John K. Thornton

Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1680

This book shows how important the African role was in shaping the Atlantic world that developed after the navigational breakthroughs of the fifteenth century. The degree of African initiative displayed in this period is stressed, both by African elites in dealing with the new visitors and trading partners and, even by African slaves in the New World. Evenly divided into sections on Africa and Africans in the New World, this study stresses cultural and institutional backgrounds to Africa and African slaves. Although the book is intended to help Africanists understand how Africans fared in the Americas, its main purpose is to give readers familiar with Afro-American history a fuller and more dynamic vision of Africa, so they can see the African slave as an African and not just as a laborer.

The trans-atlantic slave trade : a database on CD-ROM

System requirements: PC Operating System: Windows 95, 98 or NT CPU type and speed: Pentium, 166MHz Memory: 32 MB Graphics: 800 x 600 x 65,536 (16 bit) CD-ROM Speed: 6X Available hard drive: 84 MB Macintosh: System 7 or later.

The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750

Scholarly opinion on the conversion of the Kingdom of Kongo to Christianity has generally been that it was superficial, diplomatically oriented, impure, dangerous to national sovereignty or rejected by the mass of the population. This article argues that although Christianity in Kongo took a distinctly African form it was widely accepted both in Kongo and in Europe as being the religion of the country. This was possible because Kongo, as a voluntary convert, had considerable leeway to contribute to its particular form of Christianity. Also, European priests were much more tolerant of syncretism in Kongo than in regions like Mexico, where colonial occupation accompanied the propagation of Christianity. Kongos control over the theological content allowed the religion to gain mass acceptance while its control over the Church organization and finance allowed it never to be an instrument for foreign domination, in spite of Portuguese attempts to use it as a ‘fifth column’. When European priests arrived in Kongo during the Portuguese colonial occupation at the end of the nineteenth century, they rejected the local form of Christianity, thus ending its acceptance among Europeans as Christianity.

On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas

Scholars have long taken interest in the conversion of African slaves to Christianity in the New World which have mixed, to one degree or another, African religious forms with Christianity. The process has been studied in greatest depth by sociologists, such as Roger Bastide, anthropologists like Melville Herskovitts or art historians such as Robert Farris Thompson. Although the most devoted of the scholars concerned with this have not been historians, and much of the basic research has been in current practices rather than historic origins of African and Afro-New World religions, all scholars share some vision of the historical process. In this vision African and European religions and world views meshed in a past which is far beyond the memory of modern informants and probably dates back to the early days of Afro-European contacts.

Early Kongo-Portuguese Relations: A New Interpretation

One of the most durable myths of the history of central Africa is that of the early subversion and domination of the kingdom of Kongo by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Its original statement was made by James Duffy in 1959 and was amplified by Basil Davidson two years later. According to this argument the Portuguese had found a well-developed kingdom of Kongo when they reached the mouth of the Zaire River in 1483, and had entered into an alliance with the ruler. The alliance, first made with king Nzinga a Nkuwu (baptized as Joao I in 1491) and strengthened and continued with his son Mvemba a Nzinga (better known under his baptized name of Afonso I, 1506-1543) involved a partnership in which Portuguese settled in Kongo and provided technological and military assistance to Kongo in exchange for trade, mostly in slaves. As a result of this exchange Kongo adopted Christianity, and for a time the two kings addressed each other as “Brother.” But the alliance, despite its good beginning, was rapidly upset by the greed of the Portuguese settlers, who saw the situation merely as an opening for quick riches through the slave trade. As a result the higher aims of the Portuguese court were subverted--first because the Portuguese, with a higher level of development, were able to benefit from their position more than Kongo; secondly because Lisbon was unable to control its settlers in Kongo or Sao Tome. In the end there was a massive involvement of Portuguese in Kongolese affairs and a breakdown of authority in Kongo.

