The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
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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 advantage of the new circumstances ushered in by the expansion of the Angolan slave and ivory trading frontier. 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