by Faun Rice
pre-Kisra spirits at Dogon Gari. The god Lashi and this shrine in particular—to
which the Bussa king also sends an annual sacrifice—are linked to certain of the
oldest ethnic groups of the kingdom, notably the Kamberi people, who speak
a Yoruba dialect, and also certain Dogon clans. As this is a shrine of the native
owners dedicated to the ancient god, what is characteristically at stake in the
annual sacrifice is the fecundity of the earth; for until the Bussa king’s sacrificial
ram is offered, the chief of Dogon Gari did not send the season’s yam crop.
Stewart (ibid.: 75) observes: “Many of the ancient shrines and spiritual places
in Borgu are associated with the Kamberi and it is believed as other groups set-
tled in the area, the last to arrive submitted to the sacred rituals of the earliest
inhabitants.” This helps account for the report (ibid.: 194) that the pre-Kisra re-
gime was actually dominated by two “families”: not only the Bakarabundi at old
Bussa, but in the outlying village of Monai, the group headed by one Bamoide,
who, though of Kamberi origin, was known as the “brother” of the Bakarbundi
(of Mandingo origin). Accordingly, the prominence of the Kamberi and Lashi,
representing the autochthonous people and their own earthly powers, is another
form of the tendency to reduce the complexities of serial kingship orders to the
master dichotomy of foreign rulers and native owners—which is also to say, to
the structural chiasmus formed by the interaction of the complementary and
opposed values of autochthony and alterity.
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
201
ORIGINS OF THE KONGO KINGDOM
The structures and traditions of serial stranger-kingship in the Kongo region
were much like those of Borgu, although, so far as I am aware, they have largely
gone unremarked as such by the early chroniclers and the later scholars alike. The
issue of the integration of successive foreign dynasties has been foreclosed nota-
bly as it is presented as a discrepancy between competing versions of Kongo his-
tory, rather than a temporal sequence synthesized as a structural palimpsest. The
reports of an original BaKongo migration from the interior, beyond the Kwango
River, are general y taken as disposable exceptions to the dominant tradition of
Ntinu Wene’s coming from beyond the Congo. Or else the serial kingship is rec-
ognized but not conceptualized, as though it were of no particular significance
that Ntinu Wene incorporated several older kingdoms in the course of the epic
journey to his own. In the climactic episode of this charter tradition, also often
widely noted and little theorized, Ntinu Wene submits to and is instal ed by a
Chief-Priest of the Earth, Nsaku ne Vunda, in the ancient capital of Mbanza
Kongo—the characteristic function of the native owner whose own ancestors
were once the rulers. For the most part, however, everything happens in the
Europeans’ accounts as if they were content to fol ow the authoritative discourse
of the latest Kongo powers-that-be in reducing the perduring structures of suc-
cessive stranger-kingdoms to the master dichotomy of immigrant rulers and
autochthonous subjects by conflating all previous regimes in the latter category.
As, for example, the early eighteenth-century account by Bernardo de Gallo:
It is necessary to know that there are two peoples in this kingdom. One arriv-
ing as immigrants and the other truly of the land, the latter composed of those
who submitted or subjugated and the other the dominant ones. The dominant
ones came with king Lukeni [aka Ntinu Wene] and they were called Essikongo
or Congolese nobles, inhabitants of the royal city. The others, the subjects, are
those who are found in the lands and provinces of the kingdom, and those called
Akkata, Alumba or peasants and rustics. (Cited in Randles 1968: 57)
Some years earlier, the Capuchin missionary Cavazzi noted a similar distinc-
tion, also observing that the BaKongo did no productive work, leaving that to
slaves; although rather than completing society, they passed their days smoking
(ibid.: 57, 59). In any event, the countryside at that time also had some aristo-
cratic inhabitants, including those from previous regimes as well as Essikongo
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ON KINGS
bearing the graded titles of European nobility in charge of various districts.
Taken together with the ethnic diversity of the underlying population, the col-
lapse of this complexity into the binary opposition of immigrant rulers and
native subjects is the structural condensation I am talking about. Among the
anthropologists, Balandier (1968) alone takes note of two distinct incursions
of immigrant rulers and suggests they refer to different historical periods, but
otherwise the general scholarly opinion follows the dualist model—which is no
doubt the ethnographic reality. “The conqueror [Ntinu Wene] created a new
system when he founded the kingdom of Kongo,” writes Kajsa Ekholm, “but
he remained a foreigner. The land did not belong to his forefathers and for that
reason he was dependent on the first occupants and primarily on their repre-
sentative, Nsaku ne Vunda” (1972: 155; cf. Vansina 1992; de Heusch 2000).
