The Kongo people (also , singular: or M'kongo; , , singular: )Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular, Indiana University Press, 2000, p.62 are a Bantu ethnic group primarily defined as the speakers of Kikongo. Subgroups include the Beembe, Bwende, Vili, Sundi, Yombe, Dondo, Lari, and others.
In the early Medieval Period, the Bakongo people were subjects of the Kingdom of Vungu. After its fall, they lived along the Atlantic coast of Central Africa in multiple kingdoms: Kongo, Loango, and Kakongo. Their highest concentrations are found south of in the Republic of the Congo, southwest of Pool Malebo and west of the Kwango River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, north of Luanda, Angola and southwest Gabon. They are the largest ethnic group in the Republic of the Congo, and one of the major ethnic groups in the other two countries they are found in. In 1975, the Kongo population was reported as 4,040,000.See
The Kongo people were among the earliest indigenous Africans to welcome Portuguese traders in 1483 CE, and began converting to Catholicism in the late 15th century. They were among the first to protest slave capture in letters to the King of Portugal in the 1510s and 1520s, then succumbed to the demands for slaves from the Portuguese through the 16th century. From the 16th to 19th centuries, the Kongo people became both victims and victimizers in the raiding, capturing, and selling of slaves to Europeans. The export trade of African slaves to the European colonial interests reached its peak in the 17th and 18th centuries. The slave raids, colonial wars and the 19th-century Scramble for Africa split the Kongo people into Portuguese, Belgian and French parts. In the early 20th century, they became one of the most active ethnic groups in the efforts to decolonize Africa, helping liberate the three nations to self-governance.
Etymology The origin of the name Kongo is uncertain, but several theories have been proposed. According to the colonial-era scholar Samuel Nelson, the term Kongo is possibly derived from a local verb for gathering or assembling."It is probable that the word 'Kongo' itself implies a public gathering and that it is based on the root konga, 'to gather' (trans[itive])." Nelson, Samuel Henry. Colonialism in the Congo Basin, 1880–1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994. According to Alisa LaGamma, the root may be from the regional word Nkongo, which means "hunter" in the context of someone adventurous and heroic.
It may be derived from the Proto-Bantu word for hunter, similar to the IsiZulu term , meaning spear, as in , "Spear of the Nation", the name for the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) during its struggle against apartheid.
Douglas Harper states that the term means "mountains" in a Bantu language, which the Congo river flows down from.Congo, Douglas Harper, Etymology Dictionary
The Kongo people have been referred to by various names in the colonial French, Belgian and Portuguese literature, names such as Esikongo (singular Mwisikongo), Mucicongo, Mesikongo, Madcongo and Moxicongo. Christian missionaries, particularly in the Caribbean, originally applied the term Bafiote (singular M(a)fiote) to the slaves from the Vili or Fiote coastal Kongo people, but later this term was used to refer to any "black man" in Cuba, St Lucia and other colonial era Islands ruled by one of the European colonial interests. The group is identified largely by speaking a cluster of mutually intelligible dialects rather than by large continuities in their history or even in culture. The term Congo was more widely deployed to identify Kikongo-speaking people enslaved in the Americas.Thornton, John, Les anneaux de la Memoire, 2 (2000) 235–49. "La nation angolaise en Amérique, son identité en Afrique et en Amérique", "
Since the early 20th century, Bakongo (singular Mkongo or Mukongo) has been increasingly used, especially in areas north of the Congo River, to refer to the Kikongo-speaking community or, more broadly, to speakers of the closely related Kongo languages. This convention is based on the Bantu languages, to which the Kongo language belongs. The prefixes "mu-" and "ba-" refer to people, singular and plural respectively.
History The ancient history of the Kongo people has been difficult to ascertain. The region is close to East Africa, considered to be a key to the prehistoric human migrations. This geographical proximity, states Jan Vansina, suggests that the Congo River region, home of the Kongo people, was populated thousands of years ago. Ancient archeological evidence linked to Kongo people has not been found, and glottochronology – or the estimation of ethnic group chronologies based on language evolution – has been applied to the Kongo. Based on this, it is likely the Kongo language and Gabon-Congo language split about 950 BCE.
The earliest archeological evidence is from Tchissanga (now part of modern Republic of the Congo), a site dated to about 600 BCE. However, the site does not prove which ethnic group was resident at that time. The Kongo people had settled into the area well before the fifth century CE, begun a society that utilized the diverse and rich resources of region and developed farming methods. According to James Denbow, social complexity had probably been achieved by the second century CE.
According to Vansina small kingdoms and Kongo principalities appeared in the current region by the 1200 CE, but documented history of this period of Kongo people if it existed has not survived into the modern era. Detailed and copious description about the Kongo people who lived next to the Atlantic ports of the region, as a sophisticated culture, language and infrastructure, appear in the 15th century, written by the Portuguese explorers. Later anthropological work on the Kongo of the region come from the colonial era writers, particularly the French and Belgians (Loango, Vungu, and the Niari Valley), but this too is limited and does not exhaustively cover all of the Kongo people. The evidence suggests, states Vansina, that the Kongo people were advanced in their culture and socio-political systems with multiple kingdoms well before the arrival of first Portuguese ships in the late 15th century.
