Banda

The Banda are a Ubangian-speaking people of the savannas north of the Congo basin, concentrated around the Ouaka and Gribingui rivers in the northeastern Central African Republic, with related groups spilling into the Congo. Their languages form a cluster of about nine vernaculars within the Niger-Congo family.

Banda society is patrilineal, organized in dispersed village groups under headmen rather than kings; in wartime the villages chose temporary war chiefs and stripped them of power once the danger passed. They lived by hunting, fishing and cultivation, and became known for carved ritual objects and enormous animal-shaped slit drums that carried messages between settlements.

Before the nineteenth century they led a largely unmolested life, but from the early 1800s slave raiders out of Wadai and Darfur swept down on their lands, carrying captives to Nile and Lake Chad markets and pushing Banda communities south and west along the Ubangi.