ABSTRACT
The early Christian history of Central Africa offers us a fascinating account of indigenized Christianity and sheds light on a complex era of Euro-African political, economic and religious engagement. With a focus on the fifteenth-eighteenth century, this examination of the interactions between Portugal, Rome and the Kingdom of Kongo allows us to trace the early establishment of Christianity in the latter. Long before the advent of nineteenth-century missionary David Livingstone, the deeply Christianized Kingdom of Kongo represents a truly vibrant period of Africa’s Christian history. Some have argued that, based on the decline of Kongolese Christianity through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the earlier efforts were ineffective, and the adoption of Christianity only superficial and politically motivated. But as we shall see, Christianity became a well-established and deeply indigenized part of Kongolese culture and identity, strongly influenced by a primal religious worldview. However, it suffered significantly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from changing European perspectives on acceptable Christian doctrine and practice; Kongolese warfare and civil strife; and the ravages of the slave trade. When we approach Christian history we need to ask who is telling the
story, and what their motivations are for doing so. European missionary accounts, for example, will necessarily differ from those of African Christians. Nigerian historian Ogbu Kalu argues that history should be “a certain type of memory that evokes liberative power; not mere knowledge of the past but one that is commitment. It should lead people to the truth of their condition in a scientific manner, not violated by cant or propaganda” (2005: 1). In that spirit, this chapter seeks to engage more deeply with the worldview of both the
European and Kongolese Christians during these centuries in the hope of attaining a well-rounded understanding of this rich period of African Christian history. This chapter focuses on two pivotal episodes in Central Africa’s Christian
history in the Kingdom of Kongo, which was located in West Central Africa and included what are now Angola, Congo and western Democratic Republic of Congo (MacGaffey 2005). Firstly we will explore the early response to Christianity under Manikongo Afonso I, who ruled from 1509-1543 and is often regarded as the founder of the Church in Kongo; his abiding commitment to the faith laid the foundation upon which Christianity grew in his flourishing kingdom. Secondly, we will analyze a fascinating early eighteenth-century account of a prophetic movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1682-1706), a Kongolese Christian noblewoman and nganga who emerged as an influential religious leader claiming to have been possessed by Saint Anthony and who preached messages of peace and unification for the war-torn Kingdom. The popular Antonian Movement, which her teaching spawned, serves as an example of the degree to which Christianity had become indigenized in Kongo and vividly demonstrates both the points of affinity and conflict between elements of European Christianity and the Kongolese primal worldview.