The Kingdom of Kongo
Kongo oral tradition suggests that the Kongo people were originally citizens of a federation of states called the Seven Kingdoms of Kongo dia Nlaza and a separate kingdom called Vungu. These kingdoms and their peoples were ultimately absorbed into the Kingdom of Kongo, which was founded in the 14th century. The kingdom was modeled not on hereditary succession as was common in Europe, but based on an election by the court nobles from the Kongo people. This required the king to win his legitimacy by a process of recognizing his peers, consensus building as well as regalia and religious ritualism. The kingdom had many trading centers both near rivers and inland, distributed across hundreds of kilometers and Mbanza Kongo – its capital that was about 200 kilometers inland from the Atlantic coast.
The Portuguese arrived on the Central African coast north of the Congo River, several times between 1472 and 1483 searching for a sea route to India, but they failed to find any ports or trading opportunities. In 1483, south of the Congo river they found the Kongo people and the Kingdom of Kongo, which had a centralized government, a currency called nzimbu, and markets, ready for trading relations. The Portuguese found well developed transport infrastructure inlands from the Kongo people's Atlantic port settlement. They also found exchange of goods easy and the Kongo people open to ideas. The Kongo king at that time, named Nzinga a Nkuwu allegedly willingly accepted Christianity, and at his baptism in 1491 changed his name to João I, a Portuguese name. Around the 1450s, a prophet, Ne Buela Muanda, predicted the arrival of the Portuguese and the spiritual and physical enslavement of many Bakongo.Thomas T. Spear and Isaria N. Kimambo, East African Expressions of Christianity, James Currey Publishers, 1999, p. 219Godefroid Muzalia Kihangu, Bundu dia Kongo, une résurgence des messianismes et de l'alliance des Bakongo?, Universiteit Gent, België, 2011, p. 178
The trade between Kongo people and Portuguese people thereafter accelerated through 1500. The kingdom of Kongo appeared to become receptive of the new traders, allowed them to settle an uninhabited nearby island called São Tomé, and sent Bakongo nobles to visit the royal court in Portugal. Other than the king himself, much of the Kongo people's nobility welcomed the cultural exchange, the Christian missionaries converted them to the Catholic faith, they assumed Portuguese court manners, and by early 16th-century Kongo became a Portugal-affiliated Christian kingdom.
Slavery in the Kingdom of Kongo Initially, ivory and copper were the main sources of trades between the Bakongo and Portuguese. After 1500, the Portuguese had little demand for the minerals and sought enslaved people for their sugarcane plantations in São Tomé. The Portuguese began purchasing these captive individuals, and then began kidnapping people from the Kongo society, soon after. In 1514, they provoked military campaigns in nearby African villages to take enslaved locals for labor. This violated the terms of the agreement between Afonso I, the ManiKongo (King of Kongo), and the Portuguese crown, which prompted the ManiKongo to write letters to the king of Portugal and threaten to end all trade with the western nation if he did not adhere to the original terms.
Portuguese enslavers met traders at planned locations outside of the Kingdom of Kongo, such as the Malebo Pool, and offered luxury goods in exchange for kidnapped and captured people, which included Kongos. Historian Jan Vansina believes that this created an incentive for border conflicts and slave caravan routes, from other ethnic groups and different parts of Africa, in which the Kongo people and traders participated. The slave raids and volume of trade in enslaved human beings increased, and by the 1560s, over 7,000 people per year were captured and exported by Portuguese traders to the Americas as slaves. The Kongo people and neighboring ethnic groups retaliated with attacks, such as the Jaga invasion of 1568. The Jaga people pillaged the Kongo lands, burning Portuguese churches and attacking the capitol. They nearly ended the Kingdom of Kongo.
The Kongo people also created songs to warn themselves of the arrival of the Portuguese, one of the famous songs is " Malele " (Translation: "Tragedy", song present among the 17 Kongo songs sung by the Massembo family of Guadeloupe during the Grap a Kongo). The Portuguese brought in military and arms to support the Kingdom of Kongo, and after years of fighting, they jointly defeated the attack. This war unexpectedly led to a flood of captives who had challenged the Kongo nobility and traders, and the coastal ports were flooded with "war captives turned slaves". The other effect of this violence over many years was making the Kongo king heavily dependent on the Portuguese protection, along with the dehumanization of the African people, including the rebelling Kongo people, as cannibalistic pagan barbarians from "Jaga kingdom". This caricature of the African people and their dehumanisation was vociferous and well-published by the slave traders, the missionaries and the colonial-era Portuguese historians, which helped morally justify the mass trading of slaves.