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Thornton, John K. 1998. THE KONGOLESE SAINT ANTHONY: DONA BEATRIZ KIMPA VITA AND THE ANTONIAN MOVEMENT, 16841706. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 228 pp.
John Thornton's objective in writing this book was to render a well-documented episode of Kongolese history in a narrative style, accessible to nonacademics. He has largely succeeded. Thornton is certainly the right person for the task, as he has been working with the relatively rich set of primary documents on the Kongo Kingdom for more than twenty years. The historical episode-the rise of the Antonian prophetic movement from the religious experience of a young Kongolese women named Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita at the turn of the seventeenth century-is familiar to scholars of the Central African past, but the story has never been told in such detail, nor its historical context considered so thoroughly. At the time of Dona Beatriz's birth in 1684, the Kongolese elite's experience of Catholicism was nearly two-centuries-old. The Kongo Kingdom was also several decades into a period of severe civil strife, as its ancient capital, Sao Salvador, lay abandoned, and competing regional factions were fighting among each other to claim the royal title. These conflicts generated a large number of captives who were often sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas. As a consequence, Kongolese Catholic slaves played key roles in the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, as well as the Haitian Revolution at the end of the century. Thornton rightly points out that these connections have not been fully appreciated by scholars, studying either side of the Atlantic.
The book begins with an Introduction that...