Luchazi

The Luchazi, who speak the language of the same name, are the principal people of the Ngangela cluster of Bantu communities in eastern Angola, concentrated around Muié and the Moxico lands east of the Bié Plateau.

Their speech forms a dialect continuum with Nyemba, Mbunda and Ngonzela, and Ngangela itself was a label coined in the 1700s by Ovimbundu traders and missionaries for the tribes of east-central Angola; each community kept its own language and identity, with no overarching polity uniting them.

They lived by subsistence cultivation, rearing animals and gathering wild honey and fruit. Known to the Portuguese from the 1600s, they were drawn into the commerce of the Luanda and Benguela bridgeheads, first as victims of the slave trade through African middlemen and later as suppliers of wax, honey and ivory carried to Benguela by Ovimbundu caravans.