On 2 July 1706, at Evululu — the mountain camp from which King Pedro IV governed what was left of the Kingdom of Kongo — a woman barely past twenty was tied to wood and burned alive. A man went into the fire beside her: Barro, whom her movement called the Guardian Angel. She had given birth in captivity a short time before. Three people were condemned that day; the third, an old woman, was spared at the last moment, and the infant with her.
That is the last four sentences of her life, and it is the last we will say about the fire.
What she said before it is the reason anyone wrote her name down at all. She said that Christ was born in São Salvador — the abandoned capital of the Kongo — and that São Salvador was Bethlehem. She said the Holy Land was here, and always had been. Then she told a scattered people to go home and rebuild the city, and thousands of them did.
Her name was Kimpa Vita. We use no other name for her, and by the end of this article you will understand why.
Two Registers
This article draws on two bodies of knowledge that do not agree with each other. It will not blend them, and it will not pretend that either one is neutral.
The archive. Missionary reports, papal bulls, Portuguese state papers, and the scholarship built on them — above all John Thornton, who has spent a career on the Kongo. This material is checkable. It is also a brief for the prosecution. Every word of it about Kimpa Vita was written by men who wanted her movement destroyed, and the state papers were produced by the power that was dismantling her kingdom. Two examples, both from this article’s own footwork. The Portuguese ratification of the 1649 Capitulations is dated 22 September 1651 — but in Brásio’s own index that date sits in brackets, meaning the editor supplied it, because the manuscript carries none. And its first clause is not a commercial term at all: it forbids the king of Kongo to let Queen Njinga, Castilians or the Dutch live in or pass through his kingdom, and requires him to report them. That is not a treaty. That is an instruction, filed as a treaty. Checkable is not the same as truthful.
The transmission. The Kemite reading carried by the Sesh Coovi Rekhmirê at the Librairie Tamery Sematawy Maât in Paris, working from Magloire Mpembi Nkosi. This material cannot be checked in the archive’s terms, and it does not accept the archive’s terms. It reads the same events as a Kongo initiate would read them, and its good faith is not in question here.
Neither register gets a free pass. Wherever the transmission is the source of a claim, this article says so in the sentence itself. Wherever the archive is the source, this article says who wrote the document and why. Wherever the two conflict, it reports the conflict rather than choosing quietly.
Cheikh Anta Diop faced the same problem with ancient Egypt, and his answer was not to shout louder than the archive. It was to read the archive against the men who kept it, to make independent lines of evidence converge, and to be so precise that dismissal became impossible. That method has a price, and the price is that you do not get to improve the story. You do not get to cite a document you have not read. You get to be unanswerable.
Who Kimpa Vita Was
She was born around 1684, near Mount Kibangu in the east of the kingdom. Thornton describes her father as a mwana Kongo — a noble of royal stock, but of modest means and power in a country that had been tearing itself apart for a generation. She was not a princess. Royal blood without royal resources, in a place where royal blood had stopped guaranteeing anything.
The date is a reconstruction. No birth record exists; it is calculated backwards from her accuser’s estimate of her age. In the transmission carried by the Sesh Coovi Rekhmirê, following Mpembi Nkosi, the date is given precisely: 12 January 1684 — a precision the archive can neither produce nor refute.
She was a nganga marinda. This is not an inference, and it does not come from us: it comes from the prosecution. Bernardo da Gallo calls her “nganga marinda, that is, a priestess or doctress of a certain superstition or witchcraft called marinda.” When the men building the case against you describe you as a ritual specialist, that is the one fact you can build on.
On the Kimpasi — the sworn initiatory society — the registers separate, and it is worth being exact about how. Thornton writes that it is likely she worked within socially integrative institutions such as the mbumba kindonga or the Kimpasi. That is a scholar’s probability. The Kemite transmission states it without hedging: she was an initiate of the Kimpasi, and her office there is the key to everything that followed. The two readings point the same way and do not carry the same kind of weight. Saying so is the whole discipline.
One hard fact sits underneath both. Around 1703, the Capuchin Marcellino d’Atri had the Kimpasi lodges at Kibangu burned. Whatever she was inside that institution, the institution was being destroyed around her in the year before she began to preach.
