The Rainbow and the Kings: A History of the Luba Empire to 1891

By Thomas Q. Reefe

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520334915

Thomas Q. Reefe

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THE RAINBOW

AND

THE KINGS

THE RAINBOW AND THE KINGS

A HISTORY OF THE LUBA EMPIRE TO 1891

THOMAS Q. REEFE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1981 by

The Regents of the University of California

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Reefe, Thomas Q.

The rainbow and the kings.

Bibliography: p. 247

Includes index.

1. Luba (African People)—History.

2. Zaire—History—To 1908. I. Title.

DT650.L8R43 967.5'101 80-17627

ISBN 0-520-04140-2

To Bill and Ruth

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

LIST OF MAPS, TABLES, AND FIGURES

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

I. INTRODUCTION

Terms and Concepts

II. SOURCES

Phrases and Mnemonic Codes

Narrative Histories and Men of Memory

The Bambudye—a Luba Secret Society

Published Sources

Colonial Documents

III. THE MYTH

The Luba Genesis Myth

Transmission of the Genesis Myth

IV. THE CHARTER

Legitimizing Ideology and Institutions

The Bambudye—Charter and Control

V. KINGS AND CHRONOLOGY

Kinglists

Chronology

From the Rainbow to the Kings

VI. THE EARLY RECORD

The Upemba Depression: The Archeological Record and the Ecological Perspective

Patrilineal Peoples and the Matrilineal Belt: The Ethnographic Perspective

Nkongolo/The Rainbow: The Linguistic Perspective

VII. PYRAMIDS UPON PYRAMIDS

Stage 1: The Sacred Center

Factors in Early State Formation

Stage 2: Symbols of Assimilation from the Heartland to the Zaire and Luembe Rivers

VIII. SAVANNA TRADE

Luba-Songye Trade

Samba and the Copperbelt

Empire Emergent: A Summary

IX. DYNASTIC HISTORY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Patterns of Conquest during the Age of Kings

The Generations of Kings Ndaye Mwine Nkombe and Kadilo, ca. 1690 (± 24 years) to ca. 1750 (± 16 years)

The Generation of King Kekenya, ca. 1750 (± 16 years) to ca. 1780 (± 12 years)

X. THE GENERATION OF KING ILUNGA SUNGU, ca. 1780 (± 12 YEARS) to ca. 1810 (± 8 YEARS)

Succession Struggle and Dynastic Crisis

Defeat in the West: Mutombo Mukulu and the Kanyok Kingdom

New Tributaries in the East: The Luvua-Lukuga Corridor and the Fire Kingdom of Kyombo Mkubwa

XI. THE GENERATION OF KING KUMWIMBE NGOMBE, ca. 1810 (± 8 YEARS) to ca. 1840 (± 4 YEARS)

Succession Struggles and Consolidation

Expansion toward the Northeast: The Fire Kingdom of Buki

Expansion toward the Southeast

Kinkondja and Mulongo: Securing the Zaire River Crossing

From the Upper Zaire to the Luvua

Kumwimbe Ngombe versus Kanyembo (Kazembe IV)

