The Emergence and Africanization of Catholic Christianity in the Kongo

The Emergence and Africanization of Catholic Christianity in the Kongo

When the nation of Kongo “converted” to Christianity around the turn of the 16th century, the Catholicism that developed over the next century is best understood as primarily a superficial layer added onto Kongolese traditional religion. The kings of Kongo did not try to replace previous beliefs and practices with Christianity, nor did they simply mask their traditional religion, but rather they incorporated Christian doctrines, rituals, and some aspects of Portuguese Christian culture such as literacy and medicine, into the framework of the traditional Kongolese lifestyle. Three ways by which we can evaluate the Catholicism that developed in the kingdom of Kongo are through examining how the Kings’ personal religious beliefs and practices changed; how royal policy and sociopolitical infrastructure changed to resemble that of European Christian nations or remained the same; and how the religious beliefs and practices of the majority of common people in the nation changed.

Because two kings of Kongo played the fundamental role in the introduction and development of Christianity in the Kongo, examining those kings’ personal religious beliefs and practices enlightens our understanding of Kongolese Catholicism. The Kongolese King Nzinga Mbemba (Joao I) willingly converted to Christianity that was introduced by a small band of missionary traders, and the subsequent king, Afonso I, advanced the spread of Christianity in his Kongo and saw that his relatives were educated and that some attained prominent positions in the European Christian community. Though many documents, most notably a letter to Portuguese monarch Manuel I from Rui d’Aguiar, report the p...

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...gal or Rome. Being a Christian nation allowed Kongo at first to trade with Portugal as a relative equal, and later to reassert its sovereignty with Papal backing when relations with Portugal went sour, mainly over the issue of the slave trade. Christianity became a part of Kongolese life in a form that did mimicked European Christianity in some ways, but it was fundamentally different in that it was laid on top of a very different conceptual framework of the relationships between the living, the dead, and spiritual power. This conceptual framework, as well as many particular aspects of Kongolese traditional religion which were tolerated as fetishes of a converted people, survived the introduction of Christianity. Christian rituals became an important part of Kongolese life, but Christianity was Africanized rather than the nation of Kongo becoming Europeanized.