By contrast, a number of chroniclers of Kongo charter traditions since the
seventeenth century have been reporting one or another of two fundamentally
different versions of the kingdom origins, with different casts of characters mi-
grating from different homelands across different rivers. Indeed there are many
modern groups who claim to have founded the old capital of Mbanza Kongo,
let alone those who claim to have originated there, but the widespread traditions
of an origin from the east across the Kwango River and from the north across
the Congo (Zaïre) have the warrant of early as well as recent documentation. As
can happen in serial stranger-kingships, the dynastic stories may get conflated
such that elements of one appear, more or less incongruously, in traditions of
the other. Based on information collected in 1665, the account of Ntinu Wene’s
advent by Cavazzi is one of the most informative narratives on the origins of
the reigning dynasty, except that instead of Vungu it situates the hero’s point
of departure as “Coimba in the region of Kwango”: that is, east of the Kongo
kingdom. The Jesuit Mateus Cardoso, writing in 1622, got Ntinu Wene’s home-
land as Vungu (“Bungu”) alright, but he also recorded the names of six earlier
rulers not found on any other extant king list. What these anomalies evidently
represent is the subjacent tradition of a prior kingship that had indeed come
across the Kwango. Consider, for example, a text of 1680 by the soldier-histori-
an Antonio de Oliveiro de Cadornega:
Concerning the origin of this kingdom of the Congo, the old conquerors of
Angola testified that the mexicongo nation was always reputed to be foreign . . .
that they had come from the interior to dominate the kingdom, just as we say
of the Romans . . . . In that way this mexicongo people came from the interior
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
203
and expanded. They came from the lordly lands of Congo de
amulaca, [and] took
possession of the powerful kingdom of the Congo, the natives of that kingdom
being the Ambundos, of another stock. (Cited in Paiva Manso 1877: 266)
As Amulaka extended considerably beyond the Kwango, this is something com-
pletely different.
Yet it is not completely different from certain legends recorded in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not to forget that Ntinu Wene’s own
story involves contacts with previous regimes, including the one at the capital
of Mbanza Kongo, which he is otherwise supposed to have founded. The Prot-
estant missionary Karl Laman, writing of Nsundi province, says the epony-
mous Sundi people “had immigrated and established a great kingdom before
the foundation of the Congo” (1953–68, 1: 1). In one version of the kingdom
origins, the story he reported is much the same as Vungu tradition, with Ntinu
Wene (aka Lukeni) as the main protagonist, except that the river he crosses is
the Kwango and the relations he kills for not paying the toll are his brother-
in-law and the latter’s wife (1957: 137).21 Laman was convinced in general that
the people came from across the Kwango, as indeed the tradition current among
them was “our ancestors came from the East” (1953,1: 10). In this regard, the
traditions of an original Bantu kingdom in the Congo established by migrants
from the right bank of the Kwango River collected by the Jesuit missionary
J. Van Wing (1959) are particularly suggestive for their resonance with local
references to ancient kings reported in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. From the Bankanu people, for example, who inhabit the region watered by
several tributaries of the Kwango on the Congo side: “Their principal town was
Mbansa Kongo, situated at the angle formed by the Kwilu and its tributary the
Tawa. They say that their Kongo was founded by a great chief, Na Kongo, when
he crossed the Kwango” (ibid.: 38). Or again, from the Inkisi region:
The Bakongo of the Inkisi region still know that their ancestors came from the
Kwango, and it is from the Kwango that they left to found Kongo di Ntotila, or
21. Killing his brother-in-law is not radically different from Ntinu Wene’s killing his
father’s pregnant sister. In all probability the victim was not his sister’s husband as
the wife in question would then be his sister; given the BaKongo preference for
father’s sister’s daughter marriage, the brother-in-law was more likely his father’s
sister’s son. Hence as in the Ntinu Wene exploit as reported by Cavazzi, the principal
victim was the hero’s paternal affine.
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ON KINGS
San Salvador [that is, the “Kongo of the King,” San Salvador being the renamed
capital, Mbanza Kongo]. Most traditions and legends known to the masses do
not go back beyond San Salvador to the origin-place of the population. But sev-
eral chiefs distinctly affirmed to me that the first chiefs of the tribe came from
the Kwango. (1959: 38)
Then there are the complementary accounts from clans in Mpangu province
that trace their genesis to a dispersal from Mbanza Kongo ordered by this Na
Kongo, the king of Kwango origins. From these several sources, Van Wing
(ibid.: 40) constructs an alternate history to the Vungu tradition, a narrative of
migration and kingdom formation under the aegis of Na Kongo, “the principal
chief of the Bakongo clans,” and his successors of the same title and distinction.
Beginning with the crossing of the Kwango and the initial residence on
the Kwilu in the northeast, the story takes Na Kongo and his people through
the Congo heartland to the ancient capital of Mbaza Kongo in Mpemba prov-
ince, leaving people along the way to form dependent chiefdoms (see fig. 1).
