Luba

Luba

 or Baluba

Female Luba ancestral statue of carved wood; in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris.

(credit: Courtesy of the Musee de l'Homme, Paris)

Cluster of some 5.6 million Bantu-speaking peoples who share a common political history surrounding the Luba-Lunda states. They are savanna and forest dwellers who hunt and gather, engage in agriculture, and keep livestock; they also fish intensively in the Congo and its tributaries. They have associations for hunting, magic, and medicine and a well-developed oral tradition that includes epic cycles. Two groups are noted as wood-carvers.

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Luba 

(Kiluba, Chiluba), the language of the Baluba; belongs to the Bantu language family. Luba is spoken in the central and southern regions of the Republic of Zaire by about 3.2 million people (1970, estimate). There are more than 20 dialects (the main dialects are Lulua, Sango, Kaonde, Hemba, Kiluba, and Tshiluba).

The phonetic structure of Luba is characterized by the presence of four distinctive musical tones, vowel harmony, and nasal sonants. The grammatical structure is characterized by concordial classes, which are marked by monosyllabic prefixes. The Luba class system includes augmentative, diminutive, and locative classes with a strictly maintained concord that is rarely observed in other Bantu languages.

REFERENCES

Burssens, A. Manuel de Tshiluba (Kasayi, Congo Beige). Antwerp, 1946.
Clercq, A. de. Dictionnaire Luba. Leopoldville, 1936-37.
Becket, H. W. Handbook of Kiluba (Luba-Katanga). Mulongo (Katanga-Congo), 1951.
Avermaert, E. Dictionnaire Kiluba-Franæais. Tervaren, 1954.

N. V. OKHOTINA