Colonising society in eastern and southern Africa

P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 6 Colonising society in eastern and southern Africa this chapter considers the regions east and south of the equatorial forest during the thousand years between the end of the early iron age and the outside world’s first extensive penetration in the eighteenth century. The central themes were the same as in western Africa: colonisation of land, control over nature, expansion of populations, and consolidation of societies. But the circumstances were different. Because neither Muslims nor Europeans commonly penetrated beyond the coast, fewwritten sources for this region exist to compare with Islamic and early European accounts of West Africa, while oral traditions seldom extend back reliably beyond three centuries. Much therefore remains uncertain, although archaeological research indicates the wealth of knowledge awaiting recovery. Moreover, whereas West Africa’s lateral climatic belts tended to separate pastoralists from cultivators, the two were interspersed in eastern and southern Africa, where faulting and volcanic action had left dra- matic local variations of height, rainfall, and environment. The grasslands in which mankind had evolved now supported cattle as the chief form of human wealth. Settlements were dispersed and often mobile, with few urban centres to rival Jenne or Ife. Interaction between pastoralists and cultivators created many of the region’s first states, although others grew up in the few areas with exten- sive trade. Pastoral values shaped social organisation, culture, and ideology. Notonly men but their herds were engaged in a long and painful colonisation of the land. southern africa By about ad 400, early iron age cultivators speaking Bantu languages occupied much of eastern and southern Africa, although sparsely and unevenly. Archae- ological evidence shows that they usually preferred well-watered areas – forest margins, valleys, riversides, lakeshores, and coastal plains – suggesting that they relied chiefly on yams, sorghum, fishing, hunting, and small livestock rather than millet or many cattle. In East Africa their remains have been found espe- cially around Lake Victoria (where forest clearance was already well advanced), on the foothills of high mountains like Mount Kenya, and close to the coast, but not in the grasslands of western and northernUganda, the Rift Valley, or western 100 P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 101 Tanzania, which were either uninhabited or occupied by earlier populations. Further south, in modern Central Africa, Bantu-speakers were quite widely dispersed alongside Khoisan forager-hunters and had evolved regional pottery styles, but here too their preferred settlements, as in the Zambezi Valley above the Victoria Falls, were ‘clusters of small thatched wattle-and-daub huts set in aclearing hewn out of the wooded margins of a dambo [moist depression]’. 1 Watercourses and shorelines also attracted the first Bantu-speaking settlers in modern South Africa, who generally occupied the wooded lowveld close to the coast, eschewing the treeless grasslands of the inland highveld. Southern Africa provides the best evidence of subsequent evolution through the growth of pastoralism and its role, together with trade, in fostering large- scale polities. By ad 500 Bantu-speaking groups from the coastal lowveld were settling in valleys running up into the highveld, perhaps using the uplands for grazing. By that date, people in the Soutpansberg of northern Transvaal were building homesteads of circular huts around central cattle pens in which they dug storage pits and graves, a settlement layout that became as distinctive in much of southern Africa as the straight streets and rectangular huts that characterised western equatorial villages. Further west, on the eastern pastoral fringe of the Kalahari in modern Botswana, rainfall in the mid first millennium ad was substantially higher than it is today and supported a strongly pastoral culture, known as the Toutswe tradition, which practised the same settlement pattern and differentiated about ad 1000 into a hierarchy of larger and smaller settlements, implying the existence of political authorities and demonstrating the importance of cattle as stores of wealth and means of stratification. The Toutswe tradition survived until at least the thirteenth century, when drought and overgrazing may have depopulated the region. In modern Natal, by contrast, early iron age pottery was supplanted quite radically between the ninth and eleventh centuries by a new ceramic style and the smaller settlement sites generally associated with pastoralism in this wetter environ- ment. Whether this discontinuity was due to immigration or a local expansion of pastoralism is uncertain, but the new pattern was still found among the Nguni-speaking peoples of the region when Europeans first described them. To the west of the Nguni-speakers, across the Drakensberg Mountains, the closely related Sotho-Tswana peoples also entered the archaeological record together with more extensive cattle-keeping. Their origin is contentious, but during the twelfth century the Moloko pottery later associated with them replaced earlier wares at sites in the northern