Kimpa Vita: The Life and Legacy of the Influential Christian

Prophet in the Kingdom of Kongo

By Charles River Editors

An image depicting Portuguese explorers’ encounter with the Kongo

royal family
 
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 Introduction

A map of the Kingdom of Kongo shortly before Kimpa Vita’s birth

Africa may have given rise to the first human beings, and Egypt probably
gave rise to the first great civilizations, which continue to fascinate modern
societies across the globe nearly 5,000 years later. From the Library and
Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Ancient
Egyptians produced several wonders of the world, revolutionized
architecture and construction, created some of the world’s first systems of
mathematics and medicine, and established language and art that spread
across the known world. With famous leaders like King Tut and Cleopatra,
it’s no wonder that today’s world has so many Egyptologists, but interest in
Africa has been present long before the modern era.
In the Middle Ages, the Holy Lands were lost to Christianity, and
Christian Europe was under siege. Folk tales began to circulate — their
origins obscure, but first noted in historic texts around the 12th century CE
— of a lost Christian kingdom in the East, the kingdom of Prester John. It
was believed that this kingdom had the patriarch of Saint Thomas, who
proselytized in the Orient. Later, in the 15th century, under the impetus of
the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator, Portuguese missionaries and
navigators entered the Indian Ocean from the south and, creeping northward
up the east coast of Africa, heard ever more substantial tales of a Christian
kingdom lost in the belly of Islam. As they entered upon the coast of
Somalia, competing in a growing trade in slaves and gold with Arabs of the
peninsula, they become increasingly interested in the source of this legend,
in part to fulfill the centuries-long dream of discovering the kingdom of
Prester John, but also in part to secure the alliance of a Christian power
against the force of Islam.
In 1515, a Portuguese missionary explorer by the name of Father
Francisco Álvares entered Ethiopia and took note in the interior of the
remnants of a civilization of obviously Christian origin, with living
adherents conforming to a branch of the faith clearly founded in antiquity.
Could this be the kingdom of Prester John? Father Álvares was intrigued,
but he was wary of too fanciful a construction, and he speculated more
practically on the legend of King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and other
such muses. As for the city at the center of the civilization, he called it
Aquasumo.
As it turned out, the Portuguese were arriving in Western Africa at a time
when the Kingdom of Kongo was one of the great pre-colonial empires of
Africa, with its geographic range at its greatest extent covering most of
northwestern Angola, the western edges of the Democratic Republic of
Congo and the Congo Republic, and overlapping at times into Cabinda and
southern Gabon. It was centralized mostly within the borders of modern
Angola, and it is most associated with the early history of that country,
notwithstanding its name being applied to the two Congo republics. In fact,
the name “Angola” derives from a vassal Kingdom of Kongo, the Ndonga,
the kings of which were known as Ngola (hence the adaption to “Angola”).
The Portuguese did eventually discover a Christian kingdom elsewhere in
Africa, but their Christian influences helped lead to conversion movements
in the Kingdom of Kongo, most famously that of Kimpa Vita, a young
woman whose story included striking parallels with Joan of Arc. As the
leader of a Christian movement, Kimpa Vita became involved in internal
political disputes within the Kingdom of Kongo even as she set about
spreading Christianity, and her ultimate fate has kept her memory alive as
an ideal for later democratic and religious movements across the African
continent.
Kimpa Vita: The Life and Legacy of the Influential Christian Prophet in
the Kingdom of Kongo chronicles the turbulent history of the region and the
dramatic impact Kimpa Vita had in the late 17th century. Along with
pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about
Kimpa Vita like never before.


Kimpa Vita: The Life and Legacy of the Influential Christian Prophet in the
Kingdom of Kongo
About Charles River Editors
Introduction
The Kingdom of Kongo
The Conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo
The Rise of Kimpa Vita
The Fall of Kimpa Vita
Kimpa Vita’s Legacy
Online Resources
Further Reading
Free Books by Charles River Editors
Discounted Books by Charles River Editors
 


