Modern World History

Colonization & Resistance

Precolonial Societies - Democratic Republic of the Congo

Directions: Read, highlight, and annotate this document with your group (may want to divide up
the work). Be able to share what you learned about the following:
different groups/ethnicities/languages
political systems
economic systems & products
cultural practices
organization of society

"Congo, Democratic Republic of the." New Encyclopedia of Africa. Ed. John Middleton and
Joseph C. Miller. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 494-505. Gale
Virtual Reference Library. Web. 3 Sept. 2016.

The modern society and local cultures of the vast Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly
Zare) derive from a deep common heritage in the Bantu-speaking fishing and farming communities
who entered the region some three millennia ago. The still-earlier inhabitants whom they
encountered in the heavily forested parts of the region became known abroad for their diminutive
stature as pygmies (referring to the small people of classical Greek mythology). From them the
Bantu communities learned the spiritualized secrets of the land, and they retain an enduring
respect for these first, and by Bantu cultural theory, undisplaceable and hence indispensable,
occupants even in the early twenty-first century. The autochthonous [indigenous] forest dwellers
lived in close trading relationships with the farmers in their clearings and riverine [located on a
riverbank] villages and everywhere adopted their Bantu languages. Until recent centuries their
small foraging bands remained an important presence, and recourse in the event of agricultural
failure, for the farmers.

...Many living near the copious waters carrying off the high rainfall of this equatorial region
specialized in fishing. From their dugout canoes and other technologies of fishing local community
leaders (in the literature frequently termed big men, or chiefs) developed trading connections that
brought them rare exotic goods, which they distributed among neighbors for women as wives, to
male clients, and to acquire captive strangers as slaves.

The communities they assembled they operated primarily as trading corporations and as work
teams of men trained for large-scale fishing... as well as for defense or, in at least some cases, also
aggression. Large villages, formed by alliances of big men and their retinues, muted the
competitiveness of this essentially commercial environment by assimilating the leading traders into
elaborately ranked secret societies. In these elite groups, ambitious newcomers paid heavily to
advance through the ranks, and the top-ranking senior members invested the income in whatever
ceremonies or improvements they considered to promote the welfare of the community as a whole.
The resulting constant movements of men throughout the region diminished the political
significance of regional differentiation, so that the many Mongo languages of the inhabitants of the
central forest in the early twenty-first century are distinguished only relatively vaguely. The
Lingala-speakers of the lower reaches of the main Congo stream prospered greatly, by absorbing
many local people, with development of the Atlantic-oriented trades in slaves, ivory, and wild
rubber in the nineteenth century. In the early twenty-first century, Lingala is one of the principal
languages of the northwestern parts of the country. The autochthones [indigenous peoples]
contributed to these trades both by specializing in providing products of the forests and,
involuntarily, also as captives sent down the river as slaves. In modern times, only small pockets of
these people remain in the most remote forests of Ituri in the northeast and on the watersheds on
the west side of the river in present-day Gabon and Republic of the Congo.

Cereal-cultivating farmers from the east settled the more open woodlands to the south, forming one
major cluster of linguistically related Chiluba-speaking (Luba) communities on the upper Congo
(Lualaba) River and to the west. The parent immigrants owed their evident success in fostering so
many modern cultural and linguistic heirs to the rich lands of the river valleys and their resources
of salt andparticularlycopper in the vicinity of the modern Copperbelt along the southern
border (with Zambia) of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The need to specialize in the
resources of local environmental niches led communities here to settle definitively and to define
stronger ethnic distinctions than among their counterparts along the rivers of the forest. By
distinguishing themselves thus from neighbors, whose complementing special products and
abilities they needed, ethnicity, as elsewhere, was integrative rather than isolating and hostile,
except incidentally. The prestige of trading chiefs who also formed networks facilitating broad
circulation of the groups distinctive products, as well as innumerable ideas and fashions, attracted
neighbors to their compounds, and the languages spoken in them, and to a political culture that
linked the matrilineal communities of the region (children belonged to their mothers lineages and
answered to the authority of their mothers brothers) through an idiom of permanent patrifilial
(father-to-son) ties. Oral traditions in the region later recalled these integrative phases, probably
culminating between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, as an ancient Luba empire.

