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You may have heard of the Congo.

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It's a big river in Central Africa and an even bigger country. [River flowing]

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Oh, and it’s also a terrible 90’s movie about killer gorillas.

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On the other hand, you probably haven't heard of Kongo with a K.

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This was a medieval kingdom in kinda the same area as modern Congo. [Kongo shown on a map]

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It rose to power around 1390 and kept on keepin’ on till the late 19th century.

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Giving it roughly the same lifespan as The Simpsons. [Gorilla chasing Bart Simpson]

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In some ways, Kongo looked less like a kingdom and more like a federation.

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Not because it had spaceships and fought Romulans.

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Because each new king had to be elected by a council of lords from around the land. [Council of lords appear by huts]

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There weren’t any long running dynasties here, which helped keep the society together.

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Since the ruler of each little region had a say in who got the crown, there was more [Owl wearing crown appears]

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of a chance that the new king would give a hoot about their region.

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Which kept everybody a little bit happier.

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But let’s be real…Kongo was a long way from a straight-up democracy. [Man waving from window]

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The people of Kongo were divided into an elaborate hierarchy of families, towns, communities,

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and royals.

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The Kongo people all spoke variations of a Bantu language called Ki-kongo.

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But ethnically they were pretty diverse.

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They had different customs, different beliefs, and different ideas about how to eat a Double

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Stuf Oreo. [Kongo people eating oreos]

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You open them and make Quad Stufs, obviously…

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But enough with the differences.

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Kongo's communities also had a lot in common. [Kongo community in a field together]

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Like… they were mostly pretty small.

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With its warm, thick jungles, Kongo was heaven for tsetse flies.

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The flies killed off cattle and horse herds and made it a lot harder to farm big open [Tsetse flies flying over cattle and horses and animals die]

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fields.

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So instead, most people kept small gardens and hunted or trapped animals for food.

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The only exception was the capital city, Mbanza Kongo.

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It was built on a mountain too high for tsetse flies, because as every Congolese person knows: [Tsetse fly on a rollercoaster]

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tsetse flies are afraid of heights.

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Ahem.

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Mbanza Kongo actually grew to a population of over 100,000 people.

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That's, like, two blocks of New York City today, but for medieval Africa it was pretty

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good. [2 blocks of new york city on a map]

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Kongo was also a bustling center of trade.

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It was actually one of the go-to places in the world for ivory.

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The huge ivory-trade was great for Kongo’s economy, but terrible for the elephants that [Man with giant spear beside dead elephant]

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had to die to support it.

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The Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao was one of the first Europeans to make it to Kongo. [Diogo standing outside Kongo gates]

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Not too long after, trade between Portugal and Kongo was booming.

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Unfortunately…

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Make that…catastrophically…

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Kongo’s main export soon became slaves, which were shipped over the Atlantic to work [Slave appears in a field]

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in plantations.

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Slavery hit all of Africa pretty hard.

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But it was especially devastating to the west and central-west areas, because of the geographical

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convenience factor for Europeans.

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Kongo became like a drive-through restaurant for human cargo.

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In a sad twist, women became even more valuable to Kongo communities than men. [Man places valuation on woman]

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Why?

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Because they could repopulate towns that’d been drained of people by the slave trade.

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So instead of descending through fathers, families went through mothers. [Kongo children appear]

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In the end, the slave trade seriously weakened Kongo by draining it of its manpower.

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And eventually it was colonized by Europeans almost everywhere else in Africa. [Europeans travelling over Africa]

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What can we say?

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Sometimes history seems like an endless series of awful things done by terrible people… [Atrocities leaflet flicks through images]

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