That is how the important Mbata province was generated, including certain
Kwilu and Inkisi settlements under a ruler who acknowledged the suzereignty
of Na Kongo. By the tradition, Mpangu province was constituted in response
to the growth of population in Mbanza Kongo, which prompted the king, Na
Kongo, to dispatch a levy of people from each resident clan to other areas on
a mission of conquest. This dispersal of ruling groups from Mbanza Kongo is
repeated in the traditions of Ntinu Wene and the Vungu dynasty; but what is
also paradigmatically relevant in the early historical chronicles is that a set of
interdependent kingdoms and chiefdoms centered in Mbanza Kongo preex-
isted the installation of the Vungu kings in the same sacred center. Moreover,
in their notices of local traditions, these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
records correspond closely to significant elements of the Na Kongo traditions
that Van Wing collected much later from much the same places.
With regard to Na Kongo’s initial residence in the Kwilu Valley, there is
the 1664 text of Cavazzi relating that “in Esquila [Nsi a Kwilu in the Kwilu
River Valley . . .] they revere a site hidden deep in the forest, which by ancient
tradition was the residence of the first kings.” Cavazzi was told that anyone
who looked upon the site would die (in Thornton 2001: 109–10).22 The Kwilu
22. A descendant of the Kwilu rulers came to the Kongo throne in 1568 as Alvaro I. It
may be this was a reprisal of the ancient Kwango kingship. The argument the other
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
205
sites noted by Van Wing were in the domain of the ruler of Mbata (the Mani
Mbata), whose incumbent figured prominently in the Ntinu Wene tradition as
the latter’s maternal uncle. In the Lopes/Pigafetta work of 1591, the Mbata rul-
er is described as a stranger-king in his own right—as might be expected from
the narrative of the Na Kongo incursion: “The Prince of Batta has many Lords
under him, and the natives are called Monsobos, their language being under-
stood in Congo. They are a much ruder tribe than the Mocicongo [the Bakongo
rulers], and slaves coming from them prove extremely obstinate” ([1591] 1881:
62). Regarding the information gathered by Van Wing of the colonization of
the Mpangu area by Na Kongo’s people, a passage in Pigafetta indicates that the
Mpangu ruler of the sixteenth century indeed belonged to the “oldest nobility”
of the kingdom: “The present governor is called Don Francisco Manipango, and
belongs to the oldest nobility of the chiefs of Congo. In councils of state he is al-
ways present, being already an old man and of great prudence, and for fifty years
he has governed this province without any outbreaks” (ibid.: 60). The Mpangu
notable’s political functions in the historic Kongo regime are consistent with the
typical role of former rulers in serial stranger-kingships.
Finally and more recently comes strong linguistic evidence of a pre-Ntinu
Wene dynasty from across the Kwango in an article, “On the origin of the royal
Kongo title ngangula,” by Koen Bostoen, Odjas Ndonda Tshiyavi, and Gilles-
Maurice de Schryver.23 Of this “traditional king’s title,” the authors write:
Thanks to a distinctive diachronic sound change, it is even possible to locate
quite precisely the term’s origin within the KiKongo dialect continuum. Its prov-
enance gives new credi
bility to an earlier but dis carded hypothesis situating the
origins of the Kongo kingdom in the eastern part of the lower Congo, some-
where in-between the Inkisi and Kwango rivers. (2013: 54)
In contrast to the dominant Ntinu Wene narrative, the authors would accord-
ingly revive the “older and alternative scenario [in which] the Kongo kingdom
was founded by conquerors who subjugated an autochthonous population
way around, that Alvaro’s reign motivated the Kwango tradition, would not seem
persuasive, as the Kwango, at that time the territory of the kingdom’s Yaka enemies,
would not be logically pertinent or politically desirable as a newly invented source
of the kingship.
23. Many thanks to Cécile Fromont for bringing this work to my attention.
206
ON KINGS
commonly recognized as Ambundu and came from region known as Kongo dia
Nlaza between the Inkisi and Kwango Rivers” (ibid.: 72). In this connection
they cite a “highly relevant” notice from Montesarchio’s account of his travels in
1650 though the eastern part of the Kongo kingdom and beyond. Here the ruler
of a place called Elema styled himself “Grandfather of the King of Kongo”: a
title analogous to that of the Mbata ruler in the Ntinu Wene regime, a, the lin-
guists correctly observe (ibid.: 73)—and which, as mother’s father to the king,
also signifies the founding marriage of the stranger-prince with the daughter
of the native ruler. One need only add the linguists’ reiterated assurance that
the royal ngangula title “could only have originated in one specific region of the
Kongo, i.e., east of the Inkisi River” (ibid.: 73).
Following Thornton’s (2001: 104) translation of Pigafetta, Mbanza Kongo
in Mpemba “was the center of the state of Congo and the origin of the Ancient
Kings of the land where they were born.” A priori, then, it would be highly un-
likely that “the origin of the Ancient Kings” referred to Ntinu Wene, inasmuch
as the Vungu tradition says Mbanza Kongo was already inhabited by the priest-
chief of an older regime when Ntinu Wene arrived. By all evidence,the political
configuration of the Kongo region when Ntinu Wene arrived was like Borgu
in more ways than one. A galactic polity in a phase of decentralization, Borgu
