A New Look at Kongo’s Origin

In engaging this approach, I gradually revised the Kongo’s tradition of origin.Footnote ⁷ Looking at successive bodies of data, I located other changes that took place in tradition. For example, the role of the ruler of Mbata in certifying King Afonso’s right to rule was provided by his letter in 1514, which clearly highlighted some constitutional role for that province.Footnote ⁸ Later traditions—such as those provided by the Portuguese diplomat Duarte Lopes to the Italian humanist Filippo Pigafetta in the late sixteenth century—depict Mbata as having a somewhat different special relationship with the kingdom. In these accounts, the province could provide a king should the royal line die out, but did not give it a special confirmatory role that seemed operational in 1514, and no longer included a role of certification.Footnote ⁹ In short, it seems that Mbata’s role in Kongo’s elections diminished, and tradition evolved to accommodate it.

The archetype of a hero-conqueror was presented in the early seventeenth century, when Jesuit Mateus Cardoso recorded traditions during the coronation of Pedro II (1622) that laid out an official account of the origin of Kongo. In this account, the founder king from Vungu (on the north bank of the Congo River), whose name can be reconstructed as Lukeni lua Nimi, had crossed over the river and rapidly conquered the territory that Kongo would occupy, assigning provinces which he created to his followers. Cardoso’s account acknowledges that Mbata was not conquered; rather it claimed that Mbata continued to be ruled by its own leaders, and that the two leaders exchanged wives, and the income granted to the royal wife had been converted into tribute. There is no mention there of its participation in the election of kings (in fact, Mbata did not have any presence in Pedro II’s coronation, ostensibly because the Mwene Mbata had been recently killed in a rebellion).Footnote ¹⁰

A somewhat later account (circa 1668) by Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, while reiterating the conquest narrative by Cardoso, also included additional information about Kongo’s history from sources outside of the capital and the official history.Footnote ¹¹ Cavazzi appears to retain a special role for Mbata by naming Mbata as one of the three electors who chose kings, and provided important details about Mbata’s role in history.Footnote ¹² These details were most likely taken from fellow Capuchin Girolamo da Montesarchio’s work, primarily in the northern and eastern parts of the country, where he heard local stories that were not recounted in the official history. These lands included territory which would have been part of the original core of Kongo, and also included stories recounted in Mbata, reflecting the ideas that the rulers of that province (still in the hands of its original family) had about its relationship to Kongo.Footnote ¹³

These local tales allowed Cavazzi—uniquely at the time—to maintain that the earliest kings had ruled first in Mpemba Kasi, a small province located in a larger district called “Nsi a Kwilu.” When da Montesarchio visited there, he encountered a female local ruler who declared herself as the “Mother of Kongo” (Ngudi a Kongo), because Kongo’s rule started in that region.Footnote ¹⁴ He also learned, probably also from da Montesarchio, that there was a royal cemetery in Nsi a Kwilu where the earliest “kings’ (plural) were buried.”Footnote ¹⁵ This discovery served as a prequel, as it were, to the conquest story and a complication, based on independent tradition recounted outside the capital, along with probably local memories of the ancient cemetery noted on the spot.Footnote ¹⁶

Da Montesarchio also visited Mbata on several occasions. It was probably from Duke Manuel Afonso that da Montesarchio heard Mbata’s version of its history, including a genealogy of Lukeni lua Nimi, linking him to the ruling family of Mbata, the Nsaku Lau. His account of Mbata’s gradual change of status from near independence to effectively subordinate—as appeared in the official tradition—sounds more like the way the Nsaku Lau imagined their story, as a resignation to the gradual loss of their former power and authority to the kings of Kongo for fear of simply being usurped outright.Footnote ¹⁷

Another nonofficial account of Kongo’s origin came from António de Oliveira Cadornega, an Angolan settler with deep knowledge of local affairs. Reported in 1680, his narrative argues that Kongo was not founded from the north, but from the east—specifically, from Kongo dia Nlaza, a territory which had only been incorporated into Kongo in the 1580s. Cadornega derived this information from a Portuguese trader who worked and lived in the eastern region in the 1650s rather than in the core provinces of Kongo, and so probably had a base in the history of Kongo dia Nlaza.

