Kazounde, like all the large towns of Central Africa, is divided into
two distinct parts. One is the quarter of the Arab, Portuguese or
native traders, and it contains their pens; the other is the residence
of the negro king, some ferocious crowned drunkard, who reigns through
terror, and lives from supplies furnished by the contractors.

At Kazounde, the commercial quarter then belonged to that Jose-Antonio
Alvez, of whom Harris and Negoro had spoken, they being simply agents
in his pay. This contractor's principal establishment was there, he
had a second at Bihe, and a third at Cassange, in Benguela, which
Lieutenant Cameron visited some years later.

Imagine a large central street, on each side groups of houses,
"tembes," with flat roofs, walls of baked earth, and a square court
which served as an enclosure for cattle. At the end of the street was
the vast "tchitoka" surrounded by slave-pens. Above this collection
of buildings rose some enormous banyans, whose branches swayed with
graceful movements. Here and there great palms, with their heads in
the air, drove the dust on the streets like brooms. Twenty birds of
prey watched over the public health. Such is the business quarter of
Kazounde.

Near by ran the Louhi, a river whose course, still undetermined, is an
affluent, or at least a sub-affluent, of the Coango, a tributary of
the Zoire.

The residence of the King of Kazounde, which borders on the business
quarter, is a confused collection of ill-built hovels, which spread
over the space of a mile square. Of these hovels, some are open,
others are inclosed by a palisade of reeds, or bordered with a hedge
of fig-trees. In one particular enclosure, surrounded by a fence of
papyrus, thirty of these huts served us dwellings for the chief's
slaves, in another group lived his wives, and a "tembe," still larger
and higher, was half hidden in a plantation of cassada. Such was
the residence of the King of Kazounde, a man of fifty--named Moini
Loungga; and already almost deprived of the power of his predecessors.
He had not four thousand of soldiers there, where the principal
Portuguese traders could count twenty thousand, and he could no
longer, as in former times, decree the sacrifice of twenty-five or
thirty slaves a day.

This king was, besides, a prematurely-aged man, exhausted by debauch,
crazed by strong drink, a ferocious maniac, mutilating his subjects,
his officers or his ministers, as the whim seized him,