The Kingdom She Was Born Into
On 29 October 1665, at Mbwila — Ambuíla in the Portuguese sources — Portuguese forces killed King António I and shattered the royal house. What followed was not defeat but disintegration: rival lineages, decades of civil war, a kingdom consuming itself while ships filled at the coast.
Be precise about the capital, because the popular version gets it wrong. São Salvador — Mbanza Kongo — was not destroyed by a foreign army. In 1678 the deposed king Pedro III marched on it with Jaga mercenaries, killed King Daniel I, and burned most of it. The Kongo destroyed its own capital. For roughly a quarter of a century the rival claimants ruled from mountain fortresses — Kibangu, Evululu, Lemba — and the kingdom stopped existing as a single thing.
That is the country she grew up in: a throne with no city under it.
What She Actually Preached
In 1704, after Easter, coming down from Mount Kibangu, she fell gravely ill. Da Gallo records what she said happened next: “there appeared to her a friar dressed as a Capuchin, who said he was St. Anthony, sent by God into her head to preach to the people.” This is not a vision in the European sense. It is possession by substitution — Kimpa Vita dies, and Saint Anthony speaks through the body.
What that voice said, in her accuser’s own transcription:
“Jesus Christ was born in São Salvador, which was Bethlehem; that He was baptized at Sundi, which was Nazareth; and that Jesus Christ with the Madonna, as also St. Francis, had their origin in Kongo, of the stock of the blacks.”
Read what that does. It does not ask to be admitted into a sacred history located somewhere else. It moves sacred history. Bethlehem is the ruined capital. The Holy Land is the Kongo. And the practical order follows in the same breath: go back and repopulate São Salvador, or answer to God for it.
The rest is of one piece. The Virgin born to an enslaved woman in the household of the marquise Nzimba; Saint Francis from the house of the marquis of Vunda. Saint Anthony placed above the angels and above Mary. The cross and the images rejected. And in the prayer her movement sang, the sacraments subordinated to something else entirely: God wants the intention; it is the intention that God takes. Marriage, baptism, confession — without intention, they do nothing.
She sent out disciples. The sources call them the Little Anthonys.
She was no pacifist mystic. Pedro Constantino da Silva — Kibenga — was the captain general Pedro IV had sent to resettle São Salvador. He moved his forces into the city and put them behind her. That alliance is what turned a preacher the king could tolerate into a political problem the king could not survive.
She Won
Hold two dates together.
By 1704 and 1705, on her word, the abandoned capital was full of people again. She did not live to see what became of it. She was captured near Evululu and burned in July 1706 — and her movement held the city without her for three more years.
On 15 February 1709, Pedro IV marched on São Salvador and took it. Kibenga was killed trying to surrender, and beheaded. The Antonians were broken. And Mbanza Kongo — the thing she had preached, the capital restored as the seat of the kingdom — stood again, permanently, for the first time in thirty-one years.
The king who burned her completed her programme. That is not irony. That is what winning looks like when you are not there to collect it.
The Second Death
Then comes the killing that happens after the fire.
The name. Da Gallo writes of “a black woman of Kongo, called Kimpa Vita, and in baptism Beatriz.” The baptismal name is attested — by her accuser, in the same sentence where he calls her a sorceress. What is not attested is the baptism: no register, no date, no officiant. Thornton’s own biographical notice does not mention it at all, and the widely repeated detail that she was baptised in infancy at her father’s insistence traces to a single conjectural sentence by a later scholar, hardened into fact by encyclopedias. The Sesh Coovi Rekhmirê goes further and rejects the baptism outright, treating “Dona Beatriz” as a colonial fabrication. We do not settle it. We state what the archive can and cannot show: it can show that her accusers called her Beatriz. It cannot show that anyone ever baptised her.
The son. She named him António — the child of the saint. The missionaries who took him decided the name was unsuitable and baptised him Jerónimo. She lost her name to the record; her son lost his within weeks.
The comparison. She has been called the Congolese Joan of Arc for well over a century — as though an African woman becomes legible only once she has been measured against a European one.
