Lunda Empire

The Lunda Empire was a confederation of states in central Africa, in what are now the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, north-eastern Angola and north-western Zambia. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, its ruler, the Mwata Yamvo, presided over one of the largest states in the region, linked by trade to both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

The Lunda lived in the savanna and woodlands between the Kasai and Lualaba rivers, farming, hunting and fishing. Lunda tradition tells that a Luba hunter prince, Chibinda Ilunga, came to the land and married Lueji, a Lunda queen who had inherited the royal bracelet from her father. Lueji's brothers, angry at being passed over, left to found new states to the west, including among the Chokwe and the Imbangala of Angola. Chibinda and Lueji's descendants founded a new royal line, borrowing Luba ideas of sacred kingship. Historians date the rise of the Lunda state to the late sixteenth or seventeenth century.

The ruler's title, Mwata Yamvo, "lord of the viper" or "lord of wealth", was first held by Naweej, in the seventeenth century, who expanded the state. The capital, the musumba, was a large, carefully laid-out town, with the king's compound at its centre, and moved with each new ruler. A senior woman, the Lukonkeshia, the queen mother, held great power and had her own court.

The Lunda developed a flexible political system that allowed them to incorporate many peoples. Conquered or allied chiefs kept their positions but paid tribute and received Lunda titles. Through "positional succession" and "perpetual kinship", each new holder of a title inherited the identity and relationships of the first holder, so that political ties between titles were treated as family relationships that lasted forever. This allowed the Lunda model to spread widely beyond direct Lunda control.

In the eighteenth century, Lunda chiefs led migrations east and south, founding new kingdoms. The most important was Kazembe, on the Luapula river, in today's Zambia, founded around 1740, which became a powerful state controlling trade in copper and salt and later dealing with Portuguese and Swahili traders. The Portuguese explorer Francisco de Lacerda visited Kazembe in 1798 and died there. The Mutomboko ceremony, still held each year, commemorates Kazembe's founding.

The Lunda exported ivory, copper, wax and enslaved people, through intermediaries such as the Imbangala and Ovimbundu, to the Portuguese in Angola, receiving cloth, guns, beads and other goods. Many enslaved people taken to Brazil came from the Lunda region. Cassava and maize, crops from the Americas, became staples.

In the nineteenth century, the Chokwe, hunters and traders who had grown rich from ivory, wax and rubber and acquired guns, expanded into Lunda lands. They took advantage of a Lunda succession dispute, attacked the musumba and killed the Mwata Yamvo in 1887. The Lunda state fragmented. In the 1880s and 1890s, the region was divided between the Congo Free State, Portuguese Angola and British Northern Rhodesia. The title of Mwata Yamvo survives, with its seat at Musumba, near Kapanga, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Our maps show the Lunda Empire on every map from 1530 to 1900, with an outline of up to about 280,000 square kilometres, around 60 percent in today's Angola and the rest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The earliest maps use the name for the region before the empire formed. On the 1914 map the region is part of the Belgian Congo and neighbouring colonies.