De Stadt van Lovango

Title

De Stadt van Lovango

Description

Map shows the city of Lovango from a bird's eye view and an index.

ca. 1680

Artist

Dapper (1636-1689)

Olfert Dapper was a Dutch physician and writer. He wrote books about world history and geography, although he never travelled outside the Netherlands. In 1663 wrote a book on the history of Amsterdam. His Description of Africa (1668) is a key text for African studies. His book "is one of the most authoritative 17th century accounts on Africa published in German. Translations appeared in English, French, and German. Dapper never traveled to Africa but used reports by Jesuit missionaries and other (Dutch) explorers. Within a few years he published about China, India, Persia, Georgia, and Arabia. His books became well known in his own time. The fine plates include views of Algiers, Benin, Cairo, Cape Town, La Valetta, Marrakech, St. Helena, Tangier, Tripoli, Tunis, as well as, animals and plants.

Historical Description

The indigenous population of today's state consisted of pygmies, who are now only a small minority. Bantu peoples immigrated for centuries. Among the states there, the Kingdom of the Congo, founded in the 14th century and one of the largest African states ever, emerged. In the 15th century, Portuguese sailors around Diogo Cão explored the area of the Congo estuary and established diplomatic relations with the Congo Empire in 1491. From the 16th century onwards, the Congo Empire was in decline. By the end of the 17th century, the kingdom was completely destroyed, as well as being exploited and looted by slave hunters. After this collapse, the Portuguese supremacy was replaced by that of the Dutch and British. At the beginning of the 18th century the Congo Empire had almost completely disintegrated. In 1866 the last Portuguese left. In the 1870s, Henry Morton Stanley from Welsh was the first European to travel to the hinterland. He proposed that the Congo be incorporated into the British colonial empire. The British government refused because it was primarily interested in the sources of the Nile. The Democratic Republic of the Congo was originally administered as the Belgian Congo by a legislative assembly and regional assemblies made up of only Europeans appointed by colonial authorities. By the late 1950s there was a greater turnout of Africans, but not full voting rights until independence when the colony was renamed Zaire. With the global striving for independence in the colonies, the pressure for state self-determination also grew in the Congo. After the first unrest in the capital Léopoldville and under pressure from the global public, Belgium suddenly withdrew from the Congo in early 1959, leaving behind a chaos. In 1960 the Congo gained independence.