The category. Heretic, in the missionary reports. Then possessed. Then illuminated. Then, in twentieth-century social science, a messianic symptom, a syncretist, a millenarian episode. Each label moves her one step out of politics and one step deeper into pathology. A woman who relocated the Holy Land and repopulated a capital becomes a case study in religious deviance.
Note the mechanism. The facts are not denied. The frame is set by someone else, and the frame does the work.
Read the Ledger, Not the Verdict
Here is what the same archive records, in its own hand, about the institution that wanted her dead.
This section is shorter than an earlier version of this article, and deliberately so. Several claims that circulate widely about the Kongo mission — a bishop’s personal slaving, a Jesuit school funded by an annual quota of exported captives, a friar deporting Kongo ritual specialists to a tribunal in Brazil in 1653 — trace back to a single non-academic compilation and cannot be verified. One of them is not merely unsourced but impossible: there was never a standing Inquisition tribunal in Brazil. And 1653 turns out to be the date of a text that friar wrote, not of an arrest. We removed them. We say so rather than deleting quietly, because quiet deletion is the archive’s method, not ours.
What replaced them is worse for the accused.
1452. The bull Dum Diversas, issued by Nicholas V on 18 June and addressed to Afonso V of Portugal, authorises the reduction of unbelievers to perpetual servitude. It is extended by Romanus Pontifex on 8 January 1455. Diogo Cão reaches the mouth of the Kongo river in 1482. The licence precedes the encounter by thirty years. Whatever happened afterwards, it did not begin as a misunderstanding.
1619. On 7 September, Dom Frei Manuel Baptista Soares, Bishop of Angola and Kongo — a see whose cathedral then stood in São Salvador itself — sends the Crown a report on the Kongo people. They have, he writes, no virtue, no shame, no truth and no constancy, except in evil. Read it once, slowly, as a specimen of the register in which an entire people was being filed.
1649–1651. After Portugal retook Luanda from the Dutch, Salvador Correia de Sá presented terms to Kongo. On 15 April 1649, Kongo’s ambassadors at Luanda signed them: the island of Luanda, all lands south of the Bengo, rights to every mine in the kingdom, an indemnity, tax exemptions, and control of Kongo’s foreign relations. Garcia II paid the indemnity. He never ratified. He had already filed counter-terms of his own. On 22 September 1651 — the date supplied by an editor, because the manuscript bears none — Lisbon issued a letter of ratification anyway. So the accurate sentence is not “the Kongo surrendered.” It is: Portugal ratified, alone, a document the Kongo had refused, then acted as though it bound him.
One consequence is easy to miss. The island of Luanda held the royal monopoly on nzimbu, the shells that were the kingdom’s currency. Kongo had conceded and then recovered those rights in the 1570s under Álvaro I. Between 1649 and 1651 Garcia II loses them for good and switches the kingdom’s money to raffia cloth. A state does not change its currency for pleasure.
The mission’s own books. The religious orders in Angola did not tax the slave trade. They owned people. The Jesuits held 1,080 enslaved men, women and children on the eve of their expulsion in 1760, 750 of them working the estates in Luanda’s hinterland. Their college in Luanda had 152 as early as 1594; its slave quarter grew, in one historian’s phrase, as big as some towns in Portugal. The Third Order of Saint Francis counted 97 captives in Luanda in a 1778 inventory. The Italian Capuchins, twelve. The orders bought and sold enslaved people collectively, hired out the skilled ones, and — this is the historian’s conclusion, not ours — saw slavery as a way to finance and sustain the missionary work itself.
Be exact even here, because exactness is the weapon. The Capuchins both profited from the Portuguese trade and, at times, denounced it to Rome. The record is not a cartoon. It does not need to be.
1709. And this entry belongs at the end. When Pedro IV broke the Antonians at São Salvador, captured followers of Kimpa Vita’s movement were sold into the Atlantic trade. Her people did not only die at home. They were shipped.
An Institution, Not a Faith
Be precise about what stands accused, because the distinction is the whole point.