and eastern Transvaal. From this base, they colonised the highveld of the southern Transvaal and, from the fifteenth century, the Orange Free State, whose treeless, drought-prone grasslands had deterred cultivators as much as they attracted pastoralists. The chief building material here had to be stone; remains show settlements of up to fifteen hundred people composed of interlocking circles of huts clustered P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 102 africans: the history of a continent 7.Colonising society in eastern and southern Africa. P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 103 around cattle pens and linked into communities by dry-stone walls. The mul- tiplication of these settlements during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests population growth in favoured areas, from which Sotho and Tswana groups dispersed in all directions, using their cattle wealth to assimilate earlier peoples and form the small chiefdoms that became the action groups of the highveld’s later history. Hereditary chieftainship, the homestead as social unit, and the ideological predominance of cattle became shared cultural character- istics of South Africa’s Bantu-speaking peoples, who had few of the stateless societies so common elsewhere in the continent. Yet until the eighteenth cen- tury chiefdoms were small, partly because ample land enabled the ambitious or discontented to establish new micro-units and partly because inheritance systems encouraged fissiparation by giving almost equal status to the first son of a chief’s first wife and that of his great wife (married after his accession). No settlement hierarchy of the Toutswe kind, suggesting a larger political system, is visible on the southern highveld until the nineteenth century. Similarly, among the Xhosa, the most southerly Nguni-speaking group, all chiefs belonged to the Tshawe royal family – allegiance to them defined Xhosa identity – but chief- doms multiplied in each generation as sons settled unoccupied river valleys, retaining only loose allegiance to the senior line. If a Xhosa ruler displeased his subjects, so their first missionary reported, they gradually emigrated until he amended. Northofthe Limpopo, many (but not all) early iron age pottery traditions were supplanted during the centuries around ad 1000 by new styles. Some – especially the Luangwa style, which became predominant in the north, centre, and east of modern Zambia and the north and centre of Malawi – probably signify migration eastwards from the Katanga area of Congo and the Copper- belt of Zambia. Others, notably Kalomo and later wares on the Batoka Plateau of southern Zambia, may indicate expansion by local cattle herders, although this is disputed. The most complex changes took place in modern Zimbabwe, the plateau between the Limpopo and Zambezi Valleys, where a higher degree of political organisation developed. Cultivators had inhabited this region since about ad 200.Some probably spoke languages ancestral to those of the Shona peoples now numerically dominant there. Late seventh-century plateau sites contain beads imported from the Indian Ocean coast. Two centuries later, Schroda, in the Shashi-Limpopo basin south of the plateau, reveals the first large quantities of imported beads found in Central Africa, along with scraps of ivory that suggest that this material was the source of its prosperity. Yet the region’s chief nonagricultural wealth was a gold vein running along the plateau’s highest ridge from southwest to northeast. Four goldworking sites show signs of exploitation at the end of the first millennium ad.Theearli- est reference to gold reaching the coast is al-Masudi’s account of ad 916.Less than a century later, at a site known as Leopard’s Kopje (Nthabazingwe) in the P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 104 africans: the history of a continent sweet-grass country near modern Bulawayo that attracted successive pastoral- ists, there is evidence of greatly increased cattle herds and a new pottery style. These Leopard’s Kopje people probably spoke a southern variant of the Shona language. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, they spread widely across the Zimbabwe plateau. 2 Their expansion left much of previous local cultures intact. Hoes and grain-bins scarcely changed. But a new political pattern did result, because the cattle-keepers could accumulate followers and power not only by deploying livestock but by exploiting international trade in gold. The effects were first seen on the southern bank of the Limpopo at Mapun- gubwe. Here, early in the eleventh century, people of Leopard’s Kopje culture initially established a settlement around a central cattle pen. It was also an important trading centre, with manyivory objects exchangedfor imported glass beads, and as it grew the cattle herds were shifted away from the settlement, hav- ing presumably become too large to maintain within it. Then, around ad 1220, the court moved from the plain to the top of a sandstone hill, where a distinct elite culture evolved, with imposing stone walls to designate important areas, spindle-whorls to indicate the first cloth production in the interior of Central Africa, gold-plated grave-goods to accompany dead notables, and a hierarchy of