But above all, Afonso’s pretentions to authority were undermined by the violence and terror of Portuguese slaving, which increased sharply in intensity under his rule and moved from enemy areas beyond Kongo into the heart of the confederation. For Kongo, the proof of the mani Kongo’s authority was consensus and peace among the polity’s components. Whatever the promise of the power of Catholic Christianity, the practice stripped communities of their nkisi protective power, leaving them directly dependent on Afonso, whose access to the protective powers of his predecessors seemed to mean less and less as terror spread through the vulnerable population. In the personal power he sought, he alone was also responsible.
Portuguese slavers from São Tomé Island were working out the most effective methods of acquiring captives to send off to forced labor in the gold mines of the Akan areas of West Africa and on sugar plantations on the islands of the Gulf of Guinea at the same time that Afonso was undertaking these strategies of political consolidation and implicitly assuming personal responsibility for the welfare of his realm. Beyond whatever Kongo resentments may have been brewing in reaction to Afonso’s assault on their historic communities, Portuguese slavers interfered in their ongoing local politics. They exacerbated routine conflicts and harvested prisoners taken by all sides for sale as slaves. The growing disorder sowed the seeds of the desperation that moved a succeeding generation of people in Kongo to attribute the dissension and distress to evil beyond witchcraft, which the Portuguese would understand as cannibalism.
These “Portuguese” slavers from São Tomé Island were in fact often offspring of liaisons between earlier Portuguese settlers on the island and the first generation of Kongo women they had taken there as slaves, early in Afonso’s time. The slavers spoke their mothers’ Kikongo languages as well as Portuguese, which enabled them to broker commercial relations between the communities on the mainland—sometimes with their mothers’ own people—and the commercial economy of the Atlantic. The São Tomé slavers had originally purchased captives taken in violence against the Tio around Malebo Pool in the early 1500s, and then from the Mbundu peoples (the “Ambundos” in Afonso’s letter) to the south.39 Although a few criminals from the Kongo region convicted in judicial proceedings were also disposed of, as well as some survivors of droughts and famines, more slaves could be generated by provoking armed conflicts among the competing components of the polity. These losses violated the intense Kongo ethos of political integrity and set the stage for a collective reaction to their growing sense of helpless vulnerability to unseen betrayals from within, as well as the muskets of the Portuguese.
This cycle of violence, and enslavement throughout the polity, was attributable to the mani Kongo. By the early 1520s, the disruption, as well as the wealth that collaborators outside Afonso’s circle derived from it, became a political problem of pervasive proportions. In 1526 Afonso wrote a famous letter to the Portuguese king, begging his friend, ally, and protector in Lisbon for help to end uncontrolled slaving in Kongo. After noting the abuses of the Tomista slavers and recounting the depopulation of lands and illegal enslavements of Kongo Catholics, Afonso petitioned King João III to “send neither merchants nor merchandise, because our will is that in these kingdoms there is no trade in slaves nor outlet for them.”40
Afonso’s motives, viewed in the context of the Kongo polity, seem more complex than the modern proto-abolitionist reading usually given to this plea would indicate. Since Afonso had clearly tolerated—even encouraged—foreign slaving in Kongo prior to 1526, his entreaty for help begs the question of what changed his mind. He stressed two primary rationales. First, he lamented how the São Tomé slavers had flooded the Kongo market with imported trade goods, which drove their value down. Local people whom Afonso claimed as vassals could purchase these goods that had previously been rare luxuries in such quantities that they were able to “elevate themselves” beyond his ability to control them as a sovereign authority ought to do. From his perspective, Kongo who challenged his authority by amassing wealth in trade goods promoted “evil greediness.”41
Afonso, always alert to the sensibilities of his Catholic readers in Portugal, did not designate these wealthy challengers to his authority in Kongo terms as the witches they were, but in this letter and subsequent ones, he addressed the politically enabling effects of the goods the Tomista slavers brought, since his challengers distributed them to recruit clients. He asked the Catholic king João to send him “medicine” and “remedies” for the greed he saw as illness. These requests for a cure for disorder expressed a Kongo worldview that attributed dissension, in this case tendencies toward personal autonomy asserted through accumulating material wealth, as caused by witches, and curable by collective healing. The problem was not the slaving, which had long been a moderate component of politics in western-central Africa, but rather the imports arriving in quantities that Afonso could not control.
The second reason Afonso banned slaving in 1526 was because the violence hit too close to home. Afonso later made clear his distinction between slaving and Atlantic imports inflating conflicts within the Kongo polity and the Tomistas’ targeting the Christian faction in Kongo, presumably his own family and clients. Since it was illegal in Europe to enslave Catholics, his letters to King João III emphasized this affront to European legality. The issue was political, not moral. He made clear how attacking his Catholic followers undermined his personal authority. The slavers were exploiting the tensions inherent in Kongo, both among its component communities and against the Christian core he was trying to consolidate over it.
A contrasting example from West Africa in the same period highlights Afonso’s political weakness in Kongo. The oba (ruler) of Benin, a powerful polity there, faced Tomista slavers in a situation similar to Afonso’s. In contrast to Afonso’s helpless begging for intervention from Lisbon to deal with the troublesome traders from São Tomé who were taking Benin slaves also to the Mina Castle on the Gold Coast, the oba in 1516 issued an outright prohibition of further exports of captives. Slave purchases from Benin plummeted. Afonso’s pleading tone suggests the inherently tenuous grip of a central authority in a composite polity on economic activity among its component parties. His appeal to the king in Portugal invoked the commanding authority of the Catholic monarchy he was already failing to implement.
Catholic proselytization was bad for the Tomista slavers’ business. According to Catholic law, Christians could not enslave other Christians, and conversions to Catholicism in Kongo were decreasing the supply of heathens to enslave. Afonso may have limited slaving for a time after 1526, but not for long. By about 1530, Portuguese slavers and their Kongo collaborators secured access to new sources of captives from the far northeast around Malebo Pool where Afonso had been exiled and had first sponsored the Catholic priests, and thus beyond the Kongo composite. The Teke/Tio living there, who had formerly been victims of Kongo slaving, reorganized and stabilized the slave markets near the Pool by generating captives from farther into the interior. This new expanded geography of slaving enriched all the parties to the trade. The Tio were paid for their captives with nzimbu shells from the Atlantic Coast, which they often purchased in Kongo, and Afonso levied a tax on the strings of shells and chains of captives as they passed through Mbanza Kongo on their way from and to the coast. Whereas only about seventeen hundred slaves had been sent to São Tomé per year from 1500 to 1525, the reorganized, sustainable, and profitable trade to Malebo Pool produced as many as five to six thousand slaves in peak years after 1530.42
Afonso’s