Azande

Farmers, hunters and once-feared warriors and smiths, the Azande (also written Zande) have a homeland that today is split by three national borders in the heart of Africa. Today they live in south-western South Sudan, north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the south-east of the Central African Republic. Their name is usually explained as "the people who possess much land", a reminder of the conquests that created them as a nation in the eighteenth century.

The Azande came together through military expansion in the first half of the eighteenth century, on the savanna of today's south-eastern Central African Republic. Two ruling houses shaped them. The Vungara (Avongara) clan supplied much of the political order, language and culture, while the Bandia, a dynasty of different origin, expanded into the north of today's Congo and took on Zande customs; in the early nineteenth century the two merged into one people. Succession drove further growth: when a king died his sons fought for the throne, and the losers often founded new kingdoms in neighbouring lands, spreading Zande rule north and east. Raids from the Sudanese north checked this expansion later in the nineteenth century. Outsiders once called the Azande "Niam-Niam", a name hinting at cannibalism that is now regarded as offensive.

European colonial rule divided Zande lands among Belgium, France and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Photographs taken by the Austrian Richard Buchta in the late 1870s are an important early record. From 1938 British officials planned an ambitious development project, the Zande Scheme, centred on cotton grown for processing and export. Some 60,000 Azande were resettled into planned villages of about 50 families each, and Zande labourers rebuilt around 100 miles of road. The scheme was first praised, but it largely failed because of the region's remoteness, poor roads, high costs and resistance to the new farming methods.

Zande kingdoms were led by chiefs drawn from the Avongara nobility, who acted as military, economic and political leaders, while unmarried men served as labourers and warriors. Families traditionally lived in scattered homesteads of mud-and-thatch houses built around courtyards, with kitchen gardens beside them. Today most Azande are small-scale farmers growing maize, rice, groundnuts, sesame, cassava and sweet potatoes, along with mangoes, bananas and other fruit; fishing in the rainy season and collecting termites add to the diet. Zande smiths were famed for the shongo, a curved, many-bladed throwing knife, and craftsmen carved figures in wood and clay and made drums and thumb pianos known as sansa.

Traditional Zande religion recognises Mbori, an all-powerful creator, and gives a central place to oracles and to ideas about witchcraft. Misfortune may be blamed on mangu, a witchcraft substance believed to be inherited and to act without its owner's knowledge. To find its source, people consult oracles of different standing, from the benge poison oracle used only by men to the termite oracle and the rubbing-board oracle. Christianity spread from the late nineteenth century, and about 85 per cent of Azande now count themselves Christian, more than half of them Catholic.

Ethnologue estimates about 730,000 Zande speakers in the DR Congo, 350,000 in South Sudan and 62,000 in the Central African Republic; the language, which speakers call Pa-Zande, has around 1.1 million speakers in all, and its wider classification is uncertain. Its literature is mostly oral, including tales of the trickster Ture. In South Sudan the Azande have been caught up in recent conflict: Amnesty International documented war crimes against Azande and Balanda communities in Western Equatoria in 2021.

Our 900 map draws a band labelled "Azandes" across central Africa, beside the Beja, Aksum and the Nubian kingdoms. The Azande did not form as a people until the eighteenth century, so the outline is anachronistic and approximate; it marks a broad region rather than a people of that era.