Precolonial Civilizations

Precolonial Civilizations

Information on the Congo’s original inhabitants is scarce. Tropical rainforests hamper written records and archaeologists.[1] The area's Indigenous inhabitants include the Mbenga, Baka, Mbuti, and Batwa.[2] These people have historically and collectively been identified with the derogatory term “Pygmies”. Before European contact, the Baka, Mbenga, Mbuti, and Batwa were hunter/gatherer civilizations in vast tropical rainforests. The forest was a cultural, spiritual, and economically viable space that Indigenous inhabitants used to hunt, fish, gather, and extract natural medical resources.[3] Though the communities were remote, the Indigenous inhabitants were not immune to the conflict and slavery that existed in Africa before contact with the Europeans. The earliest written reference to the Congo was by ancient Egyptians more than four thousand years ago. It is a message requesting one of the forest dwellers, known for their rarity and short stature, “from the land of the spirits, alive, safe and well, to dance the holy dances to the entertainment and felicity of Pharaoh Neferkare.”[4]

Central Africa had thriving and organized civilizations before Diogo Cao’s (Figure 3.3) expedition introduced Europeans to the Congo River in 1482. In addition to the Indigenous hunter/gatherer societies in the Ituri forests, Bantu migrations from western Africa to the Congo Basin and surrounding areas began around 2000 BCE. In the north, Sudanic and Nilotic peoples began migrating to the northern portion of the DRC in approximately 1500 BCE.[5] Poor tropical soils resulted in communal land ownership and cooperative behaviors to produce the means of survival, and environmental constraints facilitated the necessity for long-distance trade networks. [6]At the time of contact with Europe and briefly after, the Congo was home to flourishing kingdoms. Unfortunately, outside these kingdoms, the Congo was an amalgam of localized villages and nomadic peoples, making it easy for a technologically superior force to exploit the land and the native people. Before Leopold II’s acquisition, H.H. Johnston remarked, “One reason for the easy spread of Portuguese power is the absence of great chiefdom or despotism amongst the natives.”[7]

Luba Kingdom

One flourishing kingdom to emerge around 1500 CE was the Luba Kingdom, stretching from the upper Kasai River to Lake Tanganyika, which provided a massive water source for irrigation.[8] The Luba formed a patrilineal society that did not revolve around ethnicity but rather a collection of people with a shared set of political values centered around the king and regional networks of exchange and association.[9] The Luba operated a bureaucracy in which a headman ran each village. A collection of villages, a chiefdom, was ruled by a kilo, a territorial chief. A collection of chiefdoms constituted a province headed by a provincial leader accountable to the king.[10] The king was responsible for appointing all these positions, some for lifetime and others for fixed terms. The king's two most essential appointments were the twite, the head of the kingdom’s standing police force, and the inabanza, the keeper of sacred emblems.[11] The Luba were monotheistic, believing in a Supreme Creator distant from human affairs but with whom one could have a personal relationship.[12]

At its height, the Luba Kingdom occupied forty thousand square miles and contained about one million inhabitants (Figure 3.4).[13] The kingdom's people raised chickens and goats and grew several different vegetables to sustain the population.[14] Food surpluses allowed other professions to develop, and Luba blacksmiths created weapons and jewelry used as currency. Luba communities comprised a range of inhabitants, including extended families, migrants, and enslaved people, and they drew their identity from the landscapes they lived and worked in.[15] Like other African societies, the Luba relied on trade networks, both long-range and complex regional networks. Unfortunately, reliance on trade would also play a vital role in the downfall of the Luba kingdom. As ivory became scarce, the empire had many guns and mercenaries that undermined Luba kings.[16] On the eve of Leopold’s acquisition, the Luba empire had collapsed into several autonomous chiefdoms.[17]

Lunda Kingdom

Kibinda Ilunga founded the Lunda Kingdom after a split with the Luba.[19] The kingdom started as a political structure of a council of elders and a matrilineal headman who oversaw supernatural well-being.[20] As Lunda’s territory expanded and it absorbed more people, its system of governance evolved into a kingdom (Figure 3.6). The most important task for the Lunda king was overseeing tax collection to obtain a financial surplus, and districts of the empire were separated to support this process.[21] The king had total control of all the kingdom’s appointments, and the system of governance was authoritarian. There were, however, numerous councils and title-holders who held influence with the king.[22]

