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Introduction
The First Encounter and a Disruptive Colonisation
The starting point of the troubled colonisation of Angola coincided with the first encounter between Europeans and subjects of the kingdom of Congo. It occurred in 1482 when King João II sent a young commoner named Diogo Cão with an assortment of stone pillars surmounted by the cross of the Order of Christ and carved with the royal arms to mark the capes he should discover. When Diogo Cão stumbled on the Congo River, he was actually looking for something else: a passage around Africa into the Indian Ocean. He travelled to the mouth of the river, where he set up a pillar, left four messengers, and took four natives back to Portugal. Back in Lisbon, King João knighted Diogo Cão and appointed him to be the commander of a second expedition sent out to recover the messengers, whose foremost assignment was to establish amicable relations with the local authorities.1
Those friendly relations facilitated the settlement of missionaries, traders, and soldiers, but the attempt to Christianise the kingdom of Congo through the conversion of subaltern chiefs proved ephemeral.