Kuba

The Kuba, also called Bakuba or Bushongo, are a cluster of about nineteen Bantu-speaking peoples in the heart of the Congo basin, between the Sankuru, Lulua and Kasai rivers. Their ancestors are said to have migrated from the north in the sixteenth century, settling among earlier villagers and Twa foragers.

Around 1625 the outsider leader Shyaam a-Mbul united the rival chiefdoms into the Kuba Kingdom. The kingdom was ruled by a king, the nyim, drawn from the Bushoong clan, who governed through a council representing each subject group.

Maize, cassava, beans and tobacco from the Americas brought wealth, and Kuba nobles patronized embroidered raffia cloth, geometric helmet masks and carved ndop royal figures. During the eighteenth century the nyims extended their power southward along the Kasai, and the kingdom entered the nineteenth century comparatively untouched by the Atlantic slave trade.