Africa

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Central Africa to the 1870s

For centuries, the trade in captives had dominated the commercial activity of Central Africa. North of the densely forested Congo River Basin the Bornu sultanate declined by the 18th century, and its place was taken by the sultanates of Wadai and Darfūr to the east. These states conducted slave raids through what is now southern Chad and the Central African Republic and transported captives eastward through Kordofan to southern Sudan and the Nile River Valley. South of the Congo River Basin the Kazembe Empire had grown to eclipse the former Luba and Lunda empires of the region and was a powerful trading state. Meanwhile, the histories of the forest peoples of the Congo River Basin are some of the least known in Africa beyond their riverine trade contacts with peoples and states to the north, south, and west. However, these peoples became more and more threatened as Swahili slave raiders penetrated ever farther into the forest.

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Natural Resources and Trade

Besides captives, 19th-century European and Swahili traders also sought to tap into Central Africa’s vast supplies of raw materials, notably ivory. In response to the demand for ivory, some Central African peoples became professional elephant hunters. The Chokwe hunted elephants across the southern fringes of the forest, supplying ivory to Portuguese traders in Angola. Similarly, north of the Congo River, the Fang expanded from southern Cameroon into the forest of Gabon to supply ivory to European traders at the coast.

Other raw materials exported to the western coast included copper, palm kernels (the source of palm oil), cotton, coffee, and raw latex rubber. Africans collected these raw materials and traded them to Europeans in exchange for firearms, cloth, and other manufactured imports. Faced with competition from plentiful European manufactured goods, indigenous African industry—such as the manufacturing of iron tools, raffia cloth, and bark cloth—went into terminal decline in the 19th century. This economic pattern—Africa’s dependent role as an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods—persists in much of Africa to this day.

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Trading States of the Congo River Basin

In the Luapula River valley, on the southeastern fringes of the Congo River Basin, the Kazembe Empire entered the 19th century as the driving force behind a transcontinental trading network. A Lunda state, Kazembe controlled the trade in copper, which was mined in the Copperbelt region of what is now Zambia and southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and cast into ingots for use as currency. Besides copper, Kazembe also exported ivory, salt, and captives. The latter were sent mostly eastwards to meet the rising demand for slaves on the East African coast.

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By mid-19th century the demand for ivory and slaves on the East African coast was so great that coastal Swahili, Nyamwezi, and Arab or mixed-race traders began exploring west of Lake Tanganyika, penetrating the Central African interior. Leading their own trading caravans of hunters, raiders, and porters, and heavily armed with guns, they sought out new sources of ivory and slaves. In the 1850s a Nyamwezi trader named Msiri set up his own raiding and trading state west of the Luapula River in defiance of Kazembe (which at the time was suffering a civil war). This state, known as Yeke, took control of the Copperbelt and with it the western Lunda trading network.

In the 1860s Hamed bin Muhammed (also known as Tippu Tip), a man of mixed coastal and Nyamwezi ancestry, established similar raiding and trading bases on the Lualaba River (the upper Congo River), west of Lake Tanganyika. Tippu Tip considered his “kingdom” an outpost of the sultanate of Zanzibar, by then Africa’s largest market for ivory and slaves. The activities of traders such as Tippu Tip and Msiri brought the full horrors of the slave trade to the remotest forest regions of the Congo River Basin, which had previously been little affected by the trade.

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Lozi Kingdom

By the 19th century the Lozi Kingdom grew to dominate the savanna woodland region of the upper Zambezi River valley in what is now western Zambia. Lozi was a complex, centralized state. Its king delegated regional authority to aristocratic bureaucrats, who directed the seasonal cultivation of the Zambezi floodplains. In 1840 Lozi was overrun by Kololo raiders from what is now South Africa, but in the 1860s the Lozi dynasty and aristocracy were restored. In the second half of the 19th century, ivory hunting and cattle raiding accompanied an expanding Lozi state.

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Southern Africa to the 1870s

In the 18th century Sotho and Tswana states emerged on the grasslands south of the Limpopo River. As was the case with the earlier Toutswe states of eastern Botswana, cattle were an important source of power and wealth, and conflict between peoples over cattle ownership was a regular feature of 18th-century life. Across much of southern Africa population was still relatively sparse. In this setting, political change was fluid and ongoing: Dynastic clashes and disputes over cattle often led to the breakup of states and the establishment of new ones.

In the Cape of Good Hope region, the spread of Dutch-speaking settlers known as Boers (ancestors of South Africa’s modern Afrikaners) had largely been halted in the east by effective resistance from Xhosa herders and farmers who were themselves eager to expand their chiefdoms westward. The strategic position of the Cape to world sea trade, however, was to draw it into inter-European conflicts. The British seized the Cape from the Dutch permanently in 1806 (after having first occupied it from 1795 to 1803), adding a new dimension to European influence in South Africa.