ECAS 2013

King Pedro II of Kongo initiated an alliance with the Dutch States General and West India Company in 1622 when he repelled a Portuguese attack on Kongo. Seeking revenge and security from further Portuguese threats, he proposed a joint attack on Luanda with Dutch and Kongo forces operating in alliance. The Dutch accepted this invitation, and sought to attack Luanda in 1624, though Pedro's successor Garcia I ultimately declined to assist them. The alliance remained in effect however, and was renewed in 1641 when the Dutch attacked Luanda again. This time Garcia II, a later king, joined the Dutch enthusiastically, assuring the Dutch occupation of Luanda.

Since at least the late sixteenth century, the lands between the Kwanza and Longa Rivers of Angola known as Kisama figured prominently in the imaginations of leaders of the Kongo, Ndongo, and Portuguese kingdoms as a hostile terrain inhabited by bellicose and intractable resisters. This reputation was instrumental in attracting thousands of individually vulnerable individuals who fled neighboring regions where they were either already enslaved or subject to the violent depredations associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Though always politically fragmented and decentralized, Kisama maintained a singular reputation as home to those who, in the words of one mid-seventeenth-century Italian priest, "glorify in a certain independence." Drawing from archival, linguistic, and oral historical sources, in this paper, I explore the fugitive politics of being Kisama in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Interrogating the complex and often contradictory textures of political identities formed in opposition to centralized states in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Angola, I analyze the different ideologies of political legitimacy and their relationship to violence that emerged within Kisama during the early seventeenth century, contrasting them with other state and non-state political practices in the region. In particular, I focus on comparing the political practices of Kisama with those of the (in)famous marauding Imbangala bands who, by the 1630s, coalesced in the powerful state of Kasanje. I argue that Kisama and the Imbangala/Kasanje represent two distinct polarities of fugitive modernities, a concept that helps us comprehend politics beyond and against the state in early modern Africa.

The 1913 uprising in the kingdom of Kongo occurred in the wake of Portuguese attempts to recruit workers for plantation labor in Cabinda and São Tomé and Príncipe Cabinda. The attack of Kongo chiefs on São Salvador was the start of a revolt that became known as Buta's war, which would lead to the final incorporation of the Kongo kingdom in the Angolan colonial state. In December 1913 a summit was held at which the rebel chiefs expressed their grievances to a delegation of resident white men: besides the dethronement of king Kiditu, the rebels demanded the removal of one notorious Portuguese official and a number of African collaborators, a reduction of the hut tax, the end of labor recruitment for Cabinda and São Tomé, and a curtailment of the rising social powers of women in Kongo society. In this paper, I will interpret the Kongo uprising of 1913 in a 'moral economy' context, and claim that it epitomized the breakdown of a moral order. This breakdown was caused by the corruption of royal power under Portuguese rule and was closely related to radical changes in the terms of labor within the colonial domain. By conceptualizing the kingdom of Kongo as a moral community, this study draws parallels with moral economies observed elsewhere in Africa and also with earlier and later constructions of Mbanza Kongo as a moral order, both within and outside the continent.

Based on the examination of a range of primary and secondary written sources, oral interviews conducted with Angolan officials, writers, sobas and average Angolans in Luanda, Malange and Marimba as well as more than 150 questionnaires filled out by Angolans in Luanda, Huambo, and Malange, the paper argues that Njinga's status as a national figure was only informed by the memory that developed about her during the colonial period but was shaped largely by the post-independence politics of nationhood.