Remarkable how in the same breath you can accuse me of presenting information from outside of the time period and then appeal to the accounts of a missionary who wasn't even born until 1867. I also like the notion that these oral traditions of fairly recent events represent a "mythology," I guess because it's Africans who are saying it? Be a little less obvious.
Read a little better. Your map explicitly depicts these empires at their height in the Victorian era after they have started to experience a population boom thanks to shifting agricultural production. Also it might be added those guesses were compiled by imperialists after Morrison looking to justify the legitimacy of their "treaties" over as much land as possible.
I cite Morrison as the first person to record the Luba founding myth centuries after it occurred because
he is the first to write it down (he also was the first to develop a system of writing for the language). We have no written record of these kingdoms until the Victorian era. Their founding dates are a matter of oral tradition which likely has some validity. However, the lineal descent tales are indeed myths - the extant royal houses of these kingdoms do NOT show the degrees of kinship dictated by the founding myths. Genetics says that some elements of the oral history were embellished or corrupted in the retelling. This doesn't discount it, it just circumscribes how far we should lean on the wikipedia map that was cribbed from imperialists justifying their treaty overreach.
The Kongo monarchs would have been stupid to press inland. Their wealth came from the lucrative coastal trade and thus their resources were better spent consolidating control of the coast, not wandering off east in search of a bunch of agriculturalists who had no unique resources and were much too far away to tax adequately.
Are you historically illiterate about this area? Kongo's wealth came from the slave trade. Iron age agriculturalists, if organized in dense accessible populations like you propose, are
perfect for large scale enslavement warfare. This is what happen to dense settlements of agriculturists in Western African - the slaving states from the coasts leveraged firearms to cart off the population in chains to sell to the Europeans.
Just how small do you think Africa is? The Kongo Kingdom's administrative apparatus was likely already butting up against what the transportation and communication technologies of the time would allow them to effectively govern.
Well when I flew from Jo'berg to Djibouti it was about 10 hours or about 3,000 miles give or take. When I flew into Kinshasa my rough estimate is that it is around 1,000 - 1,500 miles across the DRC. What in hell this has to do with slave raiding, which was done for these distances or further in period I have no idea.
We're clearly looking at two independent spheres of interaction in the Congo Basin, one in the west and one in the south. Just because extensive contact between these two spheres seems not to have occurred in the EU4 time period doesn't mean it was impossible - it just means it wasn't worth it. Lunda and Luba had nothing to offer to Kongo, and vice versa. By contrast, Luba and Lunda did carry on some level of trade with the east coast, so we know that contact was both possible and worthwhile on that end.
Kongo was a slaving state, any non-Kongolese peoples (and even a lot of Kongolese peoples) were slaved heavily to sell them to Portugal. The only way that slaving states with a major technological advantage historically did not go enslave the neighbors was if either:
1. They couldn't
get to the neighbors.
2. They couldn't
overwhelm the neighbors.
3. The neighbors didn't
exist.
I assert that #1 is the most likely. Kongo had a well established slave trade prior to Portugal arriving. Once Portugal arrived, they provided a large number of slaves that ended up in Brazil (by some measures political instability in Kongo predicted slave prices in Brazil). Given that slaves were the
single most valuable export from the Kongo there was strong incentive to at least raid slaves from neighboring polities. Even if by some miracle you avoided direct state on state slave raiding (as practiced by Kongo, Ashante, Dahomey, Oyo, etc.), we should see at least a few major private incursions by Kongolese slavers. We know that private Kongolese slavers were running rampant, there was an official complaint to Portugal that they were aiding Kongolese factions that were uncutting the monarchy and flouting the law. Rapacious slavers, however, would not be an issue if moving large bodies of men (like oh say a small army) were too difficult to be feasible in the area.
But what about #2. Well what happened when guns historically entered the area? Shockingly, like
everywhere else in Africa, the Chokwe, in spite of vastly inferior numbers managed to overrun the entire place. We have a classic example proximal native groups using firearms to subdue more numerous distal groups. Why did
no one try this during the height of the slave trade? Were the Kongolese just that much more stupid than the West African gunpowder states (or for that matter the Central Asian gunpowder states or the North American gunpowder tribes).
Now maybe there just were not dense settlements of agricultural peoples in this area, that is certainly in keeping with the artifacts for the 14th and 15th centuries. Of course if there are no large settlements there, why are we opening it up again?
There were no kingdoms in the southern Congo Basin, and only one around Lake Victoria (only Buganda was founded before 1444). I made these facts very clear in my earlier post and you chose to ignore them. As I stated before, the tags in question would need to appear through events similar to those which spawn Funj or Sulu. I don't consider this a problem. If you want to play as these tags, start from a later start date - this is in and of itself a different challenge from playing Kongo.
Only if you take the Expedition's route. Do explain to me how coming up the Great Rift Valley from eastern Zambia is the same thing as hacking your way through a thousand miles of soggy, malarial rainforest.
Shockingly, you are neither the only poster in this thread nor is your ahistorical proposal the only one on the table. Previous maps show this, which you might have noticed had you read the thread.
THE reason given for opening the map in the first place was that Africa is too boring for you get vision and people vainly hope that more tags will make it less boring. Silly me, I assumed that you had read the discussion and were making an effort to contribute to that discussion.
Look this isn't something where we are talking about some extra-super-special one off. In a depressingly common pattern Europeans arrived with guns (the OE counts as European for this). They trade the guns for slaves or the products of slave labor. The locals use guns to build empires and enslave people further away from the Europeans. It doesn't matter where in the world this trade happened, states used guns against
every population center distal to them. You can harp till you are blue in the face about how somehow, somewhere, special magic happened that merely stopped the inland Africans from having signficant interactions with the outside world ... but at the end of the day everyone knows that dense populations are reason enough by themselves to provoke incursions from slaving states (like Kongo) if such incursions are
remotely possible.