surrounding settlements to suggest a political state no longer subject to the repeated segmentation that had restricted the scale of previous chiefdoms. Rather, when Mapungubwe was abandoned in the late thirteenth century, regional power shifted north of the Limpopo to Great Zimbabwe, where today stand the most majestic remains of the African iron age. Its stone buildings – a hilltop palace, the high-walled Great Enclosure below, and an adjoining net- work of low-walled house sites – were only the core of a small city of less permanent structures, the most impressive of some 150 sites still visible on the plateau, mostly spaced along its southeastern edge with access to the var- ied environments and all-year grazing of high-, middle-, and lowveld. Great Zimbabwe was in an especially well-watered area, admirably located for pas- toralism. In the twelfth century, it was probably the capital of a local dynasty, one of the hundreds of microstates on the plateau that formed the building- blocks of ‘empires’, much like the kafu of Mali. 3 The building of its granite walls began during the later thirteenth century, coinciding with the first traces of the gold produced by miners, often women and children, who at great risk sank shafts down to thirty metres deep, exporting at the peak perhaps one thousand kilogrammes of gold a year, or about as much as Europeans later took from the Akan goldfields of West Africa in good years. Great Zimbabwe lay far from the gold seams but apparently controlled the gold trade along the Save Valley to Sofala, enabling the chiefdom to outstrip rivals and become the centre of an extensive culture. Its peak was probably in the early fourteenth century and coincided with Kilwa’s dominance of the Sofala coast. A Kilwa coin of c. 1320– 33 has been found at Great Zimbabwe, along with many imported Chinese, P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 105 Persian, and Islamic wares of the period. Trade was probably in African hands, for there is no evidence of a foreign merchant community. Like most African capitals, Great Zimbabwe probably had religious functions: spirit mediumship, initiation, and worship of the Shona high god Mwari have all been suggested with varying degrees of probability. Yet agriculture, pastoralism, and trade were the core of the city’s economy; its decline during the fifteenth century was probably caused in part by overexploitation of the local environment (which is still denuded today) but chiefly by a reorientation of the gold trade north- wards into the Zambezi Valley below the northern plateau rim. This area’s prosperity is displayed by late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century burials at Ingombe Ilede, near the Zambezi-Kafue confluence, whose wealth in gold, locally produced copper ingots, spindle-whorls, and imported shells and beads suggests extensive trade with the coast, where during the fifteenth century dis- sident merchants from Kilwa created a rival port at Angoche to tap the Zambezi Valley commerce. Great Zimbabwe’s inheritance was divided. In the south, power passed west- wards to the Torwa rulers of Butua, whose capital at Khami was built in the finest Great Zimbabwe style. In the north, however, the expanding trade of the Zambezi bred the kingdom of Munhumutapa, founded in the fifteenth cen- tury on the northern plateau rim, ostensibly by an army from Great Zimbabwe but more probably by hunters, herdsmen, and adventurers who were part of a larger population drift northwards and who gradually extended their alliances with local chiefdoms and Muslim traders into a kingdom whose influence reached the sea. There it interacted with the Portuguese who reached the East African coast around the Cape in 1498 and seven years later looted both Kilwa and Mombasa to the advantage of their fortress at Sofala, designed to capture the gold trade. A Portuguese traveller reached the Munhumutapa’s court in c. 1511 and Portuguese established an inland base on the Zambezi at Sena in 1531.Relations soured in 1561,when the missionary Gonc¸alo da Silveira briefly converted a young Munhumutapa but was killed in a reaction by traditional- ists and Muslim traders. A Portuguese expedition, chiefly designed to seize the gold mines, slaughtered Muslim traders but was prevented from scaling the plateau, instead creating concentrations of armed slaves on the south bank of the Zambezi. Adventurers used these chikunda to exploit trade and exact tribute from the chiefdoms of the valley and its fringes, creating private domains that the Portuguese Crown recognised from 1629 as prazos. These estates, exploita- tive, paternalistic, and increasingly African in character, dominated the valley until the nineteenth century. Their private armies destabilised the Munhumu- tapa’s kingdom during the 1620s, enabling the Portuguese to impose a client dynasty, which remained largely under their control for sixty years. Yet the Por- tuguese position in eastern Africa weakened during the seventeenth century. Between 1693 and 1695, they were driven from the plateau by the Changamire, P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 106 africans: the history of a continent aMunhumutapa vassal whose power appears to have rested on an army of brutalised young men modelled on the chikunda. With