The Struggle for Mastery on the Central West African Coast, 1641—1709.[1]
When Portuguese explorers reached the coast of West Central Africa in the late Fifteenth Century, they encountered the Kingdom of Kongo. The two kingdoms began to trade, while the Portuguese also encouraged the growth of Christianity. Soon, African slaves became an increasingly important part of the trade.
Like a stone dropped into a pond, the slave trade sent out a ring of ever-widening ripples. Political leaders saw the income from the trade as the key to increasing their own power.[2] On the one hand, the slave trade added to all the other motives for expansion through conquest by African states. Leading the way, the Kingdom of Kongo sought to conquer neighboring territories whose people could be sold to the Portuguese. Other states soon learned by example or figured it out on their own. On the other hand, the allure of the trade affected the internal stability of the monarchy. The kings of Kongo long monopolized the slave trade to establish dominance over the great nobility. For their part, ambitious nobles hoped to by-pass the royal monopoly in order to increase their own power and independence.[3]
The willingness of the Portuguese to buy slaves from sources other than the royal monopoly became a continuing bone of contention. The eventual arrival of other European traders on the coast of West Central Africa would increase the disputes.
From the 1560s onward, the problem of the succession to the throne of Kongo undermined central authority. Because the succession was elective, kings won the throne by conciliating powerful noblemen. The short reigns—and often violent–deaths of a series of kings demonstrate the depth of the turmoil: Garcia I (r. 1624-1626, overthrown); Ambrosio I (r. 1626-1631, murdered); Alvaro IV (r. 1631-1636, poisoned); Alvaro V (r. 1636, killed in battle); and Alvaro VI (1636-1641, died of natural causes). Factional struggles continued through the 1600s.
To make matters worse, kings traditionally deputized family members to rule the individual provinces. During the disorder of the early 17th Century, several of these appointed officials managed to entrench their positions, looking to make them hereditary in their families. Often, those deputies received license to expand their territory.
The territory or county of Sonyo/Soyo had been a part of the Kingdom of Kongo since at least the 15th Century. By accident of Nature, it occupied what would become a strategically important part of the kingdom of Kongo. Located in the northwest corner of the kingdom, it fronted on both the Atlantic Ocean and the Congo River. It also possessed a potential port at Mpinda on a sheltered bay near the mouth of the Congo. This created the possibility that Sonyo would serve as the intermediary between European traders and the interior of the continent. Portuguese traders and African rulers soon combined to fulfilled that potential. Moreover, under King Alvaro II (r. 1587-1614), Sonyo expanded its autonomy. As time passed, the territory of Sonyo/Soyo became a serious concern to the monarchy.
The Da Silva family posed a different kind of threat to the Kingdom of Kongo. First, Antonio da Silva, Duke of Mbamba,[4] came close to gaining autonomy in his territories, which adjoined those of Sonyo. After the death of King Alvaro II (r. 1587-1614), da Silva had become a king-maker, raising up and then toppling Kings Bernardo II (r. 1614-1615) and Alvaro III (r. 1615-1622).
Fearing these “over-mighty subjects,” King Alvaro III resorted to tried-and-true measures to deal with these problems. When Duke Antonio da Silva died in 1620, Alvaro III put in his own candidate, the future King Pedro II, as duke. Early in his reign, King Pedro II (r. 1622-1624) followed the example of Alvaro III. He placed a trusted relative named Paulo in the position of Duke of Soyo. Paulo would govern Soyo from 1626 to 1641.
The Da Silvas had lost Mbamba, but they weren’t done. In 1636, a Daniel da Silva marched an army toward the capital under the pretense of trying to rescue the young King Alvaro IV (r. 1631-1636) from evil counselors. Da Silva’s army suffered a complete defeat and he was killed in the battle. In 1641, another Daniel da Silva, probably the son of the previous Daniel, seized possession of Sonyo upon the death of Count Paulo. This seizure coincided with the arrival on the throne of King Garcia II (r. 1641-1661).
