How Jesus became Black: Kongo's Discovery of its Role in the Creation and Nativity Stories.

The Kingdom of Kongo is notable for its conversion to Christianity in the late fifteenth century and as continuing as a Christian country for the rest of its independent existence. Its conversion and the propagation and maintenance are widely believed to be the work of foreign missionaries, disrupted by a nationalist reconception of Christian history by D Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a prophetess possessed by Saint Anthony in 1704. New documentary discoveries force a new understanding of this process, placing emphasis on the reworking of the Creation and Nativity as taking place in Kongo, not with D Beatriz' possessed statements in the eighteenth century, but in the sixteenth century at the hands of Kongolese intellectuals and school masters reworking European written source material, such as the Black Madonna at the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and maps of the Garden of Eden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]