Mbanza-Kongo

Mbanza-Kongo was the capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, a state that ruled a broad belt of country either side of the lower Congo river. The town sits on a flat hilltop with long views and defensible slopes, and around the royal enclosure lived the court, the king's officials and a large population, making it one of the largest urban centres in central Africa before European contact.

Portuguese ships reached the kingdom in the 1480s, and relations began as an exchange of embassies rather than conquest. The ruler Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised in 1491, taking the name João; his son Afonso I built the kingdom into a Christian state with a Portuguese-speaking court, stone churches and letters exchanged with Lisbon and Rome. The capital came to be called São Salvador, a name used from 1570, and the church begun in 1491 was raised to cathedral status in 1596; its ruins are still known as Kulumbimbi.

The same trade that brought priests and masons also drained the kingdom of people, as the Atlantic slave trade pulled captives through Kongo territory. Defeat by Portuguese forces at Mbwila in 1665 broke royal authority, and the capital was abandoned for a time before a reduced kingship returned. Portuguese rule was formally imposed in the late nineteenth century, and the town spent the colonial period as a quiet district centre called São Salvador, taking back its old name in 1976, the year after independence. In 2017 the historic remains were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as Mbanza Kongo, Vestiges of the Capital of the former Kingdom of Kongo.

The town is the symbolic centre of Bakongo identity, which reaches across the borders into both Congos. Kikongo is the first language of most residents, and many families have relatives in Kinshasa or Matadi and speak French or Lingala from years spent there during the civil war. Portuguese is the language of school, office and administration.

Respect for the Kongo past is not antiquarian here. The royal enclosure, the tombs of the kings and the old court tree are treated as places with living meaning, visited by traditional authorities as well as researchers, and the kingship survives as a ceremonial institution recognised by Bakongo communities. Visitors are expected to move through these places with a custodian and to accept restrictions on where they walk and photograph.

Christianity arrived here earlier than almost anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa, and Catholic and Protestant churches are both strong, with a prophetic tradition running through the region that produced the Kimbanguist and Tokoist movements. Church choirs, drumming and dance are part of ordinary weekends. Carnival is celebrated in the town's squares before Lent, and Kongo cultural festivals in the drier months bring together dancers, storytellers and craftworkers from across the old kingdom's territory.

Mbanza-Kongo is a provincial capital of modest size — a town of 221,141 people at the 2024 count, including the districts that have grown around the old centre — and it works as an administrative and trading place rather than an industrial one. Provincial government, schools, the hospital and the church are the main employers, along with the market and small building trades.

Most households farm as well, growing cassava, bananas, maize and beans on plots around the town, and cassava in its many forms is the basis of the local economy as much as the local diet. Trade across the nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo border is a mainstay: goods, currency and people move both ways, and prices in the market reflect what is cheaper on the other side.

The day begins early and slows in the heat of the afternoon. Water supply and electricity are unreliable, generators are common, and the roads outside the paved centre become difficult in the rains. Since the World Heritage inscription the town has seen investment in roads, the museum and the protection of the historic area, and visitors, mostly Angolan, are a small but growing presence.

Cooking here belongs to the Bakongo world rather than to Luanda. Cassava is the foundation: the root is dried and pounded into flour for funge, the smooth porridge eaten with the hand, and fermented, wrapped in leaves and steamed to make kikwanga, the dense sour bread shared with the Congos. The leaves are pounded into kizaka, a green stew cooked with palm oil, groundnuts or fish.

Fish comes dried or smoked from the coast and the rivers; chicken, goat and, in villages, game are grilled or stewed with tomato, onion and chilli. Beans cooked in red palm oil, plantains and sweet potato fill out the plate, and jindungo, the small fierce local chilli, is served on the side. Peanuts appear in sauces and as kitaba, a spiced paste eaten with bread.

Fruit is abundant and cheap in season — mango, papaya, pineapple, avocado and small sweet bananas. Palm wine, maluva, is tapped in the villages and drunk fresh, sugar cane spirit is made locally, and bottled beer brewed in Luanda is sold in every bar. Coffee from the Uíge hills to the south-east, once a major export crop, still reaches the market in small quantities.