XII. THE GENERATION OF KING ILUNGA KABALE, ca. 1840 (± 4 YEARS) to ca. 1870

Succession Struggles and Consolidation

East of the Upper Zaire River

Between the Lubudi River and the Upper Zaire River: Lubende

The Luba-Songye Frontier: Northwest, North, and Northeast

The Death of King Ilunga Kabale, ca. 1870

The Age of Kings: An Assessment

XIII. THE CONQUEST UNDONE THE LOSS OF THE FRONTIERS

The End of Luba Rule, 1860s to 1891

The Arab-Swahili and the Rise of Tippu Tip

The Luba-Songye Borderland

Msiri and the Frontiers to the South and East

Conquest States: The New Political Order

XIV. DISINTEGRATION AT THE CENTER

The Ovimbundu Way

The Succession Struggle, ca. 1870 to 1891

Violence in the Heartland during the Ovimbundu Era

Epilogue

XV. CONCLUSIONS AND COMPARISONS

Finding History in the Forest of Symbols

Trade and Tribute

Population Density and State Formation and Growth

Lineage Politics: Gaining a Competitive Edge and Losing It

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INFORMANTS

INDEX

LIST OF MAPS, TABLES, AND FIGURES

Maps

1. The peoples of Middle Africa 4

2a. Northcentral Shaba Region 68

2b. The Luba heartland and the Upemba depression 69

3. Luba Empire and Shaba-Kasai extended region

trade: eighteenth century 94

4. Luba Empire: late eighteenth century to the 1860s 116

5. Traders, raiders, and invaders of the late

nineteenth century 160

Tables

1. Episodes of the Luba genesis myth 32

2. Kinglists of the Luba Empire 50

3. Royal sacred villages of the Luba Empire 55

4. Genealogy and chronology of the royal dynasty

of the Luba Empire 60

Figures

1. Lukasa, The Long Hand 38

2. Pyramids upon pyramids 79

PREFACE

I originally conceived of investigating the history of the Luba Empire after I started graduate school, in the mid-1960s. The Empire was a dynastic state that claimed the allegiance of the Iron Age agricultural populations who occupied the central African savanna of southern Zaire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not earlier. Peoples and dynasties hundreds of kilometers away claimed Luba origins, which suggests that the Luba political system was among the first to emerge on the sweeping grasslands. According to the published literature, Luba oral historians could recite an extensive repertory of oral traditions. Archeologists were developing a useful sequence of dates for the Iron Age of southern Zaire. A major linguistic theory contended that the diaspora of Bantu-speaking peoples had started in the general vicinity of the area later dominated by the Luba Empire. Finally, no one had done research among the Luba and written a book on their history since Edmond Verhulpen had published Baluba et Balubaïsés du Katanga in 1936. In all, the task seemed well worth the effort.

I went to Shaba Region (ex-Katanga Province) of the Republic of Zaire in the early 1970s. By that time the Region had settled down from the turmoil of the Katanga Secession and the rebellions of the 1960s, and I could travel freely. Significant advances had been made in African historiography, especially in the study of African oral traditions. Archeological work being done in southern Zaire promised to flesh out the chronology of the later Iron Age. A lively debate had developed about linguistic interpretations of the diaspora of the Bantu-speaking peoples. New monographs were being written on the history of neighboring groups and states in the region, but no one had preempted my research topic during the intervening years, for there were still too few scholars studying the many themes of the African past.

Luba elders could indeed recite a large inventory of oral traditions, and the archives of Shaba were surprisingly rich depositories of colonial documents relevant to the precolonial period. Using oral data and published material, I have pushed the chronology of the Luba Empire with some precision to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Important events occurred before that time, and I have indicated a formative sequence that is compatible with the later evolution of the Empire. Nothing I discovered changed my perceptions of the importance of the Luba Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries/At that time it became a large-scale dynastic state, and its fame was such that groups far beyond its frontiers evidently felt compelled to claim a putative Luba ancestry. I have stopped the story at 1891, because by that year the Empire had ceased to exist as a large-scale state dictating the course of events in this part of central Africa.

This book is the result of two years’ research conducted in the United States, Belgium, France, England, and the Republic of Zaire. Eleven months of that time, from October 1972 to September 1973, were spent in Zaire. With the cooperation and express permission of Zairian government officials in charge of Shaba archives,¹ I was able to microfilm over 300 reports and letters written between 1907 and 1963. Positive microfilm copies have been deposited at the Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Africaines (CEDAF) in Brussels, the Co-operative Africana Microfilm Project (CAMP) at the University of Chicago, and the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Documentaires sur l’Afrique Centrale (CERDAC) at the Lubumbashi campus of the National University of Zaire.

Kamina was my base of operations while I was working among the Luba. I interviewed informants resident in and around the town, and I journeyed 200 kilometers and more to the northwest, north, and northeast to visit Luba royal courts and the former heartland of the Empire. This fieldwork was the most rewarding part of my research; without it much of the written material on the Luba Empire would have remained incomprehensible.

My formal language training in kiLuba, the language of the Luba of Shaba, did not really begin until I arrived at Kamina, and the exigencies of time and money forced me to learn the language while doing my fieldwork. I only began to feel comfortable with the language as I was about to leave Zaire, and this meant that I had to work closely with an interpreter. The majority of my research was done with the assistance of Mbombo Ngoye Kalu- hunga, who came originally from a village near the town of Kani- ama. His mother tongue is kiLuba, he is fluent in French, and we conversed in French. He had just completed his sophomore year in chemistry at the National University of Zaire and was on leave from the University during the period of our work together.

