Visiting friars find four priests serving an entire Christian kingdom

When Spanish Carmelites visited the Kongo in 1584 they found four priests in the entire country. This was a kingdom whose monarchy had been publicly Christian for most of a century and whose religion had been built entirely around what priests do. Orders had come and gone. There were Franciscans and Augustinians in the early years, Jesuits in the 1550s, a few Dominicans, then the brief Carmelite venture. None of them held on. The conditions were hard, politics were unstable, the death rate among Europeans was high, and the task as they conceived it was close to impossible. Kings quarrelled with the priests they had and asked for more. What the arrangement with Portugal had actually delivered by this point amounted to some half ruined churches, imported titles of duke and marquis, a taste for European clothes on ceremonial days, and a large population of slave traders nobody could govern.

Francis Drake sacked Santo Domingo in 1586, and the ease of it announced that Spain could no longer hold what it claimed. The deeper trouble was commercial. Spain required its colonists to buy and sell only through Spanish channels at Spanish prices, and the settlers of Hispaniola were poor, remote and badly served. English and French ships began arriving to trade with them directly, undercutting the licensed merchants, and the colonists dealt with them gladly. In 1599 Samuel de Champlain saw thirteen foreign merchantmen working at Mole Saint Nicolas on the northwest coast, in open defiance of an embargo whose penalty was execution or the galleys. The island had become a cost to the Spanish crown instead of a source of revenue. Then in September 1629 the Spanish admiral Federico Toledo Osorio cleared the French and English out of Saint Kitts. The men he expelled had to land somewhere. They went to the north coast of Hispaniola and the small island lying off it.

The Jesuit Jose de Acosta published his Historia natural y moral de las Indias in 1590. In Christian European cosmology nature was something to be known, and understanding it meant understanding its creator. The Aymara and the Quechua had no metaphysics of that shape and no concept comparable to the European one, since they did not place human beings outside the world they lived in. Acosta was therefore describing a nature that existed in his own categories and not in theirs. The habit of treating human beings as separate from and above the rest of creation was carried to the Americas as part of the equipment of conquest, and it survives in the scholarship that grew from books like his. Anyone reading Vodou or Andean practice through that separation will find superstition where the practitioners find an ordinary account of how the world is arranged.

Spanish Carmelites opened a mission in Kongo in the middle of the 1580s. A daughter of King Alvaro I learned from them about the Carmelite nuns and about Teresa of Avila, and said she wished to see an order of nuns founded in her own country. Diego de la Encarnacion, who led the mission, was moved by the request and passed it to Jean de Quintanuenas, a senior French member of the order. Carmelites in Spain and France both worked at it. Nothing came of it and no woman in Kongo ever took holy orders. Since the church reserved ordination to men, elite Kongo women had been confined to paying for chapels, feeding missionaries and supporting schools, which they had done since the first baptisms. The princess was probably the Leonor Afonso whom a Jesuit found still sitting on the royal council forty years later, describing her as most devoted to the Society of Jesus and a maker of many offerings.