The king's letters live in Lisbon

Claim (verbatim)

Christian Kongo was a literate state from the early sixteenth century: King Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga, r. c.1509-1543) and his chancery produced a stream of letters, and Kongo Christianity generated catechisms, sermons, confraternity records, and school texts — the 1624 Doutrina Christãa (Mateus Cardoso, translated with Kongo help) is the first printed book in a Bantu language, later joined by Brusciotto's Kikongo grammar (1659). Yet almost none of this survives where it was made. The mechanism is an archival asymmetry produced by destination and by war: outbound correspondence and mission reports were filed in European institutions (the Torre do Tombo, the Vatican's Propaganda Fide, the Capuchin archives — the bulk gathered in Brásio's Monumenta Missionaria Africana), which had institutional continuity, while the in-situ Kongo archive was consumed by the kingdom's later collapse and the sack that followed defeats such as Mbwila (1665). So the surviving Kongo textual record is the half addressed abroad, and the locally held half — the received letters, the working church books, the school copies — is nearly a total loss. Prediction: of identifiable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kongo Christian documents, the overwhelming majority extant today will be items preserved in European archives (letters received in Europe, mission reports filed in Rome and Lisbon), while items surviving in situ in the former Kongo will be effectively nil — under five percent of the extant total — even though the correspondence itself proves a two-directional documentary traffic (primary clause: under five percent of extant Kongo Christian documents survive in situ; the verdict follows it). Kill: António Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana (multi-volume), with the Torre do Tombo and Propaganda Fide holdings and Cardoso's Doutrina Christãa (1624); the provenance split is a repository tally over the catalogued Kongo corpus.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: of identifiable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kongo Christian documents, the overwhelming majority extant today will be items preserved in European archives (letters received in Europe, mission reports filed in Rome and Lisbon), while items surviving in situ in the former Kongo will be effectively nil — under five percent of the extant total — even though the correspondence itself proves a two-directional documentary traffic (primary clause: under five percent of extant Kongo Christian documents survive in situ; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: António Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana (multi-volume), with the Torre do Tombo and Propaganda Fide holdings and Cardoso's Doutrina Christãa (1624); the provenance split is a repository tally over the catalogued Kongo corpus.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That the surviving Kongo Christian documentary record was preserved because it was filed in European institutions — the corpus gathered in Brásio's Monumenta Missionaria Africana — while the in-situ archive was consumed by war is standard Kongo historiography (Thornton; Fromont). But the primary clause pins a provenance proportion: under five percent of extant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kongo Christian documents surviving in situ. No published work computes an in-situ-versus-European repository share over an enumerated Kongo corpus; the near-total in-situ loss is assumed and worked from rather than tabulated as a figure. Rich neighborhood, un-run proportion.

• António Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana (Lisbon, 1952- ), multi-volume
• John K. Thornton, 'The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750', Journal of African History 25/2 (1984), 147-167
• Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (University of North Carolina Press, 2014)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.