Soyo wipes out a Portuguese army and turns the date into a national feast

After Ambuila the Portuguese moved to crush Soyo, the coastal province that had grown rich on direct trade through the port of Pinda and had been drifting away from the Kongo crown for a generation. A Portuguese army beat the Soyo forces in 1670 and killed their prince. Soyo regrouped and destroyed that army in a surprise attack on 18 October, the feast of St Luke. Nobody threatened Soyo like that again. St Luke’s Day became a national festival of deliverance with processions and war dances, and the church took a full part in it. Soyo was also the one place in the whole country with an almost unbroken Capuchin presence from 1645 into the eighteenth century, and it developed something like a settled Christianity, with eight churches in its capital, lay brotherhoods whose membership was near compulsory for high office, and princes who could read and write Portuguese.