Thus, many of Kongo’s eastern provinces had once been part of the lands (Cadornega said “empire”) of Kongo dia Nlaza and were known in the seventeenth century as part of a territorial division called “Mombares” (or rectified to Kikongo as Mbwadi).Footnote ¹⁸ Although I once argued that the title “Seven Kingdom of Kongo dia Nlaza” related to Mombares, based on the contention that mbwadi equaled seven (which it does not, the word for seven is sambwadi), the possibility of a former empire east of Kongo playing a role in Kongo’s formation remains a more speculative but still potentially true contention.Footnote ¹⁹

It is possible that Nsundi, Mpangu, and Mbata—formerly part of a loosely organized, larger territory under the control of Kongo dia Nlaza—joined the founders of Kongo in this early period. Each appeared to have played a distinct role: Mbata as a close ally with many concessions, Mpangu as we shall see, as a military ally and under its own ruler, and Nsundi perhaps conquered, since it was maintained as the residence of the king-to-be. This adds to the idea of a complex set of arrangements that were still being resolved as Afonso took the throne.

I also took notice of Afonso’s 1514 letter, in which he requested the king of Portugal to write special letters to only two provincial leaders, Mbata and Mpangu. While it was clear that Mbata, as Afonso himself noted elsewhere, was a deciding voice in the election of the kings, Mpangu did not seem special enough to warrant such attention. But when Afonso mentioned his appointed leaders of most of the major provinces in 1526, he only listed his son as having some revenue from the province, not its leadership.Footnote ²⁰

Pigafetta, while relating traditions later, claimed that Afonso’s brother, who was the ruler of Mpangu, challenged his right to the throne, and also that Afonso did not fully control the province even after defeating his brother. Pigafetta also noted that Mpangu, while once an ally of Kongo was subsequently conquered from Nsundi, the province that Afonso governed before he became king. Finally, Pigafetta observed that the ruler of Mpangu when Lopes was there was a certain Francisco who held that office for some fifty years, and was still in power when Lopes left Kongo in 1584. It was only later that appointments of royal favorites on a rotating basis became established for Mpangu.Footnote ²¹

On the basis of both the official and unofficial accounts of institutions and privileges held in Kongo, I proposed that the creation of Kongo took place in step-by-step manner. Initially, it entailed an alliance with Mbata in exchange for mutual guarantees for the ruling family in each entity. This was followed by a military alliance with Mpangu. There was then a concession to Vunda—formerly a province of Mpemba—granting it power to be an elector along with Mbata, and, finally, a smaller concession of hereditary rule for the leaders of the small market town of Mpangala, a subdivision of Vunda.Footnote ²²

All these data point to a long process of Kongo’s development—perhaps starting around 1350 and continuing into the sixteenth century. The process involved a humble beginning in Mpemba Kasi, which I concluded was a province of Mpemba at that time. It then proceeded with several alliances, often ones granting special privileges to the allies, whether through continued self-government or a role in Kongo’s governance. It probably took more than one reign and more than one generation to accomplish, and to some extent the process had been erased as Kongo elites revised their own story to accommodate the centralizing movement of the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discounting or omitting these former rulers.

During this process of revision, however, I had assumed that Kongo was essentially moving into spaces without large scale complexity—perhaps districts with two levels of authority ruling a town (mbanza) and surrounding villages (mavata). Then, in 2020, by sheer good luck, I came across the Florentine Relation, a previously unknown late sixteenth century account of Kongo written by the Carmelite missionary Diego de la Encarnación.

The opening page of the Florentine Relation read:

Here was unmistakable evidence that there were a number of potentially substantial kingdoms in the space Kongo was about to occupy, and not the simple territories that most scholars had imagined. Hints had been there before, Pigafetta had noted that Mpemba “is the center of the state of Congo and the origin of its ancient kings, the soil where it was born and the leader and head of the other principalities, and for this reason the royal city of all the empire is located there.”Footnote ²⁴ Pigafetta also observed that Mpangu had formerly been a kingdom, and Diego de la Encarnación briefly mentioned elsewhere that the kings of Kongo had taken in other kingdoms during its rise.Footnote ²⁵

Historians had ignored these hints, but they could no longer do so. It was clear that the province or former kingdom of Mpemba was quite a substantial entity. Pigafetta had located its capital far to the south where the Loze River makes a great bend and passes by the “stones of fire.” In the 1960s, Cuvelier’s coworker and fellow historian, the Belgian missionary Joseph de Munck, sent catechists to Angola to locate sites mentioned in this older literature. There, in roughly where Pigafetta had located Mpemba’s capital, they found substantial evidence of a major abandoned settlement with a cemetery that had ancient material, at least from the Christian period, prominently displayed.Footnote ²⁶

Mapping the probable borders of Mpemba strongly suggests that it was probably a third or more the size of the eventual Kingdom of Kongo and thus a major state. A legal inquest ordered by Diogo I in 1550 revealed that Mpemba had at least one major sub-province, Vunda, which in turn had four subdivisions with villages beneath them.Footnote ²⁷ The data from Mpemba alone, limited as it is, clearly points to a major polity with three levels of authority of unknown antiquity, probably founded at least in the first half of the fourteenth century, if not earlier.

