Isichei makes the following very perceptive observation:
"In these early encounters, two symbolic universes met. In a sense, the world views of the Portuguese and the Kongo had much in common. Both took the irruption of the supernatural world into daily life for granted. Naturally enough, both interpreted events in terms of their own cultural history. In a Portuguese narrative, Afonso wins a battle when a bright light appears which echoes the vision claimed for Constantine.[77] In an account of events in the Mutapa kingdom, this precedent is explicit: ÔAs the army was setting out, raising his eyes to heaven, hh saw there a resplendent light, and beautiful cross, in the same form (but without the letters) in which it before appeared to the Emperor Constantine the GreatÕ" [78] The Kongo people, inevitably, located the new teaching within their own world view -- a process made easier by the fact that the missionaries translated ÔpriestÕ as nganga (a traditional religious specialist) and used the word nkisi (traditional religious object) to refer to crucifixes and rosaries, the Bible becoming mukanda nkisi, and the church, nzo a nkisi. Converts reluctant to embrace monogamy defined one spouse as a wife, and the rest as concubines." p 65
77 F. Pgafetta, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo (Cass, Lonon, 1970) p. 82. The 1591 original, in Italian, rcords information from Duarte Lopez.
78 L. Cacegas and L. de Sousa, History of the Order of St Dominic, extract in G.M. Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa (Struick, Cape Town, 1964) I, 399.