Africa

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Early Southern Africa

By 650 small Bantu-speaking communities of ironworkers and farmers had settled all over southern Africa, excluding only the drier regions of central and western Botswana, Namibia, and the Cape of Good Hope region of South Africa. In these drier areas, Khoisan hunter-gatherers and herders were dominant.

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State Formation in Southern Africa

Some southern Bantu groups may have learned how to herd cattle by absorbing Khoisan herders into their societies. From the 7th century on, cattle keeping came to be associated with the rise of chiefs. Owners of large herds were able to lend cattle to poorer people for milk and, upon the consent of the lender, for consumption or sale. In this way, cattle-owning chiefs acquired subjects, dependent upon their wealth and continued goodwill.

Chiefdoms first developed into fairly large states in the cattle-raising regions of eastern Botswana. Archaeological evidence has shown that on several flat-topped hills in eastern Botswana there were large settlements of wealthy people surrounding enclosures that would have held several hundred cattle. In the areas surrounding each of these hills were numerous smaller hilltop settlements, not as rich in their possessions or in numbers of cattle. Scholars hypothesize that each of the larger hills was the capital of a kingdom, and the smaller hills represented subordinate chiefdoms. In the flat land between the hills lived the peasantry, probably Khoisan, who tended the cattle, hunted, and tilled the fields for their patrons. These states are collectively known as the Toutswe culture, named after Toutswemogala, one of the hills. The Toutswe people established indirect trading links with the Indian Ocean coast by way of the Limpopo River valley. The Toutswe hills were abandoned and the people dispersed in about 1300, for reasons that are not yet known. Other similar state systems were established in the Lake Ngami region of northwest Botswana.

A similar cattle-keeping culture developed on the western Zimbabwe plateau, near the modern city of Bulawayo, from about the 10th century. Here farmers terraced hillsides to retain moist soils for cultivation, and miners worked the region’s rich gold seams. This western Zimbabwean culture reached its height between 1100 and 1300 when it developed close links with Mapungubwe, in the Limpopo valley in what is now northern South Africa. Mapungubwe was a wealthy, cattle-keeping state that traded gold and ivory with the coast. After about 1250, however, the focus of trade, wealth, and political power shifted to the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe on the eastern edge of the plateau.

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Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe started as a hilltop settlement in the early 13th century. Possibly chosen for some religious significance, the location also had a number of distinct political and economic advantages. The land was fertile and well watered, and the site was strategically situated at the head of the Sabi River valley, midway between the goldfields of the western plateau and the Indian Ocean coast. With cattle forming the basis of the state’s power, its location on the edge of the plateau provided a range of upland and lowland grazing. There was a plentiful supply of timber for firewood, building, and the production of charcoal for smelting, and hunters collected ivory from the area’s abundant elephants. The volume of gold trading in Great Zimbabwe grew so large that Swahili traders built a new Indian Ocean port at Sofala, due east of Great Zimbabwe, to facilitate the trade. In exchange for gold, the Swahili traded pottery from East Asia and other luxuries to Great Zimbabwe.

At its height in the 14th century, the capital city of Great Zimbabwe housed up to 11,000 residents. The great stone walls for which Great Zimbabwe is famous were built with slabs of locally available granite carved so carefully that no mortar was required to hold them together. The Great Enclosure, built in the valley between 1300 and 1400, was constructed to enhance the prestige of the king rather than for defensive purposes. Great Zimbabwe was abandoned in about 1450, possibly due to the kingdom’s overexploitation of the environment, but its stone ruins remain to this day as a monument to this large and thriving early Shona state.

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Mutapa and Other Zimbabwean States

Great Zimbabwe was quickly followed by the rise of Mutapa, a Shona empire at the headwaters of the Mazoe River to the north. Mutapa was likely founded by migrants from Great Zimbabwe itself. In the 15th and 16th centuries it dominated the gold trade between the plateau and the Zambezi River valley, notably with Swahili trading posts at Sena and Tete. In the 16th century the Portuguese established bases at both posts in an attempt to seize control of the trade and conquer Mutapa and the plateau. Mutapa resisted Portuguese intrusion until the mid-17th century, when the empire was at last subjugated. 

On the western side of the Zimbabwean plateau, Torwa (also called Butua) was founded in the 15th century as another successor state to Great Zimbabwe. At Torwa’s capital city of Khami, masons continued to refine Great Zimbabwe’s tradition of building precise stone walls.

In the 1670s a new power arose on the plateau led by a Shona military ruler called the Changamire. His army of followers, known as the Rozwi, seized control of Torwa, drove the Portuguese from the plateau in 1693, and established the Rozwi Empire (also called Changamire).

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Dutch at the Cape

In the mid-17th century a new force appeared at the southwestern tip of the continent. The Dutch East India Company established a trading station at the Cape of Good Hope to provision their ships heading to Dutch colonies in Indonesia. Subsequent Dutch and other European settlers used firearms to seize control of the region, subjugate the Khoisan, and strip them of their cattle. These white settlers established wheat farms and vineyards in the Cape region, worked by imported slaves or Khoisan forced labor. Other settlers moved into the interior, establishing large cattle ranges and hunting lodges before moving on when resources were exhausted. By the 1770s their settlements had reached as far east as the lands of the southernmost Bantu farmers. Here they met well-established and powerful Xhosa kingdoms that could command armies sufficient to halt the settlers’ advance. Thus began a century of conflict between the Xhosa and the Cape invaders.