The Kongo knew Nzambi Mpungu before any ship arrived. The missionaries reached for Kikongo words that already existed — Nzambi for God, nkisi and ukisi for the holy, moyo for spirit, nganga for priest — and the Bible became nkanda ukisi, the charm in the form of a book. But this was not simple theft of vocabulary. Kongo interpreters and Kongo priests, men like Manuel Roboredo, sat at the table where that vocabulary was negotiated. The word for baptism became kudia mungwa — to eat the salt — and it is attested in Kikongo mouths from 1584.
The message a religion carries and the machinery an empire builds around it are not the same thing. It was the machinery that kept the books above.
What followed is genuinely disputed. Thornton argues the Kongo converted voluntarily and built an autonomous African Catholic church, keeping control of theological content and church finance — which, in his reading, is why it never became an instrument of foreign rule. Cécile Fromont reaches a compatible conclusion through the visual record and throws out the word “syncretism” entirely: what the Kongo elite built was not a mixture but a new system in which foreign and local elements had been redefined into each other. Against both stands the reading of the Sesh Coovi Rekhmirê and the Kemite school, which treats the Antonian movement as camouflage — wearing the conqueror’s symbols in order to keep doing the ancestors’ work underneath.
We will not pretend this is settled. We will note the sequence the archive itself shows: the chiefs were baptised first — the ruler of Soyo, then Nzinga a Nkuwu in 1491, then his officers and nobles — and the population followed. A court may adopt a religion as an instrument of power. That is not the same as a people choosing one.
What Crossed the Water
Here is where confident writing goes wrong, including writing sympathetic to her.
The solid link between Kimpa Vita and the Americas is not a chant. It is a shipment. Her movement outlived her by three years, and when it fell in 1709 its captured adherents were sold across the Atlantic. People who had heard her preach were put on ships. That is documented, and it is enough.
Past that point the ground softens, and saying so is the job.
The numbers are contested, and contested now. In 2024 the journal The Americas gave a whole forum to this question under the title “Kongomania.” David Geggus argued that a generation of scholarship, following two articles Thornton published in the 1990s, has substantially overstated the Kongo presence in Saint-Domingue. His figures: West Central Africans were 46.9 per cent of arrivals between 1782 and 1791 — but people labelled “Congo” were around 24 per cent of the enslaved population when the revolution began. Arrivals are not population, and his central charge is that the two have been silently swapped. Thornton, Christina Mobley and James Sweet answered him in the same issue; he answered them back. Nobody won. Quoting the 47 per cent without saying who produced it, and why, would mean using a man’s evidence against his own conclusion.
The Kanga chant does not do what it is asked to do. The text Moreau de Saint-Méry printed in 1797 reads “Canga bafio té / Canga moune dé lé / Canga do ki la / Canga li.” The familiar “Kanga Mundele, Kanga Ndoki” is a modern normalisation of it into standard Kikongo. Moreau gives it as a general Vodou chant with no connection to 1791; the tie to the Bois Caïman ceremony first appears when C. L. R. James used it as a chapter epigraph in 1938. The language is Kikongo — specialists accept that much. But Geggus and Thornton both read it as a formula against sorcery, aimed at black and white alike, not an oath of insurrection. And the claim that it descends from the prayer of Kimpa Vita’s movement hits a wall: the Kikongo original of that prayer does not survive. It exists only in Italian translation inside a Capuchin report, and the Kikongo version scholars work from is a modern reconstruction. You cannot trace a word back to a text that no longer exists in the language you are tracing.
Stono is a strong argument, not a proof. Thornton argued in 1991 that the rebels of the 1739 rising in South Carolina were most likely Kongolese Catholics — the “Angola” label, Portuguese speakers, the pull of Spanish Florida, military competence consistent with veterans of the Kongo civil wars. It is elegant. But no primary source says those men were Catholic. It is inferred, and other historians read the revolt through local conditions instead.
And a general caution. Kongo institutions are richly documented in Cuba and Brazil — the cabildos de nación congo, the crowning of kings and queens of Kongo. They are not everywhere. Palmares belongs largely to the Mbundu and Imbangala world, not the Kongo. French colonial Louisiana was overwhelmingly Senegambian. “Kongo” is not a synonym for Atlantic Africa, and using it as one costs us the precision that is our only real weapon.
