Labor and Movement

The movement of people was integral to the inception of the Kingdom of Kongo and its systems of labor. In the early 15th century Kingdom of Kongo founder Lukeni lue Nimi moved the capital of the loose federation of communities under his control to a mountainous area originally ruled by Mabambolo Mabpangalla. It is here where we gain the first reference of slavery in Kongo. Mambabolo Manpagalla was defeated and his descendants were said to have been either driven out or taken as slaves. While a great deal of information is not known about the Kingdom of Kongo's use of slaves before Portuguese arrival, it is fairly accepted that most of the slaves used by the Kingdom were foreign captives, taken in through Kongo's military expansions and civil wars. The majority of people born in Kongo were protected from becoming slaves and facing exportation. This would change as the Portuguese would become more insatiable with their need for labor, and internal political conflicts would lead to the fragmentation of the kingdom's centralization allowing some native born Kongo to be taken as slaves. 

A Kingdom of Town and Country

Historian John K Thornton, describes Kongo as being made of two economic sectors- the royal city of Sao Salvador and the countryside- both sectors dominated by the state. The countryside relied on a village style economy, which was common in much of central Africa. In this style economy, land was communally owned, maintained, and harvested between households that controlled the production and dissemination of goods. While life revolved around labor for nearly all members of Kongo society, exempting the very elite, there was a division of labor between men and women. Men would typically take on the role of clearing forests, producing palm wine and oil, hunting, and participating in the long distance trade of food goods, slats, animal hide, metals, and fabrics. Women would do varied agricultural cultivation, care for domestic animals, and run household work. This form of village economy would produce a social surplus, which would be subjected to a small consuming class of village rulers and also used to support the taxes required by the state. To maintain centralization and their upperclass lifestyle, large sections of the urban elite were sent to live in the countryside for periods of time to regulate the collection of taxes. Kongo villages were mainly self-sufficient, but there was a fairly large local market and trade system, which suggests the presence of specialized labor.

The city of Sao Salvador was surrounded by large agricultural plantations that were worked by slaves. These plantations would support the city's need for food, as bulk transportation of goods from the outer towns and villages was time consuming and difficult. Evidence suggests that the slaves working on these plantations faced a fair amount of autonomy. While they worked on producing foods for the nobility, they were allowed to run their own self-sufficient households and were integrated into the villages. Therefore, the slave masters did not hold complete control over their lives as they did in other plantation labor systems across the Atlantic. While there was a fair amount of economic leeway across the Kingdom of Kongo, both the villages and towns were dominated politically and economically by the representatives of Kongo's ruling class.

The Portuguese, Internal Politics, and Slavery

The movement of the Portuguese into Kongo in the late 15th century brought change to the region's politics, religion, and regulation of labor, although there is debate over how much of that change was due to the Portuguese or to internal Kongo politics. Allowing that the Portuguese did have some amount of influence on the Kongo people and political system, and that this relationship was not one-sided for the rulers of Kongo, we can view changes in the Kingdom of Kongo as a mixture of external and internal actions and reactions. Very early on in the Portuguese-Kongo relationship there is an example of the effects of the shifting of people. In the 1470s, Portuguese sailors had claimed the island of Sao Tomé off the western coast of Africa. In Sao Tomé they created large sugar fields, which required large amounts of labor. After establishing relations with Kongo, the Portuguese looked to the kingdom to provide labor for Sao Tomé and other Portuguese territories. King Afonso, traded slaves as commodity exports to the Portuguese, but took issue with Portuguese traders going outside of the established system and capturing those who were not deemed as slaves in Kongo. He writes to Portugal about the effect of the displacement of people on the Kongo population and the Portuguese circumventing of the trade system's effect on the internal political structure of Kongo society. For example, Portuguese traders began forgoing the long journey to the capital to retrieve slaves and began trading in the coastal town of Soyo. Officials in this province, which was intentionally kept relatively impoverished in order to suppress political power, became wealthy from this trade and an alternative localized economy was developed weakening the central authority. In next week's post I will expand upon the conflicts that followed the movement of people through the lens of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade.

Birmingham, David. 1965. “SPECULATIONS ON THE KINGDOM OF KONGO”. Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 8. Historical Society of Ghana: 1–10. 

Heywood, Linda M.. 2009. “Slavery and Its Transformation in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1491-1800”. The Journal of African History 50 (1). Cambridge University Press: 1–22.

Thornton, John. 1977. “Demography and History in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1550-1750”. The Journal of African History 18 (4). Cambridge University Press: 507–30. http://www.jstor.org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/stable/180830.

Thornton, John K.. 1982. “The Kingdom of Kongo, Ca. 1390-1678. The Development of an African Social Formation (le Royaume Du Kongo, Ca. 1390-1678. Développement D'une Formation Sociale Africaine)”. Cahiers D'études Africaines 22 (87/88). EHESS: 325–42. http://www.jstor.org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/stable/4391812.