The Kongo's ambassador reaches Rome on the eve of Epiphany and dies that day

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.

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.

Two Portuguese documents survive that describe how much business the island of Sao Tome did with the mainland ports of the Bights of Benin and Biafra. The first, from 1607, gives values in milreis. Allada is entered at 800, Whydah at 200 and Popo at 400, so the whole Slave Coast comes to 1,400 out of a regional total of 2,500. Earlier readers took those numbers as the value of goods the ports could absorb, which made the trade look tiny. A closer look at the wording suggests the figures were estimates of a ten per cent tax, so the real trade was ten times larger. On that reading Allada was selling the equivalent of up to 667 people a year and the coast as a whole up to 1,167. The second paper, from 1620, counts ships rather than value, and gives Allada one or two a year, which points to a fall.

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.