What survives all of this is not a chant. It is a method. There is a difference between revolt and resistance. Revolt is spontaneous anger — a bush fire, spectacular, over when the fuel runs out. Resistance is prepared: spiritual first, then political, then military. It is taught, which is exactly why it outlives the person who carried it, and why her movement held a capital for three years after she was ash.
For a family in Montreal or Toronto reading this, that is the inheritance. Not a grievance. A discipline.
What Nobody Knows
A griot who hides an uncertainty has already broken the chain.
- Her birth date. No contemporary record. “Around 1684” is calculated from an estimate of her age. The transmission gives 12 January 1684; the archive can neither confirm nor deny it.
- Her baptism. Her accuser says she was Beatriz in baptism. No register, no date, no officiant survives, and Thornton’s own notice is silent on it. The Kemite reading rejects it entirely. Unresolved.
- Her Kimpasi office. Thornton says probable. The transmission says certain. The archive says nothing directly.
- The date of the fire. Thornton and the literature say 2 July 1706. Da Gallo’s own report says “Sunday, the first of July, 1706” — but 1 July 1706 was a Thursday. One of those is wrong and we cannot say which.
- Her trial. The record has not survived. Thornton says so plainly. We know the sentence; we do not know the proceedings, and the Capuchins who wanted her condemned were not in the room.
- Whether death by fire belonged to Kongo law. This one is not merely open, it may be undecidable. No written source on the Kongo predates 1483, so “precolonial Kongo penal law” is itself a reconstruction from post-contact European texts. Thornton establishes that the jurisdiction and the charge were Kongo. He does not say the stake was a Kongo penalty, and nobody has shown that it was — or that it wasn’t.
- The full text of the Capitulations. Brásio’s volume XI, document 33, runs from page 84 to 87. We have read its index and one clause quoted verbatim in the scholarly literature. We have not read the pages. We are not going to write as though we had.
- The Kanga chant’s descent from her movement’s prayer is not established, and since the prayer survives only in translation, it may not be establishable.
We would rather publish eight open questions than one confident invention.
What We Carry
Asked to describe how she died, the Sesh Coovi Rekhmirê declines. Among higher initiates it is held forbidden to detail in public the tortures inflicted on those who came to accomplish the good. He will not hand her body over to be looked at a second time.
We follow that instruction here, and we recommend it generally. The spectacle of African suffering is not the same as African history, and a great deal of what passes for remembrance is really just the fire, replayed.
Kimpa Vita looked at a kingdom that had lost its capital and its centre, said the Holy Land was here and always had been, and told a scattered people to go home and rebuild. Thousands did. Three years after they killed her, the man who killed her finished the job she started.
Diop did not win by raising his voice. He won by being impossible to refute. That is the standard, and it is the only one worth wearing.
We do not wear her death. We wear her line.
— Djeli Malan
She said the sacred was here, not somewhere else.
That is the idea we build on: heritage worn, not observed. See the Balanced Heritage collection.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Kimpa Vita?
Kimpa Vita was a Kongo religious and political leader, born around 1684 near Mount Kibangu into a family of royal descent but modest means. She was a nganga marinda — a ritual specialist, as her own accusers described her. From 1704 she led a movement teaching that Christ, the Virgin and the saints originated in the Kongo and that sacred history was located there, and calling for the repopulation of the abandoned capital, Mbanza Kongo. She was allied with the general Pedro Constantino da Silva. She was burned at Evululu on 2 July 1706, in her early twenties by her accuser’s estimate.
Who executed Kimpa Vita?
She was tried and executed under Kongo law during the reign of King Pedro IV, by the king and his royal council — not by the Portuguese Inquisition, and not by Portugal, which held no direct sovereignty over the Kongo at that date. The Capuchins Bernardo da Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca were her accusers and wanted her condemned, but according to Thornton they were not present at the trial itself; they interrogated her afterwards and obtained a private abjuration. Some accounts describe the tribunal as ecclesiastical; Thornton’s reading, followed here, is that it was a secular Kongo court. The record of the proceedings has not survived. This distinction is uncomfortable and it is accurate; erasing it removes the political dimension of what happened.
What happened to Kimpa Vita’s child?
