Zande

Zande (autonymously Pa-Zande) is an Ubangian language of the Niger-Congo family, spoken by around 1.1 million people in the borderlands of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic. Zande is famous internationally as the subject of E.E. Evans-Pritchard's classic 1937 anthropological monograph "Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande," one of the foundational works of British social anthropology that profoundly influenced 20th-century anthropological theory of rationality and witchcraft. The Zande Kingdom (the Avongara dynasty) was a major precolonial state of Central Africa from the 18th to the late 19th century before being divided among the British, French, and Belgian colonial powers. Linguistically, Zande is part of the Ubangian branch of Niger-Congo (NOT Bantu, despite the Central African location), with sister languages Nzakara and the more distant Ngbandi-Sango cluster.