Yombe

The Yombe are a Bantu people of the Kongo group, at home in the forested Mayombe hills that straddle the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo and Cabinda, where they speak Kiyombe, a dialect of the Kongo language. With the Vili and neighbouring peoples they formed one of the ethnic components of the Kingdom of Loango from its rise in the 1500s, and their clans also lived within the wider world of the Kingdom of Kongo.

Their carvers produced royal and funerary figures, phemba maternity statues and nkisi nkonde nail fetishes. Their cosmology placed the high god Ngoma Bunzi above earth and river spirits approached through ancestor shrines.