we beg of Your Highness to help and assist us in this matter, commanding your factors that they should nor send here either merchants or wares, because it is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them. Concerning what is referred to above, again we beg of Your Highness to agree with it, since otherwise we cannot remedy such an obvious damage, Pray Our Lord in His mercy to have Your Highness under His guard and let you do forever the things of His service, I kiss your hands many times.

At our town of Kongo, written on the sixth day of July; Jo�o Teixeira did it in 1526, The King, Dom Afonso.
{On the back of this letter the following can be read: To the most powerful and excellent prince Dow Jo�o, King our Brother.}

Moreover, Sir, in our Kingdoms there is another great inconvenience which is of little service to God, and this is that many of our people, keenly desirous as they are of the wares and things of your Kingdoms, which are brought here by your people, and in order to satisfy their voracious appetite, seize many of our people, freed and exempt men, and very often it happens that they kidnap even noblemen and the sons of noblemen, and our relatives, and take them to be sold to the white men who are in our Kingdoms; and for this purpose they have concealed them; and others are brought during the night so that they might not be recognized.

And as soon as they are taken by the white men they are immediately ironed and branded with fire, and when they are carried to be embarked, if they are caught by our guards' men the whites allege that they have bought them but they cannot say from whom, so that it is our duty to do justice and to restore to the freemen their freedom, but it cannot be done if your subjects feel offended, as they claim to be.

And to avoid such a great evil we passed a law so that any white man living in our Kingdoms and wanting to purchase goods in any way should first inform three of our noblemen and officials of our court whom we rely upon in this matter, and these are Dom Pedro Manipanza and Dom Manuel Manissaba, our chief usher, and Gon�alo Pires our chief freighter, who should investigate if the mentioned goods are captives or free men, and if cleared by them there will be no further doubt nor embargo for them to be taken and embarked, But if the white men do not comply with it they will lose the aforementioned goods. And if we do them this favor and concession it is for the part Your Highness has in it, since we know that it is in your service too that these goods are taken from our Kingdom, otherwise we should not consent to this�

Sir, Your Highness has been kind enough to write to us saying that we should ask in our letters for anything we need, and that we shall be provided with everything, and as the peace and the health of our Kingdom depend on us, and as there are among us old folks and people who have lived for many days, it happens that we have continuously many and different diseases which put us very often in such a weakness that we reach almost the last extreme; and the same happens to our children, relatives and natives owing to the lack in this country of physicians and surgeons who might know how to cure properly such diseases. And as we have got neither dispensaries nor drugs which might help us in this forlornness, many of those who had been already confirmed and instructed in the holy faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ perish and die; and the rest of the people in their majority cure themselves with herbs and breads and other ancient methods, so that they put all their faith in the mentioned herbs and ceremonies if they live, and believe that they are saved if they die; and this is not much in the service of God.

And to avoid such a great error and inconvenience, since it is from God in the first place and then from your Kingdoms and from Your Highness that all the good and drugs and medicines have come to save us, we beg of you to be agreeable and kind enough to send us two physicians and two apothecaries and one surgeon, so that they may come with their drugstores and all the necessary things to stay in our kingdoms, because we are in extreme need of them all and each of them. We shall do them all good and shall benefit them by all means, since they are sent by Your Highness, whom we thank for your work in their coming. We beg of Your Highness as a great favor to do this for us, because besides being good in itself it is in the service of God as we have said above.

From: Basil Davidson, trans., The African Past, London: Curtis Brown Ltd., 1964.
www.wadsworth.com/history_d/special_features/ext/world_hist/unbound/product/wawhm01c/content/whis/modules/empire/historicaldocuments/emp_rd_mbemba.htm

[anansi]

Emanuele Ne Vunda (died 1608), also Antonio Emanuele Ne Vunda, or Antonio Emmanuele Funta, the ambassador from Congo, sent by the king of Congo Alvaro II to Pope Paul V in 1604–1608Ne-Vunda traveled through Brazil and Spain and only reached Rome on 3 January 1608, but he died two days later of illness.

Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga (or "Francisco Felipe Faxicura", as he was baptized in Spain) (1571–1622
In the years 1613 through 1620, Hasekura headed a diplomatic mission to the Vatican in Rome, traveling through New Spain (arriving in Acapulco and departing from Veracruz) and visiting various ports-of-call in Europe. This historic mission is called the Keichō Embassy

It is interesting given the wider world context and the eventual different out come of such visitations and contact for while the Japanese subsequently beheaded their Christians converts driving them under ground and throwing out all forigners for the next 200yrs ,the Kongolese allowed the Portuguese continued access and meddling to take root,resulting in the brake-up of their kingdom resulting in war with a very powerful freedom loving Queen named Nizinga


Nzinga of the Ndongo and Matamba

Queen Nzingha was born to Ngola (King) Kiluanji and Kangela in 1583. According to tradition, she was named Nzingha because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck (the Kimbundu verb kujinga means to twist or turn). It was said to be an indication that the person who had this characteristic would be proud and haughty, and a wise woman told her mother that Nzingha will become queen one day. According to her recollections later in life, she was greatly favoured by her father, who allowed her to witness as he governed his kingdom, and who carried her with him to war. She also had a brother, Mbandi and two sisters Kifunji and Mukambu. She lived during a period when the Atlantic slave trade and the consolidation of power by the Portuguese in the region were growing rapidly.