Permission to interview at a court was granted by the king, and informants were often recommended by the king or one of his titleholders. No apparent attempt was made to inhibit or restrict my field inquiries, and requests to interview both court personnel and people at outlying villages were always granted. Only once did I have a problem in talking to informants, and that was at the court of Mutombo Mukulu, where rivalry among three royal lineages made the recitation of historical information a particularly touchy political issue.

Sometimes my interpreter and I conducted group interviews to gather data on ethnography, land tenure, salt production, etc. This information is cited in the footnotes as Field inquiry, with location and date. Most interviews, though, were conducted privately with an informant in his own compound; rarely was I forced by circumstances to conduct group interviews about historical subjects.

The amount of time spent at a court or village varied, from a day to as much as two weeks. I repaid obligations to some people with transportation and gifts in kind. Most interviews were paid for by a combination of cash and gifts. The usual payment for an interview was 30 to 35 makuta (100 makuta = 1 zaire = $1.15 on the international currency market of the time), although courtesy sometimes demanded that I pay as much as one zaire for a long interview.

My need for an interpreter dictated the interview procedures. Important informants were interviewed for several days, and I conducted follow-up interviews whenever possible. My interpreter and I started out with several question-and-answer sessions. Our exchanges in French were recorded on tape and typed, in English, as field notes within an hour or two of the interview. Information obtained in this way is cited in the footnotes as interview, with name of informant(s), location of interview, and date.

During the question-and-answer sessions, we determined wheth- er an informant was capable of giving a formal narrative testimony for tape recording. Informants were usually more than willing to provide these testimonies for the sake of accuracy. My interpreter made a transcript of the taped oral testimony and then wrote a word-for-word French translation directly below each line of kiLuba. Working from his transcription, he would next tape an oral prose translation of the testimony in French. As my kiLuba improved I made spot-checks of his transcriptions and was more than satisfied with their quality. Next, I typed an English translation of the testimony from the kiLuba transcription and the written and spoken French translations. Points in the taped testimonies that baffled me were clarified in subsequent interviews. In this way approximately twenty hours of taped testimonies were collected.²

The documented tape collection, along with about eight hours of recorded music, is listed as Thomas Q. Reefe with Mbombo Ngoye Kaluhunga, ‘Oral History and Music of the Luba People of the Republic of Zaire: Tape Recordings and Documentation’ (Chapel Hill, 1976), 12 tapes and 807 pages. This collection has been deposited with the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, and a copy is to be deposited at CERDAC. The taped testimonies in this collection are listed in the footnotes by informant’s name, place and date of recording, and tape code; thus, the notation "Nsenga Banza, Kabongo village, 23 April 1973, T6 11" refers to the testimony of nsenga Banza recorded at Kabongo village on 23 April 1973, which can be found in the collection on Tape #6 as Item #1. In addition, kiLuba transcriptions and English translations of praise phrases have been appended to the documentation for this collection.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is a revision of my Ph.D. dissertation, which was accepted in 1975 by the University of California at Berkeley. The research and writing of the thesis were carried out under the supervision of Raymond Kent, Elizabeth Colson, and Martin Klein, whose advice and support I have appreciated for many years. The finances for my research were pieced together from a number of sources, to all of which I am grateful. The University of California at Berkeley provided me with a travel grant, and I was awarded a timely grant from the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund. The Veterans Administration provided benefits, and my bank lent me some money. Above all I thank the members of my extended family who dipped into their private resources to lend me money in truly African-like gestures of communal generosity: William and Rose Wayne, and Quentin Brown.

Jan Vansina, Andrew Roberts, Joseph Miller, Roy Willis, and David Patterson took the time to read my dissertation and comment upon it before it was revised for publication, and I hope that all of them realize my gratitude. I, of course, remain responsible for the contents of the book, with whatever shortcomings it may contain.

