The Bakongo elite, however, proved unwilling to accept all the strictures of Christianity laid down by Portuguese priests, notably a ban on polygamy. To the Mani-Kongo and his nobles, a multiplicity of wives was a measure of their prestige, power and wealth. Moreover, polygamy was a vital political tool, used for forging alliances through marriage. They were also resentful of the priests’ insistence on destroying fetishes, idols and sacred sites belonging to the Bakongo religion that they had long cherished. In 1495, the Mani-Kongo decided he had had enough, renounced his Christian faith and banished the Portuguese from Mbanza.
His son Afonso, however, remained an ardent convert. He was much admired by the priests who taught him for ten years. On gaining the throne in 1506, he renewed links with Lisbon and appealed for support to establish Kongo as a Christian state. As King Afonso I, he adopted Portuguese styles of dress, introduced Portuguese rules of etiquette and protocol, acquired a royal coat of arms and gave out Portuguese titles to the elite. Provincial governors were known as dukes, and military leaders and court officials as counts and marquises. Assisted by Portuguese advisers, he promoted the work of the Church. Christianity became in effect a royal cult. Afonso also emphasised the importance of literacy, education and agricultural skills. Hundreds of students were sent to mission schools. New plants were introduced, including maize and sugar cane. Mbanza, the capital, was transformed into a city of stone buildings and renamed São Salvador.
His rule as king, however, was soon overshadowed by the pernicious impact of the slave trade. Slavery was as common in Kongo as in other African societies on the west coast. Prisoners of war captured in clashes in the outer regions of Kongo were routinely enslaved and taken to work as labourers on estates around Mbanza. Afonso himself owned many slaves and even sent several hundred as a present to his ‘brother’ king in Lisbon.
But the slave trade operated by the Portuguese added an entirely new dimension. During the 1500s, the Portuguese required an increasing supply of slaves to work on sugar plantations that they had established on São Tomé, an island in the Gulf of Guinea. Slave traders initially acquired slaves from the Benin coast, but then turned their attention to Kongo, some 600 miles away. Kongo’s domestic slavery thus became part of an international traffic in slaves. The demand grew ever stronger. Kongo slaves were sent to São Tomé not just to work on plantations there but to transit camps to await shipment to other destinations: the Gold Coast, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal. A Portuguese account noted that in 1507, in addition to some 2,000 slaves working on plantations, the island held 5–6,000 slaves awaiting re-export. Between 1510 and 1540, four to six slaving ships per year were kept busy hauling slaves from São Tomé to the Gold Coast alone. During that period, Akan traders bought about 10,000 slaves from the Portuguese for use as porters and agricultural labourers.
Not only slave traders and their Afro-Portuguese agents, the pombeiros, were involved. Caught up in slaving fever, men who arrived in Kongo from Lisbon as teachers, masons and even priests joined the fray. Local Kongolese were only too willing to participate in exchange for the alluring array of goods offered them by slave traders. During the 1520s, the number of slaves being shipped each year from Mpinda, at the mouth of the Congo River, rose to about 3,000.
Aghast at the depredations of the trade, Afonso appealed time and again to his ‘brother monarch’ in Portugal to intervene. Writing to King João III in 1526, he complained:
Each day the traders are kidnapping our people – children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family . . . This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated . . . We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for the holy sacrament . . . It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.
In another letter, he decried the involvement of his own people:
Many of our subjects eagerly covet Portuguese merchandise, which your subjects have brought into our domain. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects . . .
And as soon as they are taken by the white men they are immediately ironed and branded with fire, and when they are carried to be embarked, if they are caught by our guards’ men, the whites allege that they have bought them but they cannot say from whom . . .
Afonso referred to the priests who had turned to slave-trading:
In this kingdom, faith is as fragile as glass because of the bad examples of the men who come to teach here, because the lusts of the world and lure of wealth have turned them away from the truth. Just as the Jews crucified the Son of God because of covetousness, my brother, so today He is again crucified.
