The Gun in Central Africa. Giacomo Macola
the rulers of Kasanje had been able to protect their middleman position. The bottleneck, however, had exploded early in the nineteenth century, as a result of the crisis of Kasanje.57 From that point onwards, the Ruund capitals on the upper Mbuji-Mayi became a key destination for both Luso-Africans from the hinterland of Luanda and Ovimbundu from the Angolan plateau.58 With the appearance of new actors on the scene, trade became less regimented, and the Mwant Yavs found it increasingly problematic to enforce such monopoly over foreign exchanges as they had enjoyed in earlier decades.59
Later, the predicament of Ruund royals was compounded by the arrival of Chokwe migrants. Beginning as elephant hunters and, later, rubber gatherers, the Chokwe moved down the Kasai Valley and settled near the Ruund heartland.60 Historically, the Ruund had been poorly disposed towards firearms. In the eighteenth century, according to Leitão, they had regarded them as a “handicap to valor.”61 One century later, guns were still scarce among the nuclear Ruund.62 This explains the ease with which musket-wielding Chokwe invaders carved out a dominant role for themselves during the internecine wars that marred the political life of the Ruund state after the death of Mwant Yav Muteb in 1873. By 1887, the year in which Carvalho visited the capital of a much enfeebled Mwant Yav Mukaz, the Ruund state was a shadow of its former self. Mudib, Mukaz’s predecessor, had been killed by his erstwhile Chokwe backers and his capital destroyed. On that occasion, Chokwe warlords had captured “more than 6,000 people”—adults, children, and, especially, women, whom they incorporated into their expanding matrilineages.63 By the late 1880s, Chokwe raiders were the real masters of the Ruund heartland and had initiated a phase of indiscriminate slaving, “leaving a virtual desert where the Lunda empire had once stood.”64 The southern members of the Lunda “Commonwealth,” too, struggled to adjust to the conditions of the frontier market economy. As will be further seen in the next chapter, the southern Lunda of the Shinde and others were preyed upon by heavily armed Luvale slavers throughout the better part of the nineteenth century.
The effects of international trade on the central Luba state were, if possible, even more pernicious. This was largely a question of timing. Since they had remained more or less unaffected by the long-distance trade until the 1870s, the Luba only experienced it in its most disruptive, late-nineteenth-century guise. From about 1870, the Ovimbundu had become the main trading partners of Garenganze, Msiri’s newly formed warlord state, the brutally extractive methods of which were then producing unprecedentedly large quantities of ivory and slaves for export. The Luba fish was hooked as a by-product of the commerce between Angola and Garenganze. Exploiting Luba internal divisions and lack of familiarity with foreign trade, Luso-Africans and Ovimbundu quickly established themselves as the dominant powerbrokers between the Lualaba and the Lomani Rivers. The civil wars that accompanied each royal succession became especially destructive, with different Luba factions drawing on the support of competing Angolan entrepreneurs. The early stages of this spiral of violence—one which would eventually result in the dissolution of the old Luba state as a cohesive territorial and political entity—were witnessed by Cameron in the mid-1870s. At the time of Cameron’s passage through the Luba heartland, the followers of Alvez—one of the traders with whom Mulopwe Kasongo Kalombo had allied himself with a view to defeating his many internal opponents—were given license to plunder the most vulnerable of the king’s subjects. “Any cultivated spot they at once fell on like a swarm of locusts, and, throwing down their loads, rooted up ground-nuts and sweet-potatoes, and laid waste fields of unripe corn, out of sheer wantonness.” Cameron was certain that, “had they not been armed with guns,” Alvez’s followers “would never have dared to act thus, for on entering countries where the people carried firearms these truculent ruffians became mild as sucking doves.”65
Between Political Innovation and Continuity
The interaction between the forces of global commerce and preexisting authorities forms one of the master themes of the history of the central savanna in the nineteenth century. The political effects of this increasingly close connection with the outside world, as I am presently going to argue, were profoundly ambivalent and contradictory. To be sure—as has already been noted—central African ruling elites often struggled to control the dynamics unleashed by the onset of the long-distance trade in ivory and slaves and the militarization of social relationships that it precipitated. Among the central Luba and Ruund and in most Lunda states, the erosion of royal monopolies over foreign commerce and the distribution of imported commodities led to fragmentation, increased violence, and enhanced social differentiation and levels of slave exploitation.66 Under these circumstances, the growth of international trade resulted in the weakening of long-established elites, whose dominance was now challenged by the rise of “new men,”67 often initially installed on the already contracting peripheries of the old political formations.
In a number of cases, these efforts at state-building in a period of widespread turmoil were entirely shorn of traditional legitimacy. The aforementioned Yeke state of Msiri, the latter a Sumbwa caravan leader turned empire-builder in the region lying between the collapsing Luba and Ruund states and the shrinking eastern Lunda sphere of control, is an especially clear example of the spread of warlordism in the central savanna. Better equipped to face the trials of the era of large-scale trading than were the old Luba and Ruund/Lunda aristocracies, Msiri and numerous other political opportunists—not least Lusinga, in northern Katanga, whose tragic story has recently been masterly told by Allen Roberts68—gave birth to violently entrepreneurial conquest states, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes more enduring. In these new political organizations, power rested less on religious sanction, heredity, and redistribution than on their leaders’ personal achievements, successful involvement in commerce, and preparedness to resort to sheer violence to achieve their aims. The diffusion of firearms, and their recasting into primary means of military and economic domination, were often central to these processes of political realignment, which also drew part of their impetus from the related emergence of semiprofessional and cosmopolitan standing armies of brutalized young men.69
Although these developments were especially sudden in the interior of central Africa in this era of long-distance trade, they were by no means unique to it. The coastal societies of Angola, large-scale exporters of slaves from a very early period, had already witnessed the overthrow of established authorities and the rise of heavily militarized polities from the seventeenth century onwards.70 Northeastern Tanzania offers a more proximate example. There, control of rain medicine and kinship relations, and the redistribution of internal tribute in livestock and labor, were the most important weapons in the political arsenal of the Kilindi rulers of Shambaa. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, these ways of relating rulers to people were largely superseded by a new political culture. Revolving around Semboja, chief of Mazinde, closer to long-distance routes than Shambaai, the mountain heartland of the kingdom, such culture drew on trading connections and the slave-gun cycle to pose an ultimately unanswerable challenge to old Kilindi politics. A drawn-out civil war and a “complete victory for the forces of decentralization” were the end result. In Shambaa political thought, kingly power had always been “ambivalent. It could be used to bring life or to bring death.” In the Pangani Valley in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, death became dominant, as the monarchical order ceased to be the guarantee of fertility, unity, and stability. Political leaders began to systematically prey upon their subjects, who were often left with no choice but to seek some degree of protection by joining the ranks of the slave raiders and warlords themselves.71
Still, apocalyptic descriptions of the central savanna on the eve of the European conquest should be rejected.72 Revolutionary transformation was not on the cards everywhere, and the continuities in political tradition should not be underestimated. After all, as Ian Phimister has pointed out with reference to late nineteenth-century Zimbabwe, merchant capital sometimes “[modifies] existing social relations without decisively altering them.”73 Centrifugal forces and/or the onslaught of the new entrepreneurs of violence were sometimes effectively resisted. When this was the case, preexisting forms of authority and governance could actually be strengthened by participation in long-distance trading networks. The Bemba and, especially, the Lozi polities exemplify such processes. Unlike the neighboring Tabwa and eastern Lunda, the Bemba