information:highlighting
Political structure

The vata village, referred to as libata in Kongo documents and by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, served as Kongo's basic social unit after the family. Nkuluntu, or mocolunto to the Portuguese, chiefs headed the villages. The one to two hundred citizens per village migrated about every ten years to accommodate soil exhaustion. Communal land-ownership and collective farms produced harvests divided by families according to the number of people per household. The nkuluntu received special premium from the harvest before the division.

Villages were grouped in wene, small states, led by awene (plural of mwene) or mani to the Portuguese. Awene lived in mbanza, larger villages or small towns of somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 citizens. Higher nobility typically chose these leaders. The king also appointed lower-level officials to serve, typically for three-year terms, by assisting him in patronage.

Various provinces made up Kongo's higher administrative divisions, with some of the larger and more complex states, such as Mbamba, divided into varying numbers of sub-provinces, which the administration further subdivided. The king appointed the Mwene Mbamba, the Duke of Mbamba after the 1590s. The king technically had the power to dismiss the Mwene Mbamba, but the complex political situation limited the king's exercise of his power. When the administration gave out European-style titles, large districts like Mbamba and Nsundi typically became Duchies. The administration made smaller ones, such as Mpemba, Mpangu or a host of territories north of the capital), Marquisates. Soyo, a complex province on the coast, became a "County," as did Nkusu, a smaller and less complex state east of the capital.

Hereditary families controlled a few provinces, most notably the Duchy of Mbata and the County of Nkusu, through their positions as officers appointed by the king. In the case of Mbata, the kingdom's origin as an alliance produced this power, exercised by the Nsaku Lau. In the seventeenth century, political maneuvering also caused some provinces, notably Soyo, but occasionally Mbamba, to be held for very long terms by the same person. Provincial governments still paid income to the crown and their rulers reported to the capital to give account.

The kingdom of Kongo was made up of a large number of provinces. Various sources list from six to fifteen as the principal ones. Duarte Lopes' description, based on his experience there in the late sixteenth century, identified six provinces as the most important. These were Nsundi in the northeast, Mpangu in the center, Mbata in the southeast, Soyo in the southwest and two southern provinces of Mbamba and Mpemba.

The king of Kongo also held several kingdoms in at least nominal vassalage. These included the kingdoms of Kakongo, Ngoyo and Vungu to the north of Kongo. The royal titles, first elaborated by Afonso in 1512, styled the ruler as "King of Kongo and Lord of the Mbundus" and later titles listed a number of other counties over which he also ruled as "king". The Mbundu kingdoms included Ndongo (sometimes erroneously mentioned as "Angola"), Kisama and Matamba. All of these kingdoms were south of Kongo and much farther from the king's cultural influence than the northern kingdoms. Still later eastern kingdoms such as Kongo dia Nlaza were named in the ruler's titles as well.