Danced Combat in Angola
The connections between royal blade dances, training dances and war dances are most clear in the Kongo-speaking areas where various forms of danced combat rituals were both conceptually and semantically linked.
At the core of this semantic field was sanga as a danced ritual in which a machete-wielding chief manifested the leopard's power behind chiefship by physically killing antisocial elements or at least symbolically demonstrating the ability to do so. The royal sanga brought together both the religious cosmology and political ideology of rule in the region. In the Kongolese language the term for ritual (mvita) literally meant ‘war', because these rites were understood to take place in the context of an ongoing war on both the spiritual and human planes between good (those seeking the welfare of the community) and evil.15 This latter group was dominated by ndoki (loosely ‘witch'), greedy people willing to ritually ‘eat' others to achieve their selfish ends. The first line of defence against ndoki was the chief, whose justification for rule was his ability to harness the lethal spirit of the leopard to rid the community of such antisocial elements. This battle was ultimately determined on the spiritual plane, but its outcome was evident in the13 Roquinaldo Ferreira, ‘Transforming Atlantic Slaving: Trade, Warfare and Territorial Control in Angola, 1650-1800', unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003, 15, 218-25.
14 John K. Thornton, ‘The Art of War in Angola, 1575-1680', Comparative Studies in Society and History 30.2 (1988), 360-78.
15 Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael Harris, Astonishment and Power: The Eyes of Understanding Kongo Minkisi (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 61. outcome of physical conflicts.[873] The iconic physical manifestation of this invisible warfare was a chief s execution of antisocial elements like witches, murderers and traitors via the sanga.
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, William Holman Bentley defined sanga as ‘the sword-dance, which is only done by a chief on very special occasions;... when someone is to be executed the chief dances the sanga for a while, then stopping suddenly points the sword at the victim, who is immediately killed'.[874] Thus Kongo leaders underwent rituals during their investment that varied from district to district, but consistently transformed the individual into a leopard. This was often followed by ritual violence that publicly demonstrated that the power to kill had been successfully instilled into the ruler.1[875]Although the royal sanga ritual continued to be a demonstration of this leopard power, there were a number of historical transformations in terms of weaponry around the Kingdom of Kongo. Before the arrival of Europeans and continuing in Kongolese-speaking areas north of the Christian Kingdom of Kongo, the investiture rite, executions and sanga rituals were performed with the mbele a lulendo (‘blade of power'), an elaborately decorated machete that was the central symbol of the leopard chief s power over life and death. Within the Kingdom of Kongo these machetes were eventually joined by imported swords from Europe and the western Sudan, and later locally produced swords based on these foreign styles inscribed with Kongolese ritual symbols.[876]
A final innovation occurred in this tradition, at least in Soyo, a powerful Kongolese province separated from the Kongo capital by a large wilderness. Soyo was rich in natural resources including the trading port of Mpinda, where the Dutch arrived and began to sell firearms in exchange for war captives. This firepower helped the ruler of Soyo to declare his kingdom's independence from the King of Kongo, who had previously maintained a near monopoly over guns via the Portuguese. While scholars debate the relative advantage of firearms against most Angolan armies, there is no question that guns would have been particularly effective against the Kongolese heavy infantry since their shields could stop arrows and javelins but not bullets.
Muskets thus effectively neutralised this elite section of the King of Kongo's army. In reflection of the perceived power guns gave him, the King of Soyo was described as performing his sanga ritual first with Angolan arms, then with a rifle.[877] Despite these variations, at its core the sanga remained the dance ritual demonstrating a ruler's power to kill.Related to this were variants of the term sanguar, referring to the physical skills of attack and especially defence that were at the heart of close combat in Angola. Pero Rodrigues, a Jesuit missionary in Angola in the late sixteenth century, noted that Angolans did not use defensive armour, rather ‘all their defence rests in sanguar, which is to jump from one place to another with a thousand twists and such agility that they can dodge arrows and throwing spears aimed at them'.[878] These sanguar combat skills were developed in a number of danced ritual games, usually practised in community settings such as weddings, festivals and rites of passage. These included slap boxing, foot fighting, stick and machete fencing, and wrestling set to music.[879] This combative virtuosity was also employed in private ritual duels with sticks or machetes. Among pastoralists of the highlands, conflicts between two men were settled with stick fights. North of the Kongolese kingdom of Luango, such duels were carried out with large knives or small machetes. Although violent, this ritual duel followed a tight script in which combatants did not seek to kill each other but to shame each other with cuts, ideally to the face.[880] These duels followed clear rules aimed to prevent death at all costs, since murder would be met with severe penalties.
