The Lele people are a subgroup from the Kuba Kingdom of the Democratic Republic of Congo who originally lived along the Kasai River region.
Because of the slash and burn agricultural system they practice, the Lele set up temporary villages as they move every ten to fifteen years. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Central African interior witnessed the fluorescence of three large-scale, multiethnic states:
Kuba (discussed below), Luba, and Lunda. Imported crops and technologies and alternative models of leadership promoted strong, centralized governments that subdued neighboring chiefdoms and regulated trade routes, increasing the wealth and relative stability of the region.
Client states, incorporated into these empires via warfare and strategic alliances, gained the political systems and courtly traditions of their overlords. Art forms and insignia associated with imperial rule spread throughout the region.
Nestled in the fertile forest and savanna bordered by the Sankuru, Lulua, and Kasai rivers, the Kuba kingdom was a conglomerate of several smaller principalities of various ethnic origins. Sometime around 1625, an outsider unseated a rival ruler and unified the area’s chiefdoms under his leadership.
This man was Shyaam aMbul aNgoong “the Great.” Kuba oral histories reveal that he was the adopted son of a local queen who left his home to travel to the Pende and Kongo kingdoms in the west.
Empowered by mystical knowledge of foreign customs and technologies, Shyaam became the architect of Kuba’s political, social, and economic life. Advanced techniques of iron production and crops from the Americas such as maize (corn), tobacco, cassava (manioc), and beans were introduced.
They reorganized the government around a merit-based title system that dispersed power and promoted loyalty among the aristocracy. They treat a village wife with much honor and enjoy her honeymoon, which lasts for six months or more.
She does not cook, draw water, cut firewood, or do any of the usual work of women. If she wishes to go to the spring or to bring back some water, one of her husbands will declare that she must not carry the load and will accompany her, shouldering the calabash.
As she does not cook, she eats the food sent to her husbands by their mothers or their wives. Men and women do not eat together, but during her honeymoon, the village wife can eat with their husbands.
During this period, she sleeps with a different man in her hut every two nights, but any man in the village is entitled to have relations with her during the day.
At the end of the honeymoon, she is allotted a few husbands, sometimes five. She lives with these men, cooks for them, and has relations with them in her house.
