International Journal of African Historical Studies Vol. 49, No. 2 (2016) 255 Copyright © 2016 by the Board of Trustees of Boston University Kongo Interpreters, Traveling Priests, and Political Leaders in the Kongo Kingdom (15 th –19 th Century)* By Inge Brinkman Ghent University (Inge.Brinkman@UGent.be) Introduction Colonial and anti-colonial discourses in many cases represented the early encounters between Africans and Europeans in terms of later hierarchical relations. The colonial discourse portrayed Europeans as brave explorers who discovered African lands inhabited by people who were less developed, and who therefore benefitted from the Europeans’ technologically and a morally advanced state. The anti-colonial discourse portrayed Africans as welcoming the new strangers, only to be betrayed and pushed back by Europeans whose only goal was to exploit them. Kongo history, where contact between the Kongo kingdom and the Portuguese was established by the end of the fifteenth century, is a case in point. Both colonial and anti-colonial discourses have interpreted the contacts between Kongo people and the Portuguese in the precolonial period as hierarchical in nature. Georges Balandier, for example, classified this era as “the first colonization,” and argued that the Portuguese imposed conversion to Christianity on the kingdom of Kongo, leading to a superficial influence of Christianity among the Kongo elite only. 1 We cannot simply assume, however, that early relations between Kongo people and Europeans were hierarchical in nature. Much evidence has already been presented showing that Europeans at the time did not view the Kongo kingdom as “lesser” than European political entities of the time. Notably John Thornton has emphasized that “Kongo was not a ∗ This article has been written in the framework of the KongoKing project at Ghent University, financed with a European Research Council Starting Grant No. 284126 (http://www.kongoking.org/). I wish to acknowledge the support of Koen Bostoen, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, participants of the Robert Ross Valedictory Conference in Leiden (September 2014) and Elke Seghers for advice on the English. Translations in the article are mine. 1 Examples of colonial discourse: the heroic references to Diogo Cão, the first Portuguese sailor ever to land in the Kongo kingdom, in the epic poem Os Lusíadas (“The Lusiads”), and in the monument of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument of the Discoveries), that for a long time formed part of Portuguese social memory, and references in colonial literature, e.g., Hélio A. Esteves Felgas, História do Congo Português (Carmona: Gráfica do Uige, 1958), 11. For anti-colonial examples: Georges Balandier, Daily Life in the Kingdom of Kongo from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), 13, 14, 21, 48; Meno Kikokula, “La politique intellectuelle de Mvemba N’zinga (Dom Afonso Ier) Mani Kongo 1506-1543,” Annales Aequatoria 23 (2002), 197–216.