by Faun Rice
ON KINGS
stranger-king narratives, including the Kongo in some detail, terrestrial waters
as well as the bearing earth are the inalienable domain of the indigenous-cum-
maternal component of the stranger-kingdom.13
These associations can be found even in nascent tribal forms of stranger-
kingship. As reported by Godfrey Lienhardt (1961), for example, in Dinka
charter traditions, cognate to the Shilluk’s, Aiwel, first son of the God and an-
cestor of the priestly masters of the fishing spears, emerged at birth from a river.
These masters of the fishing spears will marry off their sisters to the arriviste
warrior chiefs, become the mothers’ brothers of the latter, and thereby unite the
dual ruling components of Dinka society. Lienhardt reports that rivers have in-
fluence on and are influenced by pregnant women: “The association to which we
point . . . is between the river as a source of life for the Dinka, women as sources
of life, and the prototype of sisters of masters of the fishing spear as dispensers
of ‘life’” (ibid.: 203).
As distant in space and language as the Bantu BaKongo are from the Nilotic
Dinka, crossing the river has very similar implications for them. MacGaffey
distills the sexual and reproductive symbolism from various legendary episodes:
This concern with fertility is represented in the legends by the magical elements
associated with the crossing of the river, in which sexual imagery is explicit:
planting the staff that burgeoned . . .; the sister who insulted her brother by sug-
gesting incest; the awl in the navel; hollowing a canoe; splitting a rock, where
“the knife in the rock” is still a current sexual metaphor; or parting the water as
did the chief Ma Kaba . . . by tying from shore to shore a woman’s tumpline . . .
a symbol of her reproductive capacity. (1986: 92)
The motif of crossing the river is a Rubicon moment in a goodly number of
African dynastic traditions, the fateful move that will set an ambitious immi-
grant prince on a course to his kingship and introduce a new order among the
native people of the land. “Indeed,” writes Aidan Southall, “it was the crossing
of the Nile and the process of incorporation of other groups that constituted the
emergence of a new, composite society, called ‘Alur’” (1989: 188). It is pertinent
to add that the generic ethnonym, “Alur,” referred originally to the indigenous
Sudanic populations of the region: an identity that subsequently included their
13. For further details on the Shilluk installation, see David Graeber’s account in
chapter 2.
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
177
late-coming Nilotic chiefs, who for their part, however, preferred to vaunt their
kinship with the Bito rulers of the once great Kitara-Nyoro kingdom. For more
stranger-king ironies that have nothing to do with history except to create it,
the Nilotic Bito, however, have long adopted the Bantu speech of their dynastic
predecessors. Not coincidently, the Bito crossed the Nile on their way to the
Kitara kingship. Again and generally: “the migration of the eponymous ancestor
of the Bambara dynasties contains the theme of river crossing that is found in so
many legends of origin in Africa” (Izard and Ki-zerbo 1992: 330).
Perhaps, then, we can up the symbolic ante on the meanings of narratives
such as that of the instal ation of the Duke of Nsundi. In crossing the river
and marrying the land, the stranger-hero effects a cultural synthesis of cosmic
dimensions, as between the celestial and the terrestrial, masculine and feminine,
the wild and the sown, foreign mobile riches and produce of the local earth, war
and peace; in brief, the fundamental conditions of human order and welfare—
the powers and sources of which are ultimately beyond society itself (cf. Sahlins
2014). Indeed, MacGaffey has emphasized that the motif of crossing the river
takes its meaning from the Kongo conception of the universe as an upperworld
of humanity separated by water from an underworld of the dead inhabited by
the spiritual beings in control of the human fate. (Alternatively, the model is tri-
adic, adding an upperworld of divine beings to the earthly plane and underworld
of the dead.) Accordingly, in a text there wil be occasion to revisit, MacGaffey
says of the prescriptive crossing of the river in Kongo origin traditions, “the
elsewhere from which the king comes is a land of spirits (Bupemba, Mpemba,
Upemba), although it may be identified with a geographical location” (2003: 11).