 The Kingdom of Kongo

By the mid-15th century, the Byzantine Empire had collapsed and the
various Crusades that had taken place in the region had largely disrupted the
overland routes of the Silk Road and trade. Compounding the difficulties of
trade was the rise of the Ottoman Empire in place of the Byzantines and the
outbreak of the Black Death in Europe.
It was roughly around this time that a period of European exploration
began, and major factors that contributed to this period of exploration were
introduced by the Chinese, albeit indirectly. The magnetic compass had
already been developed and used by the Chinese sailors since the 12th
century, although it had first been created in the 3rd century BCE as a
divination device. The Song Dynasty then began using the device for land
navigation in the 11th century and sailors began using it shortly after. The
technology slowly spread west via Arab traders, although a case can be
made for the independent European creation for the compass (Southey
1812: 210). Regardless, by the 13th century the compass had found its way
to Western traders, coming at a time that trade had been increasing across
Europe.
Trade was able to increase in Europe around the world due to more
effective ships being introduced, and some of the improvements that were
made to the ships were first introduced by the Chinese. The introduction of
multiple mast ships and the sternpost rudders allowed the ships to travel
quicker and be more maneuverable. By the start of the 15th century, ships
were now much larger and able to support long distance travel with a
minimum number of crew aboard.
With that, the Portuguese started exploring the west coast of Africa and
the Atlantic under orders from Prince Henry the Navigator. At this point,
Europeans had not yet been capable of navigating completely around Africa
since the ships being built were not yet fully capable of being able to sail
very far from the coast and navigation in open waters was difficult, but the
Portuguese continued pushing down the western African coast looking for
ways to bypass the Ottomans and Muslims of Africa who had been making
overland trade routes difficult. In 1451, Prince Henry the Navigator helped
fund and develop a new type of ship, the caravel, that featured triangular
lateen sails and would be able to travel in the open ocean and sail against
the wind. In 1488, Bartholomew Diaz rounded the southern tip of Africa,
named the Cape of Good Hope by King John of Portugal, and entered the
Indian Ocean from the Atlantic.
One explorer, Christopher Columbus, sought funding from the Portuguese
to search for a passage to Asia by sailing westwards, but he was rejected. At
this time in the late 15th century, Portugal’s domination of the western
African sea routes prompted the neighboring Crown of Castile and the
Catholic monarchs in modern Spain to search for an alternative route to
south and east Asia (termed Indies), so they provided Columbus with the
funding he required. Ultimately, Columbus discovered the Americas in
1492, and Spanish settlements in the “West Indies” would eventually be
established.
Of course, when it became clear Columbus hadn’t landed in Asia, it was
understood by everyone that this was not necessarily the route the
Europeans were searching for, and the Portuguese continued to send
explorers around the Cape of Good Hope in an attempt to reach the East
Indies. After a two-year voyage, in 1499, Vasco da Gama had successfully
reached India and returned to Portugal.
The Portuguese had found access to the trade regions that they had been
searching for, but sailing from Portugal to India and beyond would require
too many resources to travel with at once. To remedy this problem, Portugal
began establishing a number of forts and trading posts along the route. The
Portuguese were able to establish a fort on the west coast of India, Fort
Manuel, in 1500, and in 1505 a fort was erected off the coast of Tanzania,
thus beginning a trend of European colonization in Africa and Asia that
would last for the next 400 years.
The richest phase of the Portuguese African slave trade began as the
caravels began to pass beyond the Gulf of Guinea, encountering for the first
time the mouth of the Congo River. The initial discovery of the Congo was
made by the explorer Diogo Cão, another of Henry the Navigator’s
protégés, during his voyage of 1484-1486, and before long a trade depot
was established at the mouth of the river and was open for business.
 Nuno Tavares’ map of Portuguese sites along the coasts
The Congo is a vast and densely populated territory of savannah and
tropical forest that in the 15th century existed largely under the control of the
Kingdom of Kongo. At the time, the Kingdom of Kongo was one of the
great African regional powers of the age, controlling a swathe of territory
bordered in the north by the loop of the Congo River and in the south by an
imaginary line running more or less east into the interior from the site of
modern-day Luanda. The Kongo kings were powerful, wealthy, and only
too willing to do business.
As was true of all the European trading powers that would eventually
follow in the footsteps of these early Portuguese explorers, it was not
Portuguese imperial policy to try to seize or control territory on the
mainland for its own sake. Instead, depots and forts were established for the
sole purpose of conducting trade with the existing powers of the coast and
the interior. These facilities inevitably grew into settlements as missionaries
arrived and colonists assimilated, married locals, and established roots. The
same was true for the Danes, the French, the Dutch and British, who all
founded similar settlements as they joined the slave trade and lay the
groundwork for future spheres of influence. Conditions in the interior were
simply too hostile to contemplate colonization, and it would be several
more centuries before wider exploration and exploitation of Africa’s interior
was even attempted.
At its greatest extent, the Kingdom of Kongo comprised a system of
governed provinces under the control of local monarchs loyal to a
paramount king. Beyond the borders of the kingdom itself, there existed
widely dispersed spheres of influence that covered numerous satellite
kingdoms and subject polities. The entire structure was highly
sophisticated, well governed and immensely powerful, and not in the
slightest bit intimidated by the Portuguese. Its kings and princes were keen
to trade, and during the early decades of Portuguese settlement along the
coast, a generally productive relationship was maintained. In 1576, the main
Portuguese port was established at Loanda in present-day Luanda, and
barring a few small explorations, the Portuguese tended to remain in place.
While Kongolese oral history is unusually comprehensive and complete,
offering a detailed dynastic chronology for historians to study, its written
history begins only with the arrival at the mouth of the Congo River in 1482
of the Portuguese. Diogo Cão had arrived in August of that year after
noticing a wide entry through the perpetual coastal haze and a distinct
discoloration of the water, compelling him to navigate into the mouth of the
great river and sail as deep into the interior as the modern port of Boma.
Contacts on this occasion were brief and superficial, but within a few years,
Diogo Cão was back, this time with a much stronger expedition, and it was
then that a diplomatic relationship was established between imperial
Portugal and the Kingdom of Kongo.
 A depiction of Diogo Cão in the region
The climate of the interior was deadly to all but the most resilient
Europeans, resulting in the name of the “White Man’s Grave,” so the local
leaders controlled the supply of the commodities being traded. Given that
the Europeans’ arrival nearly coincided with the advent of the New World
plantation economies, there was a vast increase in the demand for slaves,
which most local rulers supplied by taking captives and moving them to
trading factories at the coast.
With the Kongolese, however, things were a little different. Portuguese
religious and mercantile agents made their way inland to the seat of
Kongolese power, Mbanza-Kongo, which they renamed São Salvador, and
imposed baptism on Nzinga a Nkuwu, the reigning Mwene Kongo, who was
then given the Christian name João I. Certain well-born youth were
recruited and returned to Portugal to be baptized and educated, returning
later to proselytize and commence the mass conversion of the population.
 Christianity in the Kongo, as was true with other significant kingdoms
and empires which made early contact with Europeans, tended to be seen
more in terms of its political than religious context. Conversion was seen as
the basis for establishing diplomatic relations with powerful kingdoms from
overseas, and generally as a preemptive, protective measure against the
Europeans’ perceived forces of commerce and religion interfering with
local sovereignty.
Initially, the rulers of the Kongo had little to fear from the Portuguese,
whose far more lucrative activities tended to focus their interest in the east,
in particular the coast of India. Eventually, settlements, ports and trade
factories were established as far east as Macau, while Portuguese maritime
explorers long preceded the likes of Captain James Cook in his “discovery”
of Australia and New Zealand. However, a drastic change came in the mid-
16th century with the development of sugar estates in the coastal regions of
Brazil, at which point a strong trade relationship was founded between the
Angolan ports of Loanda and Benguela and the slave markets of Brazil.
Figures are difficult to precisely pinpoint, but it is generally accepted that
upwards of 3,700,000 slaves of Angolan origin landed in Brazil. Historians
have estimated that for every 100 African slaves that made it to the New
World, another 40 died either back in Africa or on the voyage across the
Atlantic, so it’s possible that nearly 7 million people were exported from
what would eventually become modern Angola.
The BaKongo were, as they remain, a Bantu people, and they settled on a
landscape overlaid by millennia of occupation by pre-Bantu societies whose
stories and origins are lost to history. While to date very little archeological
work has been done in Angola to bring a very vague, pre-colonial picture
into sharper focus, certain established themes might help place the
Kingdom of Kongo in context.
The heartland of the kingdom straddles what would today be a region of
savanna woodland lying to the south of the Congo River, and, again, of the
aboriginal people of this region, little if anything is known. Scholars
surmise that they belonged to a fairly wide spectrum of hunter-gatherer
cultures that populated, albeit very thinly, the southern continent during the
middle and late Stone Age periods. They may have been the remote
ancestors of the Khoisan, who represented the last surviving traces of a
dwindling culture.
By the 5th century CE, new cultures and societies were beginning to take
shape in the tropical forests and savanna of west-central Africa, derived
from one of the great demographic permutations of the pre-colonial era.
The name Bantu is derived from the root term ntu, which means simply
“person,” with the ba implying plural, thus meaning “people.” The word
first came into common use to define a broad language group in the
research and scholarship of the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, and
specifically in his groundbreaking publication, A Comparative Grammar of
South African Languages. What it describes in this context is a race of
people traditionally described as “Congoid,” or “Negroid” which, although
no longer in common use, served to distinguish the Bantu races from the
various other broad ethnic divisions, ranging from the Khoisan of the south
to the various Nilotic peoples of the north, and every other in between, all
of whom, to a greater or lesser extent, represent minorities to the Bantu.
The Bantu race tends to be the most recognizable modern African “type,”
its ubiquity across the sub-Saharan region owed to a vast dispersal now
known as the “Bantu Migration,” or more commonly, the “Bantu
Expansion.”
Even today, after generations of careful research, the details of the Bantu
Expansion are vague, but generally it is accepted that, beginning around
1000 BCE somewhere in the region of the Niger-Benue confluence, on the
borders of modern Nigeria and Cameroon, an outward expansion of the
Bantu speaking race began. Theories to explain the prompting of this
movement are many, the most widely propagated of which is that the
development of ironworking technologies created more efficient
exploitation of local resources, perhaps even resulting in land pressures and
the expansion of pastoral agriculture. The expansion was radial, but
generally the main thrust of it was directed towards the accessible regions
of the Congo, eventually finding its way to the Great Rift Valley and the
Great Lakes region. This provided a conduit for a steady movement south,
until, ironically, at the end of the 18th century, the southern Bantu
encountered migratory Europeans fanning out from the Cape.
 The net result, of course, was the slow displacement and absorption of the
older races, the Khoisan being the most identifiable, but the proliferation of
the “click” consonant in southern Bantu languages is testimony to the
resilience of these older races and the extent of their influence. The
“Western Stream” of the Bantu began populating the central African
rainforest and its surrounding fringe of woodland savanna, and an
agricultural and pastoral society emerged, spreading slowly onto the
grassland savanna which makes up much of modern Angola. Thanks to
prosperity and surplus, a sprawling and complex society evolved. As the
British historian Basil Davidson, a man with a peculiar interest in Angolan
history, remarked, “Large kingships grew out of small ones in the measure
that developmental factors pressed that way. Finding the need for it, men
found means of channelling peripheral or rival powers into a unified power
to meet new needs and opportunities.”[1]
By about 1450, the strongest of these kingdoms emerged as the Kongo,
and perhaps more than most, the BaKongo have preserved their history
through oral and cultural tradition. Basil Davidson, in his highly acclaimed
book Eye of the Storm, made an interesting analogy regarding the kingdom:
“Their traditions sketch a picture of migration, new settlement, and
adjustment to local conditions that is markedly similar in its essence to the
consequences of the Norman invasion of Anglo-Saxon England three
centuries earlier. Around 1350 a leader and his warriors crossed southward
over the Congo River from the region west of Stanley Pool, their homeland,
and gained supremacy south of that river. With them they brought ideas
about kingship that derived from their own history. They grafted their rule
upon a people, the Ambundu, who had already developed a kingship of
their own...what came out of this, the historical Kongo kingdom, was
clearly more than a transfer of ‘Stanley Pool structures’ to the Ambundu