On this basis, I proposed that the “origin of Kongo” should be reconceptualized as the “conquest of Mpemba.” There was a reason that the would-be kings of Kongo made alliances with so many other polities and conceded significant privileges to them—emerging Kongo needed their support to take on what was probably a major power with substantial military capacity. It also explained why the founders of Kongo sought alliances from places like Vunda, Mpangala, and Kabunda, since they were probably under Mpemba’s authority and defected to Kongo for better terms.Footnote ²⁸

One might also propose an additional speculation, that in fact the polities adjacent to Mpemba (Mbamba and Wandu) at the time of Kongo’s conquest had once been provinces of an even larger Mpemba dating perhaps to 1300. Their capitals were all quite near Mpemba’s capital, unlike Soyo, or the provinces in the Inkisi Valley (Nsundi, Mpangu, and Mbata). As Mpemba weakened—possibly through the same processes that allowed adventurers from Mpemba Kasi to extract Vunda away from Mpemba—the neighboring regions broke away. This process might be similar to what happened in Kongo itself in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when branches of the royal family, caught up in civil war over the crown, seized provinces which the central power was never able to regain. If so, it would suggest that a fourteenth-century Mpemba was nearly as large as the Kongo we know from history.

Understanding Governance in Kongo

In any case, this revised history and the recognition of an earlier large and powerful kingdom before Kongo, also removes the Kongo case from the origin of large-scale polities in West Central Africa. It also casts doubt on the idea that a single conquest would be the origin of complexity, although it does not rule out an early conquest by different actors.

The issue of social complexity raises another question: how did Kongo’s strongly centralized governance evolve? In sixteenth-century Kongo, the king had substantial power over the nobility, including the right to appoint and demote officials at will. Some historians contend that Kongo had a more federal constitution in which powerful clans exercised authority, and they propose that the sixteenth-century kings had, with Portuguese guidance and help, created the centralized system. Colonial-era historians liked the idea as a part of the civilizing mission that Portugal claimed for itself.

Later historians, like Anne Hilton, and anthropologists like António Custódio Gonçalves, using ethnographic analogy from modern Kongo social organization and hints from earlier sources, advanced similar arguments.Footnote ²⁹ While both gave some credit to Portuguese agents in imposing fiscal centralization, neither gave them full credit.

If Portugal had much to say in the question of Kongo’s fiscal system, consider friendly advice that João III offered to Afonso around 1528 or 1529:

Clearly, if Afonso had been following a plan which the king of Portugal described as a version of feudal Portugal, João would not have needed to complain about Afonso’s capacity to dismiss nobles at will.

Descriptive literature about Kongo’s social organization in the late fifteenth and even the first part of the sixteenth century is limited. However, the material from the later sixteenth century is unambiguous: kings of Kongo could appoint and dismiss officials down to the sub-province level at will, and that noble income rested firmly on the grant of rendas, revenue shares that went with governance. There was no private land in the hands of nobles or leaders of shadowy clan domains.

João III’s complaint about land seizure makes it clear that the system of granting and taking rendas was well established. Afonso had indeed already dealt with this feature around 1505 when he complained that his father had been able to “take away the renda assigned to us and would let us wander around like a wayward man.”Footnote ³¹ The system which was fully explained in the later sixteenth century accounts, was probably in full operation even before the initial contact with Portugal. In practice, control over tax revenue was contingent on the royal will; the right to collect these taxes was anchored on sending revenue forward to the king and could be revoked at any time.Footnote ³²

As a result of this custom, there was nothing in Kongo like a landed nobility as would be found in Portugal, nor even independent local authorities above the village level. It is unlikely that the idea that local clans (called kanda in this literature) or other land holding bodies existed at this time, as Hilton or Custódio Gonçalves have claimed. Such entities clearly did emerge in the collapse of central authority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ultimately giving rise to the system of kandas in twentieth-century anthropology. Their traditions related to the foundation of independent territories, expansion of trading communities, or new polities created by entrepreneurial nobles during Kongo’s endless civil wars, and not to ancient primordial entities.Footnote ³³ They were not, as Cuvelier had originally proposed, ancient entities that existed before Kongo emerged.

We can comfortably assert that even before the arrival of the Portuguese, grants of income were most likely the normal source of most of the nobility’s entire income, with the exception of those nobles who had been granted specific control over lands. Tradition made it clear that Mbata had such perpetual rights, although as we have seen, those rights which seemed quite totally in the hands of the rulers of Mbata were exceptional. But elsewhere this pattern prevailed.

