The Eastern Congo First Letter Mystery.

I've been working for over two years on Eastern Congo now, visited the area three times (a fourth time starts in three weeks), and all-together lived there for more than a year. Throughout this time something has been bothering me:

Why do so many (place)names start with the letter "K"?

Let me illustrate this. The work that we do in the DRC, next to the Voix des Kivus project, is an evaluation of a large CDR development project (more here). The project (and the evaluation) takes place in four provinces in Eastern Congo (Sud Kivu, Haut Katanga, Maniema and Tanganyika) and are highlighted below:

Fig. 1: Map.

For the CDR project and the evaluation our implementing partners (the IRC and CARE International) together with local governments constructed a large database with information on over 8,000 so-called LLUs in these four provinces. The term "LLU" we invented and is a "Lowest Level Unit". Some villages consist out of "sousvillages", some "sousvillages" consist out of "quartiers", some "quartiers" consist out of "avenues", etc. An LLU is the lowest of these natural units present.

Let's have a look at what the data says regarding first letters of these units. Ready? Hereby a straightforward pie-chart:

Fig. 2: The first letters K + L + M is more than half of all villages.

Indeed: wooh! Each letter in the alphabet probably doesn't have a 1/26th chance of being selected, but just the three letters K + L + M take up well over 50% of all the first letters! This seems nuts. And this seems to be the case across the four different provinces (the K is number 11):

Fig. 3: And it seems kind of similar for all four provinces.

To emphasize this point, within the four provinces we work in particular territories. Here is the list:

• Haut Katanga: Kipushi, Kasenga, Mitwaba and Kambove
• Tanganyika: Kalemie, Kongolo and Kabalo
• Maniema: Kailo, Kabambare, Pangi and Kibombo
• Sud Kivu: Uvira, Walungu, Kalehe, Mwenga

You see my point, or better the lines underneath the letters K? 2/3rd of all the territories start with a "K"! This is substantially more than (a likely prior of) 1/26; 2/3 is the same as 17 one-third over 26! So, what's going? I don't know the distribution in other countries, but this doesn't seem to be very normal. Two thoughts (please suggest other ones!):

1. The Belgian Colonialist. Shame on me that I don't know this, but did the Congolese have a written language when the Belgians arrived (or probably the Arabs is more appropriate knowing they were in the east much earlier)? And (if so) the same one? Maybe the local languages had many sounds that sound like a "k", so when the Belgians visited far-away villages and documented their names they heard and thus wrote down "k"s. Or, Another reason would be that the "K" on the typewriter got stuck back then.
2. The Language Origin. In Swahili one of the uses for the prefix "ki" is to indicate that the stem that follows is a language (Kifaransa is for example french, Kirega is the language of the Rega tribe, etc.). I know that "ki" is not the same as a "k", and that Swahili is not the same as the local languages spoken in Eastern Congo, but could it be that the natural units started of as mainly language units?

But I don't know. And am curious. Any anthropologist an idea?