Origin traditions and history in Central Africa.

Historians using oral traditions must continually grapple with traditions of origin, for unlike scholars of religion, folklore, or ideology, they must determine what is historical and what is legendary in these ancient memories. Yet for Africa these traditions are all that historians have to reconstruct the origins of the societies that they study. Thus, early European historians of central Africa--for example, the great missionary historian Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, who wrote Angolan history in the mid-seventeenth century (Cavazzi 1687)--anchored their research in oral traditions. (1) Historians working during the early colonial period used oral tradition as well: Joseph van Wing wrote a history of the Kongo in 1920 in which he mixed oral traditions he had collected with documentary research. This approach, a reliance upon a combination of oral tradition and archival research, has since been employed by historians in every corner of Africa.

Jan Vansina's influential book De la tradition orale (1961) has served as a manifesto for oral history's use by the modern generation of Africanist historians. Vansina's methodological strictures, while not always followed, have given this resource an academic status. Seen as an "African voice" in contrast to the accounts of travelers from Europe or America, oral tradition is often evoked in discussions of African history even if it is not always used. (2)

While some types of oral tradition read like chronicles and are perhaps as reliable, at least, as the chronicles of the Middle Ages, (3) traditions of origin are less well regarded. This is because the histories of the origins of kingdoms in central Africa are essentially political documents, and like politics they change over time, subject to tire hard whim of pragmatic realities. Just as American jurists wrangle

over the Founding Fathers' intention in writing the Constitution, and have recourse to historical studies to establish, for example, what their attitudes toward a "well-regulated militia" might have been, so for central Africans the story of the origin of political units is a fundamentally constitutional matter.

We have an insight into this process in central Africa that is not always possible in other places on the continent because of the region's long tradition of literacy, especially in the Kingdom of Kongo, located in what is now northwestern Angola. Thanks to its own literate traditions, and tire fact that its early conversion to Christianity (in 1491) gave it an unusually large number of literate visitors, Kongo provides an excellent model for illuminating how the process might work in areas that do not have a similar history of literacy (4) (Fig. 1). To understand how politics changed origin stories throughout the region, we might first witness the process in Kongo and then make some observations about the political nature of accounts of origins of the Lunda Empire and its neighbors, where a detailed local chronicle preserved in oral tradition has influenced much of the history of the interior regions of west central Africa.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Early European Accounts

The earliest insights we have into the origin of Kongo were set in writing in 1588 by Duarte Lopes. Although Lopes was a Portuguese New Christian (converted Jew), and thus a foreigner to Kongo, he served as Kongo's ambassador to the Holy See at a crucial time, when the Vatican was considering making Kongo the seat of the first bishop on mainland Africa (Fig. 2). As such, and as a "fidalgo of the royal house" as Iris letter of credentials from Kongo's king Alvaro I states, (5) Lopes was surely privy to the version of Kongo's history that circulated in the capital; as a trusted ambassador he must have presented it accurately in Europe. Lopes's written text is lost to us, but it formed the basis, along with his oral testimony, of Filippo Pigafetta's book, Relatione del Reame di Congo et delle cinconvincine contrade (1591). (6) That source does not deal explicitly with the origin of the Kingdom of Kongo, but in asides that deal with the history of tire provinces, it seems likely that the history of the country was conceived as something like this: The Kingdom of Kongo was formed when several independent provinces came together. The focus seems to have been on the voluntary nature of the original kingdom, thus a federation, although some of the provinces were conquered by force (Pigafetta 1591:37-38). This version of Kongo's history probably reflects the relatively decentralized nature of Kongo's polity in the immediately preceding period and the power of some of the provinces.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The origin story and the politics changed when the next set of oral traditions was written down in the mid-seventeenth century. These texts were put together by European missionaries, first by the Jesuit Mateus Cardoso in 1624 and then by the Capuchin missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo in 1668 (but probably also based on Jesuit sources, most likely the now lost chronicle of Joao de Pavia, composed around 1635). (7) The Jesuits' mission, founded in 1619, was close to the royal family, and the Jesuits were deeply interested in Kongo's affairs, so that it seems likely that the missionaries' accounts are well founded in the version that circulated at court.

