KASANJE

historic African kingdom on the upper Kwango River in what is now Angola. It was founded about 1620 by a group from Lunda, led by a warrior named Kasanje. They conquered and settled the plains west of the Kwango and named the new state after their leader. The people became known as the Imbangala; their king was called the jaga. (Jaga was also the name of a neighbouring kingdom, whose people were also called Imbangala.) By the mid-17th century, Kasanje enjoyed a thriving trade with Lunda and other states of the interior. It also established political and commercial ties with the Portuguese traders on the Atlantic coast. As other kingdoms in the region became distracted by petty wars, Kasanje won control of the main trade routes between the interior and the Portuguese colony of Angola, which, by the 1670s, extended inland as far as the Kasanje border. At the market of Cassange (the capital of Kasanje), Portuguese cloth and guns were exchanged for slaves to work in Brazil. The Imbangala monopoly of inland Portuguese-African trade lasted from the 1650s until the 1850s, when the nearby state of Ovimbundu succeeded in opening alternative routes and markets. Kasanje repulsed a Portuguese military expedition in the mid-19th century but was occupied and incorporated into Portuguese Angola in 191011. Its long success in blocking the Portuguese advance had lasting effects: some of the lands farther east, inaccessible to Angola in the 19th century, were instead absorbed into the Congo Free State and are today a part of Congo (Kinshasa).