The Nyanga (also Banianga, Banyanga, Kinyanga, Nianga or Nyangas) are a Bantu people in the African Great Lakes region. Today they live predominantly in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near the frontier with Rwanda and Uganda.[1] They speak the Nyanga language, also called Kinyanga, which is one of the Bantu languages. There are about 150,000 speakers of Nyanga according to a 1994 census, but most are also fluent in Swahili. Their national epic is the karisi Mwindo.
Notes
[edit]- ^ James Stuart Olson, "Nyanga", The Peoples of Africa: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), 454.
Further reading
[edit]- Biebuyck, Daniel P. De hond bij de Nyanga: ritueel en sociologie. Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1956.