country, or a mere elaboration of already existing Ambundu structures, than
the Norman kingship in England was a mere variant of the polities of
northern France or Saxon England. William the Norman, and the Kongo
Ruler Ntinu Wene (or Mwene, meaning ruler), had the same basic problem,
and they set about solving it in the same basic way.”
By the time the Portuguese dropped anchor in the estuary of the Congo
River, seven kings had ruled over the Kingdom of Kongo, and the
newcomers were suitably amazed by a state, which was described as “great
and powerful, full of people, having many vassals.”
By the 1480s, the Ndongo and other similar polities were all in one way
or another under the vassalage of the Kongo rulers, and although the precise
terms of this political arrangement are obscure, there seems to be no
evidence of any kind of enduringly violent relationship, although wars of
conquest and pacification were certainly fought. In the Kingdom of Kongo,
each village complex tended to be governed by its own chief or headman
who represented the dominant lineage of the community, and who
embodied in his ritual authority a religious compact with the spirits of the
land, and the family from which his authority was derived. These local
rulers were subordinate to the king, functioning perhaps in Western terms as
local governors. The king’s authority rested on the supposition that his
ancestors were the “national” ancestors.
 The Conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo
“On the sails of caravels, on the chest of noblemen, in the hands of
clerics, and on the stone landmarks proudly erected on newly reached
shores, the sign of the cross accompanied every move of the Portuguese
explorers as a banner of conquest and a standard proselytism.” – Cécile
Fromont
In the late 15th century, the Portuguese were still fascinated by the myth of
the kingdom of Prester John, and the idea of a great and powerful kingdom
in the interior of East Africa provoked much excited speculation. The
possibility that the African people themselves could build such a kingdom
seemed at the time rather outlandish to European explorers, so it was
assumed that the mythical kingdom was the result of some Biblical exodus
dating back to ancient times. Early reports returned to the coast seemed to
back this up, and a great walled city was described by the Portuguese
historian and colonial administrator João de Barros, who referred to it as
Symbaoe, later more commonly as Zimbabwe.[2] The society associated with
this city was variously described as Monomotapa, Munhumutapa,
Mwenemutara or Mwene we Mutapa, and in later years simply as the
kingdom of the Mutapa.
When news reached Portugal of this rumored kingdom in the interior,
which was by then more fact than rumor, it was the Catholic Church that
was quicker off the mark than the state itself. A Jesuit priest by the name of
Father Dom Gonçalo da Silveira was the first literate European to arrive at
the gates of the kingdom of the Mwene Mutapa.[3] What he found was
indeed a kingdom of great wealth and sophistication established on the
central plateau of the southern African subcontinent, ruled by a dynasty of
kings known as the Mwene Mutapa.
The scope of the kingdom of Mutapa amazed Father Gonçalo da Silveira,
and his breathless dispatches described a society of unimaginable wealth
and sophistication, sustained by a rich trade in gold and ivory with the
Arabs of the coast. Indeed, present in the court of the Mwene Mutapa were
numerous Arabs, all engaged in the coastal trade and certainly hostile to the
presence of any power likely to challenge their mercantile predominance on
the Central Plateau.[4] As the story goes, Father Gonçalo da Silveira was
able to convert the ruling “Mambo,” or king, to Christianity, which was
probably wishful thinking on his part. In all likelihood, the Mambo saw
“conversion” as some sort of diplomatic accommodation with a new and
largely unknown power present on the coast, rumors of which had likely
reached his court.
Events would play out similarly in the Congo. The Portuguese took note
of the existence of the Kingdom of Kongo at the moment that they dropped
anchor, realizing that it was something quite out of the ordinary. On his
return journey to Portugal following his first visit to the mouth of the Congo
River, Diogo Cão took along four Kongolese nobles to learn Portuguese so
that they could serve as the first teachers and interpreters. This ensured that
by Diogo Cão’s second visit, the evangelization of the Kongo leadership
could begin.
This first encounter between Christianity and the kings of Kongo is
recorded in the writing of Portuguese chronicler Rui de Pina, who
chronicled events according to both eyewitness accounts and official
correspondence. According to his account, Baptismo do Rei do Congo,
published in 1491, Nzinga a Nkuwu (1470-1509) received baptism along
with six of his courtiers, subsequently taking the Christian name of João I.
The event was celebrated with a great deal of pomp and ceremony, after
which Catholicism was declared the national religion of Kongo. It was
ordered that Christian clerics be well received in every part of the kingdom
and that all pagan idols, symbols, and practices be purged.
 A depiction of João I of Kongo
According to Rui de Pina, two of those baptized with the king
experienced a similar vision in their sleep, reporting that they were visited
by the Virgin Mary, in resplendent form, requesting that they congratulate
João I on his conversion and his kingdom to Christianity. The next morning,
as one of the men stepped out of his house, he encountered a large carved
cross fashioned out of an unknown type of black stone. “I found a holy
thing made of a stone I have never seen before,” he reported to his
sovereign and to the priests now established in court. “And it is shaped as
the object that the Friars held when we became Christian and that they call
the Cross.”
Showing the curious object to the clerics, the king inquired as to its form
and meaning. “Sir!” answered the clerics, moved to tears. “These things are
signs of grace and salvation that God has sent to you and your kingdom,
and for this we give Him and you also should give him infinite thanks.” The
black stone cross was carried in procession to a church recently built, and
there it was placed as the centerpiece, as it was believed to be a relic of this
great miracle of conversion. This must certainly have been a source of great
satisfaction to the Portuguese Catholics in the area.
The conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo has been studied by historians,
sociologists, and anthropologists, and the central issue is just how sincere
the conversion was. The conclusion must certainly be that the decision was
political, and that the leadership of the kingdom recognized the potential of
a diplomatic relationship with Portugal. Viewing itself as one great
kingdom dealing with another, it’s likely the Kongolese viewed the embrace
of Christianity as a prerequisite to this, and it’s safe to assume that the
Catholic clerics responsible for that conversion did nothing to disabuse
them of that notion. he situation in regards to the BaKongo was rather
different to many other instances of Christian conversion in Africa simply
because it was not accompanied by conquest, meaning that the institutions
of the new religion, unique as they were, and are, to the local faith, were
fashioned by the leadership of the kingdom by their own efforts, and
according to their own interpretation. The Portuguese certainly did seek to
pursue a diplomatic and trade relationship with the kingdom, upon the
understanding, initially at least, that it was too powerful to subjugate.
Besides that, Portuguese policy at that time was specifically trade, with no
particular pretensions before the establishment of the colony of Angola to
rule the country.
 João I of Kongo ruled until he died around 1509, after which he was
succeeded by his son Mvemba a Nzinga, who ruled the kingdom as Afonso
I. Afonso I was a keen supporter and promoter of Christianity, and he more
than any labored to create a workable version of Roman Catholicism
peculiar to Kongo, writing to the Vatican in the hope of relaxing the laws of
celibacy imposed upon priests in the kingdom. It was also during his reign
that the colonization of Brazil created an insatiable demand for slave labor,
at which point an institution was introduced into Kongo that began the rapid
disintegration of its established social relations. In an environment of
frenetic economic activity revolving around this brutally destructive field of
commerce, the social fabric of the kingdom’s various communities
inevitably frayed.[5]
Afonso I was also instrumental in establishing the form and complexion
of a syncretic version of Christianity that combined elements of
Catholicism and traditional animist practices that would survive as part of
Kongolese culture for so long as the kingdom remained self-sustaining and
nominally independent. Constantly short of trained and ordained clergy, the
kingdom made up for this through the establishment of a strong religious
laity, with local, indigenous schoolteachers (mestres) providing the
backbone of the system. Typically, they were recruited from the nobility
and trained in local schools established by the Portuguese clergy, and they
provided most of the grassroots religious instruction and the missionary
outreach that served to spread the essential canons of Christianity to the
outer reaches of the kingdom. As such, the mestres also tended to define
and evolve the local peculiarities of the faith in the region. For example,
Afonso I’s son Henrique was sent to Europe to be educated, and after
returning as an ordained priest, in 1518 he was named Bishop of Utica, a
North African diocese recently reclaimed by the Portuguese from the
Muslims.
The Catholic order perhaps most associated with the Kongo was the
Franciscan Order of the Capuchins, who established their first mission in
1645. The Capuchins, it is worth emphasizing, were an Italian order of
Catholics friars, not Portuguese, as one might suppose. It was the stated
preference of the Portuguese authorities, according to their Padroado rule,
that only missionaries of Portuguese nationality were acceptable in the
Kingdom of Kongo.[6] King Garcia II, however, who ruled the kingdom
from 1641-1661, believed it would be advantageous to break the established
Portuguese monopoly. In this regard, he was aided by a combination of
political factors, one of which was the Dutch-Portuguese War of 1601-1661.
That conflict resulted in a brief Dutch occupation of Angola and Brazil, and
a three-way alliance negotiated in 1641 between the Dutch, the Kingdom of
Kongo, and the Kingdom of Ndonga allowed the Dutch to capture and
briefly control the two principal Angolan ports of São Paul de Loanda and
São Filipe de Benguela.[7]
It was during this time that the vanguard of Capuchin monks were able to
slip into the kingdom despite Portuguese protests, and once they were
established, many more followed. Throughout the process, they
demonstrated a willingness that the Portuguese never had to make their way
deep into the interior to take their message directly to the outlying
communities, ending the traditional reliance on local mestres to preach and
to minister where the Portuguese were unprepared to venture. Thus, after
1650, missionary activity in the modern boundaries of Angola was
dominated by Capuchins, which also reflected the growth in scope and
influence of the Franciscan order in Europe. In fact, the Capuchin
infiltration into the Kingdom of Kongo represented the most concentrated
and extensive evangelization anywhere in black Africa before the modern
era. Between 1645 and 1835, records indicate that 440 Capuchin friars were
active among BaKongo.[8]
Figures are speculative and obviously subject to highly fluid definitions of
conversion, but during the second half of the 16th century, 341,000 baptisms
were recorded at the hands of just 37 clerics, which seems quite
extraordinary.[9] As one historian put it, “How can the large numerical
claims of converts be understood? This question must be answered in an
historical perspective, relating the situation in its context to both the Latin
Christianity of the period and to traditional Kongo culture. There was a
tolerant and inclusive approach to the problem of conversion in Africa. It
was made all the more acceptable, as fundamental religious concepts where
expressed in Kikongo, all of them related to Kongo cosmology, such as
Nzambi (God), and Nkisia (holy), and moyo (spirit or soul). Usually they
followed the example of their ruler. At his baptism a herald would announce
what was expected of the crowd, and the masses assembled in the market
places would queue up to the baptismal font.”
There was certainly local resistance to this, in particular among oracles
and spirit mediums who were inevitably marginalized and frozen out of the
new religion, and who were, in any case, reluctant for obvious reasons to
convert. After a mass conversion, rumors would begin to circulate that
those who had “tasted the salt” would die a sudden death.[10] However, the
nature of Catholic rituals – eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ
– and the heavy reliance on mystical ceremony held a natural appeal to the
masses of BaKongo, as it would in many other parts of Africa. The ease of
the merger between ancestral veneration and the veneration of saints, as just
one of many other peculiarities of Catholicism, went well in a nation
transitioning from an old to a new faith. The freedom of expression in song,
dance and drumming likewise exerted a strong appeal to particularly
younger converts, and the lack of consequences made the transition
altogether easier. Under similar circumstances, in the Buganda Kingdom in
1885, a group of 30 converts were burned alive at the orders of the Buganda
ruler for refusing to refute their faith, but no such thing ever happened in
the Kingdom of Kongo.
In fact, the only recorded incident of such grotesque punishment involved
a young woman, who suffered such a fate not at the hands of a vengeful
pagan ruler, but the Capuchin monks themselves.
 The Rise of Kimpa Vit a
In August 1704, a 24-year-old, high-born BaKongo woman by the name
of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita lay in a semi-coma, ill from some unnamed
malady and certain only of her own imminent death. In a miasma of
delirium, and amid feverish and distorted dreams, her family gathered
around, watching helplessly as her life ebbed away. Then, as the story goes,
her fever abruptly abated, after which a serenity of spirit descended upon
her, followed by a soothing vision that appeared at the foot of her bed,
invisible to the companions who watched anxiously over her. The vision
was of a man wearing the blue hooded habit of the Capuchin order, and he
introduced himself as Saint Anthony, the firstborn son of the Faith and of
Saint Francis, sent from God to possess her in order that he might preach to
the people. She was to progress with the restoration of the Kingdom of
Kongo and inform all who threatened her that the wrath of God awaited
them.

