The Poisonwood Bible

An American missionary family lands in the Belgian Congo in 1959 and settles by the Kwilu River in the Bandundu backcountry, near the real river town of Kikwit. Over the next years the story follows the country out of colonial rule and into the turmoil of independence, from the fictional village of Kilanga to Leopoldville, then downriver to Bulungu. The map holds the Kwilu heartland; the family's later drift into Angola and back to Georgia falls outside it.

The Price family

Kilanga, on the Kwilu

Book 1

The family arrives to run a mission in a riverside village of mud-walled houses and mango trees, where the father's certainties collide at once with the land, the language and the people. The village is fictional, but the setting is drawn from the real mission country along the Kwilu.

Book 1, The Things We Carried

inspired by Kilanga is an invented village and does not appear on any map. Kingsolver places it on the Kwilu River in the Bandundu backcountry, so this marks a representative point on the real river a short way upstream of Kikwit.

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