In these Jesuit-authored accounts, there is no mention of a federation. Instead the first king, Lukeni lua Nimi, is presented as a conqueror who came from the north, on the other side of the Congo River. In Cardoso's account, he was the younger son of a king, unlikely to succeed to power after his father, and seeking a new kingdom of his own. In Cavazzi's telling he commits a dreadful double homicide, stabbing his pregnant mother through the womb; then, gathering his followers, who are encouraged rather than repelled by this gruesome murder, he conquers Kongo. The version written by Cavazzi clearly engaged an already existing, contradictory historiography that included the emphasis, in Lopes's earlier version, on provincial privileges, but it characterizes these privileges as granted by the king only after conquest as an act of kindness. Thus the older tradition survived in the new.

Political motivations most likely underlie this transformation of tradition. The two Kongo kings who dispatched Lopes to Rome, Alvaro I and II (together ruled 1568 1614), underwent a long process of centralizing authority, pushing their claims against provinces like Soyo and Mbata that did not easily cede their own claims. Cardoso, in his version, stresses that the king gave out the right to rule provinces, not for life but at the king's pleasure--clearly a slap at the concept of provincial federation that was implicit in the earlier tradition. The royal version thus represented the marching orders of a new order, determined to centralize power, revenue, and decision making at the court. Descriptions of the Kongo government during this period make it clear that the program was largely successful (see Thornton 1983).

Kongo centralization did not last, however. In 1665, following the death of King Antonio I at the Battle of Ulanga (Mbwila), the country underwent a long and disastrous civil war. Its proud capital of Sao Salvador (Fig. 3) was destroyed, and, in 1678, abandoned. Rival kings built fortified capitals in the north, east, southeast, and western parts of the country, but none were strong enough to overcome their rivals and restore the kingdom. Finally, toward the end of the century, Pedro IV, who made his base in the rocky mountain fortress of Kibangu east of the ruined capital, sought to unite the country by diplomacy. He sponsored or participated in several round-robin diplomatic efforts, working with Capuchin priests as intermediaries, and eventually managed to win unification in 1709. In 1710 two Capuchin priests produced two versions of Kongo's origin story, one old and one new. In the old story, told by Bernardo da Gallo (1999:46-47), Lukeni lua Nimi conquered the country to avenge an insult pronounced against his mother by a ferryman.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The new story was related by Francesco da Pavia (in Toso 1999:21), the key diplomatic player in Pedro IV's negotiations. It told of Kongo's unification by a "wise and skillful blacksmith" who managed to win election to the position of king by universal consent because he settled their disputes so successfully. Da Pavia's version, which effectively reflected the vision that a king like Pedro IV had of his country and its future, draws on widespread central African imagery of blacksmiths as mediating figures, whose production of steel was likened to women giving birth. Pedro's diplomatic gambit was successful, for during the next fifty years, the concept of rotating kingship, in which each of the major contenders would rule in turn, was accepted in theory if not always in practice (da Savona 1976; also in L'Italia francescana 1974:135-214). Thus a diplomatic leader had hearkened to an origin story of a blacksmith king to break the older version of the haughty conqueror giving and taking provinces at his whim.

Although the blacksmith king does not reemerge in later tellings of Kongo's origin, neither does the conqueror. In 1782, King Jose I, recently having defeated his rivals in battle, had someone in his court create a document of Kongo history, the earliest document on Kongo's past written by a Kongo. Published three quarters of a century later in the Boletim Oficial da Colonia de Angola from a dilapidated original in the Kongo archives, this document does not mention Lukeni lua Nimi at all, and indeed, he appears to have passed more or less out of oral tradition as well. (8)

Instead, the new origin story focuses on the coming of Christianity to Kongo and on the reign of Afonso I (1509-42), by this time, and up to the recent past, regarded as the founder of the country. After relating the story of the conversion of Kongo by Portuguese missionaries in 1491, the account goes on to describe the glories of Afonso, whom contemporary Europeans had called the "Apostle of Kongo" because of his zeal to convert the country. In this account, Afonso's zeal extended to his mother, who refused to remove a small idol that she wore around her neck in defiance of her son's order that all idols be destroyed. After pleading with his mother to obey, the king finally ordered her buried alive. This story had been in circulation in Kongo since probably the 1680s (Thornton 1998:192), but only in the mid-eighteenth century did it become a central moment in the foundation of the kingdom (Fig. 4).

