Luba Empire

The Luba Empire, also called the Kingdom of Luba, was a pre-colonial state in the Upemba Depression of what is now southern Democratic Republic of Congo. Archaeology shows the depression was occupied continuously from at least the fourth century, when iron-working farmers settled there; over the following centuries its people developed nets, harpoons and dugout canoes, dried fish for trade with the savanna, and by the tenth century combined fishing, farming and metal-working in a society where social stratification was beginning to form. Luba oral traditions tell of Kyubaka Ubaka and Kibumba Bumba, the mythical founders, and of the mulopwe, sacred kings whose authority combined political power with ritual mediation with the land spirits. The kingdom expanded through a system of client chiefdoms and became one of the largest states of central Africa, its economy based on salt, iron, copper and cloth. In the nineteenth century the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades and the raids of Swahili-Arab traders from the east undermined the state, and by the time of the Belgian conquest in the 1880s and 1890s the empire had fragmented.