The excitement of history derives from its expanding role in understanding change in society. The study of history came late to Central Africa but is now developing rapidly. In the pre-colonical period it asks new questions about each facet of population growth, each economic innovation, each interface between the inner world and the outer world, each evolution of religious perception, each new mastery of political skills, each realignment of kinship networks. The three chapters of this book on the greater Zaïre basin and northern Zambezia were first published in the Cambridge History of Africa when the new flood of historical questions, historical ideas, and historical information was in spate. Enthusiastic research continues to add greatly to the debate as the further reading list shows. Archaeologists have studied the lake-side civilizations of Katanga to illustrate the rise of the wealthy fourteenth-century rulers who managed the fishing economy and the copper trade. Oral historians have returned to the Kuba of the forest to rethink the whole relationship between mythical rationalization and historical explanation. The extensive work in the south-eastern savanna has been carried forward in a great stock-taking national history of Zambia. The northern fringe of Central Africa is also beginning to open up at each historical level as archaeologists, linguists, historians and Islamists embark on new research along Africa's remotest academic frontier. In the west a young generation of scholars has embarked on the renewed study of the Atlantic records to enhance the sophistication with which the Afro-European encounter was interpreted. Among the fruits will be fresh analyses of the seventeenth century Kongo kingdom.