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Among Afonso's important acts, according to the 1782 account, was the creation of the Order of Christ (though in fact the order was first created not by Afonso but by his late-sixteenth-century successor, Alvaro 1). The mid-eighteenth-century kings of Kongo manifested their power and extended their influence by granting knighthoods in the Order of Christ. Indeed, Jose (and his successors) judiciously gave out these knighthoods to his supporters and selected rivals as a means to bolster his position in the precarious world of the king. Hence, the origin story shifted to specifically Christian themes, typified by Afonso's burying his mother and operationalized by the founding of the Order of Christ.

Nineteenth-Century Revisions

The nineteenth century witnessed yet another transformation of Kongo's politics and a radical shifting of its story of origin. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1852 and the world-wide trade revolution brought about by the Industrial Revolution in Europe, Kongo underwent its own profound economic transformation. The kings and indeed even the old aristocracy lost much of their power; new upstart generations, enriched by long-distance trade that employed directly or indirectly perhaps half the country, asserted themselves. For example, Pedro V, king during this tumultuous period, faced a substantial rivalry from a certain Garcia Bwaka Matu, a man of low estate, being descended not from some ancient king of Kongo but from a simple local nobleman. Enriched by owning markets and controlling porters, he rivaled the king in wealth and territorial influence (Thornton 2000b:354-56).

The new trading barons or their would-be imitators managed their business in long-distance trade by establishing family relationships in their many trading areas, connecting these through kinship networks. The clans formed by the kinship networks each had their own oral traditions of origin, typically of migrations along the trade routes from a conventional place of origin, most commonly the Patalao (the Padrao, a marker left by the Portuguese on the coast of Kongo in 1491) or Sao Salvador. By defining the routes and their relationships with villages that they founded, the clan leaders or their employees and followers could claim protection and support from all those who were members of the clan (Thornton 2000a:461-62).

In 1856, as this process was beginning to unfold, Adolph Bastian, a German explorer visiting Kongo, noted that the first king of the country had proclaimed the law to the twelve clans that made up the country. Bastian knew no Portuguese or Kikongo and had spent little time in Kongo. He reported this tale on the strength of hearing it told in Kikongo to an interpreter, who translated it into Portuguese to a second interpreter, who retranslated it into English. Given the possibilities for error, this can only be considered a hint of the next stage of the origin story, of Kongo as a confederation of clans (Bastian 1973 [1859]:124).

In 1910 Petelo Boka, a catechist in the Redemptorist missionary station at Vungu, wrote down a series of historical and ethnographic notes about the Kongo. He wrote them in Kikongo and in a school notebook, (9) including the histories of a number of clans and a story of an unnamed early king who founded the kingdom by sending out the various darts from his capital to take up their posts in the countryside (Fig. 5; Boka 1910:87-92). (10) It was probably not the only such version (perhaps Bastian had heard a similar story), but it became important because Redemptorist missionaries decided to publish it. In 1928 Jean Cuvelier, head of education for the mission, and eventually to become bishop of Matadi, published the story along with a synthetic history of Kongo in the missionary newspaper Kukiele. (11) The newspaper, and Cuvelier's conviction that Kongo could be brought more closely into the Catholic fold by recalling its Christian past, made Boka's story the starting point for a new search for Kongo's origin in the original clans, numbering either nine or twelve, that settled the country, while also providing the founders of the rest of the clans in the country.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

While Boka was writing, however, the Kingdom of Kongo was ceasing to exist as a political unit. Pedro V (1857-91) had accepted a status as a vassal of Portugal at the start of his reign, and more officially in 1885. From this point Kongo sovereignty was slowly undermined by demands of the Portuguese residents for labor, leading to a major revolt led by Tulante Andre Buta in 1913-14. In the aftermath of the unsuccessful revolt, the kingdom was formally abolished, and the king, a puppet of the Portuguese, allowed official authority only over the administrative district surrounding Sao Salvador (Thornton 2000b:351-58). The Kingdom of Kongo's life as a political entity was over, and it was transformed into a new sort of symbol.

