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Zaire The Kongo Peoples
The Kongo have long occupied all of Bas-Zaïre Region.
Most but
not all of these peoples, together with substantial
numbers in
Angola and smaller numbers in Congo, were originally
inhabitants of
the kingdom of the Kongo encountered by the Portuguese in
the late
fifteenth century. For all practical purposes, that
kingdom had
disintegrated into a number of small chiefdoms by the
early
seventeenth century. The end of the kingdom's political
power did
not preclude the continuing spread of Kongo influence,
however, and
some groups may have become Kongo in culture later.
Given the size of the population and the territorial
range of
the Kongo, much dialectical variation in their language
has
developed, to the point that some dialects are barely
mutually
intelligible. There are similar variations in other
aspects of
culture. From the seventeenth century until the arrival of
the
Belgians, there were shifting combinations of smaller
chiefdoms
into larger entities under the domination of one or
another chief,
the power of a dominant chief often reflecting his easier
access to
or more effective exploitation of the slave and ivory
trade of the
period. The hierarchies thus established were usually
ephemeral. In
the end, the effective units were the clans, their larger
constituent units called by anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey
houses
(the units controlling land), and lineages, rather shallow
units.
All of these units were based on matrilineal descent.
Although each
unit had a head, authority was shared with persons both
inside and
outside the unit in a complex fashion.
Because of their early contact with Europeans, the
Kongo were
among the groups early and heavily influenced by Roman
Catholic and
Protestant missionaries and by the schools established by
them. The
Roman Catholics placed particular emphasis on the
traditions of the
Kongo as they understood them and in turn communicated
these
reconstructed traditions to their students. The complex
interaction
of myth, competition, and the ambition of some leaders of
Kongo
origin as the prospect of independence loomed made the
Kongo the
largest single group to define themselves in ethnic terms
for
political purposes in the late 1950s and one of the few to
develop
an articulate ethnic ideology
(see The
Rise of Militant Ethnicity: Abako
, ch. 1).
Data as of December 1993
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