Kingdom of Loango

The Kingdom of Loango was a Central African state founded by Kongo-related peoples in what is now the coastal region of the Republic of the Congo, southern Gabon and the Angolan exclave of Cabinda, emerging by around the sixteenth century as an offshoot of the older Kingdom of Kongo to its south. At its height in the seventeenth century Loango's influence extended along the coast from Cape St Catherine in the north to near the mouth of the Congo River, and the kingdom grew wealthy from Atlantic trade in ivory, copper and textiles before increasingly turning to the trade in enslaved people. Its capital drew extensive Dutch, French and Portuguese trading contact from the coastal port that European traders knew as Loango Bay. The kingdom's political authority eroded through the nineteenth century amid competition among European trading interests, and it ceased to exist as an independent state during the European colonial partition of Central Africa.