Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/598

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WEST AFRICA.

only seven escaped with their lives. Since then, however, the Portuguese suzerainty has been again accepted.

At the Kwango-Kassai confluence the ruling race are the Ba Teke, although numerous villages are also occupied by the Wa-Buma, who are the same people as the A-Boma of the French Congo. These traders and boatmen come down from the Kassai to Stanley Pool, where they transfer their commodities to the porters by whom the exchanges are effected with the Lower Congo. The Wa-Buma are

Fig. 253. — Density of the Population in the Congo Basin.

an intelligent, industrious, and cheerful people, whose supreme chief is a queen residing at Moshi, a place of about three thousand inhabitants, crowning a high cliff on the right bank of the Kwa. On the bluff rising above the south side of the Kassai-Congo confluence stands the station bearing the English name of Kwamouth, given to it before the Kwa was known to constitute the lower course of the vast Kassai-Sankuru-Kwango fluvial system.

The stations of Nyombe, Lukolela, and Bolobo, on the left bank of the Congo above Kwamouth, although abandoned by the Congo Government, are still much--