Nkundu Erotic

The Nkundu, also spelled Nkundo, are forest people of the central Congo Basin and one of the largest branches of the wider Mongo family. Their country lies in Équateur province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, south and east of the river port of Mbandaka, along the Ruki and Momboyo rivers and out toward Lake Tumba. It is flat, wet, heavily forested land, cut by blackwater streams, where the equator runs through the villages and a canoe is often more use than a road.

No king or state ever held the Nkundu together. A language and a story did. The language is Lonkundo, the western form of Lomongo, a Bantu tongue close enough to the speech of the neighboring Ekonda, Ntomba and Bolia that the borders between them blur. Lingala rules the river and the market in Mbandaka, but Lonkundo holds in the village. It also had a long run as a church and school language, because both the Catholic Sacred Heart fathers at Bamanya and the Protestant Disciples of Christ at Bolenge chose to work in it. Two of those priests, Gustaaf Hulstaert and Edmond Boelaert, spent decades recording it. The story is the epic of Lianja. His father dies fetching safou fruit for his pregnant wife. Lianja is born fully armed, avenges the death, and then leads his people toward the great river with his sister Nsongo. A good bard with a chorus can fill a night with it.

Daily life runs on cassava, plantain, oil palm, fishing and trapping. Villages are built from patrilineal lineages, and authority sits with elders rather than a paramount chief. Marriage traditionally joined two lineages through bridewealth handed over in stages, once in copper and brass valuables, now in cash and goods. Twa communities live alongside Nkundu villages in an old, unequal arrangement of hunting and labor owed to patron families, and the discrimination built into it is still a live grievance.

The worst rupture came with the Congo Free State. Forced rubber collection in the 1890s and 1900s brought hostage taking, flight into the forest and hunger, and sleeping sickness followed. For decades afterward births ran so low that colonial doctors and missionaries wrote openly about the Nkundu dying out. They did not. Numbers recovered from the middle of the twentieth century. Most Nkundu today are Christian, Catholic or Protestant, and many keep a working respect for ancestors, forest spirits and the healers who deal with them.