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The changes which Kasongo Cinyama, Cokwe raiders, and the Tungomb (Angolan traders) brought to Kasai in the 1870s had a profoundly destabilizing effect on Kanyok society. These outsiders, who were actually auxiliaries of Western merchants, Arab traders, or distant African chiefs, threatened to undermine the Kanyok government and society. In a land where the mid-century schism had already divided the state into separate eastern and western sections, village life became less secure, economic patterns less predictable, and political structures less stable. During these chaotic times, Mwen a Kanyok Kabw Muzemb struggled to give security and direction to the Kanyok state. A ruthless, tyrannical, and arrogant individual, and also a cunning, violent, and pitiless slave trader, Kabw Muzemb was able to control and use the era's predatory economic and military tactics to strengthen his own political position, to stabilize Kanyok government, and to protect Kanyok frontiers. (See Map 11.) While in the end an unequal match for the Congo Free State, he was, however, able to meet the lesser challenges from the Cokwe, Kasongo Cinyama, and the Tungomb. Kabw Muzemb's rise to power When Kasongo Cinyama fled to Etond in the late 1870s, he left Kanyok politics in turmoil. Although his puppet Ciband Musumb ruled at Mulundu, no one sat on the chief's chair at Katshisung. To add further confusion, as Kasongo Cinyama withdrew north to reestablish himself in the Gandajika area, he gave seven guns to Shimat a Ciband a Cilomb who hoped to take power at Katshisung. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intended as a history of the Kanyok and not an explanation of scholarly theory, the text of this book gives only limited attention to a discussion of historical methodology. There are three reasons for this strategy. First, the study of African history has matured to the point where scholars should not be defensive about the tools and exegetical techniques of the discipline. Thus, each new book need not devote long sections defending and explaining method or legitimacy. In fact, having once studied the social values and institutions of pre-industrial America, I am convinced that African historians often are more cautious and demand more proof when drawing conclusions than their colleagues in either American or European studies. Second, I make no claims to have developed a new methodology. Readers will recognize my debt to scholars such as Jan Vansina, Joseph Miller, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz. Anyone interested in learning about methodology should turn to their studies for more comprehensive and elegant statements than I make in this work. Finally, I owe a debt to the Kanyok people to recount their story and not to fill the book with discussions on topics which are unneeded and incomprehensible to many readers. While I know that the stories of Citend, Ilung a Cibang, Kasongo Cinyama, and Kabw Muzemb will be worth telling for many years to come, I have less confidence that the manner in which their history has been recovered will be of enduring interest. Thinking back over the books, articles, and dissertations I have read, I know of nothing more tedious and quaint than now outdated, but once fashionable, studies which used historical or political data only as vehicles to support an intricate explanation of scholarly technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prolonged interregnum at the end of the eighteenth century betrayed the uncertain prospects facing the Kanyok people and their leaders. Although the extensive Luba tribute system afforded new economic opportunities, it also presented novel dangers because the same channels of travel and information granting the Kanyok access to the Luba world allowed the Luba to interfere in Kanyok affairs. Luba warriors and brigands from east of the Luembe River attacked villages, seized hostages, plundered crops, and appropriated land. Luba chiefs, eager to siphon off Kanyok wealth, monopolized the flow of tribute from the Luilu valley area. By the late 1700s, feuding Kanyok chiefs were unable or unwilling to resist these incursions and public confidence in government weakened. The old legends glorifying Luba hunter ancestors seemed meaningless as eastern Luba neighbors raided the land, and as Kanyok leaders boasting fictive Luba descent fought among themselves. Kanyok historians claim that in this context of uncertainty and instability, an improbable savior emerged to restore dynastic fortunes and renew the people's faith in themselves, their government, and their legends. Described by the Kanyok as the preeminent figure in their history, Ilung a Cibang is said to have reorganized the Kanyok military structure, expelled or controlled the Luba invaders, expanded his authority over other regional chiefs, and extended his influence over non-Kanyok rulers to the north and east of his domain. Although Kanyok fortunes are said to have been at a nadir when Ilung took office, supposedly when he died the land was at peace, the dynasty secure, and the neighboring chiefs recognized the supremacy of the Mwen a Kanyok. