Kakongo

The Kakongo are the Bakongo people of the small kingdom of the same name, on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa in the area of the present-day Republic of the Congo and Cabinda. In the thirteenth century Kakongo formed part of a confederation led by Vungu, and for a time it was a vassal of the Kingdom of Kongo, whose king Afonso I still claimed it in 1535.

From the sixteenth century onward it was effectively independent, ruling from its inland capital of Kinguele. Portuguese merchants opened factories in the 1620s for copper, ivory and slaves, and with neighboring Ngoyo and Loango, Kakongo became a major coastal commercial power between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the 1680s it kept diplomatic ties with Soyo across the Congo River, before losing the river island of Nzari a Kongo to Soyo around 1688.