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agricultural surpluses. Some of the states were the size of Ireland. They were feudal, hierarchical societies. At the top stood a king, a village chieftain to the n th degree, the father of his people, protector and benefactor of his subjects. He cared for the community, consulted the elders, and settled disagreements. The result of this political construct is not hard to imagine: a great deal indeed depended on the personality of the king. One could be lucky or unlucky. When power becomes so personalized, history becomes manic-depressive. This certainly applied to the kingdoms of the savanna. Periods of prosperity alternated rapidly with periods of decline. The changing of the throne led almost invariably to civil war.
    If our imaginary boy grew up along the lower reaches of the Congo, he was a subject of the Kongo Empire, the most famous of all these feudal principalities. Its capital was called Mbanza-Kongo, today a place in Angola, just south of Matadi. In 1482 the coastal inhabitants of that empire had seen something extremely remarkable: huge huts looming up out of the sea, huts with flapping cloths. When those sailing ships anchored off the coast, the people along the shore saw that there were white people in them. These had to be ancestors who lived at the bottom of the sea, a kind of water spirit. The whites wore clothes, lots more clothes than they did, which seemed to be made from the skins of strange sea creatures. All highly peculiar. The inexhaustible quantities of cloth the strangers had with them made the people think they probably spent most of theirtime weaving, there below the ocean. 4
    But these were Portuguese sailors who, in addition to linen, also came bearing the consecrated wafer. The king of the Bakongo, Nzinga Kuwu, allowed them to leave four missionaries behind in his empire and sent four dignitaries with them in exchange. When the latter returned a few years later with weird and wonderful stories about that distant Portugal, the king burned with the desire to learn the Europeans’ secrets and, in 1491, let them christen him Don João. Several years later though, disappointed, he returned to his polygamy and divinations. His son, Prince Nzinga Mvemba, however, was to become a deeply devout Christian and to rule over the Kongo Empire for four decades (1506–43), under his Christian name of Afonso I. It was a period of great prosperity and consolidation, during which the king’s power was founded on trade with the Portuguese. When those Portuguese asked for slaves, he had raids carried out in neighboring districts. It was an ancient practice—slavery was an indigenous phenomenon, anyone with power also had people—but his cooperation created so much goodwill with the Portuguese that Afonso was allowed to send one of his sons to Europe to attend seminary. In Lisbon the son in question, eleven-year-old Henrique, learned Portuguese and Latin and then moved to Rome, where he was enthroned as bishop—the first black Catholic bishop in history—before returning home. But Henrique was of weak constitution and died a few years later.
    The Christianizing of Congo was therefore undertaken by Portuguese Jesuits and later by Italian Capuchins as well. These activities in no way resembled the missionizing of the nineteenth century; here the church made its appeal expressly to the upper reaches of society. The church stood for power and affluence, and that appealed to no little extent to the top of the Kongo Empire. The wealthy had themselves baptized and assumed noble Portuguese titles. Some of them even learned to read and write, although a sheet of paper at that time cost asmuch as a chicken, and a missal cost as much as a slave. 5 Yet churches were built and cult objects ( fétiches in French) burned. Where sorcery was found, Christianity was obliged to triumph. A cathedral arose in the capital, Mbanza-Kongo, and governors in the provinces had churches built as well. The population at large viewed the