In 1415, a Portuguese armada, carrying the largest army ever assembled by a Portuguese king, crossed the Mediterranean on a new crusade against Islam, aiming to capture the fortress town of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast. On board was Prince Henry, the ambitious 21-year-old son of King João I, determined to make his mark as a crusader and hoping that the capture of Ceuta would prove to be only the start of Portuguese military expansion in Africa.
Ceuta was a valuable prize. It was one of the strongest fortresses in the Mediterranean, guarding its western approaches; it was a major commercial port, well known for its wheat exports; and it was one of the northern terminals of the trans-Saharan caravan trade routes bringing gold, ivory and pepper across the desert from the Muslim kingdoms of the Sahel. When Ceuta fell to the Portuguese in a single day in August 1415, its capture was greeted in Europe as a great triumph. Portuguese envoys proclaimed the town to be the ‘gateway and key to all Africa’. From wealthy traders captured at Ceuta, the Portuguese learned about the sources of gold shipments crossing the Sahara. Some traders spoke of a ‘River of Gold’ far to the south flowing into the Atlantic.
But Ceuta remained no more than an isolated enclave on the north African coast, surrounded by Muslim adversaries and dependent on Portugal for supplies. The gold trade lay beyond reach. Henry’s attentions turned to other ventures in the Atlantic, to the Madeira Islands, the Canary Islands and the Azores. As Portugal’s sea power increased, however, he resolved to find a sea route to the goldfields of black Africa.
Hitherto, sailors had ventured no further south along the Atlantic coast of Africa than Cape Bojador, a barren coastal landmark 130 miles further south than the Canary Islands, notorious for its fogs and heavy surf. The prevailing wind and current there, running from the north, made return journeys hazardous. Several ships probing southwards had never returned. Beyond the cape lay what medieval geographers knew as the ‘Torrid Zone’ – a treacherous sea and an inhospitable coastline stretching for hundreds of miles into the unknown. In Arabic, Cape Bojador was known as Bon Khatar: ‘Father of Danger’.
Under Henry’s direction, Portugal pioneered major advances in shipbuilding and navigation. The Portuguese fleet was equipped with newly designed caravels, which were highly manoeuvrable and ideally suited for reconnaissance along unknown coasts.
Year after year, Henry sent expeditions southwards along the African coast. His aim by now was not only to outflank the trans-Saharan routes and gain direct access to the goldfields but to search beyond for the land of Prester John, said to be cut off from the rest of Christendom by the Muslim powers that controlled north Africa.
The exploration of the west African coast was swift and dramatic. In 1434, a Portuguese crew sailed around Cape Bojador and returned safely against the wind. In 1436, Portuguese mariners reached an inlet 250 miles beyond Cape Bojador, naming it Rio d’Oro in the mistaken belief that they had discovered the River of Gold. Finding only colonies of seals basking in huge numbers on the sandbanks and islands in the estuary, they sailed further southwards, keeping within sight of the surf that continuously broke on the desert shores. In 1441, they reached Cape Blanco and erected there a tall wooden cross – a padrão – marking their arrival in the name of Christianity, a tradition followed by other Portuguese seafarers exploring the coast of Africa. Further south, they encountered Idzagen Berber fishermen on Arguin Island where a perennial spring provided supplies of fresh water. Discovering that Arguin was located only six days’ travel from the most westerly of the trans-Saharan caravan routes, they set up a permanent trading post there, hoping to outflank desert traffic with a sea route to the north. In 1445, Portuguese mariners reached the mouth of the Senegal River which traditionally marked the boundary between the Berber and Arab tribes of the Sahara and ‘the Land of the Blacks’. They called the local inhabitants there ‘Guineus’ after the Moroccan Berber word for ‘blacks’.
The volume of trade that the Portuguese managed to pick up was initially meagre. In their dealings with Arab and Sanhaja merchants, they bartered textiles, clothing and wheat in exchange for luxury items such as antelope skins, ostrich eggs, civet musk, gum Arabic and small quantities of gold dust. They loaded up large quantities of seal skins and seal oil. And they also dabbled in the slave trade, acquiring some slaves through barter and others in clashes and raids on the local population.
The trade in slaves soon turned out to be the most profitable part of their business. In 1444, a Portuguese official, Lançarote de Freitas, backed by a consortium of merchant-adventurers from the Algarve port of Lagos, mounted an expedition of six caravels to islands on the Arguin Bank with the express purpose of capturing slaves. In a ruthless attack, armed mariners seized some 235 men, women and children, most of them from poor Idzagen fishing families, killing those who resisted. The captives were crammed on board the caravels and kept bound in filth and stench for six weeks on the return voyage to Lagos.
