Kingdom of Kongo

I just love the name “Congo”. Somehow, my little occidental brain came to associate it with drums, big animals standing in the savannah, thick dark water humming with mosquitoes, some sort of danger or threat at nightfall. Joseph Conrad’s book “The Heart of Darkness” certainly helped develop this mystique. Congo would be the perfect name for “heartbeat”. I’m walking in the jungle, branches crack behind and above me, my heart is beating at 160 congos per minute.

The Congo river was (and is) one of Africa’s hearts, and the Portuguese explorers who sailed it in 1482 and found the many villages of the Kingdom of Kongo on its banks most certainly realized that. This was a prosperous region, densely populated, with the capital Mbanza Congo (in today’s northern Angola) registering around 100,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Natural resources, manufacturing activities and a functional trading network accounted for this prosperity. The painting above, by missionary Giovanni Cavazzi (sixteenth century) depicts that commercial buzz.

The Portuguese and the Kongo rulers soon established a successful partnership. Nzinga a Nkuwu was the first king to convert to Christianity. He adopted the Christian name João, and his offspring was named after Portuguese kings and VIPs: Afonso, Henrique, Diogo… The Portuguese provided military power and education through the church. The Congolese provided… slaves. The trade existed prior to the Portuguese arrival, but exploded as the colonization of Brazil – its sugarcane plantations, its goldmines – demanded an ever-growing workforce.

Anyway, this happy friendship didn’t last forever and as other colonial powers entered the game (the French and the Belgian) the Kingdom of Kongo (along with its puppet ruler) was abolished in 1914. Previously, the region’s new boarders had been drawn at the Berlin Conference (1885). Because the Belgian wanted a land exit to the Atlantic for their Zaire, the Portuguese Congo was detached from main Angola and the Cabinda enclave was born.

Cabinda. What a headache for the Angolan government. Why can’t they slurp its immense reserves of oil (more that 60 % of the country’s production) without being bothered by separatists and voices claiming the end of human rights violations and a fairer distribution of revenues?
Although a Peace Agreement was signed in 2006, Cabinda remains Angola’s most unstable region. The many riches of the Kingdom of Kongo prompted greed and war. Cabinda carries this history and is somehow still living it.