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Kanyok, along with other people living on the southern savanna, experienced profound changes in their political, ritual, mythological, economic, family, and military life. These changes resulted in part from the accumulation of inevitable adjustments all societies make as they adopt a more sedentary existence, but outside forces and products, some from as far away as the Americas, also made this a time of transition and innovation. While the Kanyok and many of their neighbors had once been organized in small-scale matrilineal polities, by the end of the seventeenth century, ambitious patrilineally oriented big men gained control of most villages and regions. (See Map 3.) Not only did the big men dominate military, political, and economic life, they or their supporters also transformed the rituals and legends which legitimized and perpetuated the new leaders in office. New wealth, population growth, and insecurity Evidence from surrounding peoples indicates that by 1500 the pace of local and regional commerce had quickened and that important centers for the production or exchange of traditional African products such as iron, salt, palm nuts, palm oil, dried meat and fish, and even copper had emerged across the southern savanna. Before 1700, Kaleng a Mukel, a Kanyok region rich in palm groves, was known for the manufacture of salt. (See Map 4.) At Kaleng a Mukel, ash from burnt grass and palm branches was leached with water to produce a brine which was then boiled or allowed to evaporate until a form of salt remained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth-century Kanyok were increasingly drawn into the expanding Luba economic, political, and cultural orb. Of all the Kanyok leaders, the chiefs at Mulundu were the most successful in profiting from the opportunities afforded by the enlarged Luba trade and tribute system and in avoiding the dangers presented by an aggressive Luba domain. The Mulundu regime owed its success to a series of dynamic chiefs who continued to borrow Luba political ceremonies and symbols, but who also maintained an independent base of authority. In part they relied on their own personal shrewdness and strength, and in part, they drew on traditional Kanyok or Bantu theories and rituals to improve their positions. During the seventeenth century, when they had consolidated their wealth and political control, ambitious Kanyok rulers had emphasized and exaggerated their ties to powerful and prestigious neighbors. Not only had these Kanyok chiefs sought to enter the Luba trade and tribute network, claim Luba ancestry, borrow Luba titles, and tell stories about dancing the tomboka at the court of a Luba chief, they had even argued, anachronistically, that earlier matrilineal heroes such as Citend and Mwen a Ngoi had Luba connections. By the last decades of the eighteenth century, however, economic exchanges, once welcomed as opportunities to profit from the extensive Luba tribute system, frequently were interpreted as taxation or even extortion; the ceremonies of tomboka, initially performed as indispensable rituals of investiture, were sometimes viewed as marks of denigrating subordination; and legends of Luba hunters, originally fashioned to offer prestige and independence to patrilineal big men, increasingly were discredited as instruments of cultural and ideological oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kanyok believe they inherited their land or rivers, forests and savannas from the distant, immigrant ancestors described in their oral traditions. While most tales of heroic migrations reflect economic, political, social, and linguistic transformations of relatively stationary populations and do not recall actual geographical movements, the Kanyok are indebted to the earliest Bantu people who settled the southern savanna. For besides the land, the Kanyok and their neighbors inherited basic cultural concepts and practices from the men and women who entered the territory many hundreds of years ago. While recent borrowing is responsible for some of the cultural similarity evident across the region, ancient concepts about social stratification, symbolic representation, and spiritual forces are also part of the common savanna legacy which has existed for many centuries. Emergence of the Kanyok as a distinct ethnic group The Kanyok are but one of the hunting, gathering, fishing, and cultivating Bantu peoples who expanded and consolidated their territorial claims over the southern savanna during the last several millennia. Although most physical clues about the Bantu peoples from before 1000 BC have either been lost or not yet uncovered, linguistic evidence suggests that by approximately 1000 BC, the ancestors of the Ruund (or Lunda), Pende, and Cokwe groups now settled in northern Angola, south central Zaire, and northwestern Zambia were no longer closely associated with the predecessors of the Luba and Luba-related peoples, including the Kanyok, who now live to the east and north. After another thousand years, by perhaps AD 1, the Cokwe and Ruund forebears had separated into two distinct groups while the Luba, Tabwa, Bemba, and Lamba ancestors no longer maintained enough contact among themselves to preserve linguistic uniformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]