Vungu

Vungu, also called Bungu, was a historic kingdom in the Mayombe region between the present-day Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the thirteenth century it headed a confederation with Ngoyo and Kakongo, and Kongo tradition holds that the first king of Kongo ruled at Bungu before crossing the Congo River to conquer his realm. The earliest documentary reference comes in a 1535 letter of Afonso I of Kongo, who listed JBungu among the places over which he claimed authority. Traditions collected at the Kongo court and written down by the Jesuit Mateus Cardoso in 1624 repeat the Bungu origin story. During the 1620s, after the Jaga were driven out of Kongo, they moved north, allied with Loango and occupied Vungu. The kingdom therefore belongs to the cluster of small coastal polities whose rivalries and alliances shaped the lower Congo before the rise of the Kongo kingdom and the arrival of Atlantic trade.