As the last kings of Kongo struggled with the Portuguese, Protestant missionaries moved into the country and began to produce significant writings in Kikongo, mostly confined to newspapers that combined news, folklore comments, history, and numerous biblical stories. Various missionaries gradually came to realize the linguistic unity of the Kikongo-speaking peoples, a unity that extended considerably beyond the boundaries of the old kingdom. The Baptists in Sao Salvador produced a detailed linguistic study of all these dialects, and began serious work on a translation of the Bible, accompanied by a large dictionary, all compiled before the turn of the century (Bentley 1887). In 1910, the same year Boka wrote his history in the Kikongo promoted by missionaries, Kavuna Simon published an article in the Swedish-sponsored Kikongo newspaper Misanu Miayenge, noting the fact that many people in the region spoke this same language and calling on all people who spoke it to unite (see MacGaffey 1993:22-23). In the new colonial environment, the Kingdom of Kongo was becoming the Bakongo "tribe." (12)

As a "tribe," the Bakongo became both larger and less historically defined than the kingdom had been. Although many Kongo continued to search their oral history for the stories of their clans, and the question of the genealogy of the Kongo continued to be pursued, the stories of their origins increasingly became more elaborate. In 1956 another Redemptorist, Joseph de Munck, published the first edition of an extremely influential Kikongo history of Kongo, relating that the first Kongo had probably migrated from Egypt (de Munck 1956:7). (13) His tale perhaps related to colonial mythology (such as the famous Hamitic myth, which linked all achievement in sub-Saharan Africa to "white" migrants from Egypt) as much as it did to anything he heard in tradition, though de Munck was a tireless pursuer of oral traditions, organizing whole expeditions into Angola to recover as many clan traditions as possible. (14)

The Postcolonial Consciousness

Nationalist politics in the Belgian Congo, especially as the country moved toward independence, was increasingly based on ethnic lines, and there were benefits to making one's ethnicity as large and encompassing as possible. For Kongo, Joseph Kasavubu's ABAKO party represented their ethnic interests, and among Kasavubu's followers were two critical historical thinkers, Rafael Batsikama and Andre Fu-Kiau Bunseki. In 1969 Fu-Kiau published, in Kikongo, an important study of Kongo religion and philosophy. He devoted some attention to the question of ultimate origins of the Bakongo, which he derived locally, though on the north bank of the Congo (Fu-Kiau 1969:13-14). (15) Batsikama's history also placed its origins locally among three clans, the "three stones on which Kongo cooked," in the words of a popular proverb (Batsikama 1971:179-235). For both men, the ideas of an ancient and distant origin were still too much of a colonial myth to be accepted.

Postindependence politics in Zaire brought a flourishing of ideas, the encouragement to write in the vernacular languages, and a continued ethnic consciousness. As Mobutu's regime drew to a close, Muanda Nsemi formed a ethnonationalist religious organization, drawing on the traditions of independent churches and religious movements that had arisen in the Kongo area since Simon Kibangu's new church in 1921. Called Bundu dia Kongo, the movement provided Muanda with ample opportunities to devise and propagate his own visions of the Kongo past. Increasingly, Muanda saw the Bakongo as the ancestors and founders of most of Bantu Africa, in his many publications stretching its borders to Zambia, Namibia, even to Tanzania. He fell upon elaborations of the "three stones" proverb that had interested Batsikama, but declared them to include whole African zones that encompassed most of west central Africa. (16)

Muanda's ideas have spread to Angola as well as within Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC). In Angola, ethnicity was as strong as in Zaire, and in the liberation war and subsequent civil war, Kongo chose loyalty to its own ethnic party, FNLA, and then to locally organized branches of the UNITA party. In the 1992 elections, the ruling MPLA party deliberately chose to fund and organize Kongo unity or restorationist parties (both FNLA and its successors have sought the restoration of the Kingdom of Kongo as a goal). A great deal of Bundu dia Kongo's ideas, combined with local lore, thus entered the Angolan political agenda, especially as refugees crossed and recrossed the border between the two countries.