His protests were to no avail. King João III showed no sympathy. Kongo was useful to him only as a source of slaves and revenue. He replied:
You . . . tell me that you want no slave-trading in your domains, because this trade is depopulating your country . . . The Portuguese there, on the contrary, tell me how vast the Kongo is, and how it is so thickly populated that it seems as if no slave has ever left.
Afonso tried to enforce restrictions on the trade, but with limited results. He himself was personally affected by the trade. In a letter written in 1539, he disclosed that ten of his young nephews, grandsons and other relatives who had been sent to Portugal for a religious education had disappeared en route. ‘We do not know so far whether they are alive or dead; nor what happened to them, so that we have nothing to say to their fathers and mothers.’ Subsequent records showed that the group had been taken to Brazil as slaves.
Land of Prester John
11
IN THE LAND OF PRESTER JOHN
Still hoping to find a route to the land of Prester John, a new Portuguese expedition under the command of the navigator Bartolomeu Dias set sail in 1487 and six months later rounded Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of Africa, proving that the continent could be circumnavigated. Venturing further for several more weeks, Dias reached a rocky headland now known as Kwaaihoek in Algoa Bay where he erected the first Portuguese padrão on the eastern seaboard of Africa. On his way back, Dias landed at a well-watered cape that he had missed on the outward voyage and planted another padrão. He named it the Cabo de Boã Esperança – the Cape of Good Hope.
A much larger expedition left Lisbon in July 1497. It was equipped with new ships designed to undertake a voyage longer than any other ever recorded in European history. The flagship, the San Gabriel, was a floating fortress, with twenty cannon, built to take the strain of firing broadside. The crews of each vessel were also well supplied with matchlock guns and small hand-held cannon, effective at close range. Indeed, the expedition was not so much a voyage of exploration or a commercial venture as a heavily armed reconnaissance. In coming years, the use of force was to be the hallmark of Portuguese expeditions to the Indian Ocean, shattering traditions of trade that had lasted there for 800 years.
The expedition’s commander, Vasco da Gama, an ambitious provincial nobleman, was given letters addressed to various potentates, including Prester John, whom it was hoped he would meet, as well as dossiers of information about the routes around the African coast that earlier sea captains had gathered. After reaching Cape Verde Islands, instead of following the coastline, he sailed south through the Atlantic, then eastwards, remaining out of sight for ninety-three days, striking the coast about a hundred miles north of the Cape of Good Hope. His feat of navigation over nearly 4,000 miles of open ocean surpassed that of Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery westwards across the Atlantic in 1492.
After rounding Cape Agulhas in November 1497, da Gama anchored in the bay of São Bras, the modern Mossel Bay, and made contact with local inhabitants. Their encounters were recorded in a roteiro – a log book – compiled by one of the soldiers on board, Alvaro Velho:
On Saturday about two hundred negroes came, both young and old. They brought with them about a dozen
oxen and cows and four or five sheep. As soon as we saw them we went ashore. They forthwith began to play on four or five flutes, some producing high notes, the others low ones, thus making a pretty harmony . . .
The Portuguese proceeded to erect a padrão in the neighbourhood, but as their fleet was preparing to leave, they could see a group of Africans demolishing it.
On Christmas Day, passing along a coastline of green and wooded terrain, da Gama called it Terro do Natal, after the Day of Nativity, a name still in use. In January 1498, he anchored in Delagoa Bay. Velho recorded:
This country seemed to us to be densely populated . . . The houses are built of straw. The arms of the people include longbow and arrows and spears with iron blades. Copper seems to be plentiful, for the people wore [ornaments] of it on their legs and arms and in their twisted hair. Tin, likewise, is found in the country, for it is to be seen on the hilts of daggers, the sheaths of which are made of ivory. Linen cloth is highly prized by the people, who are always willing to give large quantities of copper in exchange for shirts.