Their arrival onshore on 8 August 1444 became a public spectacle, watched by crowds of Lagos residents. Prince Henry himself was on hand to supervise the proceedings, mounted on a horse. The captives were marched to an open space outside one of the town gates and divided into five groups. One group of forty-six of the best slaves was set aside for Henry for his share of the booty. The remainder were either retained by their new owners or put up for auction. The event was described by a court chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, in the Chronicle of Guinea:
These people, assembled together on that open place, were an astonishing sight to behold . . . Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards the heavens fixedly and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe to help them; others struck their faces with their hands and threw themselves full length on the ground; yet others lamented in the form of a chant, according to the custom of their native land, and though the words of the language in which they sang could not be understood by our people, the chant revealed clearly enough the degree of their grief. To increase their anguish still more, those who had charge of the division then arrived and began to separate them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their husbands and brother from brother. No account was taken of friendship or relationship, but each one ending up where chance placed him . . .
Dividing them up proved difficult:
For as soon as the children who had been assigned to one group saw the parents in another they jumped up and ran towards them; mothers clasped their other children in their arms and lay face down on the ground, accepting wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let their children be torn from them . . .
According to Zurara, a total of 927 ‘infidels’ were shipped to Portugal from west Africa between 1441 and 1447. Henry justified the trade by claiming that its only purpose was to make Christians of infidels and pagans; any ‘inconvenience’ suffered by a converted slave in this life, he argued, was insignificant compared to the benefits of eternal salvation that conversion to Christianity brought.
On many occasions, however, the Portuguese encountered local African rulers only too willing to act as business partners in the slave trade. Slavery formed an integral part of African societies on the west coast. Slaves owned by rulers, state officials and wealthy merchants were commonly used as porters, agricultural labourers and domestic servants. In the absence of land ownership, they represented a major source of wealth. They were also a principal commodity in trade, regularly exchanged for gold, ivory or copper, an essential medium of transaction. They served in effect as a form of convertible currency, preferred to any other. Indeed, the development of commerce was partly a function of the growth of the slave trade.
Enslavement was an organised activity. It was frequently the result of wars of expansion or civil wars. In some cases, rulers of an expanding state regarded enslavement of a conquered population as a useful means of increasing their wealth and status and building armies; in other cases, slaves were simply a by-product of political conflict which could be turned to profit. There was consequently a large market in slaves readily available to passing seafarers with goods to exchange.
On their voyages exploring the Senegal River in the 1440s, the Portuguese established regular trading links with two Wolof kingdoms, Walo and Cayor, long accustomed to dealing in slaves and other commodities with Arab and Sanhaja merchants, exchanging them for Barbary horses which had survived the journey across the Sahara.
‘The King,’ wrote the Venetian adventurer, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, ‘supports himself by raids, which result in many slaves from his own as well as neighbouring countries. He employs these slaves . . . in cultivating the land . . . but he also sells many to the [Moors] in return for horses and other goods.’ Horses were highly prized. According to da Mosto, the Wolofs would offer from nine to fourteen slaves for a single horse.
Hired by Henry to help in the exploration of Africa, da Mosto made two voyages to the coast of ‘Guinea’, as the west African coast was known, in 1455 and 1456, recording his experiences in Le Navigazioni atlantiche. On his first voyage he was invited by the damel of Cayor, a Muslim, to visit his capital about twenty miles inland from the mouth of the Senegal River. The damel’s kingdom was little more than a collection of villages, but da Mosto was impressed by his retinue of 200 attendants and the elaborate ceremonies of his court.
. . . it cannot be doubted that rulers like him are not there because they are rich in treasure or money since they possess neither, nor do they have any income to spend. Nevertheless, in terms of the ceremonial which surrounds them and the size of their retinues, they may truly be regarded as lords and rulers [signori] like any lords anywhere else. To speak the truth, they are more revered and feared by their subjects and better accompanied by more people than are our lords [in Italy] by theirs.
On his second voyage, da Mosto ventured up the Gambia River to the capital of the king of Bati where, once again, the most valuable commodity on offer was slaves. Between 1450 and 1458 a dozen ships left Portugal each year for the Guinea coast, some making a profit as high as 800 per cent.
The Portuguese soon replaced their early strategy of raid-and-trade with straightforward commerce. Africans were recruited to serve as interpreters and intermediaries. In 1456, the Portuguese crown dispatched Diogo Gomes to negotiate treaties of peace with African rulers on the coast, enabling Portuguese traders to travel freely under their protection.
