Luís Mendes de Vasconcellos

The transatlantic slave trade has transformed the economics and the politics of this entire region, turning what were once wars of territorial expansion or tribute collection into something far more devastating, wars whose primary purpose is the capture of captives to be sold into bondage and shipped across the ocean to labor on plantations in Brazil.

By the time Mbande takes the throne, the man governing the Portuguese colony is Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos, and Vasconcelos is not interested in the cautious diplomacy that has characterized some earlier periods of contact.

He is a soldier and an administrator who sees in Ndongo's internal instability, in the very succession crisis that Mbande is struggling to consolidate, an opportunity.

A kingdom distracted by internal purges, a new ruler whose legitimacy is not yet fully secured, regional sobas whose loyalties are uncertain and therefore purchasable, this is precisely the kind of fractured political landscape in which colonial expansion thrives.