In its Angolan manifestation, ideas of ancient Egyptian origins have crept back in, now cleansed by time of their colonialist implications, and perhaps even distantly enriched by the acceptance in some circles of the works of Cheikh Anta Diop. While in Luanda in 1997, I met Manuel Ferraz Alberto, leader of one of the small, recognized restorationist parties, the Sovereign Conservadores Party. His platform included ample demonstrations that Kongo had originated in Ancient Egypt, and argued that an ancient migration lay at the root of this connection. (17)

Meanwhile, another group, the project Mizaza, which sought to enhance respect for ancient Kongo customs, organized a conference in 1999 that included an account by Mbuki Nabi Lukombo Bisuaki of a long migration that began first in Ethiopia in the year 4200 "before the era of the fish. This migration took the Bena Kongo to Egypt in 4000, then had them migrating, after the reign of Pharaoh Akhnaten, back to Ethiopia in time to be present when Makeda married Solomon to form the Falasha in Ethiopia. Subsequent migrations found them in Great Zimbabwe, Zululand, southern Angola to found the Herero, and finally to Kongo proper. (18)

These intellectual theories have made their way to the countryside. An account by Joao Paulinho, regarded in Mbanza Kongo as the best traditional historian in the region, has the Kongo originating in Ethiopia and makes the "three stones" to be Gabon, the DRC, and Angola. (19) While these theories are unlikely to have any scholarly impact, as opposed to the "Hamitic hypothosis," which was equally farfetched, they are believed in both the DRC and Angola by a wide range of people, both educated and rural (Fig. 6).

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Lunda Origin Myths

This long tale of origins in Kongo provides us with an overview of more than 400 years of change, and reveals the intimate relationship between politics and myths of origin. It is probably not possible to make a similar reconstruction for anywhere else in Atlantic Africa (though it is in other areas with long literate traditions, such as the Western Sudan or Ethiopia), and thus to demonstrate the flexibility of this element of traditional history. But we can get some hints of how the process works elsewhere by examining the traditions of the Lunda Empire to the east of Kongo, which claims to provide its own key to the history of a vast area of central Africa.

Not only was mid-nineteenth-century Lunda itself a huge empire, certainly the largest surface area of any political unit in sub-Equatorial Africa, if not in all of pre-colonial Africa, but its traditions also had a place in many surrounding regions. The Lunda traditions are important because the zone to which they refer has not had any documented history to speak of that predates the first visitors from Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, when Joaquim Rodrigues Graca left detailed notes of his journey to its capital in 1843 (Rodrigues Graca 1890). Any modern understanding of the history of the region must perforce rely on the oral traditions.

Rodrigues Graca did not record any history, however, and it was not until close to the end of the century that systematic recording took place. German travelers made partial recordings, but it was left to the Portuguese visitor Henrique Dias de Carvalho to make a thorough and exhaustive collection and documentation of the tradition in 1885 (Dias de Carvalho 1890). In this version, Lunda began when a wandering hunter from Luba named Cibinda Ilunga met and eventually married Lweji, a Lunda princess, and they in turn founded the great empire. Following this "Lunda Love Story" as the anthropologist Victor Turner dubbed it, a disappointed brother named Kinguri set out westward in rebellion, eventually settling on the Kwango River and founding the Imbangala kingdom of Kasanje. In order to bring the recalcitrant brother back, Lweji and her husband dispatched various relatives and children to pursue Kinguri, and they in turn founded their own dynasties in the surrounding territories (Dias de Carvalho 1890:51-122). (20)

The resulting tale created a structure that connected to the Lunda Empire virtually every west central African state known to it in the late nineteenth century by some sort of genealogical tie. But traditions recorded among the Imbangala in the seventeenth century reveal only an origin in the central highlands in Angola, not deep in the interior. (21) The traditional link probably developed in the nineteenth century, when strong Imbangala-Lunda trading connections developed, for by the 1880s Imbangalas had accepted the story of their Lunda origins. (22) Indeed, it seems likely that stories of Lunda migration infiltrated the origin traditions of many states that traded with Lunda during the era of the ivory and rubber trades (Fig. 7). Viye, in Angola's central highlands, claimed origins in the nearby country of Songo in the eighteenth century, but by the mid-nineteenth century both Songo and Viye had added a link to Lunda, though each retained memories of more local origins (Correia 1797). (23)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

