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In 1704, on Mount Kibangu, near the mouth of Mbidizi river, Kimpa Vita, a woman apparently from the Kongo aristocracy baptized as Beatriz, proclaimed that Saint Anthony appeared to her while she was deeply ill. He urged for the recomposition of the Kongo political entity through the reaffirmation of the centrality of Mbanza Kongo, its symbolic capital, then known as São Salvador. Kimpa Vita’s prophetic call, deeply rooted in local cosmologies, incorporated a complex reinterpretation of Christian figures, rituals, and symbolic elements, visible from the outset in the veneration of Saint Anthony, anointed as the savior of Kongo. This reflected a long relationship with Christianity and Europe, which began two centuries earlier with the baptism of mwene Kongo Nzinga Nkuwu in 1491. The rapid growth of the movement launched by Kimpa Vita is inseparable from the warfare in the region at the time. The Atlantic slave trade multiplied, and, with it, the fear associated with transoceanic travel and an uncertain fate marked by violence, the rupture of all social ties, and submersion into the complete unknown. In a sense, without ever mentioning it expressly, Beatriz Kimpa Vita’s appeal gave voice to these popular concerns, challenging the different segments of the aristocracy who benefited from this unstable and fearful context, fighting amongst themselves to conquer spheres of power and influence, and precipitated the evolution of political forms in the region. The Antonine movement, as it is known in historiography, had a short life. On July 2, 1706, Kimpa Vita was burned at the stake on the orders of Pedro Afonso Água Rosada Nusamu a Mvemba, known as Pedro IV, with the direct participation of Capuchin priests in Kongo at the time who classified her as a heretic. Echoes of the movement, however, carried across space and time. Artifacts of material culture, such as the Toni Malau figurines, and similar prophetic appeals involving expressions and figures of Christianity, including St. Anthony, crossed the ocean aboard slave ships and emerged in slave revolts in the Americas led by Africans from that region. The influence also spread to prophetic movements in the 20th century.

The institution of slavery in West Central Africa predated the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, though there is limited information about its nature and extent or the gender and age dynamics prior to that period. Slavery in different West Central African societies in the 16th and 17th centuries was broadly defined as the legal and social outsider status of people originating from different states or chiefdoms and brought under captivity as a result of raids or wars, the payment for taxes from tributary states and chiefdoms, punishment for crimes such as adultery in royal circles, or direct purchase. This has been identified as lineage slavery and was distinct from the Atlantic slave trade. Yet, the characteristics of slavery changed throughout the centuries. In the 16th and 17th centuries, local captives could become part of the kin of their owners after a process of integration in their new host society. They turned into insiders, even in instances in which they retained their enslaved status. However, from the 17th century, the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade and Portuguese colonialism resulted in a growing demand for captives, transforming the relations between captives and enslavers. The increasing presence of enslavers and their demand for different supplies, such as foodstuffs, resulted in a greater demand for labor in Portuguese colonial settlements, vassal chiefdoms, and autonomous states. Violence increased and individual kidnapping became the main method of enslavement, though warfare persisted as a method of capture well into the mid-19th century. Relations of dependency were increasingly disrupted and local captives became more vulnerable to deportation to other areas of West Central Africa and different parts of the world. Furthermore, the risk for insiders to be enslaved, re-enslaved, or deported increased, contributing to the redefinition of the meaning of slavery. Finally, following the prohibition of slavery by Portuguese colonial law in 1876, other forms of forced labor resembling slavery in varied ways emerged and were practiced until the third quarter of the 20th century. Resistance persisted throughout.

The fateful encounter between a cadre of European seafarers, military men, traders, and West and West Central African fishermen, seafarers, and merchants spurred one of world history’s longest and most intensive forced migrations. The transatlantic slave trade initiated the formation of an integrated Atlantic world characterized by mass population movements, colonization, political conflict, militarization, and increasing transregional commerce. Consequently, the transoceanic traffic in human beings spurred not only great pain but also profound innovations in the generation and usage of new financial instruments, which provided the means for the expanding webs of market exchange that fed the evolving demand for the enslaved. Finance tied together far-flung communities, paradoxically through a dehumanizing institution that was also an inventive, adaptive, and dynamic one. Because traders had to navigate an array of political contexts, currency systems, cultures of transaction, and modes of contract making, flexibility was key. Slaving—both slave raiding and later mercantile exchanges of those held in bondage—preceded and helped catalyze the emergence of Atlantic capitalist modernity and generated many of the financial techniques that people are familiar with today. Transformations in the financing of the transatlantic slave trade encompass over four hundred years of history and include many permutations such as the sea loan, the family firm, the royally sponsored monopoly trading company, and the merchant firm. Because financing long-distance rather than local trade required specific mechanisms for profit-making calculations, merchants had to be attentive to dynamic contexts such as the growth of plantation agriculture in tropical parts of the Americas, the increasing availability of specie-based forms of currency due to an efflorescence of gold and silver mining in West Africa and Central and South America, political centralization in West Africa, and the emergence of European fiscal–military states. Despite this, there was not a linear progression of financial organizational forms, as merchants and buyers relied on strategies that responded to varied local economic and political conditions within the ports at which they traded.