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Western historians have systematically downplayed black Haiti’s early-nineteenth-century revolutionary victory over Napoleon’s armies, the University of Chicago anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes: “The world of the West basks in what François Furet calls the second illusion of truth: what happened is what must have happened. How many of us can think of any non-European population without the background of a global domination that now looks preordained? And how can Haiti, or slavery, or racism be more than distracting footnotes within that narrative order?”
    A favorite prop in this endeavor has been to focus on the wildest theories of the so-called Afrocentrics, a mostly black group of scholars who have often painted ludicrously idealized pictures of the African past. At heart, what this ridicule amounts to is a clever game of concealment, whose aim is the erasure or covering up of what should be Europe’s own great shame.
    From Hegel to Conrad, we have been told time and again that Africa has little history worth recalling, or to believe the late Oxford scholar Hugh Trevor-Roper, no history at all, “only the history of Europe in Africa.” “The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell?” says Marlow, hero of
Heart of Darkness,
as he makes his way up the Congo River. “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.” Africa was a nearly blank slate when the white man arrived, a dark continent. And yet, since we know that Europeans have been almost obsessive about recording their own history, we would do well to ask, Why does so much amnesia surround Europe’s collision with its neighbors to the south?
    The first extended contact between Europeans and a major state in sub-Saharan Africa most likely began in 1491, when Portuguese missionaries visited the Central African kingdom of Kongo, a three-hundred-square-mile proto-state comprised of half a dozen provinces. Its capital, Mbanza-Kongo, was situated just on the Angolan side of what is now that country’s border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
    By all accounts, the people of the kingdom were warmly hospitable to the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans they had ever laid eyes upon. Indeed, although no actual event of the sort is recorded, one easily imagines a reception akin to the first American Thanksgiving. As missionaries are wont to do, they set about trying to make converts, and because the Kongolese king, or Mani Kongo, was interested in obtaining European goods—including firearms—in exchange for allowing them to do so, he gave the proselytizers a free hand.
    Kongo struggled valiantly with the unanticipated consequences of this fateful decision over the coming decades and, for a supposedly savage culture, fought with extraordinary honor to keep its head above water against what quickly became a Portuguese deluge. But the kingdom would have none of the success of the Dogon, and when the Portuguese embrace became suffocating, there was no way to escape it.
    Looking back, one can point to a mere accident of history that sealed Kongo’s fate. Portugal’s great age of exploration, conquest and finally colonization was launched by the invention of the caravel in the 1440s. And when some of these swift new ships, which were capable of sailing into the wind, were blown off course in 1500, the leader of the expedition, Pedro Alvares Cabral, inadvertently chanced upon the land, previously unknown to Europeans, that we now know as Brazil. The exploitation of Brazil, initially for the cultivation of sugar, created such powerfully compelling economic opportunities for the Portuguese that just nine years after the first missionaries had arrived in Mbanza-Kongo, the soul-saving rationale for the Portuguese presence in Central Africa mutated almost overnight into something quite