He was spared. She had given birth shortly before her capture — she was found nursing him, which mattered because her movement preached chastity. Three people were condemned: Kimpa Vita, her follower Barro, and an old woman. The woman and the infant were spared; Kimpa Vita and Barro burned. The child was handed to the missionaries and baptised. She had named him António; the priests judged that name unsuitable and renamed him Jerónimo. Note that several reference works — including two entries in the same biographical dictionary that hosts Thornton’s own — state that the baby was burned with her. Thornton and da Gallo both say otherwise.
Why is almost nothing known in her own words?
No writing by Kimpa Vita survives. Every account of her preaching comes through Capuchin missionaries hostile to her movement — principally Bernardo da Gallo’s 1710 report to the Propaganda Fide, alongside Lorenzo da Lucca, Marcellino d’Atri and Luca da Caltanisetta. Even the prayer her movement sang, the Salve Antoniana, survives only in Italian translation; the Kikongo text scholars cite is a modern reconstruction. No Kongolese testimony about her is preserved.
Did Kimpa Vita say that Jesus was Black?
This is a simplification of something sharper. The missionary sources report her teaching that Jesus, Mary and Saint Francis originated in the Kongo, that Christ was born in São Salvador — “which was Bethlehem” — and baptised at Nsundi. That is a claim about nation, and about where sacred history physically happened. It is not a claim about race in the modern sense, a category that did not yet operate as it does today. The distinction is not a technicality: it is the difference between a political theology of the Kongo and a twentieth-century idea projected backwards.
Did Kimpa Vita inspire the Haitian Revolution?
There is no documented filiation. What is documented is that her movement’s captured followers were sold into the Atlantic trade after 1709. Beyond that the ground is contested: West Central Africans were around 47 per cent of arrivals in Saint-Domingue between 1782 and 1791, but people labelled “Congo” were roughly 24 per cent of the enslaved population by 1791, and David Geggus has argued that Kongo influence has been systematically overstated — a debate he, Thornton, Mobley and Sweet conducted in print in 2024. The claim that the insurgents’ Kanga chant descends from her movement’s prayer is not established and probably cannot be, since the prayer does not survive in Kikongo.
What were the Capitulations of 1649?
Terms presented at Luanda in April 1649 by the Portuguese commander Salvador Correia de Sá, after Portugal retook Luanda from the Dutch. Kongo’s ambassadors signed them on 15 April; the demands included the island of Luanda, all lands south of the Bengo river, rights to all mines in the kingdom, an indemnity, tax exemptions and control of Kongo’s foreign relations. King Garcia II paid the indemnity but never ratified the agreement, and had submitted counter-terms of his own. Lisbon nonetheless issued a letter of ratification and confirmation, published in Brásio’s Monumenta Missionaria Africana from an original at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino; its date of 22 September 1651 was supplied by the editor, as the manuscript carries none. Its first clause forbids the king of Kongo to shelter Queen Njinga, Castilians or the Dutch. The loss of the island of Luanda ended the kingdom’s monopoly on nzimbu shell currency.
Did the Catholic missions in Kongo and Angola profit from slavery?
The religious orders in Angola were themselves substantial slaveholders. The Jesuits owned 1,080 enslaved people before their expulsion in 1760; their Luanda college held 152 as early as 1594. The Third Order of Saint Francis counted 97 captives in Luanda in 1778, the Italian Capuchins twelve. The orders bought and sold enslaved people collectively and worked them on their estates, and the historian who established these figures concludes that they treated slavery as a means of financing missionary work. At the same time, Capuchins at points denounced Portuguese trading practices to Rome. Both things are true, and the second does not cancel the first.
Was the Antonian movement syncretism?
Disputed — and the term itself is the problem. Thornton reads Kongo Christianity as an autonomous African church, voluntarily adopted and locally controlled. Cécile Fromont rejects “syncretism” outright, arguing that Kongo elites did not mix two systems but redefined both into a single new one. The Kemite school, following the Sesh Coovi Rekhmirê, reads the Antonian movement as camouflage — political resistance wearing Christian symbols. What all three refuse is the idea that two pure religions met for the first time in 1491, which is not what the Kongo of 1704 was.
