Independence: 1975 – from Portugal World Heritage site: M’banza Kongo, capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, which flourished as one of the largest states in southern Africa from the 14th to the 19th century.ANGOLA: QUICK FACTSBorn in Angola: Cabo Snoop, an MTV-nominated kuduro dancer and mus...
The Kingdom lasted approximately 140 years, with a population of around 5,000 people in the capital at its peak. Central Africa. In West-Central Africa, there were multiple kingdoms by the year 1500 BCE. Kongo was the most significant and potent of them; it was situated south of the ...
Robusta coffee comes from the Coffea canephora plant. As the name suggests, it’s a sturdier, more robust variety of coffee (compared to Arabica), and accounts for about 40% of the world’s total coffee production. The Robusta plant has a greater crop yield than that of Arabica, contains ...
Kongo, former kingdom in west-central Africa, located south of the Congo River (present-day Angola and Democratic Republic of the Congo). According to traditional accounts, the kingdom was founded by Lukeni lua Nimi about 1390. Originally, it was probabl
Of these, Kongo, situated in the northern part of the country, south of the Congo River, was the largest and most centralized. Ndongo, with its centre in the highlands between the Cuanza (Kwanza) and the Lukala rivers, was an important rival. Other states, such as the kingdom of ...
when Europeans identified the river with the kingdom of theKongopeople, who live near its mouth. Following the overthrow of Mobutu in 1997, the country’s name prior to 1971, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was reinstated. Congo subsequently was plunged into a devastating civil war; the...
Initially the Portuguese crown and Jesuit missionaries forged peaceful links with the kingdom of the Kongo, converting its king to Christianity. Almost immediately, however, slave traders followed in the wake of priests and teachers, and west-central Africa became tied to the demands of the São...
In 1591 the Italian mathematician Filippo Pigafetta included a number of Kongo words and phrases in a description of the kingdom of Congo that he based on information provided by Oduardo Lopez, a Portuguese traveler to Luanda in 1578. The first extant book written in a Niger-Congo language ...
Vodou, a syncretism of the West African Vodun religion and Roman Catholicism by the descendants of the Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and other ethnic groups who had been enslaved and transported to colonial Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and partly Christianized by R
Unlike Zaire, however, the name Congo has origins in the colonial period, when Europeans identified the river with the kingdom of the Kongo people, who live near its mouth. Following the overthrow of Mobutu in 1997, the country’s name prior to 1971, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,...