Traditions changed again when the Belgians decided to use the Lunda Empire's claims to support their own rule in the region. These changes were not in Lunda itself, where the tradition remained stable, but in areas that were marginally connected to it. The Luvale, living south of the Lunda in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, used Lunda traditions of migration to demand that the colonial government separate them from the Lozi Kingdom, a demand which the British government granted in 1941. When both they and the nearby Southern Lunda wished to claim the intervening fertile district of Chavuma, representatives of Luvale and Southern Lunda in 1956 went to Lunda to seek a resolution from Lunda traditionalists. The Lunda ruler, unwilling to clarify the situation, sent his daughter Lweji to rule Chavuma. This action failed to relieve the dispute, nor did a Zambian government commission in 1971. Mose Kaputungu Sangambo, a local historian who had been a delegate of the Luvale to Lunda in 1956, revisited the Lunda capital in 1973, and subsequently composed a detailed book on Luvale history; two American scholars, the historian Robert Papstein and the anthropologist Art Hansen, published it for him in the United States in 1979. (24) In this book, Sangambo traces the ultimate origin of the Luvale to Tanganyika, through Lunda, where marriages connected them to the empire, and then finally to their locations in Zambia. Along the way, Chavuma managed to become Luvale territory (Sangambo 1979:1-13). When Papstein returned to Zambia to conduct fieldwork in 1980, he found his research was spoiled by the bitter dispute his unintended support for the Luvale position had generated. (25)

Thus, just as Kongos in Angola see the ever more elaborate history of their origins as reinforcing their position against a government dominated by "Kimbundus" who speak no African language and are suspicious of history, so the Luvales look to an ever more elaborate origin myth to support their land claims in their home area. Politics, much more than aesthetics, mythology, or even history, continue to determine the myths of the origins of central African states.

Traditions of origin provide fascinating insights into the political philosophy of the people who tell them, but they have not proven to be as helpful for reconstructing the earliest history of African polities. Their sensitivity to political necessity and their changes, which we can document in central Africa, nevertheless make them valuable political documents and help to unravel the identity of their tellers, and the polities or interests they represent.

[This article was accepted for publication in January 2004.]

Notes

(1.) See also Cavazzi's manuscript "first draft" on Mbundu traditional history (Cavazzi ca. 1665), presently in the possession of the Araldi family of Modena.

(2.) See, for example, the methodology statements in General History of Africa, 1981, vol. 1.

(3.) Dias de Carvalho (1890:521-75) includes such a chronicle of the Lunda Empire.

(4.) I have dealt in greater detail elsewhere with the evolution of origin tradition and tradition in general in Kongo (see Thornton 2000a:439-57; Thornton 2001).

(5.) Instructions to Duarte Lopes, January 15, 1583, in Brasio 1952-88, vol. 3: 234-35.

(6.) Originally published in Rome, 1591. A facsimile edition was published by Rosa Capeans (1949) along with a Portuguese translation (Lisbon, 1951). See also the modernized Italian edition (Cardona 1978) and the English translation by Margarite Hutchinson (1881). Willy Bal's densely annotated French translation (1960; 2002 rev. ed. updated by Michel Chandeigne with John Thornton) is the best scholarly edition.

(7.) These seventeenth-century texts are Brasio 1969 [ca. 1624] (cap. 13, fol. 14); the French translation by Bontinck & Segovia 1972 [1624], also published in Etudes d'histoire africaine, no. 4 (Lubumbashi, 1972), which marks the pagination of the original manuscript and establishes the author as Mateus Cardoso; Cavazzi 1687, book 2, pars 86-89. On Cavazzi's likely source, see Thornton 1979:253-64.

(8.) The text, entitled "Memoria de como veio a nossa christianidade de Portugal ...," was stored in Kongo's archives and was copied from an "old and deteriorated" (and probably original) version by Francisco dos Necessidades in 1844. It was subsequently published, in 1858, in "Factos memoraveis," Boletim Oficial da Provincia de Angola, nos. 642, 643.

(9.) The 1910 manuscript, formerly housed in the Redemptorist archives of the Katholieke Universiteit Te Leuven (Belgium), is presently in the possession of Jos Roosen. My thanks go to Father Roosen and Hein Vanhee for scanning the original text.

(10.) See also Boka 1910:1-2 on the nine clans. Much of the history provided in the manuscript concerns Kionzo, Boka's home region. These statements of history are only for context.

