Bapoto is the name of a tribe (sometimes also referred to as Bapoto, Foto, Mafoto, Poto, Upoto) and village on the right bank and islands of the Congo River, now a district of Lisala in the Mongala Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
With them are included the Mondonga. One source says they are related to the Lusengo and are subject to the Yomongo branch of the Mongo proper.
The economy is based primarily upon fishing and trade, with agriculture definitely subordinate. Bananas, maize, oil palms, and tobacco are grown, and apparently manioc as well. Goats, dogs (eaten), cats, and chickens are kept. There is little hunting except from canoes on the Congo River for swimming deer, hippopotamus, and crocodile. Each Bapoto village regularly trades fish, salt, and pottery with an inland village, in return for manioc, bananas, maize, and pumpkins.
Men fish, trade, gather palm nuts, clear land, and do what little hunting is done. Women do a little fishing, make salt and pottery, and do nearly all the cultivation.
The principal items of property of this mercantile people are slaves, canoes, houses, private fishing grounds, copper and brass money, livestock, and iron tools and weapons. Each family has property in tilled land.
Inheritance is patrilineal. Brothers take precedence in regard to movable property, sons in regard to immovables.
Except for slavery and the "aristocracy of freemen" there is no social stratification. Slaves are recruited through capture in war and settlement of debt. One source reports that slave status is hereditary. Another source says that the children of two slaves are half-free and, if males, are permitted to marry freewomen; also that a slave marrying a freeman becomes free, as do her children. Pecuniary motives are so strong that a poor man or one with
few kinsmen is likely to be seized by a powerful man and sold as a slave.
The normal residential uAit is a patrilocal extended family, occupying a compound. Its head is the grandfather, father, or senior brother, who is succeeded by his eldest son. The successor renounces his own name and takes that of his predecessor.
The Bapoto live in compact villages on the banks or islands of the Congo. Each has a "palaver house." A village consists of a number of extended family compounds (lingunda), each having a central court with dwellings on three sides and the river on the fourth. When a compound is outgrown, the family head authorizes one of his brothers to leave and establish another compound in the same village. Dwellings are rectangular with thatched hip roofs and palm- tliatched walls.
The village presumably is a patrician. Typically it is divided into quarters, which probably are clan-barrios. Circumcision is practiced, but not clitoridectomy (female circumcision).
The practice of filing teeth was common in the region, but the Upoto tribe had a specificity: only one tooth was cut for men and two for women.
There are village headmen, but they have little authority, since the extended families are much more strongly integrated • than the larger local group. The heads of extended families form a village council.
One source denies any political integration above the local level, but another source says there are a number of chiefs with considerable authority and that succession passes to a brother rather than a son.
Sources: