Africa

F

1

States of the Great Lakes

As woodland was cleared for cultivation, wider areas of East Africa became suitable for cattle keeping. In the centuries before and after 1000, Nilotic-speaking cattle herders pushed southward into the newly exposed grasslands of the Great Lakes region. Some retained their Nilotic language and culture, such as the Luo northeast of Lake Victoria. West of Lake Victoria, Nilotic herders integrated into Bantu society and adopted local Bantu languages. In this period local state structures began to emerge. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the states of Bunyoro, Ankole, Karagwe, and Buganda were established in what is now Uganda and northern Tanzania. By the 16th century Bunyoro had grown to dominate the region.

In the same period the hierarchical kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi emerged in the mountains bordering Lake Kivu and Lake Tanganyika. These kingdoms were ruled by a cattle-owning aristocracy, known as Tutsi, who exacted tribute from the farming population, known as Hutu. The distinction between Tutsi and Hutu was one of power and wealth rather than ethnicity, although so-called ethnic differences between the two would be distorted and exploited in modern times.

The kingdom of Buganda, located at the northwest corner of Lake Victoria, grew in stature by the early 18th century. The region’s rich, fertile soil and regular rainfall supported intensive banana cultivation, which in turn supported a dense population and allowed for the development of a powerful, centralized state. Power rested with the kabaka (king) who controlled his realm by granting land estates to regional chiefs. A sophisticated system of roads and administration was established and by 1800 Buganda rivaled Bunyoro as the major power of the region.

To the east, Nilotic herders moved into the Kenya highlands and the Eastern Rift of the Great Rift Valley. Absorbing southern Cushitic-speaking cereal farmers and herders, these peoples were the ancestors of the Kalenjin of Kenya and the Dadog of Kenya. Subsequent Nilotic migrations, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, created the Karamojong and Teso of northeastern Uganda, the Samburu and Turkana of northwestern Kenya, and the Masai of the central Kenyan rift valleys and northern Tanzania. The pastoral Masai traded with the Bantu-speaking Kikuyu (Gikuyu) and Kamba of the central Kenya highlands and maintained peaceful relations with them.

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Most of the Bantu-speaking farmers of Kenya and Tanzania lived in small, clan-based chiefdoms, but sizeable states emerged among the Chagga, Pare, and Shambaa in the wetter hills of northeastern Tanzania. In central and western Tanzania, the Nyamwezi became experienced traders in iron and salt, establishing important links between the coast and the emerging states of the western Great Lakes region.

F

2

Swahili and East Coast Trade

About 2,000 years ago, the Indian Ocean coast was populated by Bantu-speaking farmers, cattle keepers, and fishers. These people established small village settlements on estuaries and islands and built small boats for fishing, communicating, and trading along the coast. This region was known to Greek and Roman traders of the early centuries ad as Azania. By this time Bantu settlements stretched from the Kenyan island of Lamu in the north to the Rufiji estuary near modern-day Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the south. These communities exported ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoise shell, and other goods.

With the ongoing spread of Islam, from the 8th century the communities of the East African coast became more directly connected to the long-distance trading network of the Indian Ocean. Muslim Arabic-speaking traders settled along the coast and married into local ruling families. The language and culture that developed remained distinctly African, but with Arabic and Islamic borrowings and influences. This language and culture, and the people in general, are referred to as Swahili. By 1000 Swahili trading settlements stretched from Mogadishu in the north to Mozambique, the Comoros archipelago, and northern Madagascar in the south. (By this time, Madagascar had been settled by Polynesian peoples from the eastern Indian Ocean.) Other major Swahili towns included Mombasa, Kilwa, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar. The more prosperous Swahili towns minted their own copper and silver coins. Gold from the southern African interior became a significant export in southern Swahili towns, while northern towns sold captives for slave labor. Most of these slaves were sent to the Middle East, many to work in southern Iraq collecting salt from coastal flats.

The growing significance of the Swahili gold trade prompted further Arab immigration in the 12th century. Wealthy Muslim elites ruled the Swahili cities, and their imports of fine Indian and Chinese pottery hint at the range and wealth of their Indian Ocean trading connections.

After Portuguese sailors first rounded southern Africa at the end of the 15th century, Portugal sought to seize control of this lucrative Indian Ocean trade, especially the gold trade. The Portuguese sacked several of the principal Swahili cities, built a string of fortresses along the coast, and dominated the coastal trade until an Arab force from Oman drove them out of the northern cities in the 1690s.

G

Early Central Africa

In Central Africa, the Bantu migration came full circle. By 1000 bc western Bantu-speaking farmers had crossed the Congo River and settled in what is now Angola. Approximately 1,500 years later, eastern Bantu-speaking groups—descended from groups that had spread throughout East Africa—met and intermingled with their distant relatives in what is now Angola, southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and western Zambia.

