Solongo

The Solongo, also called Basolongo or Mussurongo, are one of the principal subgroups of the Bakongo, settled around the mouth of the Congo River. They speak Solongo, a dialect of Kikongo.

Their history is bound up with Soyo, already a province of the Kingdom of Kongo when the Portuguese reached the river in 1482; its governor, the mwene Soyo, was the first Kongo lord to be baptized in 1491. Soyo's port of Mpinda shipped slaves, ivory and copper through the sixteenth century.

In the 1590s Soyo's ruler was made a Count, and during the following decades Soyo broke free of the Manikongo and became an independent state that intervened in the Kongo civil wars of the seventeenth century. Later European navies also had to contend with Solongo piracy off the Congo estuary.