Traditions of Genesis and the Luba Diaspora

Origin stories are an important genre of central African oral traditions. Historians have long been intrigued by these stories, for their plots tell of the beginnings of societies and of the founding of ruling dynasties. It has been possible to cross-check the information in the oral traditions of many of the societies of west central Africa against data in Portuguese written records dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These documents have helped to direct investigators towards the best assumptions to make when analyzing the oral traditions of west central African societies. However, writing the early history of the savanna societies in the very middle of central Africa (in southern Zaire and northern Zambia) has always been hampered by the absence of written documents which describe the area much before the early nineteenth century. Historians studying the early political history of these societies have been forced to link the events and characters of origin stories to each other without any anchor in written documentation.Recently, doubts have been raised about the nature and function of origin stories. It is no longer clear that the first step in studying the early history of central African savanna societies is to compare different origin stories with each other, as one would a group of written documents, in order to establish a consistent historical story-line or narrative. Rather, questions raised about the nature of origin stories have brought out the point that the first step in writing the early history of this area is to resolve methodological and historiographical issues, before the historical essence can be distilled from these tales.