It is possible, of course, that Kongo’s highly centralized system evolved during the conquest period, although it would seem at odds with the many compromises made by the kingdom’s founders. Instead, one might posit that this was a feature of Mpemba and perhaps other territories integrated into Kongo in the early period: Mbamba, Wandu, and Nsundi in particular. It seems likely that once Mpemba fell, the new rulers, the kings of Kongo, could simply replace the existing rulers and their officials using an already established system of revenue collection and distribution. Using the resources that the fall of Mpemba released, the new kingdom of Kongo could easily conquer the smaller neighbors adjacent to Mpemba without making further compromises, and remove and replace local governance at will.

Seeking the Origins of Political Complexity

Vansina’s two books on the history of West Central Africa are presently the best and most carefully argued studies of the development of social and political complexity in the region.Footnote ³⁴ His approach tended to be neo-evolutionary, in that complexity was created or even invented as new challenges were faced. The development of inequalities inherent in social complexity, while acknowledged, were often played down in favor of a sense of progress for all. When one area passed the threshold of complexity, the idea might move by diffusion from a point of invention to places where the system was borrowed.

Marcos Leitão de Almeida, reexamining some of Vansina’s points, put considerably more weight on slavery, force, and inequality in advancing complexity, which seems to be more appropriate. Using the evolution of terms translated as slavery, Leitão de Almeida sees the origins of this inequality in very early times, when people appear to have lived in egalitarian communities of villages, but it takes firmer hold much later. In particular, by the largely linguistic evidence that he deploys, we can say forceful displacement accompanied by social differentiation were the product of what he calls “slaving strategies.”Footnote ³⁵ His observation that terminology relating to justice and dispute resolution accompanied these strategies, suggests that social differentiation took the form of state formation.

One might imagine a group of village communities engaged in mutual raiding. Unable to conquer their neighbors, they took smaller groups of captives and exploited them, creating social differences and establishing a gap between the raiders and captives within each community. Some of these larger units then so drained their neighbors of population that they weakened them to eventual surrender, forming provinces of the growing polity. In order to control intervillage and interterritorial violence within the surrendered areas, the leaders also outlawed raiding and substituted legal systems and dispute resolution laws.

Higher levels of complexity arose when these units were grouped together, and a third order of settlement can be observed. Thus, initially villages (mavata) were grouped into a territory with a capital (mbanza), and that unit was subsequently united into a regional order with its own mbanza to make what might be called a province and, finally, into group of provinces surrounding a city (but with these cities also called zimbanza). The higher-level organizations were called wene, either with three orders or, in the case of Kongo, with four. The title mwene in turn had a semantic field that included dispensing justice.Footnote ³⁶

As the higher levels of authority developed, the slaving strategy included concentrating larger and larger numbers of people around the capital. This space—densely settled but not necessarily an urban landscape, like Mbanza Kongo’s—would eventually come to include over 100,000 people.Footnote ³⁷ Such a district could fund the lavish lifestyle of the higher elite and provide a sizable population from which to recruit military forces.

While this process might continue by increasing in size and scope to include places like Mpemba or Kongo, it did not necessarily lead to a smooth movement from simple to complex throughout the region. In much of West Central Africa, many small units survived attempts to absorb them into larger and more deeply stratified units. The Dembos region between Kongo and Ndongo and the Kisama region were typical of these low-level stratified polities.Footnote ³⁸

Beyond Kongo: Social Complexity to the South

A revised understanding both of Kongo’s governance and the significance of Mpemba forces a reconsideration of the origin of social complexity in the larger region as well, for the consolidation of Kongo was but one of several patterns. It is important to note, for example, that ancient Mpemba’s capital lay very close to the linguistic frontier of Kikongo and Kimbundu, defined by the stretch of rugged low mountains associated with the Dembos. For this reason, it is probably advisable to shift Vansina’s approach of using linguistic data for the reconstruction of the origin of political developments out of Mayombe where he placed it as the center of innovation for Kongo and for Loango to the west, and move it further south, to the region of Mpemba’s capital.