A Note on Sources
Claims marked in this article as coming from the transmission of the Librairie Tamery Sematawy Maât are drawn from the methodical reading of Kimpa Vita given by the Sesh Coovi Rekhmirê, working from Magloire Mpembi Nkosi’s Kimpa Vita, la fille de Ne Kongo. That work is a historical novel and the reading is a critical commentary on it; neither is used here as a source of documentary fact. Where the transmission asserts something the archive cannot verify, this article reports it as the transmission’s position and says so.
Everything else rests on the missionary reports, on Portuguese state papers as published by Brásio, and on the peer-reviewed literature. Three claims present in an earlier version of this article have been removed for want of a traceable source: an annual quota of exported captives said to have funded the Jesuit school at São Salvador; the deportation of Kongo ritual specialists to an Inquisition tribunal in Brazil in 1653, which is additionally impossible, since no standing tribunal existed there; and a personal imputation of slave trading against the bishop of 1619. Documented figures on the orders’ slaveholding have taken their place. We record the removals rather than deleting them quietly.
Sources
- Bernardo da Gallo. Relazione to the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide, 1710. Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide, Rome. Italian edition: Teobaldo Filesi, “Nazionalismo e religione nel Congo all’inizio del 1700: la setta degli antoniani,” Africa (Rome) 26/4, 1971, pp. 463–508.
- Brásio, António (ed.). Monumenta Missionaria Africana: África Ocidental. Agência-Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1952–1988. Vol. VI (1611–1621), doc. 123, “Relação do Bispo do Congo a el-Rei,” 7 September 1619, pp. 375–384. Vol. X (1647–1650), doc. 113, “Condições de Paz do Rei do Congo,” 19 February 1649. Vol. XI (1651–1655), doc. 33, “Carta de Ratificação e Confirmação das Capitulações com o Rei do Congo,” [Lisbon, 22 September 1651], pp. 84–87; original: Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Angola, Cx. 3. (Date and place supplied by the editor; index consulted, pages not.)
- Cuvelier, Jean (trans. and ed.). Relations sur le Congo du Père Laurent de Lucques (1700–1717). Institut Royal Colonial Belge, Mémoires, t. XXXII, fasc. 2, Brussels, 1953.
- Jadin, Louis. “Le Congo et la secte des Antoniens. Restauration du royaume sous Pedro IV et la ‘Saint Antoine’ congolaise (1694–1718).” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 33, 1961, pp. 411–615.
- Bontinck, François (trans. and ed.). Diaire congolais (1690–1701) de Fra Luca da Caltanisetta. Nauwelaerts, Louvain–Paris, 1970.
- Nicholas V. Dum Diversas, 18 June 1452; Romanus Pontifex, 8 January 1455.
- Gomez, Coovi (Sesh Rekhmirê). “Lecture méthodique de Kimpa Vita, la fille de Ne Kongo de Mpembi Nkosi,” Live n°37. Librairie Tamery Sematawy Maât / Université Panafricaine des Savoirs Imhotep, Paris. (Critical commentary on a work, video format.)
- Mpembi Nkosi, Magloire. Kimpa Vita, la fille de Ne Kongo. Éditions Anibwe, coll. Sankofa, 2012. (Historical novel; the work under critical discussion in the source above. Not used here as a source of documentary fact.)
- Thornton, John K. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. Cambridge University Press, 1998. (Title cited as published; this publication does not use that name for her.)
- Thornton, John K. “Kimpa Vita.” Dictionary of African Christian Biography.
- Thornton, John K. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718. University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
- Thornton, John K. A History of West Central Africa to 1850. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Thornton, John K. “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750.” Journal of African History 25/2, 1984, pp. 147–167.
- Thornton, John K. “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” American Historical Review 96/4, 1991, pp. 1101–1113.
- Thornton, John K. “Afro-Christian Syncretism in the Kingdom of Kongo.” Journal of African History 54/1, 2013, pp. 53–77.
- Thornton, John K. “Kongomania and the Numbers Game.” The Americas 81/2, 2024, pp. 265–274.
- Geggus, David. “Kongomania and the Haitian Revolution.” The Americas 81/2, 2024, pp. 219–247.
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