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After Mass on major feast days of the Catholic calendar, provincial governors in the Kingdom of Kongo organized ceremonial martial dances called sangamentos, a local Portuguese term adapted from the Kikongo verb kusanga, of jump or to leap', referring Lo the acrobatic moves executed during the performances.' Sangamentos were festive occasions in which Kongo social hierarchies were performed, celebrated, and reinforced as rulers proudly displayed the attributes of their might and legitimacy while subjects humbly paid allegiance to reigning political and religious powers/ In a dynamic rendition of the ceremony painted around 1740 by the Capuchin friar Bernardino d'Asti (Fig. ?), dancers sport regalia that Kongo nobility adopted after the official conversion of their realm to Catholicism at the turn of the sixteenth century.3 The performers wear prestige caps and shoulder nets typical of local insignia but here seamlessly combined with coats and swords inspired by European symbols of status (Asti e. i74o:fol. 1 8). These outfits and the sangamento performance as a whole, I argue in this article, were visual manifestations of the elaborate symbolic and mythological manipulations that underlay the adoption of Christianity as the Kongo Kingdom's state religion.
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The Kingdom of Kongo was a highly centralized polity founded in the 1300«, according to oral histories and archeological evidence.4 In west central Africa, it extended south of the Congo River through the western part ol today's Democratic Republic of the Congo and northern Angola. Its political organization ivas centered on the person of the king, who ruled with absolute power over large territories from his capital city by means of governors sent from his court to provincial towns. The regal function was not hereditary. Rather, a group of qualified electors chose the new king called a mani} among a pool of eligible candidates. This system of transition rendered royal successions delicate political affairs and placed high value on the ability of the chosen king to assert his rule and establish his legitimacy in political, military, and supernatural terms. Kongo monarchs therefore depended heavily on a range of regalia, narratives, and ritual apparatus Eo demonstrate their power and naturalize their rule.
The Kongo kingdom entered into European history in 1483 with the arrival in west central Africa of Portuguese explorers and clerics led...