Mwene Muji

Mwene Muji was a polity of the Congo Basin, reconstructed by the historian John Thornton from oral traditions and early European records, which lay around Lake Mai-Ndombe and probably stretched south towards Idiofa, dominating the lower Kasai region. It was ruled by the BaNunu, whose rulers bore the title Ntote, and it was formed shortly after 1400 according to traditional king lists. Its power rested on the rivers, the Lukenie, Kasai, Kamtsha, Kwilu and Wamba, along which it expanded, and on a riverine navy that controlled trade in fine cloth and other goods. At its height the polity covered much of the lower Kasai basin and may have included parts of the territories of the later Kuba and Pende kingdoms; the Jaga who invaded Kongo in the sixteenth century are said to have come from a province of Mwene Muji. It first appears in writing in 1591, in Filippo Pigafetta's account of the kingdom of Congo, where the name Monemugi was placed on maps over much of the unknown interior. In the early seventeenth century its unity broke down as the Boma, Yaka and Bozanga kingdoms seceded. It declined further in the nineteenth century and was surpassed by Boma; its capital, Mushie, was a small fishing village by the time the Belgians arrived, and its imperial status remains debated.