The King of Kongo Is Baptised

The account followed here is that of a Portuguese writer, Rui de Pina, chronicler of King John II, who wrote to honour his king and the faith.

According to Pina, Portuguese ships under Diogo Cão reached the kingdom of Kongo in 1485. When the messengers he sent inland to the king were slow to return, Cão carried off to Portugal some Kongo nobles who had come aboard. They were sent back with presents and an invitation to the Christian faith (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapter 57). The king then sent an embassy of his own with ivory and palm cloth. It asked for priests to baptise him and his people, for masons and carpenters to build churches, for farmers, and for women to teach the baking of bread, and it brought boys to be taught to read and write. The envoys were baptised at Beja with the king and queen of Portugal as godparents (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapter 58).

A fleet carrying Franciscan friars and church furnishings left Lisbon on 19 December 1490. It reached the river of Kongo on 29 March 1491, and on Easter day, 3 April, the lord of the coastal province of Soyo, an uncle of the king, was baptised with the name Manuel (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapter 58 (pp. 150–157)). The Portuguese then travelled twenty-three days to the royal court, where the king received them before a great crowd, seated on a platform, and was presented with the masons, carpenters and farmers he had asked for (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapters 59–60). Pina does not name the town. The king’s son Afonso I of Kongo later dated a letter from “our city of Congo” (Afonso I, Letters no. XXVII (6 July 1526), pp. 53–54), the place now called Mbanza Kongo.

The king would not wait for the stone church, which was begun on 6 May and dedicated to Saint Mary (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapter 61). On 3 May 1491 a friar named João baptised him in a hall of his palace together with six of his nobles, and he took the name João after the king of Portugal. He then ordered the idols burned (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapter 62 (pp. 165–169)). The queen was baptised on 4 June as Leonor, and the king went to war against rebels under a banner of the cross that the Portuguese had given him (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapter 63). Pina reports the nobles’ dreams and the finding of a stone cross as miracles (Rui de Pina, Chronicle of John II chapter 62 (pp. 165–169)).

The Kongo side is heard only later. A proclamation issued in Afonso’s name in 1512 says that his father received Christian teaching and made a good beginning but was then turned away from it; that Afonso, who held to the faith, was exiled; and that on his father’s death he defeated a brother who had seized the kingdom, his enemies testifying that they saw a white cross and Saint James in the sky (Afonso I, Letters no. IX (1512), pp. 6–9). In 1526 he wrote to the king of Portugal that he needed nothing from that kingdom but priests, a few teachers, and wine and flour for the mass, and that merchants were carrying off his people, even nobles and his own kin, so that the land was being emptied; it was his will that there be no trade in slaves in his kingdoms (Afonso I, Letters no. XXVII (6 July 1526), pp. 53–54).