In the 16th century, the Portuguese position in the slave trade was threatened by England and France. As a result, the Portuguese shifted their slave-trading activities to The Congo and South West Africa. Mistaking the title of the ruler (ngola) for the name of the country, the Portuguese called the land of the Mbundu people "Angola"—the name by which it is still known today.

In 1662, at a conference with a governor of Portugal, he deliberately failed to provide a chair for her. Her loyal subjects knelt down before her and she sat upon their backs.
Nzinga first appears in historical records as the envoy of her brother, the ngiolssa Ngola Mbande, at a peace conference with the Portuguese governor João Correia de Sousa in Luanda in 1599.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, states on the Central African coast found their economic power and territorial control threatened by Portuguese attempts to establish a colony at Luanda (in present-day Angola). Many of these states had become regional powers through trade in African slaves. It was the growing demand for this human labor in New World colonies such as Brazil that ultimately led Portugal to seek military and economic control of this region. Old trading partners came under military attack by Portuguese soldiers and indigenous African raiders in search of captives for the slave trade, and rulers were forced to adapt to these new circumstances or face certain destruction. One leader who proved to be adept at overcoming these difficulties was the queen of Ndongo, Ana Nzinga.

In 1624, Ana Nzinga inherited rule of Ndongo, a state to the east of Luanda populated primarily by Mbundu peoples. At that moment, the kingdom was under attack from both Portuguese as well as neighboring African aggressors. Nzinga realized that, to remain viable, Ndongo had to reposition itself as an intermediary rather than a supply zone in the slave trade. To achieve this, she allied Ndongo with Portugal, simultaneously acquiring a partner in its fight against its African enemies and ending Portuguese slave raiding in the kingdom. Ana Nzinga's baptism, with the Portuguese colonial governor serving as godfather, sealed this relationship. By 1626, however, Portugal had betrayed Ndongo, and Nzinga was forced to flee with her people further west, where they founded a new state at Matamba, well beyond the reach of the Portuguese. To bolster Matamba's martial power, Nzinga offered sanctuary to runaway slaves and Portuguese-trained African soldiers and adopted a form of military organization known as kilombo, in which youths renounced family ties and were raised communally in militias. She also fomented rebellion within Ndongo itself, which was now governed indirectly by the Portuguese through a puppet ruler. Nzinga found an ally in the Netherlands, which seized Luanda for its own mercantile purposes in 1641. Their combined forces were insufficient to drive the Portuguese out of Angola, however, and after Luanda was reclaimed by the Portuguese, Nzinga was again forced to retreat to Matamba. From this point on, Nzinga focused on developing Matamba as a trading power by capitalizing on its position as the gateway to the Central African interior. By the time of her death in 1661, Matamba was a formidable commercial state that dealt with the Portuguese colony on an equal footing. Nzinga, who reconverted to Christianity before her death at the age of eighty-one, became a sensation in Europe following the 1769 publication of Jean-Louis Castilhon's colorful "biography," Zingha, Reine d'Angola, in Paris.
www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pwmn_2/hd_pwmn_2.htm

[jari]

Nice Thread Brada

[mena7]

Nice thread about the kingdom of Kongo Anansi. Nice color pictures of Kongolese people, Queen Nzinga, Prince Nicolau, Ambassador Ne Vunda, Ambassador Tsunegaga.

[anansi]

Renaissance Lisbon was home to the highest percentage of blacks in Europe at the time, ranging in status from slaves to knights.

This reality is reflected in an unusual painting made by an unknown artist, probably from the Netherlands, of the Lisbon waterfront in the late 16th century, where blacks and whites from a variety of social strata co-exist in a public square.

I am willing to bet that the Blacks pictured on horse back of military baring are Kongolese upper classes who joined the Knighthood some of the others may well have been slaves and middle class trader types, the slaves were not neccessarily Kongolese mind you, if this is from 1570-80..keeping in mind that very strong ties were made with the Kingdom of the Kongo and Portugal during that era.

Credit to Malibudusul at E/S.

Please follow this link below
From Kongo to Othello to Tango to Museum Shows
www.artnews.com/2012/10/25/image-of-africans-in-western-art/

[zarahan]

Just had cause to use this info for something else. Great resource!