From Mpemba northward, the critical term for a person holding political authority was mwene, which was from the same root as the political unit itself (wene), while to the south, in Kimbundu, the term of a political authority was soba, which ultimately connected to terms of similar political significance (soma) in the Central Highlands of Angola, much further south.Footnote ³⁹ Vansina used linguistic data to propose that the political system used in the southern reaches of the Central Highlands of Angola extended northward through the current-day Umbundu-speaking highlands of Central Angola and ultimately to the Kimbundu-speaking areas.Footnote ⁴⁰

Vansina had proposed some chronology for the southern region using archaeological work as well as linguistic data. In particular, he used data from radiocarbon dates that placed a large but now mostly destroyed archaeological site, Feti la Choya, in the thirteenth century to date this site as support for an early emergence of a large kingdom there.Footnote ⁴¹ The dates, however, were not clearly assigned to the relevant finds, and so they must be considered as indecisive for the floruit of Feti la Choya, though a thirteenth-century date is not ruled out.Footnote ⁴² When Ernest Lecomte, the first literate visitor, saw the site dominated by a pyramid and with extensive walling in 1893, he was told it was so old no one knew when it was founded and the first humans emerged there.Footnote ⁴³ It seems reasonable to contend that this polity was probably functioning at least in the sixteenth century and that it might ultimately be a model used much farther north as political complexity emerged there.

Some hints about a powerful southern polity come from Pigafetta’s account based on information that was available to Duarte Lopes, who spent some of this time in the emerging Portuguese colony of Angola (1579–83). In his account of the regional geography, Pigafetta wrote that “near the Cape of Good Hope there is a king called Matama and the provinces ruled by him are called Climbebe.”Footnote ⁴⁴ His kingdom’s name is better read as Kulembebe, and it might have been located in the same area as the ruins of Feti la Choya, although there is insufficient geographical or archaeological evidence to make a completely convincing case for it being Kulembebe’s capital.Footnote ⁴⁵ Taking away the locative prefix ku- it might be read as “Elembe, the great Iagge” the name that Andrew Battel, a Scottish sailor shipwrecked on the south coast of Angola in the 1590s gave to the kingdom where the Imbangala leader Embe Kalandula, “sometime his page, took his people to Benguela.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Between the archaeology of Feti la Choya, the other stone ruins of what appear to be towns, albeit undated by archaeological research, the regions south of the Angolan Central Highlands had developed large scale political units, probably of the three-order variety, since according to Pigafetta’s report on Kulembebe, it had provinces (province in Italian).Footnote ⁴⁷ Whether Feti was the capital of this kingdom or not remains to be resolved by archaeology. Thomas Desch-Obi and Estevam Thompson have both made a serious case for this kingdom’s destruction in perhaps 1580 in connection with the origin of the Imbangala bands who scattered widely over the region and into the Kimbundu–speaking areas.Footnote ⁴⁸

It may suffice to note that Feti la Choya had an early, if not a thirteenth-century date, and thus the sort of political complexity associated with it and a large region south and east of it had a well-established archaeological basis. Vansina traced the development of cattle raising, and then agropastoral society reaching eastward as far as the Botswanan sites of Tutoung, Bosutswe, and Mapungubwe, and the development of social complexity and differentiation by about 1000 CE, and outlines the route northward into Angola.Footnote ⁴⁹ Given that the cultural developments at Mapungubwe are widely regarded as precursor of the Zimbabwe culture by the twelfth or thirteenth century, Vansina’s description of Feti la Choya as an “Angolan Zimbabwe” is not at all far-fetched by direction and results, if not chronology.Footnote ⁵⁰

The emergence of Ndongo appears to be the first, or at least the first known, large-scale polity in the Kimbundu-speaking area, and the term soba implies at least some connection to the south. Its emergence took place almost in the view of eyewitnesses. Portuguese from São Tomé were probably probing the Kwanza River, and engaging in trade and perhaps serving as mercenaries to local powers early in the sixteenth century. These Portuguese merchants’ presence probably led to the king of Ndongo sending a mission to Portugal in 1518.Footnote ⁵¹ Portuguese officials in turn visited Ndongo in 1520 and were there until 1526, though there is little direct testimony about them.

Reports about the kingdom began in 1560, and the ruler at the time was said, on the basis of local tradition augmented by the recollections of earlier visitors, to have come to power around 1515. Descriptions of Ndongo written by Jesuit writers in the 1580s observed that the region possessed no less than 736 small polities (murindas), each one led by a soba. The residence of Jesuits in Ndongo’s capital in the 1560s and 1575 probably gave them some access to precise calculations of fiscal units.Footnote ⁵² This extraordinarily precise number presupposes, given the size of the area, that each of these could have been no more than a town and a handful of villages each.Footnote ⁵³ These were the first order of social complexity like those observed in Kongo.

Ndongo expanded westward from its core in the highlands of the interior largely by taking in these small units as subordinates, either through conquest or voluntary subordination. The Portuguese in their turn made agreements with these sobas when they won them from Ndongo during their wars in the region following 1575. Their records show that, at least initially, they simply took over the obligations owed to Ndongo for themselves.

