As a child growing up in the Lower Congo listening to tales from our oral history, I heard many times about the exploits of Kimpa Vita who was still remembered after 250 years as a major cultural heroine (We did not know her as Dona Beatriz.) It was something of a shock to find that Thornton has chosen to present his account almost exclusively through the eyes of her enemies and killers. He feels compelled to do this because of the nature of the available evidence. The Europeans left a wealth of written commentary while the Kongolese have only their oral history and living cultural traditions. He discounts these non–archival sources because anthropologists and other investigators, as well as Kongo writers themselves, have done virtually all of their work in the area north of the Congo River, which in his opinion was "never" a part of the Kongo Kingdom. In addition, oral history is considered inexact and fanciful, and culture today is too far from the 18th century to be a reliable guide. "The modern scholar has little choice," he says, but to try to read between the lines and hope that the Kongo viewpoint can be surmised" (3).

Faced with the obvious bias and shortcomings of his only acceptable sources, Thornton tries to compensate by the cautious use of ethnographic materials in the hope that they will throw some light on the "ideological world of the eighteenth-century Kongo presented in the Capuchin accounts" (5). Nevertheless, there remains no convincing Kongo voice or presence in this book, and readers are left pretty much on their own to evaluate the thoroughly Eurocentric point of view that dominates. In fact, Thornton's attempts to enhance the liveliness of the narrative actually intensify the European bias. For example, when the archives report a Kongo speaker's remarks, Thornton changes them to a direct quotation. The gain in dramatic immediacy, however, gives the witness more credibility than he deserves, considering the problems of cultural blindness and self-interested motives. Worse, they create a jarringly Italianate voice for the otherwise silent Kongolese. The thought-processes of the Kongo actors are thus presented largely as European projections. Beatriz’s "confession" rings false to a Kongo ear. And how did Don Bernardo know that she and her consort died speaking the names of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, when they lay bound with wood piled over their faces surrounded by a noisy crowd? The account of this episode is suspect and full of gaps, but Thornton allows his witnesses to tell their story with a minimum of irony and editorial interference.

The terms that Europeans applied to a society they did not understand mirrored their own – king, queen, duke, marquis, nobles, vassals, peasants – and imposed misleading concepts of power and social structure. Actually, all rulers within the Kingdom, including the king himself, were called "mani, " suggesting a much less hierarchical society and a clue to the loosely federated groups of clans and families that constituted the Kingdom.

With a less conservative approach to Kongo cultural studies, Thornton might have projected an image of the Kingdom against which the reader could better judge this European version of events. As it is, we lack a clear sense of what the Kingdom meant to those who fought so hard over it, particularly Dona Beatriz herself. Not everyone agrees that the Kongo source are unusable. The Kingdom of Kongo (Nsundi Province) did indeed extend north of the Congo River. Thornton's own map shows a boundary that includes the area of present-day Luozi, and some maps chart it even farther north. The spread of those inhabitants across Manianga to Brazzaville carried a conservative culture into the region where the most intensive research has been done, and where in modem times prophetic movements like Kimpa Vita's continue to arise. There is no reason to doubt their claim of descent from the Kingdom. It is true that traditional cultures do not stand still; but continuity is also a fact, especially in matters of religion.

Even through the opacities of European reportage, present-day Kongolese can recognize the spiritual motivation behind Beatriz's crusade. The social order belonged as much to God and the ancestors as to man. The personal ambitions of rulers - who were elected by a council and were not hereditary - were kept in check by the ancestor-monitored responsibility toward their people, who were closely united by clan and family relationships. The idea of the Kingdom as a single spiritual entity had a dynamic life of its own, which is why Beatriz rose to fight for its recovery after the break up of the Kingdom into warring factions under the impact of the Portuguese intrusion. The tendency of Western scholars is to misjudge the power of spiritual belief in African social life and politics, and to reduce motives to personal ambition for power or wealth. Thus, Thornton speculates that Dona Beatriz may have been trying to establish a "theocracy" with herself as head and kings as her servants. This understanding of "kindoki" or the use of supernatural powers, is likewise limited by an effort to envision it in terms of Western moral and psychological norms. Kimpa Vita's movement can only be understood against the backdrop of Kongo oral tradition and culture. If the methods of modern Western historiography will not allow this, then we must continue to read African history as a creation by Europeans in their own image.