Friedrich Pacher’s painting of Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint

Francis of Assisi
He had, the apparition went on, tried many times to intercede on behalf of
the BaKongo, moving from one province to another, entering the heads of
many people, among them of a woman from Nzeto, and an old man from
Soyo, and another from Bula, and now he was in Kibangu, and he had
chosen her.[11] Upon that, the apparition approached her, and entering her
head, merged with her. Then she felt her illness banished and her strength
return. She rose from her bed and stepped out into the bright sunshine full
of passionate resolve, possessed, indeed, by Saint Anthony. Her divine
instructions were to restore the Kingdom of Kongo, ravaged by civil wars,
divided by a disputed succession and its structural integrity undermined by
the effects of Portuguese religious dominance and trade, in particular the
socially corrupting slave trade.
Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita was born in 1684 on the banks of the Mbidizi
River in the eastern corner of the Kingdom of Kongo, in the shadow of
Mount Kibangu – the “Fortress” – a place of deep symbolic significance.
Tradition has it that she was a woman of rare beauty and intelligence,
which, considering her cult-like status in the religious mythology of the
region, is hardly surprising. Kibangu, indeed, was part of an ancient
network of royal establishments, and from its flanks rose five rivers, the
largest of which was the Mbidizi. As remains the case in many indigenous
cultures, rivers were of particular spiritual importance, forming the
boundary between life and death, between the commonplace of day-to-day
life in the temporal world and the mystical realm of the afterlife and the
ancestral spirits. The Mbidizi, as the largest, was endowed with particular
significance, for any turbulence upon its surface was seen as an omen of
defeat in war, and when calm, it was a sign of inevitable victory. A perfectly
round stone found long ago was acknowledged as a token given by a local
deity, and it sat in the center of a nearby field shaded by a sacred tree, its
care entrusted to a living initiate and to the spirits of the mountain.
By the 17th century, Kongo had become a predominantly Christian society,
and like every other BaKongo child, Dona Beatriz was baptized – she “ate
salt” – at the moment that any traveling cleric passed through her town. The
idea of salt and not water as a means to sanctify baptism was derived from a
much older belief that evil people or maligned spirits could not digest salt
and would as a consequence be unable to harm or possess a baptized
person.
 It is generally accepted that a Portuguese cleric – a certain Father Luis de
Mendonça – who was of mixed race (which, by then, a majority of non-
native Portuguese speakers were) was the one who performed the
ceremony. While local mestres, along with a following of students and
acolytes, tended to circulate through the countryside quite regularly,
performing various services and providing religious instruction, an ordained
priest might only appear once or twice a year. Dona Beatriz was the name
given to the child upon her baptism, and it is an interesting fact that the title
of “Dona” for a woman and “Dom” for a man were in wide usage across the
class spectrum. They were not, as was the case in Portugal, reserved for
persons of aristocratic rank. The forms were often distorted in day-to-day
use, so that Dom João might become Ndozau, Dom Pedro Ndopetelo, and
Dona Isabela Ndona Zabela. In all likelihood, therefore, the name “Dona
Beatriz” would have been pronounced Ndona Betelisi.[12]
In common with all BaKongo, alongside a Christian name would be given
a local name, and in Dona Beatriz’s case, this was probably Kimpa Vita, the
name that she used in later life. Kimpa, then, would have been her given
name and Vita her father’s name. She was born into perhaps the highest
class of local aristocracy, the Mwana Kongo, or “Child of Kongo,” which,
although an august claim to the original lineage of the kingdom, did not
necessarily imply automatic wealth or social or political position.
The year of her birth – 1684 – was one of turbulence and civil warfare in
and around Kibangu and the Mbidizi. The Kongo Civil War is usually dated
between 1665 and 1709, and it involved a number of rival houses. The main
protagonists were the Houses of Kinlaza and Kimpanzu, alongside
numerous other interests and factions that entered the fray from time to time
by claiming lineage or descent from one of the parties. The war was
inevitably beneficial to the Portuguese because it generated a great many
war captives with which to fill the barracoons of the Portuguese slave ports,
and by the end of the war, the kingdom was practically destroyed, with tens
of thousands of Kongolese killed or sold into slavery.
As a child growing up in the midst of all of this, and with the social
privileges and advantages of aristocracy, Dona Beatriz appears to have been
deeply interested in events as a young woman. A war-weary society
existing in the crumbling ruins of a once brilliant kingdom seemed to long
for a power much greater than dukes and kings to reunite the clashing
factions of the empire and to restore the glory of the kingdom. It goes
without saying that prophets and seers flourished in this environment, and
cults owing inspiration to one saint or another popped up with frequency. It
began to appear to those within her family and social circles that Dona
Beatriz was somehow gifted, perhaps even an nganga, or a spirit medium.
While this might sound incongruous in a society so predominately
Christian, the truth is that Christianity in Kongo never quite expunged the
traditional, pre-Christian belief system. Rather, ancient religion simply
assimilated and adapted itself around Christian symbolism and ritual,
incorporating guilds and lodges of a much older faith. Catholic priests were
often called nganga since they too claimed qualification to access
knowledge and seek assistance from the world beyond. The power of an
nganga was known as kindoki, and it was essentially shamanistic, relying
on drumming, dancing and clapping, and various narcotic substances to
induce a trance.
Dona Beatriz began her initiation into this guild while still quite young,
entering a particular chapter of the craft known as nganga marinda. Its
specific function was one of social and political mediation. One can
imagine that she was drawn to this vocation as much for the sake of its
spiritual relevance as the fact that it offered an avenue of involvement in the
turbulent political affairs of the moment that were not traditionally the
domain of women. She belonged to a sub-society within the guild known as
the Kimpasi, which is directly translated into “suffering,” and this
communicated with great spiritual emphasis the understanding that the
community was suffering. The Kimpasi was widely distributed through
Kongo, although it was not centrally administered, nor was there much
commonality in ritual and observance. A single common theme, however,
was the ubiquity of Christian prayer and symbolism, with the cross being
the most important. A lengthy process of training was required before an
initiate could enter the order.
The arrival of the Capuchins in her district of Kibangu in the mid-17th
century introduced an immediate tension into the Kimpasi society. This was
simply because the Capuchins, unlike the Portuguese, did not treat
traditional cult institutions with any indulgence whatsoever. In fact, they
made the suppression of witchcraft their special duty. Notwithstanding the
similarities in role and function of the church and the societies, the
Capuchins took a very uncomplicated view of the matter, which was simply
that the functions of the clerics amounted to the work of God while that of
the ngangas was diabolical. The Capuchins called them fattucchieri,
meaning “witches” or “sorcerers.”
The argument for this, of course, was rooted in European theology, not
Kongolese, and as a result, Capuchin efforts to flush out the Kimpasi
societies was met, initially at least, with no success at all. The various
structures and enclosures that comprised the home of the Kimpasi in
Kibangu were burned down by the Capuchins in 1699, in defiance of King
Pedro IV, who ruled the portion of the kingdom for which Kibangu was the
capital. “God shall arise,” the fathers cried as the flames took hold, “His
enemies shall be scattered; those that hate Him shall flee before His face.”
Every unrepentant initiate was excommunicated under what the Kongolese
understood to be a kumloko, or a powerful curse. This told the people that
the Capuchins were also possessors of kindoki, a power that they could use
for both good and evil.
In the face of all of this, Dona Beatriz abandoned the Kimpasi, for reasons
perhaps of fear, but also because she would have been convinced by it all
that the society was not the vehicle that would carry her into politically elite
circles. For King Pedro, who found himself engaged in an ongoing war of
attrition with Queen Ana and her kinsman, the political implications of the
Capuchin presence in his court offered a potential advantage. If he could
win the support of a powerful religious order in the matter of his own claim
to rule, the benefit would be incalculable.
Dona Beatriz bent to tradition and submitted to an arranged marriage. She
did not, however, adjust well to the disciplines and restrictions of traditional
marriage, for she was of both willful temper and strong and independent
disposition. She was a woman of high intelligence, of acknowledged
spiritual gifts, and neither of her two marriages survived. She was also
inevitably caught up in the Capuchin campaign against witchcraft in the
community, which was now the personal crusade of Father Bernardo de
Gallo, the ranking Capuchin friar in Kibangu. He would emerge as a central
figure in the evolving saga of Kimpa Vita.
Father Bernardo emerges from the chronicle of this episode as a
missionary priest very much of the orthodox tradition. He also appears to
have been a man of rare arrogance and titanic insensitivity, and of both
short temper and petulant character. He was an uncompromising ideologue,
perfectly suited to the zealotry applied by his order, and obsessive in his
desire to impress upon court and society in Kibangu that Christ and his
earthly agents outranked the authority of earthly kings. He would not
adhere to customs and etiquettes in his approaches to the king, which both
unnerved the king and disconcerted his people. However, while Father
Bernardo was deeply unpopular, he was still religiously potent, and thus
politically indispensable.
This was the state of affairs that the kingdom found itself in at the dawn
of the 18th century. Once powerful and unified, Kongo was now fractured
by internal and external forces. The influence of Christianity and
commerce, in particular the slave trade, altered the ancient social balance,
adjusting the distribution of power and introducing destructive dynamics
that a majority of people, including those in leadership, did not fully
understand and were certainly unable to control. At the same time, there
existed a deep and visceral desire for the restoration of the kingdom by
those who carried a vision of some utopian era that they believed existed
before the arrival of the Portuguese, and before the corrosive blight of the
slave trade and everything else that came with it.
Sometime in 1703, a rumor began to circulate concerning an old woman
somewhere deep in the rural districts who had witnessed a vision of the
Virgin Mary and received the message that Jesus was angry with the people
of Kongo and demanded that they cry to Him for mercy. The appropriate
ritual for this was to recite the Hail Mary after three cries for mercy. This
notion of a cry for mercy very quickly caught on and became something of
a slogan for an emerging quasi-religious and political movement that was
centered around the restoration of the kingdom. The king, for various
