Kongo sends an ambassador to the Vatican and he dies in Rome

Antonio Manuel Nsaku Ne Vunda was accredited to the Holy See in 1604 as ambassador extraordinary of the kingdom of Kongo, the second African to hold such a post at the Vatican. At home he had commanded the constitutionalist forces under king Mpanzu a Nimi, whose reign ran from 1587 to 1614. The journey took years and ruined his health. He died in Rome on 6 January 1608 and was buried in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. He had told his hosts that the trade in Black people appeared nowhere in the ten commandments. Kongo had by then been sending missions to Europe for more than a century. Kasuta Nsaku, who took the name Joao da Silva, served as the kingdom's first ambassador to Portugal from 1488 to 1490, and Dom Pedro de Sousa led an embassy to Pope Leo X in 1516. These were sovereign missions from an African state, sent while Portuguese ships were already carrying its people across the Atlantic.

In 1605 and 1606 the colonial authorities in Santo Domingo destroyed the settlements along the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola. The aim was to stop the contraband trade that those towns carried on with foreign shipping. The result was a further fall in a population that was already shrinking, since many Spaniards on the island left for the American mainland, drawn by stories of rich indigenous kingdoms and by a crown that now cared more about its continental colonies. New settlers from Spain saw no reason to come to the Caribbean. The nineteenth century Dominican historian Jose Gabriel Garcia, a doctrinaire liberal, called the operation a violent answer to a problem the government could not win by law, and held that a freer trade policy would have prevented it. He also drew the longer line. Emptying the north and west of the island opened the door for French colonists to settle there.

Kongo kings had been trying for a century to open a direct line to Rome that Portugal could not cut. In 1604 Alvaro II sent Antonio Nsaku ne Vunda, the Mani Vunda, holder of the oldest religious office in the kingdom and the authority that sanctioned the king's own. He was held up for years in Spain. He landed at Civita Vecchia mortally ill, attended by a few servants and a Spanish Carmelite who had visited the Kongo as a young man, and reached Rome on 5 January 1608, the eve of Epiphany, the feast that celebrates the kings of the world coming to Christ with gifts. Pope Paul V came to his room. The ambassador commended the king and church of the Kongo to him and died. The scene was painted into the frescoes of the Vatican Library and his bust stands in Santa Maria Maggiore.

Around 1604 a man called za-Krestos began preaching in Amhara that he was the new Christ, born a second time in Ethiopia for the Gentiles. The Emperor Za Dengel had him executed. That did not end it. His followers multiplied and built a church of their own with a hierarchy, its own rites, and a communion in which people received the body of za-Krestos, said to have been taken from a woman named Amata Wangel. The Emperor Susenyos eventually wiped the movement out by force, and many of its members threw themselves off a precipice rather than submit. Very little is known about it beyond that. The shape is worth holding in mind, because exactly a century later a young woman in the Kongo would announce that a saint had taken the place of her soul, gather a following in a shattered kingdom, and be burned for it. Both movements spoke the language of the church that had been brought to them.