Although Kongo and Portugal had been trading partners and participated in a cultural exchange during the sixteenth century, the establishment of the Portuguese colony of Angola in 1575 put pressure on that relationship.

Kongo initially assisted Portugal in Angola, sending an army to rescue the Portuguese governor Paulo Dias de Novais when his war against the nearby African kingdom of Ndongo failed in 1579.

But subsequently as Portugal became stronger it began to press harder, and in 1622 severed even the cautiously friendly relationship of the earlier period when a large Portuguese army invaded southern Kongo and defeated the local forces at the Battle of Mbumbi.

[3] In the years following the Dutch withdrawal, Angolan governors sought to obtain revenge against Kongo and to support the slave trade with a highly aggressive policy.

King António I, an aggressive monarch in his own right, was negotiating with Spain to renew an anti-Portuguese alliance, and also sent ambassadors into the Dembos areas to persuade them to join Kongo against the Portuguese, promising Spanish aid.

The Kongo army included a large number of peasant archers, probably about 15,000, some 5,000 heavy infantry equipped with shields and swords, and a musket regiment of 380 men, 29 of them Portuguese led by Pedro Dias de Cabral.

After the battle, the head of the king or Manikongo was buried with ceremony by the Portuguese in the chapel of Our Lady of Nazareth situated on the Bay of Luanda, and the crown and sceptre of Kongo were sent to Lisbon as trophies.

This civil war, which raged for half a century, led to Kongo's decentralization and fundamental changes, leading to Kongolese historians, even in 1700, regarding the battle as a decisive turning point in their country's history.

They led a rebellion at the engenho, escaped, and later formed their own kingdom of Quilombo dos Palmares, a Maroon nation which controlled large areas of northeast Brazil during the Dutch-Portuguese War.