The Bena Riamba

Bena Riamba was a cannabis-centred religious and political movement among Luba-speaking communities of the Kasai region, in present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. It flourished in the Lulua Valley during the 1870s and 1880s. Shared smoking expressed friendship and allegiance, but the movement also participated in warfare, commerce in captives and alliances with European colonial agents.

“Sons of Hemp” is its familiar translation. Geographer Chris S. Duvall prefers “people of the riamba”: European observers could not reliably distinguish the local words for people and children, and later writers supplied competing translations. The familiar English name should not decide who belonged or what they believed.

Trade and the first gardens

Duvall traces the movement’s origins to an encounter around 1864 between Mukwajanga, a Cokwe elephant hunter and trading intermediary from Angola, and Chishimbi, a Luba-speaking leader. In that reconstruction, they smoked together and Chishimbi planted cannabis after trying it. Their relationship opened access to firearms, cloth and other goods.

The account comes through later sources, particularly the Portuguese traveller Henrique Dias de Carvalho. Its approximate date concerns this local political story, rather than the first arrival of cannabis anywhere in the Congo Basin. It offers no basis for assigning the movement’s origins to Swahili traders arriving from Zanzibar.

Chishimbi credited the plant with his trading success. His lubuku, a society of friendship, joined smoking to a programme of commercial openness and greater political centralisation. The greeting moyo signified an oath or life in Duvall’s account; it should not simply be translated as hemp. Riamba belongs to the regional family of words that includes diamba.

A movement divided

Chishimbi died around 1873. Sources disagree about the succession, the relationships between leaders, and even whether particular terms were names or titles. Mukenge and Chingenge emerged as competing authorities. Sangula Meta sustained the movement’s religious teachings; her precise family relationship to the men remains uncertain.

The German explorers Paul Pogge and Hermann von Wissmann were interested participants in this politics. Their African allies supplied guards, porters and access to the region. Wissmann favoured Mukenge, while Dias de Carvalho’s account favoured Chingenge. Reading only the Germans makes their preferred leader appear more representative than the evidence warrants.

Bashilenge, prominent in European descriptions, was not a neutral community name. Duvall notes that the people so designated disliked it and identified as Baluba. Labels hardened through warfare and colonial administration, obscuring a shared language beneath competing political identities.

Smoking, belonging and authority

Accounts describe followers gathering to smoke, sing, dance and share food. Large cannabis gardens surrounded settlements. The calabash water pipe could affirm friendship and trust, including during dealings with outsiders.

Smoking also served coercive purposes. Duvall describes judicial ordeals in which participants continued until someone lost consciousness, and humiliating initiation procedures imposed on defeated leaders. Accounts of rejecting older weapons coexist with the acquisition of rifles. Rhetoric about peace did not prevent warfare or the sale of women and children to trading partners.

These reports require care: surviving descriptions are partial, frequently sensationalised and written by observers with interests of their own. They nevertheless contradict the later image of a universally peaceful cannabis society. Religious fellowship and authoritarian power could inhabit the same institution.

What the engraving records

The Am Kongo engraving, published in Im Innern Afrikas in 1891, places Chingenge, Sangula and Mukenge alongside European explorers. Duvall identifies those three seated figures from left to right. Mukenge, labelled “Kalamba” on the plate, holds a large calabash water pipe.

The image preserves named participants and their material culture through a colonial documentary frame. It does not give an unmediated view of a ceremony. The 1881 encounter is a moment in that record, not the movement’s founding date.

The movement fragmented as conflict intensified and the Congo Free State expanded its power. Duvall traces reports into the 1890s, rather than a single agreed ending. The later 1903 ordinance against smoking hemp belongs to a distinct phase of colonial control; it should not stand in for an explanation of the movement’s decline.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}