Origin traditions and history in Central Africa

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by John K. Thornton

Historians using oral traditions must continually grapple with traditions of origin, for unlike scholars of religion, folklore, or ideology, they must determine what is historical and what is legendary in these ancient memories. Yet for Africa these traditions are all that historians have to reconstruct the origins of the societies that they study. Thus, early European historians of central Africa--for example, the great missionary historian Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, who wrote Angolan history in the mid-seventeenth century (Cavazzi 1687)--anchored their research in oral traditions. (1) Historians working during the early colonial period used oral tradition as well: Joseph van Wing wrote a history of the Kongo in 1920 in which he mixed oral traditions he had collected with documentary research. This approach, a reliance upon a combination of oral tradition and archival research, has since been employed by historians in every corner of Africa.

Jan Vansina's influential book De la tradition orale (1961) has served as a manifesto for oral history's use by the modern generation of Africanist historians. Vansina's methodological strictures, while not always followed, have given this resource an academic status. Seen as an "African voice" in contrast to the accounts of travelers from Europe or America, oral tradition is often evoked in discussions of African history even if it is not always used. (2)

While some types of oral tradition read like chronicles and are perhaps as reliable, at least, as the chronicles of the Middle Ages, (3) traditions of origin are less well regarded. This is because the histories of the origins of kingdoms in central Africa are essentially political documents, and like politics they change over time, subject to tire hard whim of pragmatic realities. Just as American jurists wrangle

over the Founding Fathers' intention in writing the Constitution, and have recourse to historical studies to establish, for example, what their attitudes toward a "well-regulated militia" might have been, so for central Africans the story of the origin of political units is a fundamentally constitutional matter.

We have an insight into this process in central Africa that is not always possible in other places on the continent because of the region's long tradition of literacy, especially in the Kingdom of Kongo, located in what is now northwestern Angola. Thanks to its own literate traditions, and tire fact that its early conversion to Christianity (in 1491) gave it an unusually large number of literate visitors, Kongo provides an excellent model for illuminating how the process might work in areas that do not have a similar history of literacy (4) (Fig. 1). To understand how politics changed origin stories throughout the region, we might first witness the process in Kongo and then make some observations about the political nature of accounts of origins of the Lunda Empire and its neighbors, where a detailed local chronicle preserved in oral tradition has influenced much of the history of the interior regions of west central Africa.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Early European Accounts

The earliest insights we have into the origin of Kongo were set in writing in 1588 by Duarte Lopes. Although Lopes was a Portuguese New Christian (converted Jew), and thus a foreigner to Kongo, he served as Kongo's ambassador to the Holy See at a crucial time, when the Vatican was considering making Kongo the seat of the first bishop on mainland Africa (Fig. 2). As such, and as a "fidalgo of the royal house" as Iris letter of credentials from Kongo's king Alvaro I states, (5) Lopes was surely privy to the version of Kongo's history that circulated in the capital; as a trusted ambassador he must have presented it accurately in Europe. Lopes's written text is lost to us, but it formed the basis, along with his oral testimony, of Filippo Pigafetta's book, Relatione del Reame di Congo et delle cinconvincine contrade (1591). (6) That source does not deal explicitly with the origin of the Kingdom of Kongo, but in asides that deal with the history of tire provinces, it seems likely that the history of the country was conceived as something like this: The Kingdom of Kongo was formed when several independent provinces came together. The focus seems to have been on the voluntary nature of the original kingdom, thus a federation, although some of the provinces were conquered by force (Pigafetta 1591:37-38). This version of Kongo's history probably reflects the relatively decentralized nature of Kongo's polity in the immediately preceding period and the power of some of the provinces.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The origin story and the politics changed when the next set of oral traditions was written down in the mid-seventeenth century. These texts were put together by European missionaries, first by the Jesuit Mateus Cardoso in 1624 and then by the Capuchin missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo in 1668 (but probably also based on Jesuit sources, most likely the now lost chronicle of Joao de Pavia, composed around 1635). (7) The Jesuits' mission, founded in 1619, was close to the royal family, and the Jesuits were deeply interested in Kongo's affairs, so that it seems likely that the missionaries' accounts are well founded in the version that circulated at court.