I was affiliated with the Lubumbashi campus of the National University of Zaire as a Research Associate, and its staff and student body helped me and my family in innumerable ways. I am especially appreciative of the support of Kabongo Ilunga, Valentin and Elizabeth Mudimbe, Jean-Claude Willame, Guy de Plaen, and Jean-Luc Vellut. I thank N’Dua Solol Kanampumb and Shaje’a Tshiluila for their willingness to share their information on the Lunda and Songye, respectively, as well as Walter van Dorpe for his help with some Dutch translations.

Robert Schechter, Jeffrey Hoover, John Yoder, and Pierre de Maret all did doctoral research among near and distant neighbors of the Luba. They were kind enough to look over my dissertation and share their research results with me. I hope I have stolen none of their thunder by reporting and footnoting portions of some of their works.

John Studstill, David and Bronwen Womersley, and Everett and Vera Woodcock all helped smooth my family’s transition to life in Kamina, and my wife and I remember their many kindnesses with affection. John and David, in particular, offered invaluable advice that accelerated my field research, and I am also appreciative of Theodore Theuws’s letters containing useful tips about working at Kamina. Two former residents of the town deserve special mention: I am deeply grateful to Harold Womersley, who has shared with me both his insights from forty-seven years of mission work among the Luba, and his own books and manuscript on Luba history; and I must also thank E. d’Orjo de Marchovelette for granting me an interview and outlining his quarter-century of colonial service.

The Zairian government officials who assisted me are too numerous to mention here. However, special acknowledgment must go to those who granted me access to the archives under their control. My research brought me into contact with leaders of Luba society, and there is no way I can repay the four Luba kings whose cooperation made my fieldwork possible: Kasongo Ny- embo, Kabongo, Kinkondja, and Mutombo Mukulu. There are dozens of Luba informants to whom I am grateful, and four men deserve special recognition: kyoni Ngoye, kyoni Kumwimbe, nsenga Banza, and tshikala Mwamba. If there was anyone who had his patience tested during my fieldwork, it was Mbombo Ngoye Kaluhunga, my interpreter. I owe him a personal debt, and I think of our work together as a professional collaboration in the investigation of a subject in which we had a mutual interest.

Laurie Christesen and Mandy Hollowell typed drafts and the final manuscript for this book as well as other things I have written. I appreciate their initiative and attention to detail.

Finally, I must thank my wife Pat for her active support and involvement in my research over the many years of this project, and my sons Jeremy and Christopher for their patience and goodnature throughout. Without my wife’s candor and encouragement I doubt that this book would ever have been completed.

A NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

I have used English spelling for all proper names. Place names are listed as they appear on the maps issued by the cartographic service of the Republic of Zaire. All words and phrases in African languages are spelled according to the conventional orthography of H. W. Beckett’s Hand Book of KiLuba (Luba-Katanga). Only a few peculiarities need be noted. The letter i changes to y and u changes to w before vowels. I have used the letter p, as in mu- lopwe (sacral king), but it should be kept in mind that p undergoes a sound shift to h among the Luba living in the former heartland of the Empire.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

XX

SECTION ONE: PEDESTRIANS, PADDLERS, AND MEN OF MEMORY

I. INTRODUCTION

Luba land is located in the middle of central Africa, on the savanna just south of the rainforest in the Republic of Zaire. The trade in slaves and ivory, and the other intrusive forces of the international economy that affected people and polities toward the west and east coasts from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, had little or no impact upon the creation and maturation of Luba institutions. The Luba Empire was a fully developed dynastic state well before even the most indirect effects of the international economy were felt this far in the interior. Ironically, or tragically, the slave and ivory trade played a role in the history of the Empire only at the end, in the 1870s and 1880s, when integration into the forward edges of the expanding frontiers of international trade tore the Empire apart. Therefore, the history of the formation and expansion of the Luba Empire is the story of a truly African phenomenon.

The Luba are patrilineal subsistence farmers who practice swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculture. Theirs is a relatively high country—1,000 to 1,100 meters above sea-level—where the temperature averages about 24° C. and a bit over a meter of rain falls in the course of a year.¹ Long expanses of grassland are broken by lightly wooded gallery forests; dense vegetation occurs only in occasional clusters and along the banks of streams. This stretch of the southern savanna is part of the upper Zaire basin, where small streams flow east and west to meet major rivers which run from south to north. The human story that follows is about the pedestrians and paddlers who moved across this open and accessible land and waterscape.

