The Missionary | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 13, 1888

The Missionary.

THE KINGDOM OF CONGO AND THE ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES.

(Continued.) About the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the labors of the missionaries met with a serious interruption in consequence of an invasion of the country by hordes of the war-like Giaghis. San Salvador was burnt to the ground, and the king and his people had to betake themselves to the "isle of horses," on the Zaire, for safety. In this extremity, the king of Congo appealed to Don Sebastian, king of Portugal, for help, which was promptly granted. Don Francis Gouvea was dispatched with six or eight hundred Portuguese troops, and after having been re-enforced by two or three hundred more, from Angola, he gave battle to the invaders in the heart of the kingdom. After several engagements, in which the Giaghis showed great bravery, he succeeded in driving them from the country, and restored the king to his throne. The missionaries, who it is supposed retired to Angola during these strifes, returned to their labors, and having been re-enforced by new recruits from Europe, not only re-established the Catholic worship in all the provinces of Congo, but extended their labors into neighboring districts over which the king of Congo had no jurisdiction. In the meantime San Salvador was rebuilt, commerce was resumed on a more extended scale, and the country soon attained to a degree of prosperity and power quite beyond anything it had previously known. This period of peace and prosperity, however, was not of more than forty or fifty years' continuance.

In the year 1636 a civil war broke out between the king of Congo and the count of Sogno. The occasion of this war arose from an unjustifiable attempt on the part of the king to transfer the province of Sogno to the crown of Portugal. Having had need of the aid of the Portuguese of Angola to effect his coronation, he engaged to give them for their assistance two gold mines and the country of Sogno. The proposition, as might have been foreseen, roused the indignation of the people, as well as the count, to the highest pitch, and they soon placed themselves in an attitude of defiance. The count denied the sovereignty of the king of Congo, and not only charged the Portuguese with fraud in accepting what he had no right to give, but reproached them bitterly with ingratitude, inasmuch as only a few years before, when they were driven out of Loando St. Paul by the Dutch, he had given them shelter in his country and extended to them pardon that had never been requited.

The king of Congo raised a large army, and having been joined by about eighty Portuguese, he determined to force the count into submission. In the first engagement the Sognoese army was beaten, and the count himself was slain. His son and successor, who was a man of equal energy and bravery, resumed the war, and in the first engagement the royal army was not only defeated, but the king himself and a large number of his Portuguese allies were made prisoners. The king, Don Alvaro the Second, obtained his own liberation by acknowledging the independence of the count and ceding to him an additional district of the country. It was not long, however, before this treaty was denounced, and hostilities were recommenced by the king, but with no better success.

For a time hostilities were suspended, but the country of Sogno was never afterwards united to the crown of Congo. The part which the Portuguese had taken at the commencement of these troubles, made them ever afterwards intolerably odious to the Sognoese. The count indulged his resentment by persecuting the missionaries in his country. Several of them were ignominiously dragged out of his dominions and thrown among the savages on the opposite side of the river, where it was thought they would be put to death. It was not long, however, according to the statements of the missionaries, before this deed of violence recoiled with redoubled force upon the count's own head. The love which the people bore to their religious teachers, and the apprehension of some dreadful calamity from Heaven, roused them to a state of frenzy, and the count in turn was seized and drowned in the Zaire, near the spot where he had perpetrated this deed of cruelty against the missionaries. A more devout successor ascended his throne, and the missionaries were recalled to exercise more absolute authority than they had ever done before.

About the same time Don Alvaro the Second sent to Pope Urban the Eighth for a new recruit of missionaries. In compliance with this request, twelve Capuchins were sent; but having been detained on account of the war with Spain, they did not reach Congo until after this king's death. A part of this company remained with the count of Sogno, and the others found their way to San Salvador, where they were kindly received by Don Garcia the Second, the son and successor of Don Alvaro. The reign of Don Garcia was short, and he was succeeded by Don Antonio the First, who, by his unparalleled wickedness and brutality, not only threw his whole kingdom into disorder and anarchy, but had nearly extirpated every trace of Christianity from the land. He not only behaved in the most despotic and brutal manner to his own subjects, but treated the Portuguese residents and the missionaries with so much indignity that they were compelled to fly from his realms. It was not long, however, before the Portuguese of Angola determined to resent these indignities. An army of one or two thousand natives and four hundred Portuguese soldiers was raised, and they determined to give this impudent king battle in the heart of his own country. Don Antonio himself was killed, and his crown was taken to Loando St. Paul.

Had the Portuguese been so disposed, they might have turned this victory to good account by subjecting the whole kingdom to the Portuguese crown. But this seems never to have been desired. As they enjoyed a monopoly of the trade of the country, there was no object in making it a dependency of the crown of Portugal. There was also, it is probable, a religious motive which prevented the Portuguese from seizing upon the country. Congo had received the Catholic religion at a very early period after its discovery, and its sovereigns, with one or two exceptions, had always shown as much deference for the authority of Rome as those of Portugal itself. All of her kings had been crowned according to the Catholic ceremonial, and the crown itself had been bestowed by the pope as a testimony of their loyalty.

After the signal defeat just mentioned, the country was left to recover from its disorders as best it could. It was not long, however, before order was restored and another king placed on the throne of Don Antonio, but who he was we are not informed. He signalized his reign by an unsuccessful effort to reunite the province of Sogno to the crown of Congo. Father Carli, in 1667, saw the great duke of Bamba, who was always the leader of the royal forces, just after he had disbanded an army of 150,000, with which he had in vain attempted the subjugation of the count of Sogno. Twenty years later, and the great duke himself had renounced his allegiance to the king, and cut off all intercourse between the capital and Loando St. Paul. The close of the seventeenth century may therefore be regarded as the termination of the national existence of the kingdom of Congo.

The missionaries continued their labors in some parts of the country, especially in the province of Sogno, some time after the dissolution of the Government. During the earlier part of the eighteenth century their authority in Sogno was nearly as great as it had ever been; so much so that English vessels could not buy slaves in the port of Sony without first conciliating their good-will. At what time precisely, or from what causes, they finally abandoned the country altogether, we are not certainly informed, and can therefore only conjecture.

Before the close of the eighteenth century, indeed, for anything we know to the contrary, before the middle of it, not only all their former civilization, but almost every trace of Christianity, had disappeared from the land, and the whole country had fallen back into the deepest ignorance and heathenism, and into greater weakness and poverty than had ever been experienced, even before its discovery.—Bibliotheca Sacra.