Leen Helmink Antique Maps

Between 1578 and 1589, the Portuguese merchant Duarte Lopez travelled to Central Africa on the orders of Philip II of Spain (Portugal being under a personal union with Spain) to serve as ambassador to the powerful central African kingdom of Kongo (now northern Angola). Portugal had first made contact with the kingdom in the 1480s, developing a trading relationship in luxury goods including ivory and precious metals and later in the enslavement of Kongo and neighbouring people. This relationship also involved the regular kidnapping of Kongo nobles in return for Portuguese troops and their transport back to Portugal. By 1483, the king (Mwene Kongo) Nzinga a Nkuwu (r. 1470-1509) converted to Christianity and travelled to Portugal to learn the religion, adopting the Christian name João in honour of the Portuguese king, João II (r. 1481-95). Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism, soon spread across the kingdom, encouraged in particular by Joao I's successor Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga (r. 1509-42/3.

Following Afonso I’s death in 1542, Portugal took advantage of instability over the succession, intensified enslavement despite Kongo protests and tried to increase its control over the country. As relations between the two states continued to decline, in 1568, a new dynasty under Alvaro I Nimi a Lukeni lua Mvemba (r. 1568-87) came to power, with Lopez arriving a decade later. In his twelve years in Africa, Lopez made significant observations on Kongo culture and the political situation in the region. He returned to Portugal in 1589 and made overtures to Pope Sixtus V to sponsor a new mission to Kongo. In response, the Pope ordered a transcription of Lopez’s report by the explorer Filippo Pigafetta, which was published in 1591 under the title Relatione del reame del Congo. The book was quickly translated into Latin, English, French, Dutch and German. It provided one of the most detailed accounts of Central Africa available in the sixteenth century. Despite Lopez’s hopes, the Pope did not sponsor a new mission to Africa, leaving him to make his own way back to Kongo, after which nothing more was heard.

Even though Pigafetta’s work was translated into various European languages, by the nineteenth century, his book was forgotten and central Africa became known pejoratively as the ‘Dark Continent’, a region about which nothing was known. This new edition, translated from the Italian by Margarite Hutchinson with a preface by the abolitionist explorer Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, was published in 1881. In her introduction to the work, Hutchinson blamed the loss of knowledge about Kongo and its neighbouring states among readers in Britain on a general disinterest across Europe in Portugal’s colonisation of Africa.

(Hutchinson)