This chapter explores the connections between the French port of La Rochelle and Atlantic Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. La Rochelle’s slave-trading activities had multiple dimensions. The city’s merchants loaded their vessels traveling to the Atlantic coasts of Africa with a variety of commodities and luxury products. The chapter shows how these material items shaped the commercial, social, and cultural exchanges between La Rochelle’s merchants and Loango coast local. Through this broad picture, the chapter seeks to examine the positions of La Rochelle’s agents Jean-Amable Lessenne, Le Montyon’s ship captain, as well as Daniel Garesché, the rich owner of the ship Le Montyon who gave Mfuka Andris Pukuta the silver kimpaba as a gift following the Cabinda conflict in 1775. An examination of these wealthy men’s activities allows us to situate La Rochelle’s position in relation to other ports involved in the trade of enslaved Africans, as well as to envision the links between the French port and the Loango coast, and even more specifically its connections with the West Central African ports of Malembo and Cabinda, where the Mfuka Andris Pukuta was established.

The kingdoms of Loango, Kakongo, and Ngoyo were highly centralized states, a feature that may have favored their persisting autonomy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Unlike Luanda and Benguela, two Portuguese colonies, due to a variety of internal and external factors, not only the Portuguese, but also no other European power managed to ever control the three main ports of the Loango coast during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. As these three kingdoms of the Loango coast developed during the seventeenth century the initial European demand for commodities such as ivory and copper was gradually replaced with the commerce dealing in human beings during the second half of the seventeenth century. This chapter examines the history of the three kingdoms of the Loango coast. It explores how these states were structured, by identifying the main local agents involved in the trade with Europeans. It pays a particular attention to the role of the Mfuka in the Kingdom of Ngoyo in order to understand the complex interactions among African rulers, their local agents, and Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French slave merchants, who were often in competition.