The Ila people are an ethnic group in The Republic of Zambia who make up 0.8 percent of the total population.
Some Ila raise animals such as chickens, goats, or pigs on a small scale, and mostly cows, though that is usually for tradition and prestige.
[1] The Ila-speaking peoples and their neighbours on all sides belong to the Bantu subdivision of the Africans, and their ancestors in remote times must have come down from the southern Sudan.
But they have were evidently influenced by, and to some extent intermixed with, peoples of another section, which, after passing from the north-east through the Congo territory towards the west coast, curled* back again towards the centre of the continent in a south-easterly direction.
The closest affinities to Ila are found in a line of dialects stretching from the Subia on the Zambezi to the Bemba on Lake Tanganyika, and including midway the Tonga, Lenje, Bisa, and others.
It is an old Bantu root : Suto, ila; Zulu, zila; Ronga, yila; Herero, zera; Nyanja, yera; Upper Congo, kila cf.Ganda, omuzira, a totem.