reasons, did not ally himself with this movement and did not come down
from his palace on Kibangu to participate. Nonetheless, a rather amorphous
and ill-formed movement began to grow around this simple plea, spreading
quickly throughout the populated regions of the valley of the Mbidizi River.
Alongside a gaggle of prophets and seers, one man, in particular, was heard
to recite the revolutionary dreams of a child who reported that God would
punish the Kongolese people if the ancient capital of São Salvador was not
reoccupied immediately.
Clearly, the message in this and many other revelations was that those
who delayed the reunification of the kingdom due to their wars and rivalries
were also guilty of delaying peace and divine restoration. One particular
prophet whose voice rose above the melee was a certain Apollonia Mafuta,
an elderly woman who implicated King Pedro directly as subject to the
anger of God, and she too based her authority on visions of the Virgin Mary.
Pedro summoned the woman and interrogated her, but despite the urging of
the Capuchin clerics in court, he would not authorize her arrest.
It was at about this time, in an atmosphere of fermenting religious and
political fervor, that Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita fell ill with that fateful
malady from which she would emerge, in August 1704, as the reincarnation
of Saint Anthony. As her fever diminished and she rose from her deathbed,
she informed her family that she had been ordered by God to go forth and
preach, and to bring about the restoration of the kingdom. She gave away
her property, and in a state of Christian poverty, she denounced the king, the
Catholic clergy, and the symbolism of the faith. Father Bernardo de Gallo
came in for particularly bitter condemnation, decried as jealous and
envious, and worse still, determined to deny that any Kongolese saints had
reason or right to exist. In general, her message was that neither the king
nor the clergy possessed the will or power to restore the kingdom. Because
of this, she went on, it was necessary to forge a different path and anoint an
alternative power. For this holy mandate, as the incarnation of Saint
Anthony, she presented herself.
As in the case of Apollonia Mafuta, Pedro was extremely wary of taking
any action that might direct public anger at him, and after a similar
interrogation, Dona Beatriz was released to continue her work. Father
Bernardo de Gallo was deeply disturbed by it all, in particular when it was
reported to him by a servant of the Capuchin hospice in Kibangu that as
Dona Beatriz left the palace and walked down the footpath from Kibangu
hill, the twisted and ancient trees that lined the route were rejuvenated,
rising and straightening as she passed. Moreover, the finger of this new,
allegedly miracle-performing oracle appeared to be increasingly pointed at
the clergy and their institution, undermining the demand for universal
respect that lay at the core of the Capuchin style of ministry.
Meanwhile, Dona Beatriz, in an increasingly messianic mood, was
moving through the country, preaching, gathering followers, and increasing
her influence. The essence of her message was that Saint Anthony was the
most important of all the saints, and since he was the patron saint of
Portugal, he was also regarded as the patron saint of Kongo. She demanded
that the faithful now pray only to him. She also confirmed Apollonia
Mafuta’s claims regarding the anger of Jesus and His pending retribution
upon the people of Kongo. Added to this was the message that the arrival of
Saint Anthony among them proved that the Kongolese did indeed possess
saints of their own race - Saint Anthony, she assured her people, was black,
and a man of Kongo. God, she claimed, had revealed to her that Jesus too
had been born not in Bethlehem, but the royal city of São Salvador, and that
he and Mary were also black Kongolese. So too, she insisted, to the
unbearable dismay of the friars, was Saint Francis of Assisi, the father of
the Capuchin order.
As she set about revising the history of the Catholic Church in Kongo,
Beatriz found herself obligated to reform it. Rituals and prayers were
reimagined and altered to reflect this content, which she insisted was its true
original content. For example, she modified the title of the Salve Regina,
addressed to the Virgin Mary, to the Salve Antoniana, which, in the words
of Father Bernardo, contained “so many outrageous statements that I do not
know if I could call them diabolical craziness or truly desecrating
blasphemy.”
As all of this was unfolding, Father Bernardo and King Pedro, who is
often depicted as decidedly weak of character and vacillating nature,
resolved to bring Dona Beatriz into court to formally explain herself. To
overcome her stated revulsion for Father Bernardo and her obvious
suspicions that the opportunity would be taken to seize her or compromise
her in some way, she was placed under royal protection.
The details of the interview were recorded by Father Bernardo with the
same chilling attention to detail as a holy inquisitor, and it seems that Dona
Beatriz approached the encounter in a whimsical mood, “walking on the
tips of her toes, the rest of her feet not touching the ground, and she swayed
her body from side to side just in the way a snake moves.”[13] She spoke in a
language peculiar to an initiate of the Kimpasi, and for all intents and
purposes she was in a state of possession. She was questioned first on
points of doctrinal detail, and then, when asked finally who she was, her
reply was simply that she was Saint Anthony, come down from Heaven.
None of this sat well with Father Bernardo, and although there was
nothing in the short term that could be done about it, he became a bitter and
implacable enemy of Dona Beatriz. He had no doubt whatsoever that she
was possessed, but he believed with Christian surety that she was actually
possessed by the Devil or some subservient diabolical agent. This was
somewhat inevitable, for while the flexible doctrinal interpretation of
Kongolese Christianity accepted possession as a perfectly natural state of
affairs and could mean many things, to a Catholic priest, it could only mean
one thing. While Catholic mysticism echoed animist mysticism in many of
its aspects, such as the calling up of saints, an acceptance of the apparition
of the Virgin Mary, and the consumption of Christ’s flesh and blood, a line
was crossed when Dona Beatriz claimed to be possessed by a revered
Catholic saint.
To King Pedro, Father Bernardo laid out his position without
equivocation. He insisted Dona Beatriz was a witch who was possessed by
the Devil. Why God had allowed this situation to take root in Kongolese
Christendom, he could only guess, but he suspected that failings of the
king’s nature and rule were somehow at the root of it. With the support of
the king, as the secular authority in the land, he, the symbol of Christian
authority, would be quite happy to lead whatever vigorous action was
necessary to snuff out the flame of Dona Beatriz’s movement before it
gathered strength and became dangerous.
 For his part, Pedro was caught in a political quandary. He stood between
the necessity for Church support in the precarious balance of power and the
danger of the growth of a popular moment that held the potential to be co-
opted, if not by himself, then certainly by his enemies.
Dona Beatriz continued to ambulate and preach, acquiring a reputation for
performing miracles and emerging as a powerfully charismatic, messianic
figure, her message still the desire of God and Saint Anthony for the
Kingdom of Kongo to be restored. Among her miracles was the healing of
infertility, which was prominent in a society still influenced by animist
priorities because special powers in the area of fertility were always
powerfully attractive.
Soon she found herself at Mbuli and the camp of colonist Manuel da Cruz
Barbosa, where she began as usual to preach.[14] Da Cruz Barbosa, who was
not a man given to indecision or a surplus of sentiment, sensed immediately
that Dona Beatriz and her emerging Antonian movement was an incipient
threat to the status quo, and that it needed to be crushed immediately. He
appealed for permission from Pedro to seize the self-proclaimed Saint
Antony and cut off her head.
While da Cruz Barbosa was whispering in one ear, Father Bernardo was
intriguing in the other, but Pedro would not be pushed that far. Dona Beatriz
was thus left to her own devices and allowed to preach where she would.
Pedro’s indecisiveness offered Dona Beatriz uninhibited freedom to build
a movement and the freedom to extend her voice and message to regions
and districts that lay under the jurisdiction of other rulers. First, she
travelled to Bula to present herself to King João, whose administration
covered nearly 100 miles of the south bank of the Congo River. Her
message once again was the reunification of Kongo, but this time she was
interested in the trove of ancient Kongolese royal insignia taken from São
Salvador when it was sacked in 1678. In particular, she wanted to retrieve
the Santissimo Sacramento, or the most Holy Sacrament, a relic contained
in a brocaded bag, tied with silk cords and containing the papal bull and
numerous indulges given to the Mwene Kongo Diogo I, who ruled from
1545-1561. Tradition held that the document had been obtained by a
miracle, and if Dona Beatriz could persuade João to give it to her, she
would hold a symbol of enormous power and influence over all the
Kongolese.
As with Pedro, João wanted nothing personally to do with Dona Beatriz,
but he was also unwilling to act decisively against her. She was not offered
the Santissimo Sacramento, but she began to immediately attract followers
among João’s subjects. When she pointed to the heavens and threatened to
bring down a deluge upon the land, rain fell with unprecedented fury, and
the effect was understandably electrifying. When the palace guard was sent
out to deal roughly with her, she hurried away from Bula, but as she did,
she announced to her followers that by a miracle she had laid claim to the
Santissimo Sacramento, and she announced her return to São Salvador to
commence the reunification of the kingdom.
At first blush, it may seem curious that Dona Beatriz claimed a false
miracle and lied so openly about her acquisition of the Santissimo
Sacramento, bearing in mind her revelation and obvious belief in her own
divine purpose. This has puzzled historians ever since, leading some to
decry the whole movement as a hoax, and others to suggest simply different
notions and ideas of possession. Nonetheless, she maintained the fiction,
avoiding any immediate advance on São Salvador and accepting instead the
protection of a powerful local aristocrat, Pedro Constantino da Silva
Kibenga. Kibenga, known also as the Duke of Mbamba, was quick to sense
the wisdom of harnessing Dona Beatriz’s growing influence, and from
there, almost certainly under Kibenga’s handling, she sent a message to
Pedro, João, and a handful of others. The letter summoned them to the royal
capital of São Salvador, threatening those who did not comply with similar
punishment to the floods that she had brought down on Bula.
This was all very heady stuff, and while she rode the crest of a wave of
popularity, a leader-hungry society submitted willingly to her natural
charisma, her powerful oratorical style, her mesmerizing beauty, and her
aristocratic bearing. As her popularity blossomed and as her name spread,
the tone of her message became demonstrably more political. While no
single nobleman answered her summons, the common people certainly did
by flocking to her sermons in droves, and the Salve Antoniana, along with
the signature cry for mercy, became a clarion call in the movement for the
restoration of the kingdom. It was becoming clear that she was tilting a
relatively devout population away from the traditional teachings of the local
Catholics, and in particular, Father Bernardo in Kibangu found himself
frequently derided and abused.
