Their polities, however, never entirely lost their original traits, consisting of unstable coalitions rather than centralizing kingdoms. Near the sources of the Zambezi, for instance, competition between the Chinyama, the Kakenge, and other Luvale titles remained an important factor throughout the nineteenth century.33 Among the Luvale and similarly mobile groups, power—as a perceptive visiting missionary observed in 1895—was more “diffused” than in settled monarchical communities, such as the neighboring Lozi (the Luyana’s successor state).34 Partly because of this, on the frontiers of large-scale state systems, ethnic cultures did not coincide with coherent political unities, and the influence of the colonial “creation of tribalism” would be profound and transformative.35
THE IMPACT OF MERCHANT CAPITAL
The incorporation of the central savanna into globalizing trading networks in the nineteenth century was bound to have serious repercussions on the political landscape and patterns of governance described above. The increasingly pervasive impact of the outside world and the complex changes it gave rise to form the subject of this section. Merchant capital and its African representatives followed two broad axes of penetration into the central interior of the continent. Their convergence in the middle decades of the century turned the central savanna into an arena of accelerated economic and political exchanges. To understand how this came about, the development of both eastern and western itineraries and the activities of their chief protagonists need to be discussed in some detail.
The Indian Ocean Trading Frontier
Until the closing years of the eighteenth century, much of eastern and central Africa had been relatively isolated from the Indian Ocean coast, where Zanzibar was then emerging as a major commercial entrepôt under the leadership of the Bu Sa’idi dynasty of Oman. Indirect trading links, based on local and regional networks of exchanges, had certainly been in place, but these had not been of such magnitude as to transform the sociopolitical landscape of the interior. From the end of the eighteenth century, however, a growing international demand for east-central Africa’s ivory and slaves resulted in the forces of commerce gathering unprecedented momentum. During the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the bulk of the long-distance trade through present-day central Tanzania remained in the hands of African caravaneers—most notably the Nyamwezi and related groups, such as the Sumbwa (see map 1.2). It is probable that by the 1800s some Nyamwezi caravans had already begun trading with the kingdom of Kazembe, to which they were attracted not only by ivory and slaves, but also by the copper that the Mwata Kazembes received as tribute from their subordinates in southern Katanga.36 Direct Nyamwezi trade with Katanga itself dates to the 1830s or so.
As the century progressed, better capitalized and better armed coastal merchants—normally referred to as Arab-Swahili, that is, residents of Zanzibar or the Islamized Swahili towns under its loose sway—began to encroach on Nyamwezi routes.37 One of the effects of this competition was to increase the destructiveness of the trade and to push its frontiers further and further inland—a development facilitated by the establishment of Zanzibari bases in Unyamwezi country and at Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, in the 1840s. By then, as attested by Gamitto in 1831–32, coastal merchants had already begun to visit the Lunda of the Mwata Kazembe, meeting part of the royal demand for cloth and other “ostentatious” possessions, including “forty very clean shot guns, and six hunting carbines wrapped in lace-trimmed cloth.”38 Initially clearly deployed solely as charismatic symbols of royal wealth, the guns imported by Mwata Kazembe IV Keleka (“Chareka”) eventually left his Wunderkammern (cabinet of wonders): c. 1850, Keleka’s subjects—the Zanzibari trader Said ibn Habib reported—were “armed with muskets,” some of which must have been used for military purposes.39 These muskets were almost certainly flintlocks—either cast-off “Brown Besses” or trade guns modeled on the latter that Zanzibar was then beginning to ship to the mainland in sizeable quantities. It has been estimated that the number of guns passing through Zanzibar rose from about five thousand per year in the 1840s to nearly a hundred thousand in the 1880s, by which time the Bu Sa’idi capital had become one of the “main conduits for small arms transfers” in the entire western Indian Ocean.40 After visiting the lower Luapula Valley, Said ibn Habib proceeded to the “great copper mines” of Katanga—where “a great many people [were] employed” and whose product was “taken for sale all over the country”—and the “petty states” of the Ila (“Boira”) and Lenje (“Warengeh”).41 It was on the middle Kafue that Said ibn Habib first came across a party of long-distance traders from the far west: the Indian Ocean and Atlantic trading frontiers had intersected.42 Taken together, they were set to overlay the bulk of the central savanna.
MAP 1.2. Main nineteenth-century trade routes.
Further to the south, the ivory trade between Lake Malawi and the Portuguese colony on Mozambique Island, in northern Mozambique, had been in the hands of the Yao, then living predominantly to the south of the Ruvuma River and along the eastern shore of Lake Malawi, since c. 1700. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, as conditions of trade deteriorated on Mozambique Island, the Yao reoriented their activities towards the coast of southern Tanzania and, specifically, the ancient port of Kilwa, which had accepted Bu Sa’idi overrule in the 1740s. It was from about this time that the Yao, besides ivory, also began to deal extensively in slaves, a good number of whom were now acquired by French traders in Kilwa and imported into their Indian Ocean island colonies of Mauritius and Réunion. The Yao obtained some of their ivory from the Bisa, another group of semiprofessional traders who acted as intermediaries between the Lake Malawi region and political brokers further inland, such as, once again, the Mwata Kazembes of the lower Luapula Valley, with which the Bisa had been in contact since shortly after the foundation of the kingdom in about 1740. Eventually, in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the Bisa began to travel themselves all the way to Kilwa, where they offered their ivory at a cheaper price than the Yao did. Bisa competition in the ivory market—as Edward Alpers has suggested—further intensified Yao involvement in the slave business. The search for fresh supplies of slaves—many of whom were now deployed internally, on Arab- and Indian-owned plantations on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, and the Tanzanian coast opposite them—eventually led rival Yao gunmen to encroach manu militari upon Mang’anja territory along the southern shores of Lake Malawi and the heavily populated Shire Highlands of southern Malawi in the 1850s and 1860s.43
As in the Nyamwezi case, the Yao sector, too, witnessed increasing coastal activity as the century progressed. By the middle of the nineteenth century, an Arab-Swahili base had been established at Nkhota Kota, among the Chewa near the southwestern shore of Lake Malawi.44 In the late 1870s, a smaller coastal settlement also sprang up among the Senga of the upper Luangwa River. Both sets of traders fed the traffic in slaves along the Malawi-Kilwa caravan routes, where violence—as Livingstone famously reported—had become a pervasive fact of life from at least the 1860s.45
Political relationships between Arab-Swahili traders and preexisting African authorities can be roughly subdivided into two phases. Since the vertical distribution of resources was an essential ingredient of their power, savanna kings and chiefs normally did their best to ensure that foreign trade took place under monopolistic conditions, or something that closely approximated them. Initially, given their precarious position, trailblazing coastal traders had little choice but to cooperate with domineering African authorities. It was only during a second phase, roughly beginning in the 1850s–1860s, that the Arab-Swahili resolutely moved against central African trading monopolies. This change of strategy was dictated both by their newfound military strength in the interior and by the increasingly competitive nature of the long-distance trading environment. The assumption of an explicitly political and military role on the part of coastal traders followed thereupon.
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