Demography and History in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1550–1750

It has long been generally supposed that the kingdom of Kongo suffered a severe decline in population due to the civil wars of the seventeenth century and the slave trade. These figures are derived from literary estimates made by travellers and missionaries of the time. New estimates of population can be obtained by combining the statistics of baptisms left by the missionaries who lived in Kongo with a reconstruction of the age structure of the kingdom. Use of these estimates permits more exact calculations for the period 1650–1700, which suggest a much lower population level—about 500,000—than the commonly accepted figure of two million. This discovery suggests that the postulated population disaster did not occur; instead, it seems that levels of population remained relatively stable, growing slightly throughout the period in question. In addition to revising estimates of population, it has been possible to use the available statistics to throw light on the age structure and vital rates that prevailed in Kongo in the late seventeenth century, as well as to examine certain factors that have impinged on population.

AFRO-CHRISTIAN SYNCRETISM IN THE KINGDOM OF KONGO

This article examines the way in which Christianity and Kongo religion merged to produce a syncretic result. After showing that the Kongo church grew up under the supervision and direction of Kongo authorities rather than missionaries, it will track how local educational systems and linguistic transformations accommodated the differences between the two religious traditions. In Kongo, many activities associated with the traditional religion were attacked as witchcraft without assigning any part of the traditional religion to this category. It also addresses how Kongo religious thinkers sidestepped questions of the fate of the dead and the virginity of Mary when harmonizing them would be too difficult.

Legitimacy and Political Power: Queen Njinga, 1624-1663

Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba has recently been viewed as a usurper of the throne, largely because some contemporary documents describe her as such. But the issue of legitimacy to rule in Ndongo was a complex one, based not on a fixed constitution but a set of contradictory historical precedents which were cited to establish authority. Njinga managed to find such precedents to support her claims, which were further reinforced by her control of the chief military officials of the country. In so doing, she was able to establish her legitimacy and even became a precedent for female rule in the years that followed her death.

Traditions, Documents, and the Ife-Benin Relationship

Historians of Nigeria have been curious for many years about the relationship between the various states of the southern zone since the sixteenth century. The fact that the area has produced a rich art, has a fairly elaborate set of traditional histories, and has been the subject of some systematic archeological work means that the modern scholar has somewhat more to go on in reconstructing the regions history than just the fairly sparse and disappointing contemporary texts that came out of the early Portuguese contacts and subsequent European trade and navigation. But contemporary documentation for southern Nigeria remains much weaker than that for other African areas, such as the central African zone, Gold Coast, or the western Atlantic coast.Nevertheless, documents have raised problems in understanding the history of the area that cannot be fully solved by recourse to the other sources of information, in spite of the comparative richness of non-documentary sources. One of these documentary problems is the issue of the Ife-Benin relationship as documentated in archeology, contemporary texts, and art history. The problems raised by the relationship between these two southern Nigerian cities ultimately reflects on a much larger set of questions concerning the relationship of all the early states south of the Niger, at a period quite near the origin of the state system that would predominate the rest of the pre-colonial period.

New Light on Cavazzi's Seventeenth Century Description of Kongo

The very full description of west central Africa given in Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolos book, Istorica Descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba ed Angola , first published in 1687, has long been one of the most important sources for the reconstruction of the social, political, economic, and religious history of these three Central African states in the seventeenth century. This is true even though it has long been known that Cavazzi was not an eyewitness to all that he described, especially in the kingdom of Kongo, which he visited only briefly after finishing the draft of the book. Therefore, the recent discovery of a new, unknown manuscript version of Cavazzis work among the family papers of Dr. Carlo Araldi of Modena is very useful, for it helps us to understand the sources that Cavazzi used to write the portions of his work on Kongo, the one area of west central Africa of which he had no first hand knowledge. Since the Istorica Descrizione was published several years after Cavazzis death by another Capuchin, Fr. Fortunato Alamandini, who noted in his own introduction that he had edited the final version from a confused mass of documents and notes, the new manuscript initially raised the hope that fuller versions of Cavazzis original source material might be contained in it. I therefore examined the portions of the manuscript pertaining to Kongo with high hopes that the document would contain masses of fresh eye-witness source materials that Fr. Alamandidi had weeded out to make Istorica Descriizione a publishable work.