Ndongo’s conquests might have been on the backs of earlier regional consolidations. Ndongo had its own provinces, called kanda, each of which grouped numbers of sobas under a single authority. Such a possibility allows for earlier equivalents of Ndongo, perhaps with different centers and in theory at least a complicated political history that now eludes us entirely.

The southern focus of titles used in the Kimbundu-speaking regions requires a re-examination of the origins of political centralization there. In the 1970s, Joseph C. Miller proposed that there were several regional groupings before the rise of Ndongo. Because many soba titles are in the form of two-part names, Miller suggested that these names were short perpetual genealogies, and that the first name of the pair of names was descended from the second.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, Miller proposed that Kulembe was an ancient title because Sungo a Kulembe was a known title in the seventeenth century. He connected the term with Elembe from Battell’s account, but not with Pigafetta’s Climbebe, as interpreted above, although doing so would have strengthened his case.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly, moving north, he proposed several other groupings, like Libolo or others with a number of names with Hango as their second element, which might group as an older territory called Hango.

A problem with this system was that it was not easy to show the kind of geographical clustering that would support his underlying speculation, although it remains a potentially interesting attempt. Miller’s system relied on the unproven theory that titles were perpetual genealogies and thus recorded earlier senior titles as perpetual fathers who might, in turn, have many generations of titleholders. Miller’s rationale at the time was the belief that the Imbangala founder-figure Kinguri, thought to have left Lunda around 1550, would need much more time to reach the area, and by translating soba names into titles held for more than one generation, he aimed to stretch the genealogies back to the sixteenth century.

However, Kinguri’s migration from Lunda never happened the way it was understood in the early 1970s. Thus, while parsing of titles might hint at a tradition, it is not based on an explicit testimony of tradition. Explicit traditions of origin for Ndongo were only collected in the seventeenth century, and in these traditions, the holders of the kanda office were in fact branches of the royal family, but not, as in Kongo, holding income-bearing rights on short and revocable terms, but as hereditary possessions.Footnote ⁵⁶

If the emergence of Ndongo was the first large-scale polity in the region, it was remarkably late in coming, as Mpemba to the north and Kulembebe to the south likely predated it. However, as there is no way to rule out that there might have been earlier consolidations of authority in the Kimbundu area, as Miller proposed, which had subsequently collapsed and were only just being replaced by Ndongo. As Miller rightly observed, the narrative traditions concerning these early polities would have been later overlaid by Ndongo’s tradition.

There is, however, some evidence that higher levels of authority in Ndongo were later than in the southern area, which gave it the soba title, but also the northern neighbor of Mpemba or Kongo. In Ndongo, the word for king, muchino, was borrowed from Kikongo.Footnote ⁵⁷ Likewise, mwene was in use in Ndongo, often for officials, so perhaps a borrowing for this sort of institution from Kikongo as well.Footnote ⁵⁸ This would then suppose that higher level complexity in Kimbundu-speaking areas was later than either of its neighbors.

One interpretation would be to assert that the lower levels of political complexity probably emerged even before 1000, if one trusts archaeological work undertaken much farther south, and the vocabulary of higher levels borrowed from Kikongo (but from Mpemba rather than Kongo). This would then follow the development of these larger entities at a time that is unlikely to be discerned without archaeological investigation of changes in settlement patterns and creation of elite artifacts that would indicate higher levels of stratification and differentiation.

The Mystery of Mwene Muji

The general fixation on Kongo as the earliest large-scale political consolidation also ignores areas farther east. One of the most notable features of the interior of Central Africa is the geography imposed by the massive Congo River basin. It rises from higher elevations that run along the modern northern border of Zambia and across the adjacent parts of Angola and flows as a giant loop going almost due north until it takes a dramatic turn in the middle of the Democratic Republic of Congo, plunging south and southwestward until it meets the sea. Hundreds of tributaries oriented south to north and parallel to each other follow the same course almost due northward to meet the arc of the main channel of the Congo River far away.

In the southern reaches of the river valleys, a relatively dry climate and poor, sandy soil rendered the interfluvial areas, even today, virtually devoid of inhabitants. The population clustered along the rivers, and their orientation was decidedly south to north. Because of this feature, the Kwango, the westernmost tributary of the Congo system formed a sort of natural frontier with areas to the west, since the land westward of the west bank of the Kwango was oriented by other rivers that flowed east (or south to east) to west into the Atlantic like the Kwanza or Kunene. The geographical disconnect meant that European visitors who provided us with the bulk of the information about the region had very little information, often quite scattered in time, about the lands that lay east of the Kwango.

