Battle of Mbwila

The Kingdom of Kongo had been Catholic since 1491, sent ambassadors to Lisbon and Rome, and had spent two centuries managing the Portuguese rather than being managed by them. A dispute over a border district brought the two to battle at Mbwila in October 1665, where the Kongo army had numbers and the Portuguese force had disciplined musketry and field guns. King Antonio I was killed, along with a generation of the kingdom's nobility, and the succession that should have followed had no obvious claimant left alive. Kongo did not fall to Portugal; it fell into a civil war among its own houses that lasted the better part of forty years. Those wars fed the Atlantic slave trade with captives on a scale the kingdom had previously resisted.

Kongo is the standard corrective to the idea that pre-colonial Africa lacked states with archives, since its kings wrote letters in Portuguese, litigated in Rome, and left a documentary record that John Thornton and others have used to reconstruct battles like Mbwila from both sides rather than only from European accounts. Read that way the battle is not a colonial conquest at all but a defeat in a war between two states, fought largely by African soldiers on both sides, whose consequences were internal. Historians differ on how directly Mbwila caused the civil wars, with some treating it as the trigger and others as the moment an existing succession crisis became unmanageable. The battlefield has never been located precisely, and even the spelling of the place varies across the sources between Mbwila, Ambuila and Ulanga.