Mbuun

The Mbuun, also called Ambuun or Bunda, were a Bantu people of the western Congo basin, chiefly in the Idiofa territory along the Kwilu and its tributaries. Their oral traditions remember a migration from the Gabon side through the lower Congo and Angola, from a land called Okoolung beyond the Kwango.

When the Lunda empire of the Mwata-Yamv overshadowed neighboring lands through the 1600s and 1700s, the Mbuun kept a fragmented political order of village chiefs with limited local authority and no paramount ruler. Society was organized through matrilineal clans, a system tradition says they adopted from the neighboring Yansi.

They shared with the Yanzi and Dinga belief in a supreme being called Nzeem-a-mpong. Known as pacific traders rather than warriors, the Mbuun spoke Mbuun, or Mpuun, a Bantu language also recorded as Kimbuun or Gimbunda.