Linking the sanga dance of rulers and the skill of sanguar developed in danced contests were collective sanga dances called sangamento that served as both tributes and war preparation. In times of peace these martial exercises acted as offerings of loyalty on the part of subordinates; one source defines sangamento as ‘to show oneself faithful'.
Such collective sanga tributes served to offer kings a type of military review to assess the size of his potential army and his soldiers' level of sanguar. In the Kingdom of Kongo before the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century, tributary sanga performances took place on the day each province paid their annual tribute. After Christianisation, the frequency of these rituals was increased, with a sangamento taking place on the feast day of St James, the kingdom's patron saint, as well as Christmas, Easter, Corpus Christi and other holy days. The Kingdom of Soyo augmented this calendar with another annual sangamento to commemorate Soyo's decisive defeat of the Portuguese army at the Battle of Kitombo in 1670. Additionally, in Christian kingdoms such as Kongo and Soyo, these tributary rituals took place next to churches and with the participation of Christian missionaries whose blessings ritually reinforced the rulers' legitimacy as having the backing of the Christian God as well as the ancestral leopard. While such peacetime ceremonies were thus fundamentally ritual displays of political allegiance and spiritual legitimacy, the improvised performances were not without physical violence, often ending with a number of injuries and deaths.[881]In times of conflict, soldiers and officers in Angola always performed sangamento rituals in front of their rulers before heading off to war. This war dance functionally served as an embodied declaration of war and simultaneously fired up soldiers to meet danger with courage. Additionally, the sangamento served two fundamentally ritual objectives. First, these practices were seen as conducting war on the spiritual plane, in which it was hoped the effects of the enemies' spiritual protection could be broken.[882] Second, since killing was reserved in Angolan political ideology for the ruler who was invested with the power of the leopard, it seems likely that pre-war sangamento may have ritually extended to peasant soldiers a temporary participation in the leopard leader's power to kill antisocial elements, in this case an enemy's soldiers.
This is signalled by the king holding his unsheathed blade - the symbol of the leopard's power - in his right hand during the performance of the ritual by his troops, as he did when extending his power to a royal executioner.[883]While their relationship to spiritual power took on local expressions, all Angolans saw such combat rituals as an essential part of the many layers of ritual preparation for battle. Cyril Claridge noted that it was not uncommon for wars in Kongolese areas to begin by the lead generals of the two groups meeting in a final attempt at peaceful terms. If unsuccessful, the generals first chose the battleground for the upcoming conflict, then symbolically initiated the war by attempting to draw their rival's blood in close combat, before returning to their troops who were being prepared via war dance sangamento.[884] As historian John Thornton has shown, when two Angolan armies engaged each other, the conflict often began with a brief volley of arrows before clashing in an open formation that allowed for individual skill in close combat.[885] Yet the real damage came not in this opening confrontation, but when one side broke from the initial melee and the victors mowed down the fleeing forces. Thus in the central highland kingdom of Bie, the general and his most elite troops were send ahead into battle and the king and main body only closed when these forward fighters demonstrated that the war had already been won on the spiritual level.[886] In the late sixteenth century Angola witnessed the beginnings of a military revolution based not on firearms but upon creating an entire society of such crack troops among the Imbangala.
Linguistic evidence suggests that the Imbangala and the title of their early leader nguri (lion) emerged out of the pastoral highlands around Kilengues as a revolutionary people who lived as a permanent war camp. They trained their sanguar skill constantly and enforced a strict discipline that made them the most professional soldiers in Angola.
They did not produce any food but rather spread out like locusts, attacking existing states - pillaging their food - and then moving on. And they practised ritual infanticide and incorporated teens from among their victims into their ranks, allowing them to repopulate their armies very quickly. Both their biological children and the incorporated teens could only become Imbangala through an initiation process that was only complete after they proved themselves in battle. The Imbangala exerted a considerable impact on Angolan history by destroying existing states and eventually settling down to create stable states of their own over the course of the seventeenth century. Jan Vansina argues that their radical military way of life was a response to the arrival of European slave traders on the coast,[887] namely violence begetting violence.A number of scholars have argued that, before the arrival of Europeans, there was no word for hereditary slavery in most areas of Angola because the institution as understood in the West did not exist throughout the region.[888] Yet the Angola region was plunged into the darkness of wide-scale slaving by the wars of Portuguese expansion and enslavement launched out of their colonies in Luanda and Benguela that continued through most of the seventeenth century; years of repeated civil wars in the Kingdom of Kongo; the spread of European slave traders; and the widespread chaos in the wake of the Imbangala revolution. This tragedy caused more captives to be sent into the transatlantic slave trade from west central Africa than from any other region of the continent.
More on the topic Danced Combat in Angola:
- Leopards and Ritual Combat in the Angolan Savannah
- Combat in Rituals and Festivals
- Bibliographic Essay