Traditional Culture
The Luba tended to cluster in small villages, with rectangular houses facing a single street. Agriculture was based upon slash-and-burn cultivation in areas with good soil (usually by rivers), supplemented by hunting and fishing in the surrounding bush country. Kilolo, patrilineal chieftains, headed local village government, under the protection of the king. Cultural life centered around the kitenta, the royal compound, which later came to be a permanent capital. The kitenta drew artists, poets, musicians and craftsmen, spurred by royal and court patronage.
The Bambudye secret society had an important mnemonic device to help them keep straight the complex history and ritual life of the Luba nation. It was the lukasa, or memory board. Colored beads and shells set into a carved wooden board gave those who knew how to interpret it a spatial representation that would be used to help them remember important facets of Luba culture and history.
The Luba were famous as wood carvers. Particularly noteworthy were ceremonial masks, and such symbols of kingship as ceremonial canes, bracelets, and axes.
Another significant feature of Luba culture was kibuta – divination. The Bilumbu were spirit mediums who would enter a trance state, gazing into mboko, sacred baskets or gourds, within which ritual objects were placed. The diviner would use the objects within the mboko as an oracle, reading the will of the spirits through the position the objects took within the bowl.
For Baluba religion see the article on Baluba mythology.
Read more about this topic: Luba People
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“In abnormal times like our own, when institutions are changing rapidly in several directions at once and the traditional framework of society has broken down, it becomes more and more difficult to measure any type of behavior against any other.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)