The southern savanna has been sparsely populated. In this century the average density of different sections of Luba territory has varied between 1-2 to 4-5 people per square kilometer.² It is

1. The peoples of Middle Africa

doubtful that precolonial density patterns were much different, for then, as today, no ecological or economic imperatives existed for agriculture to change to a system of intensive exploitation capable of supporting a greater population. Control of land for political gain had little meaning in this demographic context. Rather, political gain came from the ability of leaders and their clients to overcome distance in order to establish a degree of mutual loyalty and to share in the goods produced by the people who exploited the land and water for their dispersed villages and hamlet clusters.

State formation occurred first in a territorially limited core area, or heartland, where allegiance to a chief or king and his court was strong. Control of subordinates in the heartland came from the sheer physical proximity of the leader, and his immediate access to local supernatural sanctions as well as force of arms was, undoubtedly, a factor in early state formation. However, as distance from the center grew, centrifugal forces increased in this society of pedestrians and paddlers, so that the loyalty of subordinates along distant frontiers became problematic. Nonetheless, the Luba Empire emerged as a large-scale state well before the eighteenth century, and by the 1860s its king could claim the allegiance of people living on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the east; the region where the Zaire and Łomami rivers flow into the rainforest in the north; the Luembe River in the west; and territories close to the southern Zaire copperbelt. An African empire of such size could not have been sustained for long by the use of arrow, spear, and knife alone. An important theme of Luba history is the development of ideologies, insignia, and institutions which were exported to clients on the distant periphery and which enabled the king and his kinsmen to claim a degree of loyalty from them.

The Empire emerged among people possessing a homogeneous religious culture. The Luba and their neighbors venerated their ancestors, for it was the ancestors who gave each person his vital life-force. Some spirits became associated with human collectivities or enjoyed reputations that extended over whole regions, and these spirits entered the pantheon of the most famous Luba ancestral deities. Ancestors provided a spiritual link between villages and between regions. Cooptation of elements of this religious system by the royal dynasty and its agents represents an important ideological breakthrough in the early history of the Empire.

Tribute exchange between patron and client was the most fundamental expression of political loyalty on the central African savanna, and refusal to pay tribute was a serious act of political insubordination which led to retaliation. The Luba Empire was a tribute-monger, and informants talking to European observers in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century explained the former political relationship of their region to the Empire’s royal dynasty almost exclusively in terms of tribute payment.³ Manipulation of reciprocity and control of redistribution were keys to the functioning of the tribute system. The king and his subjects were mutually dependent. Reciprocity was expressed by a subordinate giving tribute to a superior and receiving a gift of equal value.⁴ In central Africa a royal court was a major nexus of redistribution, for hard-to-get items produced in areas with unique natural resources were brought to the court and given to tribute-bearers from areas that did not possess those resources.⁵

There were, however, many obstacles to the smooth functioning of the tribute system. Despite the principle of reciprocity, tribute exchanges were subject to serious misunderstandings. Frequency of payments and quantities transferred between client and patron during past visits were not always accurately recalled in an oral society with no means of permanent bookkeeping. The quantity and quality of goods exchanged depended upon how both parties assessed their political relationship at the moment, and tribute disputes were part of the nitty-gritty of political life.⁶ It was the successful trade-offs that Luba kings and their clients made, between concepts of balanced and equitable exchange on the one hand and the uneven demands of day-to-day political life on the other, that sustained the Empire.

Specified titleholders at a Luba royal court supervised the tribute payments of specified client states and client villages. These court personnel were allowed to retain portions of the payments, and the ability to drain the tribute flow was a principal incentive for officeholding.⁷ As the Empire grew the size of the royal court increased, eventually becoming a large urban agglomeration filled with the compounds of numerous titleholders and their kin and clients. Important personalities came to court for visits that lasted weeks, and there was also a free-floating population of non-royal women from outlying lineages, who were held at court as pawns or hostages to the good behavior of their kin.

The royal court became a major consumer of goods produced by the villagers of the southern savanna, considerably draining the redistributive capacity of the tribute system. Some perishable foodstuffs were produced in the fields around the court, but it was nearby villagers who bore the brunt of court demand for staples. Royal and prestige goods flowed into court along with mundane non-perishables. Court personnel thrived upon the size and diversity of tribute, and they travelled widely to supervise tribute collection. The erection of an exploitive and territorially extensive tribute-gathering system must be judged both as one of the Empire’s historical achievements and as a symbol of its political life.