These internal problems created external problems. Because the state lacked the internal resources to deal with its enemies, the kings of Kongo learned to try to balance foreign powers against each other. In the 17th Century, Kongo came under pressure from Lunda people from the east. The Kongolese called these people the Yaka. To fight off the Yaka, King Alvaro II revived the alliance with the Portuguese. In return for hundreds of Portuguese musketeers, he agreed that the Portuguese could establish a colony south of Kongo in Loanda. Thereafter, the Portuguese continually sought to expand the reach of their authority, trespassing on Kongolese territory in the process. In part, the Portuguese sought to stop the practice along the southern fringes of Kongo of providing a sanctuary for run-away slaves.
King Garcia II (r. 1641-1661) vainly sought to reassert royal power. First, the Dutch were brought in to help fend off the Portuguese. The ensuing war see-sawed between victory and defeat. Dutch warships and soldiers soon expelled the Portuguese from Loanda and helped Garcia II suppress several rebellions within Kongo. However, the Dutch declined to press on against the main Portuguese colony in Angola, signing a peace treaty in 1643. A renewal of the war in 1646 went better, but then ended in defeat with the arrival of the remarkable Portuguese leader Salvador da Sa. De Sa soon drove out the Dutch, then began harrying the southern edges of Kongo.[5] Other tinder also piled up during the 1650s. Kongo continued to offer sanctuary to runaway slaves from Angola and began to explore a possible alliance with the Spanish.
Garcia’s chief domestic preoccupation lay in the north in the rebellious territory of Sonyo, where Daniel da Silva claimed independence from the Kingdom of Kongo. Expeditions launched by Garcia in 1645 and 1646 both came to grief. Thereafter, Sonyo maintained effective independence despite the refusal of the Kingdom of Kongo to formally recognize the fact.
By the time he died in 1661, Garcia II had failed to resolve the chief internal and external threats to the Kingdom of Kongo. His successor, Antonio I (r. 1661-1665) launched a war against the Portuguese, only to be killed in battle, along with many of his chief noblemen. The vacuum of power led to a forty year-long civil war. Different factions fought for Kongo itself, while the counts of Soyo increased their independence by defeating both invasions from Loango and by the Portuguese. Paulo da Silva, Count of Sonyo at the time of the battle that killed King Antonio I, sought to bend the rival claimants to the Kongo throne to his own purposes.
By 1670 Count Paulo had died, being succeeded by Count Estêvão da Silva. One of the pretenders to the Kongolese throne called in the Portuguese to help crush Sonyo and end the meddling of the Da Silvas. Estêvão fell in an early defeat, but his brother Pedro smashed the Portuguese and their African allies in a rematch in October 1670. Thereafter, the Portuguese kept clear of Soyo.
However, the rulers of Sonyo remained anxious. The long civil wars in Kongo had fractured and impoverished the kingdom. It may have appeared that either a decisive victory, or the emergence of new kingdoms from the ruins of the old kingdom, would depend upon drawing upon new resources from outside the old kingdom. In any event, the rulers of Sonyo sought to bolster their position through continuing contacts with the Dutch and appeals directly to Rome for Papal recognition of an independent Sonyo. Moreover, Count Antonio II Barreto da Silva shifted the focus of Soyo’s policy toward the north bank of the Congo River. During the 1680s he fought wars with both the independent kingdoms of Kakongo and Ngoyo. These wars could be interpreted as an attempt to add soldiers and resources to those of Soyo in anticipation of a new struggle for power within Kingo.
[1] I got the title for this section from A.J.P Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (1954). Sheer piracy, except that Taylor got it from Heinrich Friedjung, Der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft in Deutschland 1859 bis 1866 (1897).
[2] In what follows, there is a marked similarity to the role of “conflict diamonds” and “conflict minerals” in modern African strife. In this early case, however, it was the trade in “conflict humans.” See: Greg Campbell, Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), and Philippe Le Billon, Wars of Plunder: Conflicts, Profits and the Politics of Resources (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[3] What follows is largely based on the works of John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1999); Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660, (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and A History of West Central Africa to 1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2020);
[4] A large territory bordered by Portuguese territory in the south, the County of Sonyo on the north, and the Atlantic Ocean on the west.
[5] See: Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595-1674 (Brill, 2011) and C. R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602-1686 (Greenwood Press, 1975).