Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Marcos Leitão de Almeida

The historiography of the Kingdom of Kongo has long emphasized the profound political transformations following the Kongolese Civil War, marked by fragmentation, factional violence, and the expansion of enslavement in response to Atlantic demands. Central to this narrative is the rise of a class of oligarchs, or “entrepreneurial nobles,” who mobilized political titles and discourses of ancestry to assert their influence as local power brokers and intermediaries in the trans-Atlantic trade of goods and enslaved persons. In this presentation, I discuss how Kongolese oligarchs reshaped the vocabulary of slavery, actively participating in the renewal of Atlantic slavery in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This linguistic transformation underpinned a discourse that increasingly divorced the practice of enslavement from its previous moral constraints, embedding these strategies within the broader political and economic contexts that drove the intensification of slavery in the S.A.