Toby Green teaches Lusophone African history and culture at King’s College London.
In March 1684, a prince from the African kingdom of Ndongo arrived in Rome. Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça was there, as José Lingna Nafafé explains in his new book, to demand the legal abolition of Atlantic slavery. He was bringing ‘an ethical and criminal kufunda [case] before the Vatican court, which accused the nations involved’ – including the...
For centuries, the region that now straddles northern Angola and the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo formed a political and cultural whole. South of what the BaKongo knew as the Zaire river lay the heartland of the Kingdom of Kongo, one of the most powerful states of West-Central Africa. Kongo sat at the crossroads of trade routes linking the forests of the interior with the...
Much of the poorer part of the world is still susceptible to the disease, and as long as it is, many more people will die, and the risk of new and more dangerous variants will remain. In May 2020, the...
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