Luba

Luba, or Tshiluba, is a Bantu language of the Kasai basin in the south-central Democratic Republic of the Congo, with an eastern dialect spoken by the Luba and a western one by the Lulua.

Its speakers descend from iron-working communities that had settled the lakes and marshes of the Upemba Depression by the 400s, building dams and dikes for fishing and farming and trading copper wire and pottery.

Around 1500 these chiefdoms coalesced into the Kingdom of Luba, whose sacred kings, the Balopwe, ruled alongside a council of elders and whose political model was copied by the neighbouring Lunda. At its height in the eighteenth century the kingdom drew many surrounding peoples into its cultural orbit, while Luba remained unwritten, its histories and moral teachings carried by oral recitation.