Ironically, Dona Beatriz’s movement was assisted by the fact that church
institutions and language had been used in pursuit of overtly political
outcomes from the start. In many cases, early lessons in political
organization and the structure of mass movements came under the aegis of
the church. The decision of the Kongolese leadership to embrace
Christianity was political from the start, so the Antonian movement, as
Dona Beatriz’s following has since come to be known, was working with an
established precedent, one that would be continued across Africa for
centuries, especially in the wake of massive European imperialistic
occupation in the 19th century.
Father Bernardo kept up the pressure on King Pedro to take vigorous
action, although by then the matter had been complicated by the fact that
Dona Beatriz and other central personalities of the Antonian movement
enjoyed the protection of the Duke of Mbamba, so the opportunity to
simply arrest and try her had been squandered. Pedro responded by sending
an embassy to Bula to demand sight of the Santissimo Sacramento, to
which Dona Beatriz replied that if he so desired to see it, he should present
himself in order that she might show it to him. Pedro would do no such
thing, but in late November or early December 1704, Manuel da Cruz
Barbosa visited São Salvador. In the king’s name, he demanded to see the
brocade purse and its contents. The purse, she said, had been lodged in the
chapel of the old Capuchin hospice in São Salvador, where it was under the
protection of angels who would ensure that it was never seen. Moreover,
she claimed that any person attempting to do so would die.
To da Cruz Barbosa, this was clear evidence of Dona Beatriz’s lies, but to
confirm his suspicions he sent spies to the chapel. Needless to say, there
was no sign of the Santissimo Sacrament, and certainly no sign of an angel.
A message was sent to Pedro’s court informing him of all of this, adding da
Cruz Barbosa’s opinion that if this was a lie, then in all probability so was
everything else. However, this did not materially alter the situation, because
the Antonian movement was gathering momentum daily, and with great
spiritual influence came great political influence. Thus, by this time, Dona
Beatriz enjoyed the support of a handful of very powerful political backers.
This, at last, convinced Pedro that he had no choice but to act, and by the
end of 1704, he had amassed an army and was preparing to advance on the
royal capital as soon as the festivals of the new year were over.
 The Fall of Kimpa Vita
Dona Beatriz was precisely where she wanted to be. She was the
undisputed doyen of the royal capital, at the head of a powerful and
growing political movement. She was inspired by what would appear to
have been a sincere belief in her own possession, and she now sensed that
the mission she had been instructed to complete was within her grasp.
While still only in her early 20s, she nonetheless seemed to have a firm
grasp of the dynamics of power, and no less the theatrics and powerful
symbolism of a millennial Christian movement. Rumors of her
extraordinary power were exaggerated across the land orally, and acolytes
flocked to join her army of “Little Anthonies” who carried the outreach of
the movement to the farthest corners of the realm. Each was possessed, as
the leader was possessed, by a saint, and in the revised hierarchy of
Catholic saints, everyone was now subordinate to Saint Anthony.
Pedro set off to march on São Salvador, careful to frame his advance, not
as a response to Beatriz’s summons, but to restore the “True Church.”
However, somewhat in character, once he joined with da Cruz Barbosa on
the outskirts of São Salvador, he established a fortified camp and went no
further. Dona Beatriz and her followers, supported by the Duke of Mbamba,
remained entrenched in the city, practically challenging Pedro to act.
It must have been a source of unbearable frustration to da Cruz Barbosa, a
man of decision and authority, to be hamstrung by the indecision of a weak
king. Father Bernardo was summoned to add some support to a wavering
ship, but when he appeared in camp, he seemed for once obtuse and
disinterested, refusing to declare his support for Pedro. Why he chose at
that moment to assert the traditional neutrality of his office is hard to say,
but all the while, the Little Anthonies continued to pour into the
countryside, buttressing the Antonian creed and stirring up momentum for
the restoration of the kingdom. Naturally, as Pedro’s resolve evaporated,
Dona Beatriz’s ambitions grew.
On a doctrinal level, the Antonians ran afoul of the Catholic Church
primarily over the rejection of baptism as a necessary ritual of conversion,
based on the simple logic that an omnipresent and omnipotent God would
be aware of the content of a person’s heart without the need for holy salt or
water. This point was challenged in quite a few places, but most notably
during the annual tour of his parish by a certain Father Lorenzo da Lucca,
who would emerge as a central figure in bringing about Dona Beatriz’s fate.
Father Lorenzo was thoroughly upset when local villagers, for the first time
in memory, refused to bring their children out for the traveling friar to
baptize. Instead, they turned to a “Little Anthony,” who was already in the
district claiming the divine sanction “by a person who has risen from the
dead.”
Father Lorenzo immediately tracked this individual down and made what
was in effect a citizen’s arrest. The impact of this, at least according to
Father Lorenzo’s own account, was that the wider community felt some
relief at being liberated from the minor tyranny of the Antonians. While this
might well have been so, it is also true that the community were also not in
any way disabused of their belief in the message of the Antonians, or the
power of the kindoki. It was only under the direct threat of
excommunication and the burning of their villages that the common people
began bringing their children out to be baptized. Over the question of the
arrested Little Anthony, the community actually demanded his release, but
Father Lorenzo demurred, threatening any who tried to release the man with
excommunication. There followed a brief and tense standoff before Father
Lorenzo left the district in a hurry with the Little Anthony still in custody.
This represented a minor victory for the local clergy, but it left Father
Lorenzo and his colleagues deeply disturbed, marking as it did the first
open defiance of the authority of the clergy in the entire history of the
Catholic Church in Kongo. Quite clearly, the Antonian movement was as
widespread as it was popular, and while not dissenting too notably from the
doctrinal path of orthodox Catholicism, its disobedience left no other
conclusion other than that it was diabolical. Throughout the remainder of
his tour, in every district that he visited, Father Lorenzo encountered the
same resistance, and in one or two places, he endured open heckling and
hostility.
At the head of it all, Dona Beatriz was beginning, with ever more
confidence, to cultivate and propagate her political-messianic persona. Her
cult of personality was beginning to reach a fever pitch, with the highest
born among the nobility of São Salvador now clamoring to be associated
with her, to sweep the ground ahead of her feet and to lay their cloaks down
for her to walk upon. When she ate, she did so in front of an audience, and
when she drank, the faithful cupped their hands under the beaker in the
hope of catching a drop of holy water. Her temporary home in São Salvador
became a shrine, and the ruined capital was daily filled with devotees who
flocked to the city in hopes of a glimpse of her. A trickle of church leaders
crossing over threatened to become a flood, which was obviously alarming
to the Catholic clergy.
As Father Lorenzo ruefully observed, while her religious persona was
electrifying, her political role appeared less unifying than ambitious,
meaning it simply added an extra dimension to the instability and disunity
within a largely dissipated empire. The cry for mercy, the traditional plea of
the Antonian faithful, shifted very slightly in form – the word tari, or
“mercy” changed to yari, or “power.” That was extremely consequential, as
it demonstrated that she now aimed to be anointed above all the pretenders
to the throne in Kongo. If every claimant to the throne gathered under the
roof of the cathedral of São Salvador, only one would be granted the divine
right to power. This was certainly a bold strategy, revealing a temporal
ambition which now compromised not only the church, but also Pedro IV
and several other powerful aspirants.
Of course, whenever a political figure gathers a mass following, they are
likely to also gain powerful opponents, and Dona Beatriz, who was still just
21, did not seem to fully grasp that as she settled into her role as a prophet
and queen. She developed a relationship with a man by the name of João
Barro, who she gave the name Saint John and adopted as her principal
guardian angel. Three times she became pregnant, and while on the first
two occasions she was able to induce an abortion using traditional
medicine, on the third occasion it failed. This was potentially a disaster
simply because she had declared chastity an essential discipline of her inner
circle and the corps of Little Anthonies, a rule that she clearly did not
respect herself. Historians have since debated the significance of this, and
generally, the consensus appears to be that, while her belief in her own
possession by Saint Anthony was absolute, it appears she also understood
that her original form remained relevant, and if her possession was sporadic
or occasional rather than perpetual, then her temporal identity remained
constant. It was an inconvenient fact nonetheless, and she was able to hide
her pregnancy during its early term, but when this became impossible, she
left São Salvador, claiming that her regular death and visits to Heaven,
which had assumed a ritualistic significance, would now require an
extension. Therefore, she explained that she would be away from the world
for longer periods of time. In due course, a baby was born, named António
in honor of the saint who had possessed her body.
Then, as the story goes, the grove in which she gave birth and lay in
postnatal recovery was discovered by a group of ambassadors moving
between the warring camps of Queen Ana and King Pedro, and hearing the
cry of a baby, they stepped off the footpath to investigate. There they found
the mother, father, and child, and thus Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, Barro, and
the child fell into the hands of the Kinlaza leadership without the shedding
of a drop of blood. When asked if he was the father of the child, Barro at
first denied it, and when asked where the baby had come from, Dona
Beatriz tried initially to claim the child was the product of an immaculate
conception. When Dona Beatriz was presented to Pedro, his satisfaction
was soon tempered by the realization that she remained an extremely hot
political potato, and in the end, after wide consultation, he decided that
Dona Beatriz was either a religious leader or a heretic, perhaps both, which
placed her not under his jurisdiction, but that of the Catholic Church. His
decision, therefore, was to send her under armed escort to Loanda for her to
be tried by the bishop on religious grounds.
When he heard about this fortuitous turn of events, Father Bernardo
hurried to intercept the transfer. He cited the risk of Dona Beatriz’s
followers attacking the column and freeing her. Furthermore, he warned
Pedro that the bishop, who was Jesuit and not Capuchin, and thus by
definition more lenient, was disinterested in the politics of the situation.
Inevitably, he would simply punish the heretic with a mild rebuke, perhaps
a fine or a simple penance, and then send her on her way. Surely then, her
followers would interpret that as proof of the Church’s support and sanction
for her movement.
