Katende
settlement
Katende, or Sungu-Katende, was a royal sacred village of the Kingdom of Luba.
It was adjacent to the village of Kabondo.
Katende is on the upper Lomami in the Lualaba region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
After gaining power around 1770, Ilunga Sungu established his court at Katende, southwest of Lake Boya and 25 kilometres (16 mi) to the west of the Mashyo salt district of the Luba heartland. Previously the Luba kings had built their palaces northeast of Lake Boya, but the move to Katende set a precedent for locating the capital near the Mashyo resource that was followed by Ilunga Sungu's successors.
According to legend, late in the reign of Mulopwe Ilunga Sungu (c. 1770 - c. 1810) the town had become so large that the "Lord of Hygiene" could not keep the streets clear of refuse and excrement, even working all day with the help of his sons and relatives. The old king complained, blaming the Bene Kanyoka, and said they should take their dirt home with them. The Kanyok went back to their home in the west and never paid tribute to the Luba again.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6375930. Authority coordinates are -7.527, 25.264. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1770 and 1810.
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This entry incorporates text from “Katende” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.