The Portuguese provided the Lunda with manufactured goods and introduced tomatoes, maize, and pineapples to the kingdom in exchange for ivory, copper, other metals, and enslaved people.[25] As time progressed, these trading networks became increasingly one-sided in favor of the Portuguese and Afro-Arab slavers. As with the Luba, reliance on long-distance trade caused the Lunda’s downfall. By the time Leopold was to take control of the Congo, mercenaries had carved the Lunda Kingdom into pieces, and the empire collapsed after the assassination of King Mulaj II.[26]

Kingdom of Kongo

The most well-known kingdom in central Africa thriving before the Europeans arrived was the Kingdom of Kongo in west-central Africa (Figure 3.8). The Kingdom of Kongo relied highly on the mighty Congo River in its territory. At its peak, the Kingdom of Kongo occupied over one hundred thousand square miles of territory and contained two to three million inhabitants.[27] The founding myth of the kingdom was that of a blacksmith king, and as a result, the profession was considered divine and of utmost importance. The Kingdom of Kongo was a matrilineal society run by a highly organized political and judicial hierarchy founded in the late fourteenth century.[28] The Kingdom of Kongo was headed by a monarch called the ManiKongo. The ManiKongo was chosen by an assembly of the kingdom’s clan leaders, and the appointment could last a lifetime, but ineffective or inept ManiKongos were subject to deposition.[29] The ManiKongo appointed governors to a half dozen provinces, reviewed troops, collected taxes, dispensed justice, and controlled currency.[30] Supporting the ManiKongo in his tasks was an elaborate infrastructure of civil service networks and specialized positions. The Kingdom of Kongo had a functional economy with blacksmithing and weaving as cornerstone industries. The kingdom measured distance in marching days and time with the lunar month. Cowry shells were used as currency.[31]

The Kingdom of Kongo welcomed contact with the Europeans after verifying that these pale newcomers were not vumbi, ancestral ghosts.[32] Like other central African kingdoms, Kongo relied on trade networks. The relationship with the Portuguese was beneficial financially and militarily, and arriving missionaries in the kingdom fostered the spread of Christianity in the region.[33] In a show of friendship, ManiKongo Nzinga Kuwu allowed four missionaries to be left to live within the kingdom as four of his men would return with the Portuguese to their homeland.[34] His son, Nzinga Mvembi, would rule under the Christian name Afonso I (Figure 3.9). Afonso I’s son Henrique would study in Portugal and eventually make his way to Rome, where he became the first black bishop in the history of the Catholic Church. Kongo nobles were baptized and took Portuguese titles, as Christianity and affluence went hand in hand within the kingdom after European contact.[35]

King Afonso I provided something rare before the independence movements of the 1950s: an African voice. Dozens of his letters to the Portuguese king survive and are easily accessible online. Afonso I is unique in the sense that when he was born, no one in his kingdom had ever seen a pale-skinned European, and by the time he died, his whole empire was threatened by slave trades perpetrated by Europeans in the West and Arabs in the East.[36] Slavery existed in the Kingdom of Kongo and most African societies before the arrival of Europeans, with most slaves being captives of war. Nonetheless, human beings were involved in the trade networks as slaves established by Europeans and Arabs. Afonso, I was happy to oblige the Portuguese with enslaved people from neighboring territories, and he was rewarded with his son's being allowed to study at a seminary in Lisbon.[37] The exponential growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Figure 3.7) caused demand for enslaved people to explode, and Europeans were no longer as concerned with where the enslaved people came from. Desperate as his kingdom began to crumble as its population disappeared, Afonso, I wrote many letters to King Joao III (Figure 3.10) of Portugal with a similar theme:

Each day, the traders are kidnapping our people- children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family…This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated…It is our wish that this Kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of enslaved people.[38]

Although the Kingdom of Kongo technically lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, the slave trade eroded Africans' power within the kingdom. After Afonso I’s death, the Kingdom of Kongo gradually slid into the status of a vassal state of Portugal.[39]