Trade with the Guinea coast became sufficiently lucrative to attract a prominent Lisbon merchant, Fernão Gomes, in 1469 to acquire a five-year monopoly on trade beyond the Cape Verde Islands; in exchange, Gomes was required to pay an annual rent, commit his ships to explore 400 miles of new coastline each year, and sell to the Portuguese crown all the ivory he could obtain from local Africans at a fixed price.
Gomes’s ships advanced rapidly around the great bulge of west Africa. Along the coast of what became Liberia, his agents developed a profitable trade in malaguetta pepper – ‘grains of paradise’, as they were called in Europe. The coastline there became known as the ‘Grain Coast’. Further east, along the surf-bound shore, where there were no good harbours and where dense forests lined the coast and the local population was thinly scattered, the main trade was in ivory; and here the coast became known as the Tooth Coast or the Ivory Coast.
Then in 1472, after dropping anchor off the estuary of the Pra River, Gomes’s captains finally located a hinterland of alluvial goldfields, 100 miles from the coast, an area which European mariners later called the Gold Coast.
The Akan goldfields proved to be a source of such wealth that the Portuguese crown decided to place the gold trade under direct royal control and to construct a fortified base on the coast to fend off rival European traders. In 1482, an expedition was sent out to choose a suitable site and gained permission from the local ruler to build a fortress on a rocky promontory midway along the Gold Coast. A flotilla of caravels was assembled in Portugal to ferry masons, carpenters and building materials to the site. Within three weeks, they completed construction, naming it São Jorge da Mina. The fortress was acclaimed to be ‘the first stone building in the region of the Ethiopians of Guinea since the creation of the world’. By 1487, El Mina, ‘the Mine’, as it became known, was sending an estimated 8,000 ounces a year to the royal treasury in Lisbon. By 1500, the annual trade had reached about 25,000 ounces, a significant proportion of the world’s supply.
To finance their purchase of gold, the Portuguese began to participate in the domestic slave trade of west Africa. Their usual trade goods such as cloth had limited value in an equatorial climate; horses could not survive the trypanosomiasis virus carried by the tsetse fly in the rainforest belt. Firearms were in great demand, but selling them was banned by Papal bulls to prevent them from reaching Muslim adversaries. The Portuguese solution was to act as middlemen in the slave trade, acquiring slaves in the ‘slave rivers’ of the Benin coast and selling them to Akan merchants at El Mina for use as porters to carry imports inland and as agricultural labourers. By 1500, the Portuguese were shipping on average about 500 slaves each year to El Mina in exchange for gold.
Venturing into the interior in 1486, the Portuguese encountered the Edo kingdom of Benin. In recent years, Benin had been transformed by its warrior king Ewuare into a major state in the rainforest region of what is now southern Nigeria. From his capital at Benin City, Ewuare was said to have conquered more than 200 towns and villages, building a small empire that extended for seventy miles. His palace grounds included a spacious compound for courtiers, craftsmen and artisans. He sponsored ivory carving and sophisticated brasswork, carried out by specialist guilds with high skill, part of a tradition that could be traced back to the Nok Culture of central Nigeria of the first millennium BCE. As well as producing regalia for the royal court, the ivory carvers’ guild, the Igbesanmwan, turned out a variety of other ivory carvings for the wealthy elite – bowls, boxes, combs and bracelets, sometimes inlaid with copper or gilt-work. The Portuguese were so impressed by the quality that they commissioned merchandise that they could take back to Europe: salt-cellars, forks, spoons and hunting horns made of ivory and sculptures and plaques made of brass.
Probing further south, beyond the equator, on a pioneering voyage in 1482, a Portuguese captain named Diogo Cão came across the estuary of an enormous river that surged into the Atlantic at the rate of eight to nine knots. So strong was the current that it pushed on into the ocean for some fifty miles. A contemporary chronicler wrote that it was ‘as if this noble river had determined to try its strength in pitched battle with the ocean itself, and alone deny it the tribute which all mother rivers in the world pay without resistance’. Beneath the ocean surface, modern oceanographers have discovered a 100-mile-long canyon, in places 4,000 feet deep, carved by the flow of the river in the sea floor.
Cão went ashore at the river’s mouth and erected a seven-foot limestone padrão, topped by an iron cross and inscribed with the royal coat of arms and a few words recording his visit.
In the year 6681 of the World and in that of 1482 since the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, the most excellent and potent prince, King João II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered and these padrões to be erected by Diogo Cão, an esquire in his household.
From local villagers, he gathered that the name of the river was Nzadi, meaning ‘the great river’ and that he had arrived in the territory of a powerful ruler, the Mani-Kongo, whose capital lay far inland. Before continuing his journey southwards, Cão made arrangements to contact the Mani-Kongo, sending four messengers to his capital, expecting to pick them up on his way home.
