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Synopsis: This chapter continues the preceding discussion about Europe's rising star in its maritime expansion, describing repression of Indians in the transplant New Spain and Brazil. Strains soon showed, as exemplified in the criticisms of Las Casas and his defense of Indian rights. Capuchin and Jesuit missions became entangled with the slave trade, resulting in a setback to evangelization efforts in the Kongo and elsewhere. The chapter connects the American Revolution with Protestant missionary awakening, and with the evangelization of New World Africans. The antislavery movement teamed with trans‐Atlantic missions to establish a free colony of Nova Scotians in Sierra Leone. Following abolition, African recaptives began arriving in the colony, and thus commenced the real modernization of Africa, thanks to the new middle class raised in mission schools. The chapter concludes with the legacy of antislavery in Sierra Leone and of the post‐colonial debacle and ensuing civil war.

This chapter describes the Kongo in the 19th century. The architecture, devotional paraphernalia, political regalia, and rituals that central African artists had created since the late 15th century continued to play an influential role in the cultural and religious development of central Africa in the 1800s. Artistic, religious, and social remnants of Kongo Christianity endured throughout the period. Symbolic objects of central Africa, such as nail figures or carved ivory tusks, owe aspects of their form and significance to the Kongo Christian era.

This chapter focuses on the sangamentos, a performance that gave rhythm to public life in the kingdom of Kongo. The Kongo sangamento evolved in form, nature, and purpose with the beginning of Catholicism in the 16th century. In the dances, the Kongo elite enacted mythological, religious, and symbolic local conceptions that merged with ideas from abroad to form a new Kongo Christian discourse. Christian king Afonso used mythology to combine and transform Christian history and central African traditions into Kongo Christian lore.

This chapter describes Kongo Christian fashion. The Kongo elite expressed their status as Christian nobles and participants in the Atlantic world by combining local clothing with imported textiles. The combination of local and foreign regalia gave the kingdom's elite a defined image that contributed to the promotion of the kingdom and became a motif in European imagery of overseas Christianity. The image of the Kongo elite in the early 17th century functioned in European missionary circles as a metaphor for the expansion of the church in Africa and in the world.

This chapter discusses buildings, monuments, and movable objects that created a distinct Kongo Christian landscape in west central Africa from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The Christian architecture and visual environment of the Kongo kingdom not only manifested a political discourse of triumph and legitimacy for the ruling class, but also included a religious and cosmological dimension. Churches, crosses, and burial places defined a connection between the world of the living and the dead that structured the ritual, political, and religious life of the Kongo people.

This introductory chapter presents textual, visual, and archeological evidence for the creation, use, and meaning of Christian visual forms in the Kongo between the 16th and 19th centuries. The images, objects, and practices present how Christianity and its visual manifestations remained significant in the shaping of political and religious life in the kingdom of Kongo during civil and foreign wars and the transatlantic slave trade. It establishes dates and offers interpretations on the sources and historical significance of the iconography of two main visual corpuses: Capuchin didactic watercolors and Kongo Christian art.

The fourth chapter serves to demonstrate how African American Pinkster celebrations in North America can be traced back to performance traditions that had developed in the context of Afro-Catholic brotherhoods in parts of Africa with a strong Portuguese influence. The chapter entitled “Slave Kings and Black Brotherhoods in the Atlantic World” presents the history and importance of “black brotherhoods,” Afro-Catholic mutual aid associations that existed in Africa since the late fifteenth century and flourished in the Kingdom of the Kongo and Angola in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also shows how slaves with roots in West-Central Africa and other parts of Africa with a strong Portuguese influence introduced mutual aid associations modeled upon Afro-Iberian brotherhoods in the Americas. In the context of these brotherhoods, they elected and celebrated their leaders or “kings” with Afro-Iberian performances.

This chapter talks about the cross as a central symbol in both Kongo and European religious belief. The cross as a symbol that allowed the two sides to determine the religious significance and epistemological common ground of the nature of the supernatural and its manifestations. The cross created an opportunity for Christian orthodoxy to recognize central Africa manifestations of immanence and for Kongo to broaden its religious belief to include the powers of Christianity. Kongo artists and patrons expressed their new Kongo Christian worldview through portable and elaborately crafted crucifixes.

