The art of conversion

Between the 16th and the 19th centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practised Christianity, actively participating in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm on a par with European monarchies. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, this book examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture, traces its development across four centuries marked by war and the Atlantic slave trade, and finally narrates its unravelling as 19th-century European colonialism penetrated Africa.