Ankoro

Ankoro lies on the west bank of the Lualaba River, directly opposite the point where the Luvua River joins it, making the place part of a meeting point for two major river routes. The Luvua runs northwest for some 350 kilometres from the northern end of Lake Mweru, and the Lualaba carries its water toward the wider Congo system through a low landscape of forest and waterside life.

The river country upstream, the marshy Upemba Depression, was home to iron-working farmers and fishing peoples from the fourth century onward, who learned to use nets, harpoons and dugout canoes, dried their fish for the protein-starved savanna and traded salt and iron goods, importing glass beads and cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean. This was the heartland of the Luba, whose kingdom arose in the Upemba Depression. The upper Luvua valley was home to the Bwile people, and some time after 1810 the Luba ruler Kumwimbe Ngombe conquered the region.