TheMatriarchXHusband, wife and child. Inhabitants of the Loango Coast. Hand colored etching by Ludwig Gottlieb Portman, 1806, after a drawing by Jacques Kuyper.
Once a vassal of the Kingdom of Kongo, the Kingdom of Loango was established as an independent state somewhere between the late 14th and the mid-16th century by a branch of the Bakongo, who’s descendants today are commonly known as the Bavili. Other peoples of the Loango Kingdom included the Yombe, Lumbu, Vungu, Punu and the Kugni. The kingdom was situated in the southwestern Republic of the Congo, southern Gabon and the Angolan exclave of Cabinda, north of the Congo River.
Loango was ruled from the capital Mbanza Loango, also known as Bouali or Bwali, on a coastal hillside in the Republic of the Congo, a city that was famously depicted in Olfert Dapper’s 17th century work, “Description of Africa”.
This region had been inhabited by culturally related communities of ironworkers by the 1st century AD. Loango was an exporter of copper, ivory and the luxurious Loango Cloth, which, like Kongo Cloth, was made of embroidered raffia reminiscent of velvet, popular as far as 16th century Europe. They also specialized in smithing, woodcarving and other artisanal skills.
By the 17th century, they became increasingly involved in the slave trade with Dutch and English merchants trying to bypass the Portuguese controlled slave trade in the Kongo Kingdom to the south. The 18th century saw a fragmentation of central authority, in part due to the growing power of the slave trading class who forced a century long interregna, when no king was elected.