Important natural resources were scarce. Copper came only from the copperbelt stretching along the southern Zaire and Zambia border. Raphia palms grew most abundantly from the Luba heartland northward to the Kasai Region. The upper Zaire River and its many lakes, teeming with fish, served as reservoirs of protein. Centers for the production of salt or iron were often separated from one another by hundreds of kilometers. Scarcity led to trade—it is no coincidence that the heartland of the Luba Empire was rich in salt and iron ore*and that it became a major emporium on extended regional trade routes.

As the dynastic state expanded, problems of lineage politics increased at its center. An important subordinate lineage became bound to a king, in part, by sending a woman to become a royal wife. As more and more lineages were incorporated into the Empire, the size of the king’s harem grew, and the number of royal male children eligible to rule therefore multiplied. The interregnum following the death of the king could easily lead to a major succession crisis as numerous royal males, each supported by his mother’s lineage, tried to eliminate one another.⁸ A protracted succession dispute at the center could weaken the royal dynasty and lead to the deterioration of the allegiances of tributaries at the periphery, while unresolved conflict among royal males could divide the dynastic state into several smaller lineage-based states. Many central African polities have suffered from these problems, but at least from the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century the Luba royal dynasty was able to limit the divisive impact of its succession disputes. The innovations and good fortune which made this possible are part of Luba dynastic history.

The Empire expanded by incorporating the kingdoms that lay beyond its heartland. The Luba ruler was a king over many kings; the politics of expansion was the story of the subordination of outlying ruling lineages. Lineage politics is a game for opportunists, and Luba kings were, above all, opportunists. They frequently determined the succession in subordinate royal lineages, searching for reliable collaborators. Luba kings often extended their overrule by intervening on behalf of one or another faction of the ruling lineage of a border kingdom. Lineage powerbrokering was an effective mechanism of expansion, and astute rulers did manipulate or coerce the loyalties of subordinate lineages for protracted periods. However, exclusive reliance upon lineage loyalties meant that the stability of the state would frequently run afoul of the ambition and changing needs and perceptions of the heads of subordinate lineages and their followers. Lineage leaders did rebel and sever tribute relations with the Luba royal court, but the frequency of rebellion was reduced because the royal dynasty created or gained access to politico-religious institutions that cut across lineage ties. These institutions gave Luba kings a competitive edge over neighboring monarchs who ruled without such cross-cutting mechanisms.

Men of memory, the Luba oral historians, recall the past in terms of a genesis myth and a dynastic story, a tale about a man called The Rainbow who was overthrown by an heroic figure whose progeny gave rise to the line of Luba kings. There is history here: any analysis of the Luba past must begin with The Rainbow and then turn to the deeds of the kings.

Terms and Concepts

Some terms need explanation before they are used extensively. Defining ethnicity is a problem, for people use numerous and overlapping names to express their identity. Luba, as used in this work, refers to those people who predominate in northcentral Shaba Region and in a few adjacent areas along the southern border of the Kasai Region. Today their western boundary is marked by the Lubilash (upper Sankuru) River, which parallels 24° E. long. The Łomami River, which flows northward through the middle of the territory of the Luba people, figures prominently in their traditions. In the east the upper Zaire River parallels 25° E. long, and forms a natural barrier separating the Luba proper from their close cultural kin, the Hemba (eastern Luba).

I do not intend to become involved in speculation about the etymology of the name Luba? but this work is based upon the safe assumption that people living in the area have called themselves baLuba since at least the eighteenth century, and probably for a long time before that. The Luba of Shaba are not to be confused with the Luba of Kasai, their cultural kin to the northwest. The earliest mention of the Luba that I have been able to find in print dates to 1756. In that year Manuel Leitao visited the kingdom of Kasanje in central Angola and learned from secondhand sources that among the neighbors of the Lunda east of Kasanje was a group known as the quilubas. No further information is provided, and it is impossible to determine if Leitao was referring to the Luba-Shaba or the Luba-Kasai.¹⁰

I will use the term Luba Empire here because it is the name by which this state has come to be known in the literature. However, I am not suggesting that