kongo_background_info

Welcome to the background info page. Here you will find a basic history of the Kongo Kingdom- Its Rise and Fall as I like to call it.

The people of Kongo called themselves the BaKongo and specialize in the slave trade. They live in the bulge of Africa (middle-west) in the Congo basin near the Zaire River. SW Congo, W Zaire and NW Angola made up the Kongo Empire. The northern regions are mainly rainforests and the southern regions are savannas. Along the coasts are woods and grasslands. Among the rivers are hills and mountains. The Kongo history dates back to 1000 BC. Even before Kongo became a powerful empire, it still preserved the order of the kingdoms by dividing them into villages, districts, provinces and finally, kingdoms. Villages were headed by families and districts are groups of villages headed by a chief appointed by a king.

The great empire first started out as several Bantu farmers started to make kingdoms long the Kongo River. By the 1400s, all the small kingdoms merged into an empire that would grow into one of the most powerful in Africa. During that century, the Kings controlled most of the trade routes to and from the coast. The King was all-powerful and owned many slaves as well as wives. He also controlled the amount of trades that passed through Kongo as well as acting supervisor for the tax system. During the 1400s, the Portuguese traded with the king and gradually, through missionaries, the king converted to Christianity. Most of his people followed his lead.

For the next 2 centuries, a trade alliance between Portugal and Kongo lead to eventual greed for more slaves and power from the Portuguese. As the demand for slaves grew, the population decreased slightly because the BaKongo took slaves from their own people as well as the neighboring kingdoms. But the Portuguese weren’t satisfied and waged a war against Kongo in the 15th century. The Kongo army was defeated in 1665. In northern Kongo, the French took control of the plantations by the 1800s; the BaKongo was divided up into several small provinces and the chiefs gradually wrested power from the king. By the mid 19th century, the European countries outlawed slavery and the once mighty Kongo Empire fell into decline. In 1885, Belgium controlled Kongo and named it he Belgian Congo. After a bout of epidemic in the early 1900s that killed many citizens, Kongo got its independence in 1964 and became the Republic of Zaire in 1974.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acko/h6_acko_map.jpg


 * Location
 * Movement
 * Human
 * Environment
 * Region
 * Physical