The kingdoms of Loango, Kakongo, and Ngoyo were highly centralized states, a feature that may have favored their persisting autonomy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Unlike Luanda and Benguela, two Portuguese colonies, due to a variety of internal and external factors, not only the Portuguese, but also no other European power managed to ever control the three main ports of the Loango coast during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. As these three kingdoms of the Loango coast developed during the seventeenth century the initial European demand for commodities such as ivory and copper was gradually replaced with the commerce dealing in human beings during the second half of the seventeenth century. This chapter examines the history of the three kingdoms of the Loango coast. It explores how these states were structured, by identifying the main local agents involved in the trade with Europeans. It pays a particular attention to the role of the Mfuka in the Kingdom of Ngoyo in order to understand the complex interactions among African rulers, their local agents, and Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French slave merchants, who were often in competition.

This chapter examines the conflictual context of the slave trade on the Loango coast. European slave merchants competed with each other, and French slave merchants from various ports clashed as well. French slave traders provided local agents with goods that had local demand and also attempted to respond to the specific tastes of local rulers and agents, to whom they paid customs, often referred to as presents. When these arrangements failed, ship captains did not hesitate to give themselves the upper hand by sabotaging their European rivals. The chapter shows how, on occasion, French traders also physically assaulted even their compatriots by stealing their cargos of commodities and human beings. Despite European pressures to monopolize the trade in the region, the rulers of Ngoyo, Kakongo, and Loango kept significant control over their territories during the eighteenth century. However, on some occasions, Ngoyo’s Woyo residents of Cabinda supported the French to fight the Portuguese who also attempted to control the region. Likewise, in some situations, local traders sided with specific French traders in detriment of others as well. Understanding these conflicts is central to grasp the importance of gifts of prestige and local agents in the trade of enslaved Africans on the Loango coast.

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword fabricated in La Rochelle and given as a gift to Cabindas Mfuka Andris Pukuta following the conflict of 1775. The chapter argues that the object stands for a rich example of the complex interactions between French trades and Cabinda’s local authorities. The chapter explores the work and trajectory of the silversmith, who likely created the sword, and its connections to the shipowner Daniel Garesché and ship captain Jean Amable Lessenne. Like a large cutlass, the sword follows the format of a kimpaba, a Woyo insignia. The chapter explores the uses and meanings of this kimpaba, and its connections to other existing similar West Central African swords. The chapter argues that the sword symbolizes the increasing power acquired by coastal Woyo agents in detriment of the Ngoyo’s ruler whose powers were decreasing with the intensification of the slave trade.