were profoundly ambivalent and contradictory. To be sure—as has already been noted—central African ruling elites often struggled to control the dynamics unleashed by the onset of the long-distance trade in ivory and slaves and the militarization of social relationships that it precipitated. Among the central Luba and Ruund and in most Lunda states, the erosion of royal monopolies over foreign commerce and the distribution of imported commodities led to fragmentation, increased violence, and enhanced social differentiation and levels of slave exploitation.66 Under these circumstances, the growth of international trade resulted in the weakening of long-established elites, whose dominance was now challenged by the rise of “new men,”67 often initially installed on the already contracting peripheries of the old political formations.
In a number of cases, these efforts at state-building in a period of widespread turmoil were entirely shorn of traditional legitimacy. The aforementioned Yeke state of Msiri, the latter a Sumbwa caravan leader turned empire-builder in the region lying between the collapsing Luba and Ruund states and the shrinking eastern Lunda sphere of control, is an especially clear example of the spread of warlordism in the central savanna. Better equipped to face the trials of the era of large-scale trading than were the old Luba and Ruund/Lunda aristocracies, Msiri and numerous other political opportunists—not least Lusinga, in northern Katanga, whose tragic story has recently been masterly told by Allen Roberts68—gave birth to violently entrepreneurial conquest states, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes more enduring. In these new political organizations, power rested less on religious sanction, heredity, and redistribution than on their leaders’ personal achievements, successful involvement in commerce, and preparedness to resort to sheer violence to achieve their aims. The diffusion of firearms, and their recasting into primary means of military and economic domination, were often central to these processes of political realignment, which also drew part of their impetus from the related emergence of semiprofessional and cosmopolitan standing armies of brutalized young men.69
Although these developments were especially sudden in the interior of central Africa in this era of long-distance trade, they were by no means unique to it. The coastal societies of Angola, large-scale exporters of slaves from a very early period, had already witnessed the overthrow of established authorities and the rise of heavily militarized polities from the seventeenth century onwards.70 Northeastern Tanzania offers a more proximate example. There, control of rain medicine and kinship relations, and the redistribution of internal tribute in livestock and labor, were the most important weapons in the political arsenal of the Kilindi rulers of Shambaa. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, these ways of relating rulers to people were largely superseded by a new political culture. Revolving around Semboja, chief of Mazinde, closer to long-distance routes than Shambaai, the mountain heartland of the kingdom, such culture drew on trading connections and the slave-gun cycle to pose an ultimately unanswerable challenge to old Kilindi politics. A drawn-out civil war and a “complete victory for the forces of decentralization” were the end result. In Shambaa political thought, kingly power had always been “ambivalent. It could be used to bring life or to bring death.” In the Pangani Valley in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, death became dominant, as the monarchical order ceased to be the guarantee of fertility, unity, and stability. Political leaders began to systematically prey upon their subjects, who were often left with no choice but to seek some degree of protection by joining the ranks of the slave raiders and warlords themselves.71
Still, apocalyptic descriptions of the central savanna on the eve of the European conquest should be rejected.72 Revolutionary transformation was not on the cards everywhere, and the continuities in political tradition should not be underestimated. After all, as Ian Phimister has pointed out with reference to late nineteenth-century Zimbabwe, merchant capital sometimes “[modifies] existing social relations without decisively altering them.”73 Centrifugal forces and/or the onslaught of the new entrepreneurs of violence were sometimes effectively resisted. When this was the case, preexisting forms of authority and governance could actually be strengthened by participation in long-distance trading networks. The Bemba and, especially, the Lozi polities exemplify such processes. Unlike the neighboring Tabwa and eastern Lunda, the Bemba kept both the Arab-Swahili of Itabwa and the so-called “Senga Arabs” at bay. As a result, while the overall cohesiveness of the Bemba “federation” might not have increased greatly, each Bena Ngandu chief, dealing on his own terms with coastal traders, used imported commodities to augment his “ability to attract and reward supporters.”74 As will be seen in the next chapter, after overthrowing the Kololo in the 1864, the Lozi maintained their erstwhile conquerors’ open-door policy vis-à-vis foreign traders, but reverted to being a slave-importing—as opposed to slave-exporting—society. This, and Litungas Sipopa and Lewanika’s skills in retaining ultimate control over foreign trade and the circulation of charismatic goods—firearms included—that came with it, help explain why the kingdom did not experience the same decline as the Ruund and Luba states underwent, and why it would eventually negotiate its incorporation into emerging colonial structures at the end of the century from a position of comparative strength.
FURTHER CHALLENGES FROM THE SOUTH
A significant role in extending the sway of merchant capital over parts of the central savanna was also played by Portuguese settlements in Zambezia, in the lower Zambezi Valley in present-day central Mozambique. In the eighteenth century, perhaps the majority of the slaves obtained by the lower Zambezi’s prazeiros—the Africanized descendants of the land-grant holders originally recognized by the Portuguese Crown in the seventeenth century—were retained on their estates (prazos) and put to productive uses.75 Some of their number, however, were organized into standing armies and entrusted with the task of policing the sprawling concessions and enforcing the subjugation of both their free and unfree cultivators. Occupying a most ambiguous social location, armed slaves, known locally as chikunda, were both “the objects of domination and the means by which the prazeiros controlled the peasantry and accumulated wealth.”76 In time, the chikunda—who also worked for their owners as elephant hunters, slave raiders, and long-distance traders—gave birth to a distinctive ethnic identity, one structured around such cultural markers as a “disdain for agricultural labor”—which the Chikunda construed as the preserve of women, common slaves, and subjugated peasants—and the glorification of masculine, martial pursuits such as warfare and hunting, with the notable aid of imported and partly homemade firearms.77
Slave exports from Quelimane boomed early in the nineteenth century, when the port to the north of the mouth of the Zambezi began to attract Brazilian and other ships bent on escaping abolitionist efforts along the Atlantic coast of Africa.78 The intensification of the southern slave trade meant that the Chikunda were no longer regarded as members of a comparatively privileged slave community, but, increasingly, as mere chattel for export. The Chikunda reacted violently to the new state of affairs, and slave insurrections and large-scale flights became the order of the day on the lower Zambezi. By the middle of the century, the prazo system had completely collapsed. Its fall resulted in the de facto emancipation of thousands of former armed slaves.79 As Allen and Barbara Isaacman have expertly shown,80 newly freed Chikunda had a number of options open to them in the new circumstances. Some continued to operate within the Portuguese sphere, working as professional hunters and porters for Luso-African traders (collectively known as muzungus). Other Chikunda—whom the Isaacmans refer to as “transfrontiersmen”—moved permanently away from the lower Zambezi. While some of these migrants ended up selling their military and hunting skills to vulnerable Chewa, Nsenga, and Gwembe Tonga communities, other Chikunda turned into state builders. Led by muzungu adventurers, Chikunda polities sprang up near the Luangwa-Zambezi confluence from the 1860s. Some at least of these new formations—especially those of the warlords Kanyemba and Matakenya—were veritable conquest states, resembling in many respects the creations of Msiri and other Congolese warlords. The products of the slave and ivory frontiers, Chikunda warlord states resorted to large-scale raiding and taxed local inhabitants mercilessly. With guns being deployed as their principal tools of commodity production, Chikunda conquerors made a significant contribution to regional instability,
