Mulenge

The name Mulenge originally came from the Fuliiru language when they arrived in South Kivu during their exodus from Lwindi, a district in the Mwenga Territory in South Kivu.[3] The first mention of the name Mulenge dates from the nineteenth century during the Belgian colonization; the region was designated as Umulenge, where the Fuliiru and Mbuti lives. While trekking in Uvira with Fuliiru agriculturalists, Frédéric Hautmann, a Belgian ethnologist, explorer, and linguist, glimpsed at a small hamlet of the Fuliiru encircled by a vast mountain and asked what it was named. The locals told him “Umulenge” or “Mulenghe”.[4]

In his ethnographic study of Itombwe, Hautmann stated:

“Near Mulenghe (Mulenge), two days' walk from Sanghe (Sange), I was able to observe five of these small "tumuli"; while crossing other villages of the Bafulero (Bafuliiru) of the mountain, I met another ten with pots with two holes, intact, broken or in last shards remains of these pots. This custom is practiced to protect the newborn from the evil mountain spirits. It is two months after the birth that we meet at the place where the placenta is buried. Parents, family members and friends celebrate a festival that lasts several days and nights. The tumulus is sprinkled with native beer.”[5]

Mulenge, like many regions in South Kivu, was inhabited by the Mbuti people whose primary activity was based on hunting and trading. Following Bafuliiru’s migration from the Lwindi direction towards current Uvira in the 17th century, the Fuliiru spread in the mountainous terrain of Mulenge and dispersed to other localities.[6]

The Fuliiru were formerly a highly centralized state in the seventeenth century[7] living near the Bambuti pygmies, whom they called “Wambotte” and whom they employ as servants and hunters.[8] They were fierce warriors and skilled in craftsmanship, iron metallurgy, animal husbandry and especially fishing and trade. The cross-checking of different versions collected by the first European ethnologists, colonial administers, anthropologists and cartographers working in Uvira disclose that all the territory along part of the northern west coast of Ruzizi, from Uvira to Luvungi, belonged to the Bahamba dynasty of Bufuliru, which had its capital at Lemera, to the northwest of the plain.[9] Lemera, a village situated nearby to Kasheke and Nyambasha, takes its name from Mulemera, father of Kahamba, the founder of the Bufuliru dynasty.

In the 19th century, the village developed into a vast agglomeration in the far north of Lake Tanganyika. It housed Tutsi and Hutu shepherds, who had been leading their herds to the Itombwe Highlands.[10][11][12] Some ethnologists or anthropologists (Olga Boone, David Newbury and Catherine Newbury) speak of these pastors as “foreign groups” who settled west of Baraka, in Fizi territory, among the Babembe.[13][14]

In the late 1950s and during the Rwandan Genocide, there was an influx of Hutu and Tutsi refugees into the region, increasing a diversified tribal population.

On October 1998, at the beginning of the Second Congo War, many criminal offenses were committed by the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDLC) and many civilians perished in Uvira,[15][16] including the former Mulenge post chief, Ladislas Matalambu, who was killed on October 1, 1998 at 7:30 p.m. Incidentally, Alexis Deyidedi, former administrative secretary of the Bafulero chiefdom, was assassinated on October 2, 1998 at 11 p.m.

On 10 June 2004, up to 3,500 Congolese, mostly Bafuliiru and Babembe, fled to Burundi, fleeing ethnic persecution.[17]

In Mulenge, the wet season is hot, humid, and overcast and the dry season is warm and partly cloudy. Over the course of the year, the temperature typically varies from 62 °F to 86 °F and is rarely below 59 °F or above 90 °F.