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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

  178

  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

  Congo River

  K

  N S U N D I

  w

  Chiloango RiverVUNGU

  Mbanza Nsundi*

  ango

  KAKONGO

  R

  MPEMBA

  Mbanza Mpangu*

  iver

  NGOYO

  KASI

  M PA N G U

  Lund

  Ngongo Mbata

  a Riv

  Mbanza Mbata*

  er

  N

  Mbanza Soyo

  M B A T A

  k

  Mpinda

  M

  isi

  Mbanza Kongo P

  Ri

  (São Salvador)

  E

  v

  S O Y O

  e

  M

  r

  B NKUSU

  Mbanza A

  WA

  Mbidizi (Ambriz) River

  N

  Mpemba*

  K

  D

  w

  U

  ilo

  Mbanza

  R

  Mbamba

  iver

  M B

  Loge River

  A M

  Mbwila

  B

  8o S

  A

  8o S

  A t l a n t i c

  MATAMBA

  O c e a n

  Dande River

  Bengo River

  Luanda

  Kwanza Ri ANGOLA

  ve

  12o E

  r

  Lukala River

  Muxima

  NDONGO

  16o E

  Map Area

  Capital city

  0

  50

  100

  150 km

  Provincial capital

  0

  50

  100 mi

  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).

  180

  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,

  182

  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

 

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