For several weeks more, Cão probed further south for nearly 500 miles, erecting another limestone padrão on a promontory he named Cape Santa Maria on what is now Angola’s coast. But on his return to ‘the great river’, to his annoyance he learned that his four emissaries had been detained at the Mani-Kongo’s court. In retaliation, he seized four Africans as hostages, sending a message to the Mani-Kongo saying that they would be released only in exchange for his own men on his next trip, and then headed back with them to Portugal.
In Lisbon, King João reacted enthusiastically to the news of the existence of a great African river, believing that it might offer an overland route to the land of Prester John; he hoped furthermore that the Mani-Kongo might be enlisted as an ally in the enterprise. Accordingly, Cão’s hostages were treated as honoured guests, provided with apartments at the palace, fitted out with the wardrobes of courtiers, set to studying Portuguese and Christianity and given tours of the realm, on the assumption that when they were returned to the Mani-Kongo they would speak approvingly of the wonders of Portuguese civilisation.
On his second voyage along the African coast in 1486, Cão landed the four hostages at the mouth of the great river and then proceeded to sail inland for 100 miles. Although the river narrowed, it remained navigable. But at a point near modern Matadi he encountered the Yellala Falls where the river plunges through a narrow gorge in the Crystal Mountains into a maelstrom of churning water that came to be known as ‘the Cauldron of Hell’. Unable to travel further into the interior, Cão and his companions carved their names and the royal coat of arms on rocks overlooking the falls and turned their caravel back towards the sea. Resuming his journey southwards, he planted two more padrões, one at Cape Negro, just north of the border between modern Angola and Namibia, and another at Cape Cross, on the southern fringe of the Skeleton Coast.
After their initial difficulties, the Portuguese struck up an amicable relationship with the Mani-Kongo. King João saw an opportunity to establish a Christian state in black Africa under the protection of Portugal. The Mani-Kongo, Nzinga a Nkuwu, looked on the Portuguese as potential allies, bolstering his hold on power, and welcomed their offers of assistance. In 1490, a full-scale mission was dispatched from Lisbon in a fleet of three caravels: a dozen priests, a contingent of soldiers, masons, carpenters, printers and farmers, even a few women skilled in bread-baking and sewing.
Dropping anchor in March 1491 at Mpinda, a village not far from the spot where Diogo Cão had erected his padrão, the Portuguese were given a spectacular reception. As they landed, a throng of 3,000 warriors, armed with bows and arrows, naked to the waist, painted in various colours and wearing headdresses of parrot feathers, danced in celebration to the sound of drums, ivory trumpets and stringed instruments. After three days of revelry and feasting, they were accompanied to the Mani-Kongo’s capital at Mbanza, following paths through dense forests, marshes and swamps, met by crowds of jubilant villagers along the way, ascending to a plateau in the Crystal Mountains some 1,700 feet above sea level. Their journey took three weeks.
The kingdom of Kongo had been formed in the fourteenth century by a group of clan chiefs, known as Mwissikongo, who unified several small chiefdoms through conquest. Its territory ran inland for several hundred miles and included a long stretch of the ‘great river’ which European geographers henceforth called the Congo. From their capital at Mbanza, Kongo’s kings presided over a network of royal kinsmen and officials who administered the provinces of the state, collecting tribute in copper, iron and slaves. The Mani-Kongo was all-powerful, surrounded by elaborate ceremonies. On public occasions, he sat on a throne receiving homage, dispensing justice and reviewing troops. Those who wanted to approach him had to prostrate themselves and crawl forward on all fours. On pain of death, no one was allowed to watch him eat or drink. Whenever he travelled, he was carried on a litter.
Ushered into the presence of the Mani-Kongo, the expedition’s leader, Rui de Sousa, presented an array of gifts: lengths of satin, silk and linen, brocade and velvet fabrics, silver and gold jewellery, trinkets and plate and a flock of red pigeons. De Sousa explained that the king of Portugal hoped that the Mani-Kongo and his people would accept the Christian faith and enter into an alliance with him. Impressed by the presentation, the Mani-Kongo agreed to prepare himself for baptism and sanctioned the construction of a church in Mbanza. In May 1491, Nzinga a Nkuwu was duly baptised as King João I. His son, Nzinga a Mbemba, a provincial governor, followed suit, taking the name of Afonso. Several other chiefs were converted to Christianity at the same time. The foundations of a stone church were laid in May 1491 and the building was completed two months later.
