The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
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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.
A watershed moment in the history of the 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