I FIRST ENCOUNTERED the Nunu in 1975 while I was collecting oral traditions on the history of the slave and ivory trade along the middle Zaire River. Although the main focus of my research was the Bobangi, who dominated the commerce of the middle Zaire in the nineteenth century, I was also interested in understanding the effects of the slave trade on the populations living in the hinterlands of the trading centers. Because the Nunu inhabited three geographical regions—the riverbanks, the inland swamps, and the farmlands behind the swamps—they presented an excellent opportunity for studying the impact of the slave trade on peoples living in different environmental zones.

My visits to the swamps and the farming regions proved frustrating at first. The oral traditions I collected contained little or no information on the slave trade. Direct questions about the slave trade drew mostly blank stares and shrugs. The evidence clearly indicated that the Nunu had been neither suppliers nor purchasers of slaves on a significant scale. It forced me to acknowledge that, contrary to my presuppositions, life in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century swamplands had not been dominated by the spectre of the Atlantic slave trade.

I gradually began to understand that Nunu history was animated by a dynamism of its own. The Nunu were important not because they were spectacular, but precisely because they were ordinary.