Alternate Religions: Antonianism
- cepmurphywrites
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
By Gary Oswald.
The Kingdom of Kongo was one of the largest and most powerful pre-colonial states in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its capital was in modern Angola and it dominated the mouth of the Congo river from the 14th to 18th centuries. When, in 1482, Diogo Cão of Portugal first reached that river, he recognised Kongo as ‘the greatest African Kingdom’ of that time period and made it a priority to arrange a trade deal with them.
Relationships between the Portuguese and the Kongolese were originally very good. The King of Kongo (Nzinga-a-Nkuwu) converted to Catholicism and was baptised in 1491, with much of the nobility following his example. Christian churches and schools sprung up around the country and many of the Kongolese nobility went to Lisbon to be educated, with some becoming clergymen and others joining European armed forces. A Kongolese man, Juan Garrido, fought with Cortés in Mexico and was the first man to successfully grow Old World wheat there.
But this rosy situation was not to last. Portugal was in Kongo primarily to buy slaves, and as the New World slave system kicked off, this demand grew and grew. In the 1520s King Afonso of Kongo began to panic because suddenly slaves were being taken at a much larger rate then he was used to and it was destabilising his country. Afonso's letters to the Kings of Portugal display a concern that the slave trade was getting out of his control, that it was not just captives of wars but also freeborn Kongolese being sold because ultimately the Portuguese goods were so much more valuable that laws were being broken so that they could be obtained. The treaty was that Kongo would sell slaves to Portugal, but it was understood that it was slaves that were to be sold not free people as slaves. So, Afonso urged the Portuguese kings to reign back their merchants. They didn’t. Afonso couldn’t control his own people either.
Correcting this wrong became a major priority of the Kongolese court. Afonso and his successors spent a considerable amount of effort and money buying back nobles and elites who had been wrongly enslaved by European traders. In 1623, the Kongolese Ambassador to the Vatican secured an agreement with the Pope and King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal that no Kongolese Christians should be enslaved at all, only pagans. After all, the original papal bills justifying the enslavement of Africans (from 1452 and 1455) had been aimed at pagans and not the Christian Kongolese. Philip even sent a ship load of Christian slaves back to the Kingdom of Kongo as a result.
But that makes the situation seem better than it was. The Portuguese under their Spanish King had taken a much more active role in Central African politics and between 1612 and 1622, in alliance with the Imbangala people, had won a series of stunning victories, destroying several smaller states and capturing thousands of slaves. They were now a presence in the region not only as traders but also as conquerors.
Earlier in 1623 the Iberian Governor of Angola had been defeated in an unsuccessful invasion of the Kongo, something which had been hugely controversial as Jesuit priests in the region reported in horror that pagan African soldiers in the Spanish Army had been allowed to both enslave and indeed eat African Christian civilians in that failed invasion. After the Kongolese had crushed this invading army, there had been anti Portuguese riots and the Kongolese King, accused of being too friendly with the Europeans, had asked Philip and the Pope to denounce the Governor and prove themselves friends. The agreement on slaves was their reply and an effective apology for the invasion of the previous year. This was something that Philip needed to do if he wished to keep his presence in the region.
In 1624, a Dutch fleet arrived in Angola hoping to launch a joint attack on Luanda with the Kongolese after having received an offer of alliance from their king in 1622. The Kongolese however, placated by the agreement of 1623, didn’t show up, and the Dutch withdrew. Philip’s gamble had worked to preserve his colony from the threat of the Dutch and with that danger passed, no more Catholic slaves were returned. Instead, more and more were bought as Kongo fell into Civil War, racial hierarchies overtook religious ones in Europe, and the stature of African Christians within the Catholic Church fell.
The 1623 agreement was never lived up to and was never intended to be lived up to. Instead, almost 5.7 million slaves left Angola between 1501 and 1866, a horrific number.
Kongo and Portugal were in conflict throughout the 17th century, in particular over the freedom given to Portuguese slave traders, in a series of largely inconclusive wars where neither side was really able to penetrate the defences of the other. In the 1665 Battle of Mbwila, Portugal won their greatest victory over the Kongolese and killed their king, but even this didn't lead to a successful invasion and their attack was turned back five years later. However, with no clear successor Kongo would be torn apart by a civil war for the throne which would last fifty-four years.
During this war, the Catholic church within the Kingdom of Kongo was in crisis. The religion was genuinely popular, particularly among the nobility with protestant missionaries (sent by the Dutch) having their books burned, but with education disrupted by the war and the Portuguese missionaries banned (though there were still many priests from Florence in the country), many of the peasantry were baptised without adapting mainstream Christianity. Pre-Christian rituals and beliefs were still widespread and while the Pope was still popular for his efforts to help Kongo, a lot of his clerics weren't being, associated with the slave trade, the invasions, and the civil war (which itself was perpetuated by the slave trade given that each faction could make money by selling their captured enemies).
Into this religious vacuum emerged Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita.
Kimpa Vita was born into the Kongolese nobility in around 1684 and was baptised as a Christian, as all nobility in the region tended to be. But she drifted into the older pre-Christian rituals and was trained as a nganga marinda, a person able to communicate with spirits. Kongolese Christianity, at this time, was a syncretic religion which had kept many of its pre-Christian rituals. While there were occasional purges and public burnings of pagan fetishes and the like, most of the Kongolese nobility accepted both priests and traditional wise men within their court and so there was no assumed contradiction between Kimpa Vita being a Christian and her talking with spirits.
