Abstract: The Kingdom of Kongo is blessed both with a large volume of written documentation reaching back to the late fifteenth century, and a rich volume of oral traditions set to writing in the twentieth century. However, marrying these two has proved a difficult problem as the written material seem to relate a typical history of kings and battles, while the traditions outline migrations and village settings. This work demonstrates how the modern oral traditions, usually used to reconstruct early periods in the kingdom’s history, actually relates to events in the last century of its existence, outlining the break of the kingdom’s provincial structure into hereditary independent units; followed by the emergence of new “entrepreneurial” nobles who built their own political structures, and finally lists of villages and stopping point for people engaging in the long distance trade of the nineteenth century.