this force he also con- quered the Torwa state, set up a Rozvi (‘Destroyers’) kingdom that exercised a loose overlordship in the southwest until the nineteenth century, established asubordinate dynasty among the Venda people south of the Limpopo, and asserted paramountcy over Manyika and its gold workings. Gravely weakened, the Munhumutapa’s kingdom moved its capital down into the Zambezi Valley, where it survived until the twentieth century. central africa Northofthe Zambezi, in the open woodlands of Central Africa, social and political evolution followed a different path because tsetse infestation made pastoralism a less dynamic force than population growth, cultural interaction, and trade. The best record of continuous development from the early iron age here comes from a vast graveyard at Sanga in the Upemba Depression in the southeastern Congo, one of several flood basins that were the centres of cultural evolution in Central Africa. By the sixth century ad,arelatively sparse popu- lation of fishermen occupied the lakeshore at Sanga, working iron, exploiting palm oil, probably speaking a Bantu language ancestral to that of the modern Luba people, but virtually bereft of trade beyond their neighbourhood. The community’s subsequent evolution probably rested on dried fish traded over widening areas of the protein-starved savanna. Between the eighth and tenth centuries, some Sanga graves contained ceremonial copper axes of a kind sig- nifying political authority in the region for the next thousand years. Hierarchy was emerging and the population had much increased, although the economy probably still rested more on fishing and hunting than on agriculture, while cattle were absent. Cowrie shells first appeared in tenth-century graves, imply- ing trading contact (probably indirect) with the East African coast. During the next four centuries grave-goods grew richer, suggesting professional craftsmen, and were especially elaborate in elite graves, notably those of women in what was probably a matrilineal society. A grave of perhaps the fourteenth century contained a large copper cross of a kind found widely in Central Africa at that time. It may have been a prestige object used in bridewealth. During the next two centuries smaller copper crosses of standardised sizes became common and were almost certainly currency. During the eighteenth century, Sanga was probably incorporated into a Luba empire based in the plains to the north. A nuclear Luba kingdom had cer- tainly emerged by 1600 and probably some centuries earlier. As so often, legend attributed it to the arrival of a handsome hunter, Kalala Ilunga, who gained authority over local chiefdoms and created the institutions of a larger king- dom. The real process probably took place gradually over several generations P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 107 and involved control of regional trade, the collection and redistribution of trib- ute, extensive intermarriage between kings and provincial families, a network of initiation and other societies, and the diffusion of prestigious regalia and an ideology stressing descent as the qualification for chieftainship. During the eighteenth century, the kingdom expanded into an empire stretching from the Lubilashi in the west to Lake Tanganyika in the east. Its influence and prestige extended even more widely, for chiefs claiming Luba origin established them- selves east of the lake in Ufipa, while others had settled further southwards during the seventeenth century to create a confederacy among the Bemba peo- ple in the sparsely populated woodlands of northeastern Zambia. Moreover, Luba culture had already shaped two major political systems. One was the cluster of Maravi states to the west and south of Lake Nyasa. Immigrants from the broad Katanga region had probably joined the population here during the early second millennium, perhaps attracted by the lakeshore’s reliable rainfall. They were followed, perhaps around 1400,byPhiri clansmen claiming Luba origin, a claim supported by their word for chief (mulopwe) and their rituals. The Phiri intermarried with indigenous leaders, acknowledged their control of land, gave them important political functions, but successfully asserted their own suzerainty. Their political history is difficult to reconstruct from surviving traditions and Portuguese documents, but it centred on three chieftainships with hereditary titles. Kalonga, based southwest of Lake Nyasa, claimed seniority but could enforce it only sporadically. Lundu,in the Shire Val- ley south of the lake, profited from ivory trade with the coast and attempted to assert supremacy in the late sixteenth century, when its Zimba warbands twice defeated the Portuguese and conquered much of Makua country in Mozam- bique. Undi, west of the lake, became the most powerful during the eighteenth century through trade in ivory with the Portuguese on the Zambezi. The other major state claiming Luba origin was the Lunda kingdom, across the Lubilashi to the west, where rulers traced descent to Chibinda (The Hunter) Ilunga, nephew of the legendary Luba founder. In reality, the nucleus of the Lunda state among savanna peoples south of the Congo forest was probably created around 1600 by local processes, but with some Luba borrowings. 