and “are even more dangerous.”143Further upriver, the notorious cataracts at Cahora Bassa were still worse.144
The Zambezi as Home of the Prazos
While a small military presence at Sena, Tete, and Zumbo may have been sufficient to protect commerce along the river, it did not ensure Portugal’s political control over the strategic Zambezi waterway and its environs. To establish such sovereignty, Lisbon sought to co-opt the Portuguese nationals already residing there and to turn them into agents of the state. As early as the 1580s, Portuguese merchants and adventurers had begun to amass large tracts of land along both margins of the Zambezi. With the aid of armed slaves, whom they had acquired through trade and previous conquests, they imposed their rule over the local populations living adjacent to the river and upland.145Although these individuals were not initially acting in the name of the crown, Lisbon quickly came to appreciate their potential as colonial agents. In return for swearing fealty, paying annual rents, and providing soldiers to reinforce the small garrisons in Sena and Tete, the settlers received royal titles to their crown estates, called prazos da corôa.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were more than 125 prazos,146mostly between Tete and the mouth of the Zambezi. The prazeiros lived off both the taxes (musonkho) and agricultural produce paid by the peasants who resided on their estates and the profits they derived from trading in slaves and ivory. The owners of the largest estates, such as Cheringoma and Gorongoza, collected taxes from more than two thousand peasant villages147 and commanded slave armies of several thousand.148
The crown estates had a long history, spanning almost three centuries, but did little to consolidate Lisbon’s political control over the Zambezi valley. While the prazeiros were supposed to be loyal subjects, they were not,149and officials trying to enforce Lisbon’s dictates often felt their wrath. According to one knowledgeable observer, among any “group of twenty prazeros each one has nineteen enemies; however, all are the enemy of the governor.”150Nor could the governor muster the military force needed to challenge the autonomy of the prazeiro community and impose Lisbon’s authority, since, until the late nineteenth century, the one hundred to three hundred soldiers stationed in the valley151 were poorly armed, poorly trained, and poorly organized.152
The prazeiros’ changing racial and cultural identities further subverted Lisbon’s claim of sovereignty over the Zambezi valley. By 1777, 67 percent of the settler population was racially mixed; twenty-five years later it was 10 percent higher.153Miscegenation typically led to a profound shift in the cultural practices of prazeiro families. The longer they lived in the Zambezi, the more likely they were to adopt local languages, artifacts, practices, and worldviews.154This cultural hybridity further intensified the prazeiros’ ambivalence toward the metropole.155
Between 1800 and 1850, the colonial presence in the Zambezi region declined even further. Due to growing absentee ownership, severe droughts, and locust attacks, Gaza Nguni raids, and the tendency of the prazeiros to enslave their subjects—which precipitated peasant flight and Chikunda slave revolts—the prazo system declined dramatically; by the middle of the century, only twenty prazos were still functioning.156Lisbon’s hold over Zumbo was equally precarious, and in 1836 attacks by the Mburuma Nsenga forced the Portuguese to withdraw.157By the middle of the century, only the towns of Tete and Sena, both of which were in a state of decay and under siege from surrounding chieftaincies and renegade prazeiros,158remained in Portuguese hands.
The Zambezi as a Contested Colonial Terrain
Despite its declining economic significance, the Zambezi River valley remained politically strategic. Although Portugal’s political influence and presence were effectively limited to the two enclaves at Sena and Tete, it used their existence to justify its claims to a vast swath of territory extending well into contemporary Malawi and Zimbabwe. Lisbon even imagined that it could forge a Central African empire from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, connecting its holdings in Angola and Mozambique. These imperial assertions, however, were challenged by Great Britain, by powerful mestizo warlords, and by inland African states like the Barue, whose chiefs vowed never to accept European rule.
England posed the most serious threat. Already dominating key sectors of the Portuguese metropolitan economy, British imperialists hoped to bring the fertile Manica highlands, the Shire valley, and the Zambezi valley into its empire. Beginning with David Livingstone in 1856, a wave of British explorers and missionaries “invaded” the Zambezi.159They wrote widely publicized books and newspaper articles detailing the horrors of the slave trade, the failure of the Portuguese to “civilize the natives,” and the racial and cultural degeneration of the prazeiros.160The subtext of their publications was that Lisbon was unable to govern the Zambezi valley effectively—making its colonial claims illusory.
By the 1870s, British interests had made inroads in the region. The Scottish missionaries forged a religious community in the Shire highlands, and the African Lakes Company, an English commercial venture, challenged Portugal’s trade monopoly by operating its own ships on the Zambezi River.161During the next decade, the British also incorporated portions of the Manica highlands, which Portugal considered an integral part of its territory, into their holdings in Southern Rhodesia. In 1890, to avert a looming war with Great Britain, Portugal had to renounce its claim to territory inland from the Zambezi in what later became Malawi and Zimbabwe162 This effectively destroyed its dream of creating a Central African empire linking Mozambique and Angola.
At the same time, Portugal faced serious military challenges from rebellious warlords who controlled powerful military states. The southern margin of the Zambezi River between Tete and the Indian Ocean was divided between Massangano and Gouveia’s Tonga confederation; Carazimamba, Kanyemba, and Matakenya dominated the zone from Tete to Zumbo; and Makanga and Massingire and the Makololo state163 controlled the region between the Shire River and the Undi’s territory, opposite Tete.164These conquest states built large stone fortresses, known as aringas, to defend their territory and control trade along the Zambezi, and all but the Makololo relied on large well-armed Chikunda forces to impose their hegemony over the indigenous populations.165They prospered by enslaving thousands of villagers living adjacent to the river.166
In an effort to co-opt these warlords and transform them into colonial conquerors, Portuguese officials provided them with sophisticated weapons and closed their eyes to the warlords’ clandestine involvement in slaving.167When this strategy failed, Lisbon had no choice but to bolster its military presence and aggressively attack the renegades. To do otherwise might have led to a British takeover of this region—a fear reinforced by British negotiations with the Makololo, Kanyemba, and the Barue kingdom.168Despite stiff opposition, between 1886 and 1901 Portuguese forces defeated one state after another.169
The warlords’ defeat and the retreat of the Gaza Nguni southward left the Barue as the only major regional state outside Portugal’s control.170In August 1902 an elite Portuguese force, aided by several thousand African infantry soldiers, launched a major attack on the Barue. The five thousand Barue soldiers proved no match for the heavily armed colonial army, which subdued them by the end of the year.171Sixteen years later, descendants of the Barue rebels rose up to protest chibalo (conscripted African labor), which they equated with slavery. It took Lisbon a year to crush the insurrection.172Only then, more than three hundred years after the Portuguese crown had claimed sovereignty over the Zambezi, did Lisbon effectively control this region.
The Zambezi as a Zone of Unrealized Wealth
From the moment the first Portuguese traders and adventurers moved up the river, Lisbon expected the Zambezi valley someday to yield handsome profits. Colonial officials believed the rumors of rich gold and silver deposits and later were confident that plantation agriculture would flourish along the river’s fertile floodplains. Their dreams of transforming the Zambezi valley into a vibrant economic zone, however, were never realized.
Portugal initially sought to control the river to gain access to the large gold mines it believed