 How likely this was is debatable, but it is clear that Father Bernardo
wished to keep the entire affair local, and therefore more directly under his
control. Sometime in June 1706, he approached King Pedro, urging him to
try Dona Beatriz himself and condemn her. She was thereafter interrogated
by Father Bernardo, and from that series of interviews emerges the
impression that, while Dona Beatriz acknowledged the sin implicit in her
pregnancy and further acknowledged that this tended to delegitimize her as
the vessel of possession by Saint Anthony, she would not deny or refute the
authenticity of that possession. Her virtue had been squandered by her
pregnancy, and thus she found herself in the position that she was in, but
that virtue, when unsullied, was authentic.
A royal council then met, with Father Bernardo maintaining a
conspicuous absence in order to maintain the fiction that he was uninvolved
and that this was a secular matter. At its conclusion, the council passed a
verdict of guilty, believed to be on a charge of witchcraft and heresy, and
both Dona Beatriz and João Barro were handed down a preliminary
sentence of death by burning.
Father Bernardo was joined by Father Lorenzo da Lucca and Father
Giovanni Paolo, and the following day, which was June 30, 1706, the three
priests sat with the council to pass formal sentence on the condemned pair.
Dona Beatriz was introduced to the council for the first time, weighed down
by chains and carrying her infant child. By then, no doubt due to a state of
terror, she appeared incoherent, and under stern questions by the three
priests, she was unable to challenge the assertion that she was possessed by
the Devil. She was then informed that she would be put to death by burning
at the stake without right of appeal.
After digesting this awful reality, she asked if she might submit to
rebaptism of her own free will to erase the wounds of her great sin. This sin,
again, she seemed to perceive only in the context of having compromised
her possession and duty by breaking the rule of chastity. While this request
was denied, she was offered Holy Confession in order that she could return
to a state of innocence.
The date of execution fell on July 2, 1706. At about noon, Father Lorenzo
da Lucca heard the last confessions of the two condemned, and according to
his subsequent account, her words were thus: “My death will be a penance
for my sins, and well I deserve it. What does death matter to me? My body
is nothing more than a bit of earth, it is of no account. Sooner or later it will
be reduced to cinders. It is better to die now, since I recognize my errors,
than to live on that I might easily return to my old faults through the
influence of the Devil, and damn myself.”[15]
A conundrum presented itself when her infant child was brought out to be
baptized before joining his mother on the pyre. As she and João Barro were
ordered to sit in the external courtyard of the palace, where bundles of
wood were conspicuously piled, Father Lorenzo battled with his conscience
over the question of the child. There seemed no reason to condemn an
innocent baby to such a horrible fate, so he ordered a brief delay for the
executions and hurried to the palace to locate Pedro. Pedro, according to
Father Lorenzo, was upset by the entire affair. He would not initially agree
to spare the child, arguing that the child was the fruit of a poisoned tree.
Something of a battle of wills followed, until Father Lorenzo invoked the
potent imagery of the faith, holding up his crucifix and begging for the life
of the child in the name of Christ. After that, Pedro finally agreed, and
Father Lorenzo hurried back outside, lifting the child out of his mother's
arms. With that, he offered a final blessing to the condemned and his
consent for the sentence to be carried out.
The large and noisy crowd grew impatient at the canonical pontifications
read by the priests as they lingered over the religious ceremony. The mood
of the crowd was ugly, affected by none of the passionate reverence
inspired by Kimpa Vita just a few weeks earlier. No doubt she now
presented the image of a woman both degraded and terrified, unfortified by
her faith of the past, and appearing weak and helpless before waiting stacks
of firewood. According to local legends, before the clerics had completed
the ponderous rites of execution, Dona Beatriz rose to her feet and began to
recite an abjuration. This seemed to enrage the crowd, which surged past
the guards and set upon the condemned couple, savagely beating them
before order could be restored.
As the condemned lay bleeding and barely conscious, the priests ordered
that the pair be bundled onto a standing pile of wood, and a torch was put to
them. Father Bernardo, in his official report, remarked of their end that in
“the time it takes to say a prayer, they gave up their souls, one speaking the
name of Jesus and the other the name of the Virgin Mary.”
 Kimpa Vita’s Legacy
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Antonian movement did not end with the
death of its leader and prophet. Many continued to adhere to the essential
doctrines of the movement, as well as the overarching mission to reunite the
Kingdom of Kongo. The inevitability of some level of confrontation
between King Pedro and the alliance of Antonians and the Kimpanzu
faction was inevitable. On the day after the executions, the ashes that
remained were reburned and then scattered to avoid the possibility of any
part of Kimpa Vita being retrieved as a relic. That morning, a Monday,
Pedro appeared at mass in full battle regalia, and after the service, a full
military review was held, signaling the fact that war was imminent.
The war was not a decisive or rapid affair, but it can at least be said that
King Pedro, despite his vacillating nature, mustered enough resolve to fight
and win. His final assault against Pedro Kibenga’s occupation began on
February 15, 1709, more or less three years after the death of Kimpa Vita,
and at last the Antonians and their allies were ousted from the city. This
might have appeared on the surface to be the much longed-for restoration of
the kingdom, but it was not, and when King Pedro died in 1718, he had
merely ruled over a kingdom as fractured and disunited as it was before his
victory.
Manuel II of Kongo, who succeeded Pedro IV in 1718, ruled over a
nominally restored kingdom, but by then it was already being subjected to
the steady advance of Portuguese imperial control. As the memory of
Kimpa Vita faded, so did the kingdom’s sovereignty, and it soon became a
vassal of the Portuguese colony of Angola, destined to never again be the
great and cohesive entity that reached its peak around the time the
Portuguese priests and traders arrived.
Ironically, the Kingdom of Kongo technically continued to exist as
something of an anachronism into the 20th century, and after a brief and
hopeless military rebellion in 1914, on the eve of World War I, the
Portuguese formally abolished the kingdom. The last substantive Mwene
Kongo was Manuel III, but titular kings continued to be anointed until the
mid-1960s, purely as a continuum of the traditions of the kingdom, even
though by then all of its essential institutions had disappeared. The current
pretender is Dom Josè Henrique da Silva Meso Mankala, who stands as
head of both the royal family and the Kongolese nobility.
As for Kimpa Vita, those who have attempted to determine the greatest
historical effect of the Antonian movement on the Christian identity of
Kongo often cite the thorough and complete indigenization of the Catholic
Church to the needs of a local following. Throughout the 18th century,
Kongolese religious artists and artisans began producing iconography that,
notwithstanding its surface similarity to orthodox Catholic imagery, began
portraying Jesus as a black man. This reinforced the sense that Kongo
existed as a central pillar of the Christian world, and as such, consequential
to its history and development.
Others have noted the secular impact Kimpa Vita had in the 20th century
as both a figure and concept for those who sought to lead liberation
movements against imperialism, especially in the wake of World War II. By
the late 19th century, the Portuguese held their territories as overseas
provinces, and as the Portuguese Empire declined in relation to other
European powers, their only real claim to membership of the club of major
European powers was their imperial status, which meant they were
determined to keep it.
Things only got worse for the Portuguese, and by 1965, they were
embroiled in colonial conflicts in both Mozambique and Angola. The
Angolan war was complicated and raged with increasing intensity for
decades as it morphed from a liberation struggle into a civil war, and then
into a Cold War conflict involving multiple factions within Angola, South
Africa, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.
On April 24, 1974, the fascist regime of Portuguese President Marcello
Caetano was toppled in a left-leaning military coup. The bleeding wars in
Mozambique and Angola and the pointless loss of Portuguese lives in an
unwinnable war prompted a national movement known as the Carnation
Revolution. Portuguese resistance in Africa collapsed overnight, and
negotiations with all liberation movements commenced. Mozambique was
granted independence on June 25, 1975, and Angola was given
independence on November 11 of the same year. Both nations plunged
almost immediately into civil war as the Portuguese largely evacuated.
Independence in Mozambique was characterized by an attempt by the
outgoing regime to sabotage the industrial and national infrastructure of the
country, and the mood of post-independence entente that characterized most
instances of decolonization was entirely absent.
The effect of this on the last two remaining white powers in southern
Africa was profound. In Rhodesia, a hostile front some 400 miles long was
unzipped along the eastern frontier of the country. The revolutionary
government of Mozambique sanctioned the establishment of nationalist
guerrilla bases along the entire length of its common border with Rhodesia,
and as 1976 dawned, Rhodesia was plunged into a full-blown civil war.
At the same time, Angolan liberation made possible an insurgency into
South African-controlled South West Africa, the future Namibia. Guerrillas
of the South West African People’s Organization began to conduct
operations in northern South West Africa, which brought South Africa into
the wider conflict underway in Angola. South Africa, a conventional
military power, began to attempt to influence the military situation in
Angola to suit its own local objectives, and in doing so, prompted the
engagement of Cuban ‘advisors’, which tended to internationalize the war.
U.S. involvement was mainly through covert CIA activities and Soviet
involvement through arms supplies, technical support, and on occasions air
and ground combat personnel. Cuban engagement was more direct, and
Cuban manpower and equipment were always visible on the battlefield.
South Africa now began to come under enormous political pressure from
the international community as the anti-apartheid movement began to
gather pace. South Africa was given to understand by way of her diplomatic
relations with the United States that South Africa’s continued support for
Rhodesia was no longer politically tenable.
The collapse of communism in 1989 and the end of the Cold War brought
about a great many changes across the world, and in Africa, it marked the
end of Cold War patronage that had supported and sustained so much
negative and destructive leadership in Africa. A great many regimes toppled
in the aftermath of this, and Africa was to a large degree cleansed by it, but
at the same time, the vacuums of power have often been filled on a village
and clan level, leading to constant fighting. Even in the 21st century, plenty
of observers are left with the impression that the same dilemmas facing the
likes of Kimpa Vita and Pedro will remain for some time to come.
 