The externality of the kingship is essential because power itself, the spiritual
sources of human vitality, mortality, and prosperity, comes from beyond society:
Bakongo see the ability to survive in the universe as a function of the play of
power. The terms for “ordinary people” who lack kindoki or kundu (witchcraft
power) are derogatory. People who have power obtain it directly or indirectly
from the otherworld. They are relatively successful: they live longer and have
more children and more wealth (both mbongo). Power obtained from the other-
world can be used for personal or for public benefit, with productive or destruc-
tive effect. (MacGaffey 1986: 190)
Considering the recent anthropological interest in cosmologies and ontologies
as the relative cultural grounds of what there is and how such things came to
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ON KINGS
be—not to mention the ethnographic evidence of the potency of alterity—it
seems curious that the historian John Thornton should dismiss the longstanding
Kongo traditions that the founder of the kingdom, Ntinu Wene, embarked on
his kingly project by crossing the Congo River as merely a “cosmological neces-
sity” surrounded by “ideological stories.” In his important work on “The origin
and early history of the kingdom of Kongo, c. 1350–1550,” Thornton writes:
The story of the first king crossing the Kongo from Vungu to conquer Mpemba
Kasi, the first province of Kongo, may not have any basis, however; as Wyatt
MacGaffey pointed out in his study of nineteenth-century tradition, the idea of
a river crossing, surrounded by ideological stories, may be more of a cosmologi-
cal necessity than a statement of literal truth. While there is little doubt that the
seventeenth-century Kongo elite believed that their dynasty had originated in
Vungu, or at least across the Congo River, this is not supported by earlier tradi-
tion. According to Lopes, Kongo began not across the Congo River, but in the
province of Mpemba and annexed other provinces from that core. (2001: 108)
This search for “literal truth” becomes doubly curious by virtue of Thornton’s
methods for rewriting the documentary evidence in order to arrive at it. For
one, there is his singular reliance on the 1591 text of the Italian humanist Fil-
lipo Pigafetta—based on a manuscript penned by Duarte Lopes—for his own
reconstruction of Kongo kingship origins, although this work says very little
about it, and Thornton takes the liberty of boldly revising what it does say about
it. A merchant who served as Kongo’s ambassador to Rome, Lopes wrote “the
first explicitly historical descripti
on of Kongo in 1588” (ibid.: 102). Thornton
allows that, in fact, Lopes says little about the kingship origins, because “it was
intended to convince Vatican authorities that Kongo was a Christian kingdom
of good standing and thus worthy of having its own bishop, and did not deal
very much with the pre-Christian period” (ibid.). (The pre-Christian period
would be c. 1350–1500.) But at least equally important, apart from a few snip-
pets of local traditions, Lopes does not even discuss the earlier kings because, for
all he knew, the Congolese had no memory of them: “They preserve no history
of the ancient kings, nor any memorial of past ages, not knowing how to write”
(Pigafetta [1591] 1881: 111). Not a good start.14
14. Msgr. Cuvelier and Louis Jadin did not have good things to say about Duarte
Lopes’ reportage. Was it because he was a descendant of Jewish converts—which
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
179
12o E
16o E
4o S
4o S
MPUMBU
LOANGO
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K
N S U N D I
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ango
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iver
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isi
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Mbidizi (Ambriz) River
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ilo
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iver
M B
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A M
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Map Area
Capital city
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100
150 km
Provincial capital
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Indicates probable seventeenth-century location
N
*
Figure 1. Map of the kingdom of Kongo.
they did not fail to mention? He was a trader, they said, neither explorer, voyager,
nor historian. He seems not to have traveled beyond Loango and San Salvador. “His
historical reports are without any exactitude. The errors and gaps in the Relation are
numerous” (1954: 110).
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ON KINGS
Thornton will rely significantly on Montesarchio as well as Lopes for his his-
toriographic project, which involves the deconstruction of the foreign origin
of the historic Kongo kingship in favor of a reconstructed truer history of its
endogenous beginnings immediately south of the Zaïre River in the region
known as Mpemba Kasi (aka Mpemba Nkazi, etc.) (fig. 1). Not only did the
dynasty really originate within Kongo, Thornton argues, but the founding hero
and first king was not really Ntinu Wene from Vungu, as commonly believed,
but his father, Nimi a Nzima of Mpemba Kasi. An important piece of evidence
was a passage from Montesarchio’s journal describing his visit to Mpemba Kasi
in 1650 or 1651, which reads in part, “I went to Mpemba Casi, governed by a
chiefess having authority over several villages who held the title of Mother of
the King of Congo” (Bouveignes and Cuvelier 1951: 70)—to which Thornton
suggestively adds, “the KiKongo word ‘ ngudi’ means ‘mother’ but might also
mean ‘origin’ or ‘source’” (2001: 108). So the text might also indicate she was, or
rather her ancestress was, the origin of the kingship. Possibly true, but to the op-
posite effect than Thornton supposes, as it rather implies an archetypal marriage
of the stranger-hero with a daughter of the autochthonous people, upon which
she will become the mother of the king and maternal ancestress of the dynasty.