The aridity that made trade and transport difficult in the southern end of the Congo Basin was moderated as one moved northward along the various rivers, eventually culminating in the southern reaches of the great tropical rainforest that stretches east to west across the rivers. The rainforest, in turn, is the home of the raffia palm which, since ancient times, has been used to produce a highly valued cloth with great prestige value. The cloth’s value increased as one moved southward. Consumers of this cloth obtained it often in the area around the Kwango and the Kasai basin, a major set of tributaries that converged on the Kwa River before entering into the Congo River.

Today the Kwa River has the minor town of Mushie but was in past times the capital of the Empire of Mwene Muji. This empire is mentioned by both Pigafetta and the Florentine Relation, and so it dated from at least the last part of the sixteenth century. It was also described in Dapper’s account based on sources from the 1640s. The references were sufficiently fleeting and the geographic information about it so sparse, that for a very long time historians thought it was as far away as East Africa, a geographical treatise of 1918 making it in Tanzania, mostly because Pigafetta’s 1591 map of Africa placed it nearly in the Indian Ocean.

While Vansina acknowledged the location of the toponym, he granted it little role in the development of the region. I took Mwene Muji seriously enough in my 2020 general history of West Central Africa to include it in his maps and wrote briefly about what could be learned from Pigafetta and later testimony from Olfert Dapper’s 1668 description of Africa.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, following the discovery of the Florentine Relation, I took time to examine a variety of references, both direct and indirect, to compile an idea of its geography and to interrogate modern oral traditions of the region in which there was no mention of the empire at all.

The empire had been fully eclipsed by the time Belgian colonial officials collected traditions, but I concluded that the empire survived in the traditions of a noble title called Ntote, associated with a minor colonial-created tribe called the Nunu. Ntote genealogies were twenty-four generations or longer, pushing their origin as far back as the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, although political competition for the colonial title of chef medaille may have caused the generation count to be inflated. The Nunu were known as fishermen and were heirs to a long-standing tradition of building large dugout watercraft called kekupi, briefly described in the Florentine Relation as capable of carrying, with some exaggeration, as many as one hundred people.Footnote ⁶⁰

Mwene Muji was thus capable of building an empire of uncertain but considerable dimensions through their riverine power, and could offer high-quality textiles to buyers from all over the region. Those buyers included Portuguese merchants from Angola whose thriving trade in textiles imported at least 60,000 meters annually from a place called Songo, possibly their name for the Kuba Kingdom that was just being formed, if it was not once a tributary of Mwene Muji that broke free. Dapper noted that around 1640 Mwene Muji was the source of much of the textile trade that Portuguese merchants tapped and sold no slaves.Footnote ⁶¹

Vansina’s reconstruction of this area, like his broader work on Kongo, rested on an understanding of where higher levels of social complexity had their origins. He was not inclined to accept Mwene Muji as an important early development, and so he saw the complex juncture of the Tio Kingdom, whose origin points, in Tio tradition, a bit further up the Congo River; and the Kuba Kingdom that he had first described in his PhD dissertation.Footnote ⁶² In this discussion, he observed that the region where Mwene Muji had its capital had an apparently unique and original political vocabulary, but he did not elaborate on it nor see it as ancestral to any larger polity than the Boma Kingdom, which did not emerge until the early seventeenth century.Footnote ⁶³

Archaeology, however, has offered at least a bit more evidence. The BantuFirst project, doing a survey of the Kwilu-Kasai area in 2018–23, uncovered promising sites suggesting “expansive political/social/economic entities” in the appropriate area dating to the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁶⁴ If one follows the various rivers south from Mushie, one meets the Yaka Kingdom (once part of Mwene Muji) on the Kwango, the Pende Kingdom, with a major site dating from the seventeenth century, on the Kwilu, and finally the Kuba Kingdom on the Kasai, first appearing on a map in 1646. Were these kingdoms founded within Mwene Muji which attained their independence in the early seventeenth century, or were they trading partners who could resist the fleets of Mwene Muji?

The Tio Kingdom or Great Makoko and Loango

The Tio Kingdom was already in existence when the first Portuguese arrived at the Congo River—it was mentioned in Pacheco Pereira’s geographical treatise of 1506.Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, it is regularly noted in the best geographical descriptions of the region, including Pigafetta, Dapper, and Cavazzi. But aside from noting a handful of characteristics, most notably its penchant for cannibalism, there is virtually no historical testimony about it. When Savorgnan de Brazza visited it in 1880 and the French soon moved in to occupy the region, they found or recorded very little oral tradition.