She was a relatively obscure figure until in 1704, at around the age of twenty, she became sick with an illness. She almost died and had a vision of being visited by Saint Anthony of Padua when she was at the point of death; then she died but was resurrected, bought back to the mortal world with the wisdom of Anthony to guide her. This became a rite that she would repeat for the rest of her life; every Friday she died and was resurrected every Saturday, having made contact with her spirit guide. And Anthony had given Kimpa Vita a profound revelation.
He made it clear to her that the Portuguese were very wrong about Christianity. While she still recognised the Pope she basically rejected everything else, including baptism, the gospels, the existing Italian priests, and particularly the iconography of the cross (which she rejected as celebrating the mechanism used to kill Jesus). Her main innovation was she also taught that Jesus had actually been born in the Kingdom of Kongo as the son of a slave.
This meant, of course, that Jesus was black and so, she also preached that black people were the closest to him, closest to real humanity. White people, by contrast, were linked to the supernatural because white is the colour of ghosts, the colour of spirits. She still felt that white people could be redeemed (Anthony himself was born white, after all) but they were starting further away from humanity, away from Jesus. Their Italian priests, in particular, she identified as witches, who were seducing the whites away from God by allowing them to make slaves of his favourite people.
This became the gospel she preached and the denomination known as Antonianism, and it was stunningly popular, even as the orthodox religious hierarchy rejected it as a heresy. Suddenly the Kongolese had a religion which is centred around them, that told them “Jesus was one of you”. More than that, Kimpa Vita was preaching against the civil war and the slave trade and for peace and unity: a powerful message after nearly 40 years of war.
Peasants and nobles alike flocked to her, and one of the three main pretenders to the throne, Pedro Constantinho, converted. She established her own prayers and her own religious orders and an order of missionaries who distributed little statues of Saint Anthony to pagan villages. In 1705, she and her followers occupied the ruined former capital M'banza-Kongo, which had been abandoned in 1678, and started making public speeches while burning crosses and pagan fetishes alike. She was, at this point, the most powerful religious figure in the country.
However, Kimpa had made two major mistakes. First of all, while she tried to convert all the major pretenders to the Congolese throne, as soon as one converted the others then had political reasons to reject her – and she picked the wrong one. Pedro IV beat Pedro Constantinho and Joao II to finally end the Civil War by 1709 and Pedro IV, despite his wife and top general converting to Antonianism, remained loyal to the traditional Catholic hierarchy. This was largely because Pedro Constantinho had taken the role as the Antonian contender and so he saw his victories over Pedro as being because of his loyalty to St. Francis over St Anthony.
Second of all, Kimpa got impregnated by a follower and separated herself from her community in order to give birth in her home village, which was controlled by Pedro IV. This made her vulnerable and lead to her capture and execution. She was burned as a witch in 1706, and while the movement continued without her, it was targeted by Pedro IV and finally shattered when its remaining followers were defeated three years later at the Battle of São Salvador.
Antonianism existed for less than a decade and has no known followers today. But what if it survived those tempestuous early few years?
If Pedro Constantinho had won the civil war or Pedro IV had chosen Antonianism first, then the new King would exile the Italian priests and set up a new church. An independent African church, not reliant on Europeans and based around the teachings of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita. This would quickly then send missionaries throughout the Kongo Basin and maybe beyond and is likely to pick up converts faster than the traditional white centric religion.
Catholic Europe is going to be outraged but neither Portugal nor Spain have the military power to conquer Kongo at this point, they've both tried enough to know that. If the country could resist an invasion while fighting a civil war, it'll be able to resist one now newly reunited around a new King and a new religion. Kongo will probably still be conquered in the late 19th century like it was in OTL, thanks to new European military technology, but that leaves centuries for the new religion to establish itself.
The slave trade is unlikely to slow down too much, Portugal is still in Angola and the economic motives to bring slaves to them remain. That means more and more Antonians end up going to the New World. In our world, many Kongolese slaves ended up in Haiti and Brazil where in this world, this religion will also arrive. Haitian Vodou became such a big thing because it was a universal faith that had elements of west African, central African, Christian, and Islamic faiths, and so was something that could unite slaves of otherwise entirely different ethnicities. The existence of a new religion would have to be represented in that. It's almost certain that Saint Anthony would end up in the Vodou pantheon in this scenario.
Boukman, the Vodou priest who was the first major leader of the Haitian rebellion, had a whole thing about separating the evil white god vs the good black god so Antonianism would be right up his alley. Likewise Macaya, another Haitian rebel, is mostly notable for allegedly telling Dessalines during the period of negotiations between the various rebel movements that the only King of the Blacks he'd ever recognise was the King of Kongo and so in this scenario is likely to be a follower of Antonianism. Most of the leaders who replaced Boukman were much more orthodox catholics but Antonianism, like Vodou, could easily become a faith for the poorer classes that could re-emerge in Haiti, and other slave majority areas, in the 20th century.
Had things gone slightly different, this is a religious movement that could have spread worldwide and have huge influence.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.