(11.) "Mambu ma kinzu kia Kongo," Kukiele (1928); a French translation along with commentary that established the tradition as critical to Kongo's early history appeared in Cuvelier 1930:469-87 and 1931:193-208.

(12.) The name Bakongo, while certainly grammatically possible, may well have been a neologism of the time, replacing either a variety of more local identities or Esikongo, a term which roughly translates as "citizen of the kingdom of Kongo."

(13.) The tone of this chapter is more scientific than mythical, and relates to the drying of the Sahara and the Bantu migrations as they were understood in those days. On the other hand, de Munck clearly did incorporate early traditions about the original inhabitants.

(14.) De Munck never published the fruits of this labor, only using it to inform Kinkulu and a few other short texts. His documentation is now housed in the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, found in the archives, number 4.8.16.2,

(15.) He arrived at this conclusion by interpreting and reinterpreting proverbs and other tradtional materials reported by Cuvelier, but especially the identity of Vungu and Mayombe as the origin of Kongo dia Ntotela, the kingdom.

(16.) Muanda's work is published in many pamphlets, for example the series Mayanda. Many are in Kikongo, others in French.

(17.) In 1998-99 Ferraz Alberto sent me a parcel of mimeographed materials on Kongo history that presented a cross-section of what his group believed was Kongo's origin in Egypt.

(18.) These migration accounts were published in a collective work by Kimosi kia Bakongo called Nkadilu za Bakongo (Studio One, Shutney, 1999), pp. IX-XII (which I did not see), as summarized in Dissengomoka Sebastiao Alexandre (2000:23-30). The division of time into "eras of the fish" (rendered as tandu kia mbizi a maza) corresponds to the B.C. / A.D. division of time, and seems to derive from the work of Muanda Nsemi.

(19.) Field interview, September 27, 2002, Kinzau village (15 kilometers from Mbanza Kongo). Paulinho spoke to us only in Kikongo, but his language has frequent borrowings from French, suggesting that one or another of Muanda's writings was his source.

(20.) The mythic part of the story was translated by Victor Turner as "A Lunda love story and its consequences: selected texts from traditions collected by Henrique Dias de Carvalho at the court of the Muatianvua in 1887" (Turner 1955:1-26).

(21.) Earliest traditions of Kasanje's origins were recorded about 1660 by Cavazzi, and are best revealed in his upublished first manuscript (Cavazzi, ca. 1665).

(22.) The section that follows draws from and expands my original statements in Thornton 1981:1-14.

(23). In 1885 Xa Nganje, ruler of Songo, placed his own origin in Lunda, but Viye's from his ancestors (Capello & Ivens 1998 [1882], vol. 1:148-49). Cavazzi. however, placed Songo's origins locally in the 1660s (ca. 1665, vol. A, book 1:15-24) Compare Magyar 1859:266-68 with Silva Porto 1942:165-71 for the coexistence of the two traditions of origins of Viye in Songo and Lunda in the mid-nineteenth century.

(24.) The editors' introduction gives the history of the various disputes and commissions.

(25.) This is my personal recollection of Papstein's account of his troubles given to a Faculty Seminar at the University of Zambia in 1981.

References cited

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Bastian, Adolph. 1973. Ein Besuch in San Salvador der Hauptstadt des Konigriechs Congo. Modern reprint, New York. 1st. ed Bremen, 1859.

Batsikama ba Mampuya ma Ndwala, Rafael. 1971. Voici les Jagas au L'histoire d'un peuple parricide bien malgre lui. Kinshasa.

Bentley, William Holman. 1887. Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language at San Salvador, the Ancient Capital of the Old Kongo Empire. London.

Boka, Petelo. 1910. "Nsosani a kingudi; Luzailu lua makanda, ye zimvila zazonsono, e zi zitangu nuanga mu nsi zonso." Manuscript.

Bontinck, Francois, and J. Castro Segovia (eds., trans). 1972. Histoire du royaume du Congo (1624). Brussels.

Brasio, Antonio (ed.). 1952-88. Monumenta missionaria africana. 2nd series, 15 vols. Lisbon.

Brasio, Antonio (ed.). 1969. Historia do reino de Congo, c. 1624. Lisbon.

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