Jelmer Vos’s Kongo in the Age of Empire is a very fine addition to the considerable corpus of historical and anthropological writings on the long history of one of Africa’s iconic “kingdoms,” a literature distinguished by its revealing blending of the two academic disciplines. The book is also a subtle and compelling narrative of “empire” as experienced in what was becoming northern Angola, an approach contrasting with the usual perspectives of the politicians attempting to implement colonial projects from Europe. On the history of the “kingdom,” well known through the many ongoing studies of John Thornton and recently deepened by Cécile Fromont’s provocative study of overlapping Kongo and Christian symbologies, Vos contributes a distinctive sense for how Africans understood and operated polities—as contrasted with the modern and structural connotations of “kingdoms”—that applies far more widely than this half-century along the lower Congo River. On “empire” he expands on the too-minor current in the flood of works on “conquest,” “colonialism,” “resistance,” and other abstractions that dominate too much historical writing on Africa to portray the Kongo experience of these processes as largely unaware of, and certainly unconcerned with, what seems obvious only now, from afar, and in retrospect. His narrative flows smoothly and revealingly in a thoroughly historical mode, that is, people on all sides—British Baptist missionaries, Portuguese Catholic priests, Angolan government agents, and Kongo generations, lineages, factions, and tellingly characterized individuals—proceeding under the pressure of circumstances only marginally of their own making, and through perspectives they inherited without thinking about them as such, to make the most of the kaleidoscopic changes through which they were living. The title captures the approach cleanly: the book is consistently about Kongo people, more than about the polity of the same name, navigating a turbulent age that Europeans understood as competing for national survival through overextended imperial maneuvering around the globe, using a political “moral economy” of personal relationships that had served them well enough over four preceding centuries of engaging worlds beyond, until one December afternoon in 1913, when it didn’t.
The story proceeds through roughly chronological chapters marked by the succession of broader changes sweeping through the Kongo area, and increasingly centered on the historic Catholic capital, São Salvador. The opening act sets the stage in terms of a depiction, as clear a one as I have seen, of the sense in which the Kongo integrated Catholic titles and sacraments into a thoroughly African healing cult centered on a “king” who functioned as trustee for the aggregation of communities that had long coordinated their shared business—recently slaving and the ivory trade—through a succession of holders of the title that rotated, often contestedly, among them. Although he did not rule, nor was there a “government” separate from the networks, mostly of kin, joining in the composite, the channels of connectedness flowing through him mattered. Political power in Kongo was the power of belief, and it was strong. Vos here builds on Wyatt MacGaffey’s penetrating notion of African political systems as “states of mind.” Then the growth of the export trade in wild “red” rubber in the 1860s enabled a new generation of younger men, some from communities marginal to the historic networks, and many working as carriers for European trading factories on the south bank of the lower Congo, to build retinues (including slaves no longer sold off) independent of their elders.
Happenstance, as in all good history, figures prominently, and the second chapter brings it on the scene in the persons of British Baptist missionaries, whose presence prompted a Portuguese Catholic counter-mission, and then traces the utility of both, seldom naive but often dependent, to the Kongo parties in the game through the 1870s and ’80s. The death in 1891 of the mani who had maneuvered through these shoals opened the situation to Portuguese efforts to establish an official presence, in the wake of the no-less-coincidental Berlin Conference, through the politics of the principal Kongo factions manipulating their support in the 1890s; the initiative remained effectively with the Kongo. It continued after 1900 as politics in Lisbon, yet another deus ex machina, introduced head taxes, head counts, and demands for workers for unseen plantations in Cabinda and Príncipe Island. Kongo’s remoteness in space and in conceptualization from all of this allowed the next generation of young men to appropriate these faint initiatives as cover for all-too-evident outright thuggery. Dissatisfaction focused on the mani Kongo, as custodian of the commonwealth that was clearly unraveling, and produced a meeting of the leaders of growing protest in São Salvador at the end of 1913.
The proceedings of that climactic gathering were recorded separately by both Baptist and Catholic missionaries in the room, offering a rare window on the intricacies of the politics that Vos has so lucidly explained. The meeting failed to convey its point, and protests turned violent, finally giving the Portuguese the opening they needed, again coincidentally on the eve of World War I, to introduce the succeeding incremental steps of forcing people in Kongo to acknowledge their increasingly imposing presence. But the Kongo nonetheless evidently restored the moral integrity of the whole, shaken momentarily by the chains of events detailed in the book, but no more destroyed than it had been by many preceding crises going back to the mid-sixteenth century, with the recoveries all proceeding through the collectively healing power of Kongo minds, or as Catholics have seen it, of Christianity. Vos has solved the paradox of the Kongo’s preserving of a political system that bear no substantive resemblance to European notions of monarchy. The seemingly eternal “kingdom”—of God?—reemerged in the public media as an aspiring player in the nationalist politics of the 1950s, and it figures today in the personalistic politics of independent Angola. The moral order was betrayed in 1913 but not broken, or even shaken. Vos thus truncated his story on a misleading note of finality; perhaps he will carry on the story in a sequel, to be welcomed, subtitled “resurrection of the moral order.”
Vos palpably feels the positions of all his protagonists and conveys that intuitive sensibility—perhaps the historian’s core virtue—in straightforwardly compelling prose. Far-reaching research in official files of the five imperial governments with agents converging on the lower Congo, one of the hot spots among the tensions leading up to Berlin in 1884–85, day-to-day Baptist correspondence, and rich and diverse reports of the numerous “explorers” swarming through the area provided the ample sources that he marshals expertly to tell his story. He never speaks for his subjects, skillfully allowing them to speak for themselves, and then adding concisely penetrating highlights of what they said to advance his argument, and his readers’ understanding. This thoroughly humanistic approach leaves the reader knowing Kongo thinking without having to struggle through the technical jargon of academic discourse to discern its outlines. Kongo and its foreign foils built changes historically, acutely adapting whatever hands it had been dealt to take advantage of externally induced shifts in opportunity. The effect conveys the full drama, and irony, that the best history is capable of portraying.