This chapter summarizes the visual, cultural, and spiritual universe of Kongo Christianity, which had an impact beyond the confines of the central African kingdom. Its influences reached the American continent through the enslaved men and women who had witnessed its correlations and endured among their descendants a source of spiritual and political strength. Kongo Christianity is more than a singular historical occurrence that defined a part of the African continent, it is a phenomenon whose influence has resonated across the early modern Atlantic.

This chapter looks at black identity and its evolution, and shows how the controversy over how African Americans defined themselves in the twentieth century had its roots in the slave condition of the nineteenth century. West African naming ceremonies and the ritualization and celebration of names in Africa are contrasted with the uses of names as weapons against the humanity of slaves in America. The various uses over time of such designating terms as African, Afro American, colored, Negro, and Afro-Saxon are treated and related to black nationalist thought. The names controversy reveals the bases on which the confusion over identity rests—the economic, political, and social structures oppressing black people in America. The tendency is, consequently, for the better nationalist theorists to place relatively little value in engaging in debates over names.

Christianity’s influence among Atlantic Africans began as early as the fifteenth century, and endured as a largely indigenous movement over the following three hundred years. Discovering how they came to be Christians, how many black Christians there were in Africa during this period, how contact with African culture changed Christianity, and whether Africans brought their version of Christianity with them to the Americas when they went there as forced migrants are the objects of this chapter. Led by African Christians such as Jacobus Capitein and Philip Quaque in the 18th century, Christianity’s history in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa actually extends to the fourth century CE and over the millennia has inspired the conversion of millions of adherents. Intriguing new evidence supports the idea that many Africans in the Diaspora were not only well acquainted with Christianity in places like Portuguese Kongo and Angola, but also knew about the black Christians of Ethiopia and Egypt and therefore thought of Christianity as an indigenous faith initially independent of and not wholly dominated by white slave owners, making them more likely to embrace it once in America.

“Of Bociọ, Bo, Cakatú, Zonbi, Nkisi, and Pakèt Kongos” discusses how the methods and means of socio-political control in the form of several cultural artifacts: bociọ, bo, and cakatú in Dahomey and nkisi in Kôngo resonate in Haiti in the pakèt kongo, and the zonbi. Pressley-Sanon argues that these forms of oral and material culture embody historically significant memories and continue to be useful in disfranchised people’s resistance to contemporary attempts to silence and disfranchise them.

The French Revolution in 1789 affected all of France’s colonies. As slave revolts broke out on Saint-Domingue, New Orleans became a sanctuary from the Caribbean island war. In New Orleans, Creole descendants of the Bienville era had to negotiate between their French identity and their loyalty to the king of Spain. The new governor, Francois Louis Héctor, baron de Carondelet, expanded military operations and cracked down on potential slave revolts. The Catholic Church in New Orleans had its own upheavals. Antonio de Sedella returned to New Orleans in 1795 and Cirilo of Barcelona was later sent back to Spain. The Black community in New Orleans had a rich religious and ceremonial culture, especially slaves from the Catholic, African nation of Kongo. Music and dancing crossed racial divides. After coming to power in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte bargained with Carlos IV for the return of Louisiana, sealing the deal in a secret treaty in 1801. Napoleon invaded Saint-Dominigue, hoping to return the island to slavery, while negotiations between the U.S. and France for New Orleans were underway. Napoleon ultimately lost Saint-Domingue, which became the Republic of Haiti. The Louisiana purchase was signed on April 30, 1803, giving New Orleans to the U.S.

Portuguese have emigrated to Africa since the fifteenth century. Through intermarriage with local women a caste of black “Portuguese” emerged who played an important role as intermediaries in West African trade and who developed distinctive creole languages. Portuguese culture also influenced the ruling elite of Kongo and gave rise to the creole ethnic group which dominated Angola for centuries and which has assumed power in the post-colonial era. The scramble for Africa led to increased Portuguese emigration to Africa and after World War II this received active state encouragement, although most Portuguese settlers left the colonies after independence either to return to Portugal or to move on to South Africa. Large numbers have now returned to Africa to find work in the booming economies of Angola and Mozambique.