Vansina wrote what remains the most comprehensive account of Tio history.Footnote ⁶⁶ Although his primary aim was to produce a detailed account of its society at the time of its contact with France, he did search out traditional accounts, and to some extent did what could be done with tradition for that kingdom. When he returned to the Tio Kingdom in Paths he saw it as a fundamental part of the development of the whole region north of the Congo River.Footnote ⁶⁷

In this work, Vansina placed an important center for the development of Kongo, Loango, and Tio somewhere in the north of the Congo River (Mayumbe broadly speaking). He saw the ultimate root of all three there.Footnote ⁶⁸ But this theory, whatever weight the largely linguistic work he presented, can hardly survive the changes we must make if we take into consideration the revised history of Kongo, moving social complexity away from the area north of the Congo to the borders of the Kimbundu zone, and giving more attention to Mwene Muji for areas to the east of this region.

If we replace the ultimate origin for Kongo’s emergence far to the south, and not north of the Congo River, it also changes our understanding of the emergence of Loango. Dapper recorded the oldest and fullest account of Loango’s origin story, which Vansina quotes, showing it as the expansion of Kakongo, a smaller state on the north bank of the Congo River, but quite close to the coast. Dapper’s tradition was probably collected in the 1640s and he could be recording events that took place as recently as 1550, or just beyond the normal reach of a human community’s collective memory. According to this tradition, Njimbe, in the small state of Kakongo (attested first in Afonso’s royal titles in the 1530s) managed to expand his state, first by military means, conquering small, nearby territories, and then upon having gained power, by the voluntary submission of other territories until it attained considerable size.Footnote ⁶⁹

According to the earliest Portuguese accounts, there was no large kingdom on the coast except Kongo. Even Ndongo in the pre-1520s was too far inland to gain much attention: it would not appear on maps (as Angola) until much later. Indeed, relatively detailed accounts of the coast, such as Pacheco Pereira’s description in 1506, did not mention any coastal kingdom north of Kongo. Loango was first noted in the 1550s in an account of missionaries sent out by Diogo I (1545–61).Footnote ⁷⁰ Unlike Kongo’s expansion, Loango did not have to make alliances or concessions, as it did not face an existing and powerful state, but could proceed piecemeal, gaining strength as it moved.

Having thus removed the north bank of the Congo River as the likely source for political consolidation before the rise of Kongo, we can now consider the impact of this on Vansina’s reconstruction of two other centers of innovation, one for the Tio Kingdom called Ngwi, an area north of Tio on the Congo River, and the other was Makwa on the Kasai downstream from the Kuba Kingdom. In both cases, these were places that informants claimed were where the founders originated in oral traditions heard in the early twentieth century. Linguistic data alone probably was not sufficient to establish these exact places, though Vansina did claim that the clustering of variants suggested these areas.

At present we can say nothing about the possibility of Tio originating farther up the river. In fact, Vansina claimed in his book on Tio that their traditions actually featured the concept that they evolved in situ, and did not come from elsewhere.Footnote ⁷¹ In the absence of any decisive archaeological information, this is as far as one can go. Unless convincing new traditional information emerges to the contrary, perhaps assisted by archaeological research or deeper linguistic study, it remains possible that this area does have its own local origins of social complexity.

As for the Kuba and Makwa, the recognition of the significance of Mwene Muji compels a reevaluation. According to genealogical reckoning, Kuba was not founded until the early seventeenth century (it was in existence in 1640 in any case), at a time when Mwene Muji was very much imperial, or was beginning to shed provinces, as it did with Boma and perhaps with Yaka. Today’s evidence does not allow us to say how far up the Kasai, Kwilu, or Kwango Rivers Mwene Muji exercised any control, but if we accept the (definitely shaky) evidence of the genealogies of the 1920s as extending Mwene Muji as far back as the late fourteenth century, we should not rule out Mwene Muji as either the founder or a player in founding Kuba.

Reexamining the traditional histories as dynamic rather than static sources and including a bit of the more recent linguistic and archaeological research has changed the way we understand the history of West Central Africa. The present historiographical proposition that treats Kongo and perhaps another site in southern Angola as the centers of ancient consolidations of power cannot remain when we revise complexity in the Kikongo zone or consider the emergence of Mwene Muji. We must instead begin to outline a history of social complexity that necessarily includes the emergence of Mpemba, perhaps through archaeology at its known capital. Further investigation of the stone building culture of southern Angola may give insight into Kulembebe, the oldest-known polity and likely source of at least the terminology for Ndongo and the Ovimbundu kingdoms. And, importantly, archaeology may also tell us more about the role of Mwene Muji (again work at the capital may be vital) in expanding social complexity in the Kasai-Kwilu basin.