At the end of January, the Portuguese anchored in an inlet near the delta of the Zambezi River, finding local residents who spoke some Arabic, wore flowing clothes of cotton and silk, and explained by sign language that other ships visited them from the north. For da Gama, it meant that he had closed the gap, that the route around Africa was now open. He named the inlet Rio dos Bons Signaes, River of Good Omens.
There was further good news when the Portuguese reached the offshore island of Mozambique. In the harbour were four Arab dhows which, they were told, were laden with gold, silver, cloves, pepper, ginger, silver rings, pearls, jewels and rubies. The riches of the East appeared to be within their reach. Moreover, they seemed to be close to the land of Prester John. Alvaro Velho recorded:
We were told . . . that Prester John resided not far from this place; that he held many cities along the coast, and that the inhabitants of those cities were great merchants and owned big ships. The residence of Prester John was said to be far in the interior, and could be reached only on the back of camels . . . This information, and many other things which we heard, rendered us so happy that we cried with joy, and prayed God to grant us health, so that we might behold what we so much desired.
But local suspicions about the intentions of the Portuguese fleet soon abounded. The Portuguese could offer few gifts with which to impress Swahili dignitaries, yet they depended on them for the provision of water, fresh food and the recruitment of pilots.
Velho relates that, when the sultan of Mozambique Island was invited on board and presented with hats, coral and other sundry items, ‘he treated all we gave him with contempt, and asked for scarlet cloth, of which we had none’. After a dispute over drinking water, a Portuguese landing party resorted to some modest looting, then scrambled for the boats. As a farewell gesture, the Portuguese fleet sailed up and down in front of the town, bombarding it. Thus did the Portuguese mark their arrival in the land of Zanj.
News about the Portuguese expedition spread rapidly along the coast. ‘Those who knew the truth,’ declared the contemporary Kilwa Chronicle, ‘confirmed that they were corrupt and dishonest persons who had come only to spy out the land in order to seize it.’ On their arrival in Mombasa, they were treated as unwelcome visitors. Da Gama had his own suspicions, as Velho recorded:
At night the captain-major questioned two Moors we had on board, by dropping boiling oil upon their skin, so that they might confess any treachery. They said that orders had been given to avenge what we had done in Mozambique.
Boatloads of men came alongside the ships, trying to attack. ‘Wicked tricks’ were used by ‘these dogs’, said Velho. ‘But our Lord did not allow them to succeed, because they were unbelievers.’ In revenge, sailing out of Mombasa, the Portuguese plundered a passing dhow.
Further north, in Malindi, da Gama was diverted from his search for the land of Prester John by an even greater prize. By chance he encountered there one of the most renowned Arab navigators of the time, Ahmad Ibn Majid, and persuaded him to show the Portuguese the sea route to India. Thus began an age of European maritime power in the Indian Ocean. Ibn Majid later regretted the help he had given to the Portuguese: ‘Oh! Had I known the consequences that would come from them!’
Following da Gama’s return to Lisbon in 1499, the Portuguese sent out a series of armed expeditions to east Africa to enforce their control over its wealthy trading ports. Towns that refused to submit to Portuguese demands were bombarded, then pillaged. Zanzibar was the first to succumb in 1503; Mombasa was sacked in 1505; Kilwa, Mozambique Island and Sofala were also subjugated.
But Portuguese hopes of establishing a commercial empire there soon faded. Their conquest of the coast merely disrupted the trade routes that had made Swahili towns so prosperous. Arab merchants withdrew northwards leaving Portuguese agents to swelter in the heat and die of fever.
Nor did the Portuguese manage to gain much benefit from the gold trade at Sofala, the gateway to the goldfields of the Zimbabwe plateau. A Portuguese commander reported in 1506 that Sofala was capable of supplying 4,000 tons a year. The king of Portugal was ecstatic at the news, writing of ‘infinite gold’. A fortress was built there; trading posts were established along the Zambezi River; contacts were made with the inland kingdom of Munhu Mutapa (Monomotapa); but only a comparative trickle of gold emerged. Much of the trade was diverted by Muslim merchants to their own ports and creeks north of Sofala.
