Huambo

Huambo's earlier history belongs to the Ovimbundu kingdom of Wambu on Angola's central plateau. Royal traditions remembered a line of rulers before the kingdom's better-defined emergence around the seventeenth century. The warrior Wambu Kalunga took control without a battle, but his rule did not establish an unbroken new dynasty. Kesonga, a local military leader, killed him and restored the vaNganda royal line.

These traditions give the plateau's past a political centre of its own, with royal succession contested between an incoming warrior and established local leaders. The chronology remains approximate: the kingdom is conventionally placed around 1640, while accounts of earlier kings and queens reach farther back without secure dates.