Zambezi floodplain. Unlike the Upemba Depression (and much of the central savanna), the upper Zambezi floodplain could support cattle keeping. Yet, in other respects, the two ecosystems were comparable, for the Luyana heartland, too, consisted of a special environment that needed to be closely managed if its economic potential was to be fully realized. Annual floods compelled the people of the plain to build their villages, grow their crops, and herd their cattle on both natural and artificial mounds. At the height of the floods, however, even such mounds had to be temporarily abandoned and temporary residence taken up on the plain’s forested margins. These conditions favored the development of a particularly centralized form of administration. Not only did the Luyana monarchs (Litungas) become “director[s] of the public works of the kingdom,” but control over the allocation of scarce natural and man-made mounds also gave them an important means with which to buttress their power and position.20
The floodplain’s large labor requirements were met by means of internal slavery—historically much more pervasive in Barotseland than anywhere else in the central savanna21—and through the makolo system. The makolo were military and, especially, labor units to which all the inhabitants of the floodplain belonged from birth.22 They, too, worked as a means of royal centralization, for in the eighteenth century members of the royal family were seemingly replaced as makolo leaders by appointive officials. In time, the creation of new makolo and related headships became an exclusive royal prerogative. Thus, makolo leaders ended up forming what Mutumba Mainga calls a “bureaucratic aristocracy,” whose elevated social status depended solely on its alliance with, and loyalty to, the kingship.23 A system of territorial governorships overlapped the makolo. Like the heads of the latter, the officials in charge of specific districts were also selected on the basis of merit rather than birth. Their functions were probably mainly judicial, since it was the makolo chiefs who controlled people “for purposes of raising an army, collecting tribute and recruiting labour.”24 The marginalization of the members of the royal family to the advantage of the Litungas and their officialdom had one important consequence. Deprived of accessible outlets for their ambition, Luyana princes began fiercely to compete for the biggest prize of all: the position of Litunga. This was especially the case during interregna or following successful conspiracies. In this, the kingdom of the Luyana resembled that of the Luba, among whom royal heirs were similarly barred from assuming positions of territorial responsibility. In the nineteenth century, protracted civil strife would become a feature common to both polities.
All of these centralized organizations—the Luba and Ruund nuclear kingdoms, the “members states” of the Lunda “Commonwealth,” and the Luyana polity—partook of a political economy in which rights over people, including bonds of political loyalty, were predicated on the transfer of material goods.25 Thus, a key function of rulers was to act as redistributors of resources—be they internal resources accumulated through tribute or, increasingly as we shall see, imported commodities resulting from participation in long-distance trading networks. On the upper Zambezi, for instance, the people of Bulozi, the floodplain heartland of the Luyana state, required such forest products as wood for canoes and bark for ropes. They, of course, also needed to secure access to the higher lands to which their villages were moved when the floods made the plain uninhabitable. The residents of the forest, on the other hand, turned to the floodplain for fish, cattle, and milk. This set of converging interests meant that the Luyana kings were strategically placed at the center of networks of accumulation and redistribution that ensured the circulation of the products of complementary ecological and economic zones. By controlling and manipulating such networks, the Luyana Litungas brought into being webs of dependencies and obligations that structured their power and broadcast it beyond the circle of their immediate followers.
Imposing, outward-looking capitals were essential ingredients of the mystique that surrounded most savanna kingdoms. Veritable instruments of rule, they functioned as tangible embodiments of royal power intended to impress their rulers’ subjects.26 But the growth of these urban agglomerates was also clearly related to the tribute-gathering and redistributive functions fulfilled by the royal courts that they housed.27 The Portuguese explorer Antonio Gamitto, for one, was very taken by the administrative sophistication that regulated social life in the capital of Mwata Kazembe IV Keleka in 1831–32. Going by his rough estimates, the population of what he deemed to be the “greatest town in Central Africa” is unlikely to have numbered less than ten thousand.28
As already implied, political power in the central savanna also had important religious dimensions. Its holders were deemed responsible for ensuring the health and fertility of the land by propitiating their (or other relevant) ancestral spirits. A rule of thumb is that the more centralized the state, the more developed kingly cults revolving around royal ancestors were likely to be. Following their installation, peripheral allies of the Luba Mulopwes received a number of special insignia. Paramount among these was the white powder prepared by royal spirit mediums. Through potent symbols such as these, subordinate lineage heads “participated in the aura of Luba sacral kingship,” implicitly acknowledging “the superiority of that kingship over local concepts of chiefship venerated in their home villages.”29 As for the Luyana state, the position of royal ancestors in its cosmology explains why, in 1886, Litunga Lewanika went to great trouble to persuade the missionary François Coillard to pay homage to the grave of his predecessor, Litunga Mulambwa Santulu. As convincingly argued by Gwyn Prins, this step was deemed necessary to establish the monarchy’s ritual superiority over the new arrivals, who, being “perceived by ordinary people . . . as magicians,” posed a threat to a kingly power that was itself infused with mystical attributes.30
Contrary to what a host of modern scholars tend to imply, processes of ethnic consolidation were not solely a colonial phenomenon.31 While precolonial central Africa was most definitely not inhabited by discrete, impermeable, and mutually hostile collectivities (the “tribes” of colonial parlance), the fact is undeniable that the roots and some at least of the building blocks of present-day ethnicities are to be found in the regionally uneven processes of political integration with which this chapter has so far concerned itself. Thus, as Andrew Roberts pointed out several years ago, to be Bemba in precolonial times meant not only to speak chiBemba, but also to consider oneself a subject of the holders of the Chitimukulu, the probably Luba-derived title that, after becoming the preserve of one single lineage of the Bena Ngandu royal clan late in the eighteenth century, embarked on a process of sustained territorial expansion, gradually imposing its sway over much of present-day northeastern Zambia in the following century.32
Centralizing, hierarchical state systems had thus undoubtedly come into being in the central savanna by the eighteenth century. Still, away from hubs of dynastic power, the lives of most central African peoples revolved around more fragmented, smaller-scale sociopolitical structures. On the frontiers of emerging state formations, political life was confined within the boundaries of the village, or, as in the case of the “stateless” Tonga of present-day southern Zambia, the ritual territory of rain priests. Alternatively, it gravitated around competing chiefly titles, the relationships between which were fluid and subject to frequent renegotiation. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, this latter kind of political landscape was characteristic of the Chokwe and Luvale (or Luena) of the upper Zambezi and Kasai Rivers, and of the kiKaonde-speaking sub-clans to their east.
Lacking overarching centers of power, some of these communities found it problematic—or unnecessary—to mobilize resources on a large scale. This accounts for the comparative slowness with which they reacted to long-distance trading opportunities, or the fact that, when coastal traders did appear on the scene in the nineteenth century, small-scale societies—such as, for instance, the Ila and Lenje along the Kafue River—could end up being regarded as reservoirs of slaves to be raided at will. In contrary cases, however, well-developed hunting and forest-harvesting economies could actually facilitate and expedite involvement in the market economy. Thus it was that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, the highly mobile Luvale and Chokwe spawned aggressive market-oriented dynasties (as would, some decades later, the Kaonde) that were ready to take