The Bakongo elite, however, proved unwilling to accept all the strictures of Christianity laid down by Portuguese priests, notably a ban on polygamy. To the Mani-Kongo and his nobles, a multiplicity of wives was a measure of their prestige, power and wealth. Moreover, polygamy was a vital political tool, used for forging alliances through marriage. They were also resentful of the priests’ insistence on destroying fetishes, idols and sacred sites belonging to the Bakongo religion that they had long cherished. In 1495, the Mani-Kongo decided he had had enough, renounced his Christian faith and banished the Portuguese from Mbanza.
His son Afonso, however, remained an ardent convert. He was much admired by the priests who taught him for ten years. On gaining the throne in 1506, he renewed links with Lisbon and appealed for support to establish Kongo as a Christian state. As King Afonso I, he adopted Portuguese styles of dress, introduced Portuguese rules of etiquette and protocol, acquired a royal coat of arms and gave out Portuguese titles to the elite. Provincial governors were known as dukes, and military leaders and court officials as counts and marquises. Assisted by Portuguese advisers, he promoted the work of the Church. Christianity became in effect a royal cult. Afonso also emphasised the importance of literacy, education and agricultural skills. Hundreds of students were sent to mission schools. New plants were introduced, including maize and sugar cane. Mbanza, the capital, was transformed into a city of stone buildings and renamed São Salvador.
His rule as king, however, was soon overshadowed by the pernicious impact of the slave trade. Slavery was as common in Kongo as in other African societies on the west coast. Prisoners of war captured in clashes in the outer regions of Kongo were routinely enslaved and taken to work as labourers on estates around Mbanza. Afonso himself owned many slaves and even sent several hundred as a present to his ‘brother’ king in Lisbon.
But the slave trade operated by the Portuguese added an entirely new dimension. During the 1500s, the Portuguese required an increasing supply of slaves to work on sugar plantations that they had established on São Tomé, an island in the Gulf of Guinea. Slave traders initially acquired slaves from the Benin coast, but then turned their attention to Kongo, some 600 miles away. Kongo’s domestic slavery thus became part of an international traffic in slaves. The demand grew ever stronger. Kongo slaves were sent to São Tomé not just to work on plantations there but to transit camps to await shipment to other destinations: the Gold Coast, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal. A Portuguese account noted that in 1507, in addition to some 2,000 slaves working on plantations, the island held 5–6,000 slaves awaiting re-export. Between 1510 and 1540, four to six slaving ships per year were kept busy hauling slaves from São Tomé to the Gold Coast alone. During that period, Akan traders bought about 10,000 slaves from the Portuguese for use as porters and agricultural labourers.
Not only slave traders and their Afro-Portuguese agents, the pombeiros, were involved. Caught up in slaving fever, men who arrived in Kongo from Lisbon as teachers, masons and even priests joined the fray. Local Kongolese were only too willing to participate in exchange for the alluring array of goods offered them by slave traders. During the 1520s, the number of slaves being shipped each year from Mpinda, at the mouth of the Congo River, rose to about 3,000.
Aghast at the depredations of the trade, Afonso appealed time and again to his ‘brother monarch’ in Portugal to intervene. Writing to King João III in 1526, he complained:
Each day the traders are kidnapping our people – children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family . . . This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated . . . We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for the holy sacrament . . . It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.
In another letter, he decried the involvement of his own people:
Many of our subjects eagerly covet Portuguese merchandise, which your subjects have brought into our domain. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects . . .
And as soon as they are taken by the white men they are immediately ironed and branded with fire, and when they are carried to be embarked, if they are caught by our guards’ men, the whites allege that they have bought them but they cannot say from whom . . .
Afonso referred to the priests who had turned to slave-trading:
In this kingdom, faith is as fragile as glass because of the bad examples of the men who come to teach here, because the lusts of the world and lure of wealth have turned them away from the truth. Just as the Jews crucified the Son of God because of covetousness, my brother, so today He is again crucified.
His protests were to no avail. King João III showed no sympathy. Kongo was useful to him only as a source of slaves and revenue. He replied:
You . . . tell me that you want no slave-trading in your domains, because this trade is depopulating your country . . . The Portuguese there, on the contrary, tell me how vast the Kongo is, and how it is so thickly populated that it seems as if no slave has ever left.
Afonso tried to enforce restrictions on the trade, but with limited results. He himself was personally affected by the trade. In a letter written in 1539, he disclosed that ten of his young nephews, grandsons and other relatives who had been sent to Portugal for a religious education had disappeared en route. ‘We do not know so far whether they are alive or dead; nor what happened to them, so that we have nothing to say to their fathers and mothers.’ Subsequent records showed that the group had been taken to Brazil as slaves.