region to the west of Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi was the defeat of the important Tabwa leader Chipioka Nsama I in 1867.46 Chipioka, who some twenty years earlier had scattered an Arab-Swahili party, was attacked by Tippu Tip, the notorious Zanzibari trader and empire-builder, and his comparatively small but heavily armed following. In the encounter, Tabwa bowmen “died like birds! When the guns went off, two hundred were killed instantly and others were trampled to death! They fled. In one hour, more than a thousand died. Our casualties were only two slaves killed and two wounded.”47 Following Nsama I’s defeat, his country entered a state of continuous civil war in which the Arab-Swahili—now stably settled between Lakes Tanganyika and Mweru—repeatedly played the role of kingmakers.48 After the Tabwa, it was the eastern Lunda’s turn to bear the brunt of what Marcia Wright and Peter Lary aptly termed the “Swahili version of British gun-boat diplomacy.”49 Controlled trade on the lower Luapula came to an end between the 1860s and 1870s, as coastal entrepreneurs worked systematically towards undermining royal monopolies and inaugurated an era characterized by successive foreign military interventions in the internal affairs of the much weakened kingdom.50
The Atlantic Ocean Trading Frontier
Having examined the chronology and prime movers of the Indian Ocean trading frontier, let us now turn our attention to the network of trade routes that developed in the opposite direction: from west to east. Since the seventeenth century, the Portuguese coastal towns of Luanda and Benguela had been the main Angolan termini of a thriving slave trade. The itineraries flowing out of Benguela are especially important for the regions with which the next three chapters of this book are concerned.51 Throughout the eighteenth century, most of the slaves exported via Benguela came from its immediate hinterland and the Umbundu-speaking, politically divided, central Angolan highlands. In the second half of the century, Luso-African traders settled on the plateau, especially in the kingdoms of Bihe (Viye) and Mbailundu. It was these merchants and independent local operators who extended the Benguela trading complex in an easterly direction, eventually reaching the upper Zambezi River in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.52 At this time, the Luyana—as Livingstone was later to learn53—refused to export the slaves on whose labor the political economy of their core area depended. More willing commercial partners were found among Chokwe and Luvale hunters, who quickly learned to minimize the technical deficiencies of the mainly Belgian-made trade muskets imported by Bihean and other traders, to appreciate their versatility as tools for the production of animal capital and human booty, and to draw on their gendered symbolism. The direct incorporation of the upper Zambezi into the Atlantic economy went hand in hand with the spread of both social insecurity and new opportunities for marketing the region’s primary products. These factors worked towards consolidating the sway of competing merchant chiefs. Internally divided Luvale trading principalities came into their own at a somewhat earlier date than the aforementioned Yao merchant dynasties in southern Malawi, but they obeyed similar market-driven logics and appropriated guns in similar fashion: as means of production, territorial expansion, and masculine affirmation. Slaves remained the upper Zambezi’s dominant export until at least the 1850s, though the rise in ivory prices at the coast from the mid-1830s meant that ivory (and wax) exports gradually grew in importance. Later, during the 1870s and 1880s, they would be joined by natural rubber.54
In the mid-nineteenth century, Umbundu-speaking traders were probably the main carriers of the Angolan slave and ivory trade.55 By then, their reach extended well beyond the upper Zambezi area. Having established solid relationships with the Kololo—Sotho migrants who temporarily overran the Luyana state in the middle decades of the century—the Ovimbundu trading (and, when circumstances permitted, raiding) sphere embraced the Ila and Lenje of the middle Kafue River and, eventually, the neighboring Kaonde of present-day Solwezi and Kasempa districts. Ovimbundu caravans—sometimes comprising several thousand free and enslaved porters (see figure 4.1)—also became very active in southern Congo. Since c. 1700, slave-dealing Ruund Mwant Yavs had been in contact with the Portuguese capital of Luanda through the mediation of the Imbangala of Kasanje.56 For about a century, the rulers of Kasanje had been able to protect their middleman position. The bottleneck, however, had exploded early in the nineteenth century, as a result of the crisis of Kasanje.57 From that point onwards, the Ruund capitals on the upper Mbuji-Mayi became a key destination for both Luso-Africans from the hinterland of Luanda and Ovimbundu from the Angolan plateau.58 With the appearance of new actors on the scene, trade became less regimented, and the Mwant Yavs found it increasingly problematic to enforce such monopoly over foreign exchanges as they had enjoyed in earlier decades.59
Later, the predicament of Ruund royals was compounded by the arrival of Chokwe migrants. Beginning as elephant hunters and, later, rubber gatherers, the Chokwe moved down the Kasai Valley and settled near the Ruund heartland.60 Historically, the Ruund had been poorly disposed towards firearms. In the eighteenth century, according to Leitão, they had regarded them as a “handicap to valor.”61 One century later, guns were still scarce among the nuclear Ruund.62 This explains the ease with which musket-wielding Chokwe invaders carved out a dominant role for themselves during the internecine wars that marred the political life of the Ruund state after the death of Mwant Yav Muteb in 1873. By 1887, the year in which Carvalho visited the capital of a much enfeebled Mwant Yav Mukaz, the Ruund state was a shadow of its former self. Mudib, Mukaz’s predecessor, had been killed by his erstwhile Chokwe backers and his capital destroyed. On that occasion, Chokwe warlords had captured “more than 6,000 people”—adults, children, and, especially, women, whom they incorporated into their expanding matrilineages.63 By the late 1880s, Chokwe raiders were the real masters of the Ruund heartland and had initiated a phase of indiscriminate slaving, “leaving a virtual desert where the Lunda empire had once stood.”64 The southern members of the Lunda “Commonwealth,” too, struggled to adjust to the conditions of the frontier market economy. As will be further seen in the next chapter, the southern Lunda of the Shinde and others were preyed upon by heavily armed Luvale slavers throughout the better part of the nineteenth century.
The effects of international trade on the central Luba state were, if possible, even more pernicious. This was largely a question of timing. Since they had remained more or less unaffected by the long-distance trade until the 1870s, the Luba only experienced it in its most disruptive, late-nineteenth-century guise. From about 1870, the Ovimbundu had become the main trading partners of Garenganze, Msiri’s newly formed warlord state, the brutally extractive methods of which were then producing unprecedentedly large quantities of ivory and slaves for export. The Luba fish was hooked as a by-product of the commerce between Angola and Garenganze. Exploiting Luba internal divisions and lack of familiarity with foreign trade, Luso-Africans and Ovimbundu quickly established themselves as the dominant powerbrokers between the Lualaba and the Lomani Rivers. The civil wars that accompanied each royal succession became especially destructive, with different Luba factions drawing on the support of competing Angolan entrepreneurs. The early stages of this spiral of violence—one which would eventually result in the dissolution of the old Luba state as a cohesive territorial and political entity—were witnessed by Cameron in the mid-1870s. At the time of Cameron’s passage through the Luba heartland, the followers of Alvez—one of the traders with whom Mulopwe Kasongo Kalombo had allied himself with a view to defeating his many internal opponents—were given license to plunder the most vulnerable of the king’s subjects. “Any cultivated spot they at once fell on like a swarm of locusts, and, throwing down their loads, rooted up ground-nuts and sweet-potatoes, and laid waste fields of unripe corn, out of sheer wantonness.” Cameron was certain that, “had they not been armed with guns,” Alvez’s followers “would never have dared to act thus, for on entering countries where the people carried firearms these truculent ruffians became mild as sucking doves.”65
Between Political Innovation and Continuity
The interaction between the forces of global commerce and preexisting authorities forms one of the master themes of the history of the central savanna in the nineteenth century. The political effects of this
