![]() ![]() Much of the early territorial expansion of the Kingdom of Kongo came through various voluntary agreement with smaller neighbouring states. It is generally acknowledged, however, that the establishment of the Kingdom of Kongo came about through both the voluntary and involuntary inclusion of neighbouring states around a central core state. A further issue is that local chroniclers (those writing from an insider’s perspective), such as the Congolese historian Petelo Boka, made assumptions based on the organisation of clans in more recent history. This means that there is a need to be critical about European accounts, as they were writing from the perspective of conquerors and outsiders. Understanding the early history of the Kingdom of Kongo is complicated by the lack of written sources from the time, as well as the problematic fact that almost all of the later accounts were produced by Europeans. In 1888, what was left of the Kingdom of Kongo was made a vassal state to Portugal, and in the early 1900s it was formally integrated into the Portuguese colony in Angola. The Kingdom was centered around the great city of Mbanza Kongo, located in what is now northern Angola, (location: 6☁6′04″S 14☁4′53″E), which was later renamed to São Salvador. The Kingdom of Kongo would eventually fall to scheming nobles, feuding royal factions, and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, initiating its eventual decline. The Kingdom would reach its peak in the mid 1600s. Kingdom was founded around 1390 CE through the political marriage of Nima a Nzima, of the Mpemba Kasi, and Luqueni Luansanze, of the Mbata, which cemented the alliance between the two KiKongo speaking peoples. ![]() The name comes from the fact that the founders of the kingdom were KiKongo speaking people, and the spelling of Congo with a C comes from the Portuguese translation. The Kingdom of Kongo was a large kingdom in the western part of central Africa.
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