 
 
Online Resources
Other books about African history by Charles River Editors
Other books about Kimpa Vita on Amazon
Further Reading
R. S. Basi, The Black Hand of God, themarked; 2009, ISBN 978-0-
9841474-0-3
António Custódio Gonçalves. La symbolisation politique: Le prophetisme
Kongo au XVIIIe siècle. (Munich: Weltforum, 1980)
John Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita
and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706,, Cambridge University Press;
1998, ISBN 0-521-59370-0
Robert Harms, Africa in Global History with Sources; ISBN 978-0-393-
92757-3


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[1]
Davidson, Basil. In the Eye of the Storm; Angola's People. (Doubleday, New York, 1972) p53
[2]
Readers are referred to the Charles River Editors publication Great Zimbabwe.
 
[3]
For the purpose of colonial settlement and exploration, the Portuguese typically utilized prisoners and convicts with little to lose
but test their fortunes in the colonies in exchange for certain liberties and endowments of property. The mortality rate among
them, however, was shockingly high.
 
[4]
The word “Arab,” although widely deployed in period histories, is misleading. Most often those so described were not “Arab”
in the true sense, but Swahili speaking coastal natives who dressed, spoke and most importantly worshiped like the Arab
traders whose influence had been felt on the coast since time immemorial.
[5]
In fact, the Angolan contribution to the trans-Atlantic slave trade began with the arrival of the first cargo of slaves in
Pernambuco between 1539 and 1542, the latter being the presumed year of Alphonso’s death. It was after 1550 that the slave
trade in Angola was established as the main economic activity of the region.
 
[6]
The Padroado, or “Patronage,” was an understanding reached between the Holy See and the kingdom of Portugal, defined by a
series of concordats, by which the Vatican granted the Portuguese monarchs rights of administration and theocratic privileges
over local churches.
 
[7]
The Portuguese retreated inland into the strongholds of Massangano, Ambaca and Muxima.
 
[8]
Sundkler, Bengt and Steed, Christopher. A History of the Church in Africa. (Cambridge University Press, 2000) p53
 
[9]
Ibid. p54
[10]
The ritual of baptism included placing salt on the tongue of the initiate.
[11]
Kibangu, or Mount Kibangu, lies a few miles away from the capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, M'banza-Kongo, known by the
Portuguese as São Salvador, located in northwest Angola, close to the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[12]
Thornton, John. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706. (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1998) p18
[13]
Father Bernardo, quoted: Thornton, John. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian
Movement, 1684–1706 (p. 119). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
[14]
Manuel da Cruz Barbosa, who is variously described as Pedro IV’s Mwene Lumbu, or “majordomo,” was Pedro’s powerful
ally.
[15]
Quoted: Thornton, John. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (p.
119). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition