text: # Negro Developments in Central Africa  
  Up to this point we have paid particular attention to those historical developments which were caused by other peoples within the Negro regions. It would be fallacious to assume that all the larger political states have been founded by such external influences. When Europeans first penetrated Equatorial Africa they became acquainted with such states as the kingdom of Loango or Brama along the Loango coast, the kingdom of Anzika or Anzikana in the hinterland, the kingdom of Angola and those of Lunda and Baluba in the interior of what is today the Belgian Congo and, above all, the kingdom of Kongo, referred to above. The earliest history of all these states is completely unknown to us, and we have little information about them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in spite of their existence having been noted much earlier by the Portuguese.
  None of these states appears to have reached that political complexity characteristic of the political groupings of West Africa. Although technically and economically less advanced than the Yoruba or the Hausa states, these Equatorial kingdoms were nevertheless powerful political aggregates which exercised a considerable influence upon the surrounding, but politically less centralized, tribes. In contrast to the conquest states, the political structure in Equatorial Africa was more religious and theocratic in character.  
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