[2] [3] The Congolese Azande live in Orientale Province along the Uele River; Isiro, Dungu, Kisangani and Duruma.

As a consequence of European colonialism in the 19th century, the territory inhabited by the Azande was divided by Belgium, France, and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

In 2015, conflict between the Azande and the Dinka ethnic group in the city of Yambio, Western Equatoria state led SPLA chief Paul Malong Awan to instruct soldiers to open fire on anyone insubordinate to his directives.

The British got tribal and Indigenous leaders to support the plan and attempted to run a propaganda campaign to urge the local community to abide by the Azande Scheme.

Originally hailed as a success by many scholars,[11] the program largely failed, partly because of the Azande's relative isolation to trading ports and lack of sufficient infrastructure to bring in the machinery required to build a finishing and manufacturing sector in such a rural area.

Additionally, the roads were not of adequate quality for exports and the British government deemed the prices too steep to justify.

[12] Though the plan emphasized cotton, crops that maintained soil health were promoted and land was allocated specifically for palm oil production to assure substantial yield and quality.

Coupled with the agricultural development, the British built industrial infrastructure further north near Khartoum to process the cotton and export it.

Though the plan eventually failed, its ambitions were to turn Sudan into a wealthy state by the 1970s and was initially regarded as being on track to reach or exceed the goal.

[citation needed] Variant spellings include Zande, Azande, Azandeh, Azende, Bazende,[2] Zandeh, A-Zandeh, and Sandeh.

[14] First used by other tribes in southern Sudan, it was later adopted by Westerners,[citation needed] who frequently used it to refer to the Azande in the 18th and early 19th century.

Azande Kingdom extends from the fringes of the South-central and Southwest Upper basin of South Sudan to the semitropical rain forests in Congo, and into the Central African Republic.

[16] In order to implement the Zande Scheme, the British sought to establish new settlements in the region, centered around cotton ginneries.

The British also constructed agricultural training facilities and experimental farms in Yambio and pushed urbanization schemes in the region.

[16] Colonial records described the Azande as "individualists" who, prior to villagization under the Zande Scheme, lived together in family groups on homesteads with women carrying out agricultural duties.

[13] Sleeping sickness caused internal migrations and social reorganization among the Zande people, leading them to coalesce around paths of travel, which meant that they exhausted soil nutrients near thoroughfares.

[citation needed] The British colonial authority noted in 1948 that the importation of mangoes into the Azande region from the Congo around the turn of the 20th century.

[10] In the ensuing years, mangoes grew to prominence being planted throughout the Zande territory with "avenues" of trees surrounding many of the roads in the region around the middle of the 20th century.

[15] Zande is also used to refer to related languages in addition to Azande itself, including Adio, Barambu, Apambia, Geme, Kpatiri and Nzakara.

[17] As in other African societies, applied arts, artifacts, music and oral literature are key elements of Zande culture.

Zande also have created drums and thumb pianos, called sansa, that sometimes looked like people, animals, and abstract figures.

Among the Azande, witchcraft, or mangu, is believed to be an inherited black fluid in the belly which leads a fairly autonomous existence, and has power to perform bad magic on one's enemies.

As the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard recorded in the northern Congo, due to the shortage of women in the region, male Zande warriors between 20 and 30 years of age routinely took on young male lovers between the ages of twelve and twenty, who participated in intercrural and anal sex with their older partners while also performing household duties.

[24] The practice largely died out by the mid-19th century due to increasing European colonial influence in the region, but the elders Evans-Pritchard spoke to were still sufficiently aware of it to give a fairly detailed description.

[26]: 55  According to male Azande, women would take female lovers in order to seek out pleasure and that partners would penetrate each other using bananas or a food item carved into the shape of a phallus.

[26]: 55  Evans-Pritchard also recorded that the male Azande were fearful of women taking on female lovers, as they might view men as unnecessary.

Except for criminals, clan members were never eaten except in times of severe hunger, when girls were sometimes sacrificed to ensure the survival of the others – with families exchanging their daughters so that nobody had to eat their own child.

[27] Evans-Pritchard found it impossible to determine how common cannibal customs had been in earlier times, but notes that they seem to have been quite rare during the lifetime of his informers – various older men had seen cases, but none described it as a general practice, not even during war campaigns.

[29] According to Evans-Pritchard, there is no credible evidence that cannibalism was practiced in order to acquire the properties of an admired foe or for any other "ritual" or "magical" reason.

As the only reasons he heard from Azande for eating human flesh were "either hunger, or more often, a taste for it", he concludes, in agreement with most other reports of the practice, that it "was eaten simply for meat".