G

1

Luba, Lunda, and Maravi Empires

In the Upemba Depression, in what is now southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the ancestors of the Luba people made up one of the earliest iron-working groups in Central Africa. This wet, fertile savanna woodland on the southern edge of the equatorial forest was ideally suited to the production of food and the development of settled communities. In addition, the upper Lualaba River provided the Luba with trading connections between the forest and the southern savanna. They traded salt, iron, and dried fish, and became expert craftsmen in copper imported from the south. By 1300 they had organized into prosperous farming and trading chiefdoms and were casting copper into cross-shaped ingots for use as trading currency. From these origins, a great, centralized Luba Empire emerged by the early 1400s.

According to traditional accounts, in the 1450s the growth of the Luba Empire inspired a sense of unity among the scattered Lunda chiefdoms to the west. New dynasties arose, but they recognized the authority of the existing Lunda rulers. The Lunda Empire that emerged in the 16th century was more like a confederation of tribute-paying chieftaincies than a single, centralized empire.

Luba and Lunda ideas of kingship and inheritance of power spread farther west, to present-day Angola, and southeast, to eastern Zambia and southern Malawi. The Phiri clan, which grew powerful in southern Malawi in the early 1400s, claimed to inherit its authority from Luba kings. The Phiris married into the local Banda clan and developed their own concept of kingship, based upon the authority of local religious cults. Over the course of the 16th century they founded the Kalonga, Lundu, and Undi kingdoms—known collectively as the Maravi Confederacy—in the rich elephant-hunting lands between Lake Malawi and the Zambezi River. They profited greatly from the ivory trade with the Portuguese at the Swahili coast. For a brief period between 1600 and 1650 the Maravi were united under the Kalonga dynasty as a single empire from the Shire and Zambezi river valleys to the coast of Mozambique.

In the early 18th century the king of the Lunda Empire sent a small force eastward to capture the Luapula River valley (on what is now the northern border of Zambia). The leader of the invasion was given the title Kazembe, with authority to extend Lunda tribute collection over the people of the region. In the fertile valley, which brimmed with fish and was close to the rich copper deposits in northern Zambia, this leader was able to build an autonomous Kazembe empire. By 1800 Kazembe still nominally acknowledged Lunda authority but, in practice, independently controlled a vast trading network that stretched nearly the width of the continent.

G

2

Kongo and Portuguese Interference

Before 1000 Bantu-speaking farmers had developed numerous small states in the hills and valleys of present-day Angola and in the woodland savanna country on either side of the lower Congo River. By 1400 a number of these states had merged to form the kingdom of Kongo with its capital at Mbanza Kongo, south of the Congo River. The nearby Pool Malebo, a lake formed by a widening in the river, was a major trading junction of the lower Congo region. By controlling the pool, the kings of Kongo were able to dominate trade on the river and regional overland trade as well.

Kongo was a federation of provinces and the king was elected by the hereditary rulers of the provinces. By the 1480s, when Portuguese explorers first visited Kongo, the capital housed 10,000 to 15,000 people, occupied in trading and in manufacturing iron and raffia cloth. This great concentration of people gave the king the power to challenge the local authority of the provinces. The power struggle between the king and the provinces was to be a dominant theme of Kongo’s history over the next 200 years.

The Portuguese emissaries and missionaries who arrived in the 1490s became one more element in the internal struggles. The Kongo king welcomed the Portuguese, seeking to gain strength from their weapons technology, and converted to Christianity. Kongolese Christianity retained distinctive African beliefs and rituals, despite the efforts of Portuguese missionaries to quash them. It became more of a royal religious cult than a religion of the masses. The king’s power declined in the 18th century, but the Kongolese form of Christianity persevered, incorporating further African qualities and strengthening indigenous African religious thought.

Politically, the Portuguese were arrogant and unreliable allies and refused to consider their relationship with Kongo as a meeting of equals. They intervened in dynastic struggles and entered into wars in the interior. By the mid-16th century it was clear that Portugal’s primary objective was to acquire slaves for their plantations on the island of São Tomé and, later, in Brazil. The kings of Kongo were prepared to wage war against rebellious provinces in order to acquire captives for sale, but they objected to the Portuguese dealing directly with the provinces, independent of royal control. The Portuguese fueled rebellions in the provinces, culminating in a civil war that virtually destroyed the kingdom in the 1660s and 1670s.

By this time the Portuguese had shifted the focus of their slave trading south to the port of Luanda, where they established the colony of Angola. Here, they continued their disruptive practices, clashing with the nearby kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba. Queen Nzinga of Matamba was one of their foremost opponents from 1624 to 1663.

From north of the Congo River, English, Dutch, and French traders tapped into the trade in Central African captives, and in doing so stimulated even higher levels of conflict in the region. The impact of the Atlantic slave trade was deeper and longer felt in this area than in any other part of the continent. By the 18th century the slave-raiding frontier stretched far into the forest to the heart of Central Africa.

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