Alongside their maritime expeditions to the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese made other efforts to contact Prester John. In 1487, King João II dispatched two agents, Pêro de Covilhã and Afonso da Paiva, on a ‘difficult mission’ to spy out the ports of the Indian Ocean and to find a route to Prester John in the Abyssinian highlands. Both men were experienced travellers and spoke Arabic; they used Muslim names, and adopted the appearance of itinerant merchants; but they risked death if their true identities were discovered. Selling honey as they went, they reached Aden in August 1488, and there agreed to part. Covilhã travelled eastwards to India in an Arab dhow and spent the next two years exploring the trade routes and ports of the Indian Ocean. Paiva crossed the Red Sea to the port of Zeila on the African mainland, intending to make his way to the Abyssinian highlands, but was never heard from again.
Returning to Cairo in 1490 on his way home, Covilhã was handed letters from the king stressing the importance of contacting Prester John. So he set off again and after a journey that took him to Mecca and Medina, he reached Abyssinia travelling via the Red Sea port of Massawa. Once in the mountains, however, he was told he could never leave. As previous visitors had discovered to their cost, Abyssinia’s kings refused to allow visitors to depart in order to protect the secrets of their defences from foreign attack. As compensation, Covilhã was given a wife and large tracts of land, but no word of him reached the outside world.
Thirteen years later, as a fourteen-man mission sent from Lisbon in the hope of establishing diplomatic relations with Prester John approached the king’s encampment beside the historic monastery of Debre Libanos, they were greeted by a white stranger who turned out to be Pêro de Covilhã. The mission, bearing letters and costly presents, was led by an ambassador, Rodrigo de Lima, and included a barber-surgeon, an artist, a typographer, a musician equipped with a harpsichord and organ and a middle-aged priest, Francisco Alvares.
Much to the annoyance of de Lima, the visitors were kept waiting for several weeks before the king, Lebna Dengel, deigned to grant them an audience. When they were finally ushered into his presence one night, passing through rows of men holding candles and warriors with drawn swords, Lebna Dengel remained hidden behind a curtain on a dais draped with heavy brocades. Several more weeks went by before the Portuguese were allowed a glimpse of him. Only twenty-three years old, he was sitting on a dais in the royal tent wearing a gold and silver crown and a mantle of gold brocade. Stretched in front of his face was a curtain of blue taffeta, which his attendants raised
and lowered, according to his whim; sometimes only his eyes could be seen, at other times his whole face. With Covilhã acting as interpreter, de Lima presented letters from King Manuel, offering an alliance.
Time and again when they tried to leave Abyssinia, the Portuguese encountered difficulties. Father Alvares used their enforced sojourn to compile a record of every aspect of life he encountered there, travelling widely across the mountains. Since the thirteenth century, Abyssinia’s kings had become accustomed to ruling from moveable encampments rather than from fixed capitals, relocating regularly to inspect provinces, collect taxes and wage wars against internal and external adversaries. They halted wherever there were sufficient supplies of grain, cattle, firewood and water to sustain their huge entourage, living at the expense of the peasantry. Alvares was struck by the sheer numbers of camp-followers: courtiers, judges, priests, soldiers, armourers, merchants, bakers, blacksmiths, prostitutes, cooks and common folk. He described one camp as ‘pitched like a city in a great plain’, occupying ‘a good six miles’. The king’s abode of tents and pavilions stood apart from the rest on the highest land available, screened by an enclosure of high curtains and guarded by royal pages. Other tents served as churches, or courts of justice, or prisons. In front of the Church of Justice were chained four lions, traditional symbols of royalty. Noble families each dwelled in their own ‘town of tents’, served by huge numbers of attendants. The ‘mode of encampment’, said Alvares, never changed; everyone knew their place. Once on the move, the court travelled with at least 50,000 riding mules, and sometimes as many as 100,000, as well as innumerable pack animals.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 12