(Like Joao II, who “tramples the lion in the kingdom of his mother.”) Indeed,
the documentary evidence early and late makes it clear that the reference to
the “Mother of the King of Congo” recalled a hypergamous union of a native
woman of rank with a stranger-king from across the Congo River. So reads the
relevant passage of Montesarchio’s journal, when taken in its entirety—includ-
ing what Thornton left out:
I went to Mpemba Casi, governed by a chiefess having authority over several
villages who held the title of Mother of the King of Congo. Here is the reason:
When the first king, the one who established his sovereignty over the Congo,
left Coimba, crossed the Congo, and began to be Lord of Congo, it was at the
village of Mpemba Casi that he began to reign. (Bouveignes and Cuvelier 1951:
70–71)15
Some centuries later, MacGaffey could provide a confirming report from his
own ethnographic study of the same area:
15. Thornton later quotes the second part of this text about crossing the river, but
separately and in a different context (2001: 107).
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
181
The likelihood is that Nkazi a Kongo has dominated Mbanza Nkazi [capital
center of the region] continuously for five hundred years. The name is a title
implying that the owners had the right to provide the king, Ne Kongo, with
his official wife at the time of the coronation. This woman was probably his
classificatory Father or Grandfather [by lineage . . .] and she would be known
as Mpemba Nkazi, which is the first recorded name of the Manteke region.
Probably this is what father Jerome de Montesarchio referred to when he gave
the title of the chief he met in Mbanza Nkazi in 1650 as “Mother of the king of
Kongo.” (1970: 83)
A corollary problem with Thornton’s thesis that Kongo began in Mpemba Kasi
is that his primary documentary source, the Duarte Lopes text as transmitted
by Pigafetta, distinctly says otherwise. It says that the cradle of the kingship was
in the province of Mpemba, which is in the center of the Kongo kingdom—not
to be confused with Mpemba Kasi in the north—where is located the capi-
tal Mbanza Kongo (later San Salvador). According to the Lopes’ account as
translated by Thornton, Mpemba was “the center of the state of Congo and
the origin of the Ancient Kings and the land where they were born”—to which
Thornton adds, “thus the original territory to which the other provinces were
ad
ded” (2001: 104). The well-known tradition to which Thornton alludes, how-
ever, recounts how Ntinu Wene culminated his conquest of Kongo from Vungu
north of the Congo by distributing the land to his followers from a mountain
in Mpemba near the capital he would subsequently establish at Mbanza Kongo
(Cuvelier 1946). Mbanza Kongo—another old name of which was Mbanza
Wene—remained the royal seat of the Kongo state into the Christian era: which
is not inconsistent with Lopes’ statement that it was the center of the kingdom
and the origin and birthplace of ancient kings—whose traditions were largely
unknown to him. However, on the basis of his own choice of kingdom origins
at Mpemba Kasi, Thornton simply asserts that Lopes (or Pigafetta) had gotten
mixed up: that in describing Mpemba as the origin of the ancient kings, the
author must have really meant Mpemba Kasi in the north. “What seems likely,”
to Thornton, “is that Lopes or Pigafetta conflated Mpemba, the large southern
province, with Mpemba Kasi, the smaller northern province, thus putting both
Lopes and the later Capuchins in agreement over the original core of Kongo”
(2001: 108). How could this be? The Lopes text (Pigafetta [1591] 1881: 62–70)
is perfectly clear about the location of—and unmistakably detailed in its de-
scription of—Mpemba province and its capital Mbanza Kongo. In this case,
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ON KINGS
Lopes must have known what he was talking about: he lived in Mbanza Kongo
for some years, and he was the ambassador of Mbanza Kongo to the Vatican. As
for the later Capuchins purportedly in agreement that Mpemba Kasi was “the
original core of Kongo,” besides Montesarchio, Thornton is invoking the 1687
text of Cavazzi—who was in the region in the mid-1660s—in which the found-
er of the kingdom came from across the Kwango River (rather than the Congo)
and Mpemba Kasi was the first place in Kongo he had conquered (Cuvelier
1946; Sousa 1999).16 In sum, Thornton’s rewriting of the primary sources is
perfectly arbitrary, except as it is motivated by his own empirically challenged,
secondary interpretation purporting to be what actually happened.
In an earlier work (1983: 15ff.), Thornton had already sought to deconstruct
the Kongo stranger-king tradition by asserting that “the supposed ethnic dis-
tinction” between the subject peoples generically known as Ambundu and the
ruling elite, the Ashikongo (or Essikongo, etc.), was not really a difference be-
tween native inhabitants and immigrant rulers. The reputed ethnic distinction