1300s–1400s CE: (A Second Independent Copper Discovery Along the North Side of the Congo River Near the Atlantic, Local Artisans Developing Copper Metallurgy…

1300s–1400s CE: (A Second Independent Copper Discovery Along the North Side of the Congo River Near the Atlantic, Local Artisans Developing Copper Metallurgy at an Unknown Date but Centuries After the Arrival of Iron, and Control of the Copper Trade Becoming a Major Factor in the Founding and Rise to Power of the Kingdom of Kongo): A second notable area of probable independent discovery and exploitation of copper resources lay in areas along the north side of the Congo River, just inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The local artisans of this area brought copper metallurgy into being at an as-yet-unknown time, possibly not until the later first millennium CE but in any case centuries after the arrival of iron technology there. Control of the trade in copper from these sources became a major factor in the founding and rise to power of the Kingdom of Kongo in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here is a direct line from technological innovation to state formation, from the mastery of a metal to the construction of a polity. The Kingdom of Kongo did not emerge from a void. It emerged, in part, from the economic power that came with controlling a valued commodity, a commodity that Africans had discovered and learned to exploit on their own, following the reversed metallurgical sequence that characterized most of the continent. The people who built Kongo were not recipients of someone else’s technology. They were innovators in their own right, and the political structures they created reflected the economic leverage that independent technological capacity provides.