Since authority in Kongo derived from mastery of the power of the past and performance of it in the present, Afonso would have been expected to embody and enact the formulaic procedures that protected and empowered him as the guardian of the new Catholic spirit whose power he infused throughout the community. One of his most effective actions was to distribute objects allowing baptized individuals to access the Catholic saints. The iconography of the iron swords, displayed prominently on Afonso’s coat of arms, invoked Saint James’s miraculous intervention above Afonso’s men as they had rushed into battle, and the swords were simultaneously intelligible to Kongo audiences as objects powerful in themselves. Ironworking, especially smelting, as visualized in the helmet and the swords on the coat of arms, was seen throughout central Africa as the creation of power objects and thus considered a very potent and dangerous skill. Several political traditions, including Kongo’s, identified their mythologized founding and empowering heroes as blacksmiths.24 The association of iron with authority and power in European attributes of nobility, as expressed in images of swords or battle armor like helmets, paralleled practices in Kongo.25 Afonso’s genius was to add and integrate European ideas of political hierarchy into the Kongo context. With Catholicism, as he presented it, he had renewed Kongo, just as all his predecessors had reinvigorated and empowered the continuing and aggregating series of mani Kongo.
Afonso continued his strategy of presenting Catholicism as a renewed Kongo after 1512 by deploying or—as Kongo saw it—performing the symbols and institutions of the Catholic Church. As part of this carefully orchestrated campaign of embodying Catholicism in human forms, he strategically chose which orders of European priests he allowed into his domain. When Afonso’s father accepted baptism as a Catholic in 1491, the Portuguese priests in attendance included a balance of Franciscans, canons of Saint John the Evangelist (the Bons Homines), and perhaps Dominicans as well.26 Kongo remained open to multiple religious orders until 1512, but then Afonso associated himself further with European images of iron and ironworking by adopting the canons of Saint John the Evangelist as his priests of choice from their arrival in 1509 to 1532. Saint Eloi (Saint Eligius in English) was the patron saint of the primary house of the “Loios” in Portugal. Eloi was the patron saint of blacksmiths and wielded a smith’s hammer or other ironworking tools as prominent elements in his iconography.27 Coming from the Loios monastery in Évora, Afonso’s chosen priests would have carried images of Saint Eloi depicting iron objects like a blacksmith’s anvil or tongs for pulling hot, workable iron out of a fire. Since in Africa iron was a potent means of empowering political positions, European priests who traveled throughout the affiliated regions of Kongo on behalf of Afonso carrying images of a blacksmith could have served, even unwittingly, both as embodiments of his new Catholic Kongo and as the epitome of the mani Kongo predecessors entrusted to him.
To his European sponsors Afonso presented himself as a king. To the people of Kongo he was a mani Kongo. His duality was no contradiction in the additive Kongo cosmology, and the specific function of the mani Kongo as representative of the Kongo network to outsiders both visible and invisible, present and past, made his strategies for incorporating foreign visitors and their empowering objects a straightforward continuation of the inherited Kongo arrangements entrusted to him. The clear emphasis on continuity for the Kongo “lords” and povos was necessary to balance the radical changes he made. However, he also encouraged centralizing tactics that overrode the basic diversity of the Kongo political composite. He promoted Catholic baptism and the burning of “idols,” both of which removed the accumulated past of the Kongo components from the polity’s present and future, to leave Catholic power and authority centered on himself alone, as a king.
His coat of arms explicitly claimed personal authority as the monarch over a Kongo without the independent and mediating loyalties to the communities in the composite. The two broken figures at its bottom proclaimed a homogeneous and exclusionary Christian layer over the Kongo polity’s diverse components. Carved wooden figures like these, today called nkisi (singular; minkisi plural), can be manipulated as physical embodiments of hidden power.28 They are often wooden, human-shaped figures that an nganga, or a professional trained in fabricating instruments for contacting the intangible world, makes powerful by placing spiritually charged materials, often residuals of human energy such as woven cloth or fingernails, in a cavity in the figure, often in the stomach, the site of ravenous greed. Nganga is typically mistranslated as “witch,” but the term is better defined as “healer” or “doctor” in the Kongo holistic sense of a person who heals individuals of physical or emotional pain arising from dissension and immorality in their communities.29 Like modern doctors, nganga did their work as trained specialists bound by a professional code of ethics where malpractice could result in the loss of the community’s trust in them and, thus, of their powers as well as their livelihoods. An nganga seen to be doing harm would be prosecuted as an evil witch. Individuals used these powerful minkisi to draw on the ambient past for protection or intervention during times of stress in a manner not unlike Catholic devotion to images and statues of saints in similarly troubling circumstances.
The minkisi figures on Afonso’s coat of arms were broken at the waist, torsos hanging upside down next to the edges of the white field of the Portuguese crest. In Afonso’s 1512 letter to Pope Julius II, he claimed to have abstained from all things forbidden by the Church, which, for the Catholic priests in Kongo, above all banned polygyny and what they saw as worship of minkisi idols. Since Afonso allowed polygyny to continue to maintain the political composite even after his conversion, his coat of arms professed his abstention from evil in destroying the “idols” central to Kongo community life.30 Further, he later supported his Catholic priests in their attempts to discredit nganga in Kongo and destroy nkisi power figures, and to replace them with Christian baptism and crucifixes, rosaries, and other Catholic objects of devotion. As Afonso added Christian symbols and Portuguese Catholic advisers to the Kongo context, he endorsed the definition of broken minkisi figures as sinful idols worthy of extermination by Catholic clergy. In this daring destruction he defied powers unquestioned in the previous Kongo worldview—not least the ancestors invoked through the minkisi—and presented them as competing rather than complementary. The broken figures were a direct statement of monarchy, replacing rather than adding to the composite polity of the past. However, this direct statement of personal authority was only a small marginal image on the larger coat of arms. The very clear message of the broken figures can easily be made ambiguous, or entirely overlooked, in the other positive symbols of power with the shells of Saint James, the arms holding swords, or Constantine’s cross. The coat of arms ruined the old forms of nkisi, but now operated as an nkisi in its own right by providing local communities a tangible link to the Catholic powers that gave Afonso his victory.
Even as Afonso’s severed figures demonstrated a break with a past condemned as idolatrous, in the Kongo understanding of continuity, it was still necessary to placate ancestors, who could not be neglected. In a world where the past lived on through the present, and the ancestors lived on through their descendants, the minkisi had to be replaced by new objects with new powers that provided trust to replace what communities placed in their ancestral inheritance. The minkisi were often replaced with Catholic crucifixes reconfigured in local forms, in many cases hanging figures of Kongo ancestors on the crucifix.31 Afonso disabled the previous form of power (nkisi) in his own coat of arms by showing these figures of power as severed, or “disarmed,” suggesting his personal domination over remnants of the past. He was explicitly claiming to have conquered the local Kongo powers by excluding alternative beliefs and affirming monotheistic Christianity—centered on a singularity of revelation, of God, and of monarchy—that reinforced his personal monopoly on power: “And the broken black idols on the same shield as Portugal, signified that [God’s] will caused the change and their destruction.”32