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The Jaga Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Anne Hilton
Anne Hilton
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

Joseph Miller has argued that the ‘Jaga’ invasion of Kongo in 1568 was primarily an internal rebellion supported by people from Matamba or from Makoko and the Pool. In this article I suggest that the Jaga were more probably dislocated Kongo or Tio from the lower middle Kwango. They were the ancestors of the seventeenth-century ‘Muyaka’, who raided slaves for the Makoko market. Their invasion of Kongo probably began as slave raiding. It continued as an attempt to break the Makoko king's monopoly of slave trade outlets by gaining direct access to the European traders. The invaders succeeded in temporarily overthrowing Kongo for two reasons. Firstly, Kongo was generally ill adapted to withstand sudden invasion. Secondly, the Kongo ruling elite was divided while undergoing radical political and social change. The restoration of Kongo by Portuguese forces had two important consequences. Firstly, it confirmed and advanced the changes in the ruling elite which had begun in the early sixteenth century; it thereby laid the foundation for a monopoly of the throne by a slave-based patrilineal royal segment descended from Afonso I. Secondly, the restoration facilitated the development of a new cloth-trade route from Okango through São Salvador to Luanda which compensated the mani Kongo for his loss of coastal monopoly on slave exports. This new trade enabled Kongo to suvive economically and politically into the later seventeenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , April 1981 , pp. 191 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 Important contributions to the Jaga debate have been made by Birmingham, David, Trade and Conflict in Angola (London, 1966), 64–5Google Scholar; Vansina, Jan, ‘More on the Invasions of Kongo and Angola by the Jaga and the Lunda’, Journal of African History, vii, iii (1966), 421–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMiller, Joseph C., Kings and Kinsmen, Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar resolves many of the problems concerning the Imbangala, once confused with the Jaga of the 1568 Kongo invasion.

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