Paper short abstract:

From a chapter of Mission Evangelica... from Father Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, we intend to discuss the production and the writing of the missionary texts in order to understand how the European missionaries thought about the African and organized the program of his conversion.

Paper long abstract:

The missionary literature on the Kongo and Mbundu formations is one of the most important source for understanding the historical dynamics of societies in the territory that is now Angola, and has been abundantly used by authors from various fields of social sciences. Its nature as lived and nearly instantaneous testimony of a given reality, gives them a dimension of indisputable authenticity. However, research has overlooked the fact that the missionary report is, at the same time, a construction of reality and an instrument for intervention on it. By their ethnographic character, missionary writing sets out, from its author, a relationship of power and authority that builds the African as an object of knowledge and of transformation worked by the action of proselytizing missionaries.

From a chapter of Mission Evangelica... from Father Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, we intend to discuss how the European missionaries thought about the African and organized the program of his conversion. Analyze the conditions of production of the missionary text, deconstruct, in its architecture and conceptual rhetoric, the way it represent the African reality, is a necessary step to fully understanding the social and cultural dynamics that sets the region of Angola during this period, as Marie Louise Pratt would call it, a "contact zone"; it allows, at the same time, to evaluate the historical density of Africanist discourse, understood as Christopher L. Miller, as a set of rhetorical devices that builds the historically lasting image of Africa in European literature.