“. . . Our Country is Being Completely Depopulated”: King Nzinga Mbemba on the Slave Trade

Background: The slave trade had a profound effect not only on the people enslaved, but also on the African societies from which they came. While many African societies engaged in slavery and slave trading, it was frequently quite different in nature than that instituted by Europeans in the New World. In a 1526 letter from King Nzinga Mbemba of the Congo (baptized King Affonso I) to King João III of Portugal, the African ruler condemned the impact of the slave trade on his own people, an impact that would intensify in the next century.

Sir, your highness should know how our Kingdom is being lost in so many ways. . . . We cannot reckon how great the damage is, since [your Portuguese] merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives. . . . So great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and Your Highness should not agree with this or accept it as in your service. . . . That is why we beg of Your Highness to help and assist us in this matter, commanding your factors [representatives] that they should not send here either merchants or wares, because it is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them. . . .

Moreover, Sir, in our Kingdoms there is another great inconvenience which is of little service to God, and this is that many of our people [are] keenly desirous . . . of the wares and things of your Kingdoms, which are brought here by your people. In order to satisfy their voracious appetite, [they] seize many of our people, freed and exempt men, and very often it happens that they kidnap even noblemen and the sons of noblemen, and our relatives, and take them to be sold to the white men who are in our Kingdoms. . . . 

Source: Basil Davidson, The African Past: Chronicles from Antiquity to Modern Times (1964).