Tradition versus Modernity in central Africa: King Pedro V and Prince Nicolau's competing visions for 19th-century Kongo.

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The competing ideologies of these 19th-century personalities in Kongo and their significance in the colonization of Africa, are the subject of my latest Patreon article. ⬇️.Tradition versus Modernity in central Africa.

Prince Nicolau is championed as one of Africa’s earliest nationalists in contrast to King Pedro and represents the competing visions of modernisers and traditionalists which characterised the political debates of 19th-cent Africa at the dawn of colonialism.

The most remarkable among the early modernisers of central Africa was Prince Nicolau, who was educated in Lisbon and later returned to Kongo, where he became the most vocal critic of the Portuguese colonialists and the Kongo king Pedro V (r. 1859-91).

The gentleman “railed against the Portuguese, who had ruined Kongo, against the whites who pushed their way into foreign lands, and declared that Africa would not improve until the last Portuguese had been thrown out.”.

Another traveller who visited the kingdom of Kongo in the same year met a ‘black gentleman’ who, despite elevating himself above his peers because of his western education in Luanda, was a “furious patriot.”.

There was talk of a republic, of an option for Brazilian nationality, and there were even those who considered making a gift from their beloved homeland to the Republic of the United States of America.”.

As one visitor to the region in 1856 remarked:. “At that time, certain utopian ideas of independence were brewing in Luanda, with which some exalted sons of the country sought to free the motherland, as they called it, from Portuguese rule.

A visitor to Kongo in 1856 met a black gentleman who “railed against the Portuguese, who had ruined Kongo, against the whites who pushed their way into foreign lands, and declared that Africa would not improve until the last Portuguese had been thrown out”.

In Central Africa, western-educated Africans were instead shut out of local administration and were thus very critical of both the Portuguese colonial authorities in Luanda and African kingdoms like Kongo for their slow adoption of modernization.