the mouth of the great Zaire (or Congo) River. There Cão made contact
with people he realized must come from a kingdom even grander than
Timbuktu. When he sailed back to Portugal, he brought a small group of
Kongolese. As the Spanish were to do with some Indians half a century
later, the Portuguese baptized the natives, instructed them in Portuguese,
and, in 1491, returned them to Africa. They did not just return the
Kongolese; rather, the Portuguese sent them back with a full-scale expedi-
tion designed to create a colony.
Warmly greeted in the Kongo, the new arrivals immediately “con-
verted” King Nzinga Kkuwu and his court to Catholicism. Why they were
so warmly received soon became evident. Just as Champlain would later
find in the New World, when he was welcomed by the Hurons, the king-
dom of the Kongo needed the Europeans. Just as the Hurons were locked
in war with the more powerful Iroquois, Kongo was being raided by the
neighboring Teke people. With their matchlocks, the Portuguese routed
the Teke. Astonished by the effects of firearms, the Kongolese saw the
Portuguese as virtually a divine visitation. If this was Christianity, they
wanted more of it. The heir to the throne, Nzinga Mbemba, took the
Christian name Afonso, agreed to send young men to Portugal to study,
dressed his court in Portuguese clothing, and applied for (and soon gained)
the pope’s recognition of his country as a Christian kingdom. The
Portuguese took their prisoners of war back as slaves and sent to the Kongo
as colonists Portuguese subjects, many of whom were felons (like many of
the Englishmen, Scots and Irishmen who came to the New World). Just
before Columbus sailed to America, Kongo was becoming the first Euro-
pean colony in Africa.
These African coasts—Senegambia, Grain, Gold, Slave, Benin, and
Kongo—were the transit stations on the way to the New World from inner
Africa. There, two features stand out: the first is the diversity of African cul-
tures; the second is their complexity and sophistication. I begin with the
diversity.
The inhabitants of the areas just inland from the ocean shores were
divided by culture, language, religion, and political organization. It is
important to understand these divisions, as they not only facilitated the
The African Roots of American Blacks 87