Kongo people

The Kongo people (also Bakongo, singular: Mukongo or M'kongo; Kongo: Bisi Kongo, EsiKongo, singular: Musi Kongo) are a Bantu ethnic group primarily defined as the speakers of Kikongo. Subgroups include the Beembe, Bwende, Vili, Sundi, Yombe, Dondo, Lari, and others.

In the early Medieval Period, the Bakongo people were subjects of the Kingdom of Vungu. After its fall, they lived along the Atlantic coast of Central Africa in multiple kingdoms: Kongo, Loango, and Kakongo. Their highest concentrations are found south of Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo, southwest of Pool Malebo and west of the Kwango River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, north of Luanda, Angola and southwest Gabon. They are the largest ethnic group in the Republic of the Congo, and one of the major ethnic groups in the other two countries they are found in. In 1975, the Kongo population was reported as 4,040,000.

The Kongo people were among the earliest indigenous Africans to welcome Portuguese traders in 1483 CE, and began converting to Catholicism in the late 15th century. They were among the first to protest slave capture in letters to the King of Portugal in the 1510s and 1520s, then succumbed to the demands for slaves from the Portuguese through the 16th century. From the 16th to 19th centuries, the Kongo people became both victims and victimizers in the raiding, capturing, and selling of slaves to Europeans. The export trade of African slaves to the European colonial interests reached its peak in the 17th and 18th centuries. The slave raids, colonial wars and the 19th-century Scramble for Africa split the Kongo people into Portuguese, Belgian and French parts. In the early 20th century, they became one of the most active ethnic groups in the efforts to decolonize Africa, helping liberate the three nations to self-governance.

The origin of the name Kongo is uncertain, but several theories have been proposed. According to the colonial-era scholar Samuel Nelson, the term Kongo is possibly derived from a local verb for gathering or assembling. According to Alisa LaGamma, the root may be from the regional word Nkongo, which means "hunter" in the context of someone adventurous and heroic.

It may be derived from the Proto-Bantu word for hunter, similar to the IsiZulu term khonto, meaning spear, as in umkhonto we sizwe, "Spear of the Nation", the name for the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) during its struggle against apartheid.

Douglas Harper states that the term means "mountains" in a Bantu language, which the Congo river flows down from.

The Kongo people have been referred to by various names in the colonial French, Belgian and Portuguese literature, names such as Esikongo (singular Mwisikongo), Mucicongo, Mesikongo, Madcongo and Moxicongo. Christian missionaries, particularly in the Caribbean, originally applied the term Bafiote (singular M(a)fiote) to the slaves from the Vili or Fiote coastal Kongo people, but later this term was used to refer to any "black man" in Cuba, St Lucia and other colonial era Islands ruled by one of the European colonial interests. The group is identified largely by speaking a cluster of mutually intelligible dialects rather than by large continuities in their history or even in culture. The term Congo was more widely deployed to identify Kikongo-speaking people enslaved in the Americas.

Since the early 20th century, Bakongo (singular Mkongo or Mukongo) has been increasingly used, especially in areas north of the Congo River, to refer to the Kikongo-speaking community or, more broadly, to speakers of the closely related Kongo languages. This convention is based on the Bantu languages, to which the Kongo language belongs. The prefixes "mu-" and "ba-" refer to people, singular and plural respectively.