Speakers of Lunda-Chokwe languages living to the southwest in valleys of the rivers flowing
through the drier plains there adapted this Luba political techniquecalled positional succession
(that is, from the matrilineal communities to the political titles) and perpetual kinship (the ideally
stable father-to-son political relationships thus formed among otherwise unrelated lineages)to
profit from the disruptions of Atlantic slaving in the seventeenth century. A highly successful
sequence of warlords, bearing the title of mwaant yaav, led raids against the dense Luba
populations to the north and dispatched raiding and trading agents to the west in a trading
diaspora [spread out network] known later as the Lunda (phonetically Ruund) empire. The Lunda
chiefs were major sources of captives sent west toward the Atlantic until the late nineteenth
century, and the descendants of the communities they formed retain this general ethnic identity
into the early twenty-first century. In the far southwest (present-day central and eastern Angola),
so-called Chokwe (Tshoku, Quico) refugees from the slaving grew dramatically in numbers from
hunting ivory and gathering wax and wild rubber after 1850, and their modern descendants live
along the border of Democratic Republic of the Congo with Angola.

To the far west, centered on the lower courses of the Kasai, Kwango, and Congo Rivers flowing from
the sandy plains of modern Angola and extending north into southern Gabon, the Atlantic
coastlands were settled from the north by speakers of the language ancestral to the numerous
dialects of modern Kikongo (Kongo), and its eastern extension as the trade language Kituba. The
trading chiefs who integrated this region (holding titles of mani, or lord/master, a Bantu term also
common far to the east), probably around the twelfth or thirteenth century, prospered as mediators
between the marine salt and seashells (nzimbu, used as currency) of the Atlantic, copper from the
coastal range of mountains, and raffia-fiber textiles woven from palms found on the fringes of the
forests to the north and east. These resources allowed them to recruit local matrilineal cultivators
as clients and to integrate them around the Kikongo language of their chiefly compounds. The
political systems they devised to regularize these connections seem to have involved authorization
 of particular members of these networks, by councils of representatives from the other
communities involved, to deal externally on behalf of the group; these county seats were termed
mbanza. The internal authority of these chiefs is much less clear but was probably limited or
nonexistent.

Portuguese mariners, as they approached the mouth of the Congo River at the end of the fifteenth
century, encountered one such federative political center at Loango along the coasts to the north (in
present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo), and south of the river they were conducted to the
inland mbanza of a mani with the title of Kongo (now in northern Angola). Portuguese hopes of
finding precious metals, and soon their need for slaves, led them to depict this trading chief as a
king worthy of papal legal recognition in Europe (and by extension, also its Christian monarchs) as
possessor of landed domains and thus capable of authorizing exclusive commercial and diplomatic
collaboration with themselves. This initial legal fiction of a kingdom of Kongo acquired a
substantive dimension when the Portuguese maneuvered a Christian convert into the succession to
the mani Kongo title in 1506; the entire literature on the subsequent history of the region takes this
claim to monarchy literally.

The actual politics of this kingdom of Kongo remained rather more local and, as the slave trade
grew in the seventeenth century, were increasingly dominated by a new generation of trading
chiefs who brokered the caravans of captives moving from Lunda regions toward the Atlantic. The
Kituba extension of the Kongo language is the residue of nineteenth-century trading agents of these
chiefs working inland in search of ivory and wild rubber, and settling with the slaves they kept as
their profits.

...

Excellent ethnographies and exhibitions going back to the beginning of the colonial period have
made the plastic arts [three-dimensional, like sculpture, ceramics, and crafts] of the peoples of
Democratic Republic of the Congo virtually paradigmatic [representative] of African carving in
Western culture. Carvings in the rich woods of the region, masks of the secret societies,
representations of political authority, and also consummately decorated products of the
commercial era of the nineteenth century represent not so much tradition as they capture and
interpret the ongoing moments in the histories of communities there. The stylized representations
of human figures may reflect the humanistic overtones of the regions developed commercialism, as
in Renaissance Italy and elsewhere in Africa. Diviners assemble baskets of carved objects to discern
truth in their patterns. [Blacks]miths created spectacularly wrought iron and copper scepters,
spears, and knives for men in authority. Geometric designs on pottery, on matting, and in the raffia
cloths of the Kongo region are both aesthetic and meaningful. Woven and tied styling of womens
hair, as well as elaborate scarification, body painting (often with white clay), and tooth filing and
other mutilations adorned and presented peoples social and personal identities as richly as
clothing performs these functions in less hot and humid climates.

Groups Political Economic Cultural Societal

Algeria
DRC

Ghana

Kenya

South
Africa

European Views Political Economic Slavery Imperialism

Africa &
Europe