Istwa Nou

North of the Congo river, a short way inland from the Atlantic, smiths worked out copper metallurgy for themselves. The date is not fixed, though it falls centuries after iron was already being smelted in the region, which is the ordinary African sequence and the reverse of the European one. Control of the trade in that copper became one of the foundations on which the Kingdom of Kongo was built and rose to power during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ehret draws the line from the metal to the state. A commodity people want, held by those who know how to produce it, converts into revenue, and revenue into the ability to hold territory and command loyalty. Kongo was not assembled out of nothing by accident. It was assembled by people with a technology of their own making and the leverage it gave them. The Portuguese reached the mouth of that river in 1483 and found a kingdom whose wealth had been made before they knew it existed.