M’banza Congo

M’banza Congo, also spelled Mbanza Congo, M’banza Kongo, or Mbanza Kongo, formerly São Salvador do Congo, city, northwestern Angola. It is situated on a low plateau about 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Nóqui, which is the nearest point on the Congo River. Originally known as Mbanza Kongo, it was the capital of the Kongo kingdom from about 1390 until 1914, when the kingdom was broken up and absorbed into the Portuguese colony of Angola. The city is regarded by most Kongo-speaking people as their spiritual capital.

The Kongo kingdom was largely converted to Christianity in the 15th century, and Mbanza Kongo was renamed São Salvador in the mid-to-late 16th century for a church that had been built there decades earlier. The city grew to become one of the largest in precolonial Africa, with a population exceeding 30,000 by the 17th century. Civil wars in the 1660s caused the complete abandonment of the site in 1678, but restoration of the city was initiated in 1705 by religious leader Beatriz Kimpa Vita and was later completed by King Pedro IV.

The intermittent rebellion of the area’s Kongo peoples because of forced labour and land eviction led to Portuguese reprisals and mass migration of the Kongo from 1961 to 1974 to neighbouring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The city was renamed M’banza Congo after Angola attained its independence from Portugal in 1975. M’banza Congo is now a market centre for corn (maize), peanuts (groundnuts), almonds, sesame, and cassava (manioc) grown in the surrounding area, and it has become an important centre for oil production. The city is home to the Kongo Kingdom Museum and is served by an airport. Pop. (2014 est.) 148,000.