Yaka

The Yaka are a Bantu people of the forest and savanna between the Kwango and Wamba rivers in the southwestern Congo basin, close to the Angola border, and speak Kiyaka, an offshoot of Kikongo. The name Yaka was originally a Kongo title for warriors.

Yaka society was organized under paramount chiefs and matrilineal clans, and its craftsmen made upturned-nose masks, mbwoolo figurines and the mukoku slit drum used in ritual dances.

In the seventeenth century Lunda migrants moving west under a leader named Kabamba founded the Yaka kingdom, blending with local Kongo-speaking groups such as the Mbala and Tsamba. An older Yaka polity had been subdued by the expanding Lunda Empire in the 1730s, and the reorganized kingdom long resisted Portuguese penetration.