Bakongo
The Bakongo (plural of Congo , singular Mukongo ) are an ethnic group in the estuary of the Congo River , mainly in the DR Congo (Congo-Kinshasa), the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) and the neighboring areas of Angola ( Zaire Province and Province Uíge ) including Cabinda and Gabons . Their total number is over 5 million people.
languages
A large part of the Bakongo speak the Kikongo language in partly very different dialects. After 1960 a standard Kikongo was developed as a written language in what was then Zaire ; it is taught in elementary schools in some provinces and is called Mono Kotuba . In 1992 there were about 3.2 million Kikongo speakers in all three countries. In the Republic of the Congo , they make up 46% of the population. A growing part of the Bakongo speaks as a second language, often also as a first language, Lingála , which has spread from Kinshasa as a lingua franca since the middle of the 20th century.
Religion and society
The Bakongo society is traditionally monogamous and matrilineal divided into 12 clans. Today patriarchal influences from Europe are noticeable. Their traditional religion knows two worlds, the material and the spiritual, which overlap at certain points and between which the ancestors mediate. Initiation rites play a major role; there was an elaborate burial culture with large graves made of wood or stone. Today the Bakongo are almost entirely Christians in various forms. Belonging to the Catholic Church predominates; in addition, the Baptists are particularly well represented in the Angolan part. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo , the syncretistic church of the so-called Kimbanguists was formed as early as the colonial times around 1920 , which meanwhile also has followers in the Republic of the Congo and Angola. In the last decades of the 20th century, the Bakongo found a large number of revival churches.
Originally the Bakongo mainly operated as forest planters and arable farmers. Today they produce cassava, beans, sweet potatoes, sesame seeds for their own use and bananas, coffee, cocoa, corn, peanuts, palm oil etc., especially for the large metropolitan areas of Brazzaville, Kinshasa and Luanda. The food and health situation in the countryside is poor. In the meantime, more than half of them have become city dwellers and work in a wide variety of professions, particularly trade.
history
The Bakongo, who probably immigrated from the south in the 3rd century, settled between today's Kinshasa and Matadi and gradually subjugated and assimilated their neighboring peoples such as Bambata, Mayumbe, Basolongo, Kakongo, Basundi and Babuende, were the main people of the former African Bantu empire Congo , which existed in the northwest of what is now Angola from the early Middle Ages to the 17th century. Its capital was M'banza Kongo . In 1483 the first contact between the Portuguese and Bakongo came under their king Nzinga Kuwu, who was baptized as João I by Christian missionaries . He was followed by his son Nzinga Mbemba (approx. 1456–1543), raised by Christian missionaries, as King Afonso I , who organized his court according to the Portuguese model and corresponded with King Manuel I of Portugal in the Portuguese language. Young Bakongo were sent to Portugal to study, one of them even became titular bishop of Utica in 1518 . Afonso went on a slave hunt among the neighboring peoples; Tens of thousands of slaves were handed over to the Portuguese in exchange for weapons and other goods, who used them on the sugar cane plantations on São Tomé and in Brazil . When the manhunt was no longer productive enough, the Portuguese worked with slave hunters of other races and encouraged them to catch Bakongo as well. The scandal came when the Portuguese governor in 1526 held back young people who were supposed to go to school in Portugal, including some Afonso's family members, and sold them as slaves. Afonso then tried to offer other goods as substitutes for slaves. This wish was made by the Portuguese King João III. "The pious" rejected. Afonso drove out the Portuguese, but lost prestige and power. His empire was often fractionated and lost its importance. The Congo Empire was finally smashed in 1665 at the Battle of Ambuila .
In 1885 the Bakongo were finally colonized by the Berlin Congo Conference ; The empire, which had long since ceased to exist, was divided between France, Belgium and Portugal, but a relatively homogeneous cultural area remained across the borders of the colonies. The Kimbanguist religious movement became a source of anti-colonial movement in the 20th century.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the settlement area of the Bakongo in the lower Congo experienced a strong immigration of other ethnic groups due to the upswing of the capital Léopoldville . The Association des Bakongo pour l'Unification, l'Expansion et de la Défense de la Langue Kikongo (ABAKO), founded in 1950 and led by Joseph Kasavubu since 1955, fought for the identity and dominance of the Bakongo . After independence, ABAKO stood up for a decentralized state and contributed to the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba .
During the War of Independence in Angola, the Bakongo mostly supported the anti-colonial movement FNLA and the 1961 uprising that was organized by it. When it was suppressed by Portugal, hundreds of thousands fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo . After independence, the majority of them streamed back to Angola, but often not to their areas of origin, but to Luanda and other Angolan cities, where they often had integration problems. During the civil war in Angola , they initially supported the FNLA, later partly their rival movement UNITA , against the ruling MPLA movement . After the introduction of the multi-party system in Angola, the FNLA tried in vain to become the political representative of the Bakongo; in the two previous parliamentary elections she received only a small, and most recently almost insignificant, share of the vote. At the same time, dozens of particularist parties emerged among the Bakongo, but none of them gained significant importance.
Web links
- Bakongo. In: Thomas Collelo (Ed.): Angola: A Country Study. GPO for the Library of Congress, Washington 1991
Individual evidence
- ^ Map of the ethnic groups in Angola
- ↑ Since reliable statistics are not yet available again for the Angolan part, only a rough estimate is possible.
- ↑ www.everyculture.com , accessed March 12, 2017.
- ↑ Lutz von Dijk: Africa: history of a continent. Bonn 2016, pp. 93–98.
- ↑ see History of Angola