In the eighteenth century, a Kongolese woman possessed by Saint Anthony led a mass movement to restore the Kingdom of Kongo. The movement was violently suppressed by the religious and political authorities of the country, and she was burned at the stake as a witch and heretic in 1706 – but not before she had drawn thousands of people to her in the ruins of the country's ancient capital.

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita's religious and political movement is surprisingly little known outside narrow academic circles. Even though the movement has been discussed quite widely by Africanists since the 1960s, its full implications for the history of Africa and the slave trade to America have not been explored in popular history. Dona Beatriz' movement, although primarily aimed at ending a long-lasting civil war and reestablishing a broken monarchy, can also be seen as a popular movement directed against the slave trade in Africa at the time of the export slave trade. Yet up to the present, it has not fired much popular knowledge.

This neglect may be partly because West Africa is still regarded in the United States as the principal place of origin of African Americans, even though recent research shows that as many as one-quarter of all African Americans ultimately derive from central African (and mostly Kongolese) roots.