4 The people were matrilineal, but chiefs in the new state were patrilineal in the man- ner of Luba chiefs and were known as mulopwe, although by the late seventeenth century the king had acquired the distinctive title mwant yav. Most important, in this area of sparse population where the danger of political fragmenta- tion was even greater than among the Maravi, the Lunda state adopted two brilliant devices, positional succession and perpetual kinship, by which each new incumbent of an office inherited his predecessor’s total social personality, including all his kinship relations, so that if a king’s son created a chiefdom it remained alwaysthereafterin afilial relationtothe kingship,however distant the blood relationship between current holders of the two offices. By separating the P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 108 africans: the history of a continent political from the social system while retaining family relationships as models of political behaviour, Lunda could exert a loose, tribute-exacting suzerainty over peoples of broadly similar culture in a huge area of Central Africa, ‘a chain of political islands in a sea of woodlands’. Westward expansion of Lunda influence in the eighteenth century affected Pende and Yaka political systems. Eastward emigration in the seventeenth century probably created the Bulozi kingdom from existing small chiefdoms in the Zambezi floodplain, a sophis- ticated political system in a complex environment of man-made settlement mounds, drainage channels, flood-irrigated agriculture, and redistribution of specialised regional products. Further north, during the 1740s, a Lunda general, the Kazembe, conquered and settled among the Bemba-speaking people of the fertile Luapula Valley, retaining his formal allegiance to the distant mwant yav and the Lunda aristocrats’ conviction that their speciality was to rule while their subjects fished or cultivated. Yet even here, where the elevated Luba- Lunda notion of chieftainship was sternly enforced, rulers were constrained by human mobility in a largely empty land, as David Livingstone was to write of the incumbent Kazembe in 1867: When he usurped power five years ago, his country was densely peopled; but he was so severe in his punishments – cropping the ears, lopping off the hands, and other mutilations, selling the children for very slight offences, that his subjects gradually dispersed themselvesin the neighbouring countries beyond his power. This is the common mode by which tyranny is cured in parts like these, where fugitives are never returned. The present Casembe is very poor. 5 east africa In the East African savanna, the evolution from early iron age cultures to more complex societies showed much continuity. In part it was a process of Bantu-speaking cultivators expanding their numbers and developing the skills needed to colonise new environments and absorb their scattered populations. Early in the second millennium, for example, ancestors of the modern Sukuma and Nyamwezi, who specialised in dryland grain agriculture, settled western and central Tanzania, while at the same time the adoption of the banana (an Asian plant) enabled other cultivators to colonise upwards into the forests of mountain outcrops like Kilimanjaro. But continuity was due also to the grad- ual drift southwards into East Africa of Nilotic-speaking peoples from their homelands in southern Sudan. Southern Nilotic pastoralists (ancestral to the modern Kalenjin of Kenya) had probably arrived during the first millennium bc. Eastern Nilotic pastoralists expanded slowly behind them, perhaps reaching as far south as Kilimanjaro by the early second millennium ad, although their most powerful group, the Maasai, came to dominate the Rift Valley only during P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 109 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western Nilotes, by contrast, were cultivators as well as pastoralists when their expansion from southern Sudan began early in the second millennium ad,onegroup moving northwards to create the Shilluk kingdom south of Khartoum while the bulk expanded south- wards into the Great Lakes region, where their most numerous descendants, the Luo, occupied the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. Many peoples of the East African savanna remained stateless. Among the Southern Cushitic peoples who had first brought food production to the Rift Valley and its environs, the largest surviving agricultural group, the Iraqw of north-central Tanzania,spurned political leadership despite centuries of Nilotic aggression. The original Bantu word for a chief dropped out of many Eastern Bantu languages. Isolated agricultural peoples, especially in highland areas, could resolve their disputes by shared custom, as among those who settled where the fig tree (mukuyu)grew and became known as the Kikuyu of modern Kenya. Pastoralists, too, generally had no political chiefs, acknowledging only the authority of war-leaders, hereditary ritual experts, or age-set spokesmen. Political authority in East African savanna regions generally evolved in one of two ways. In the sparsely populated woodlands of modern Tanzania, many small chiefs were descendants of pioneer colonists and took their title, ntemi, from a word meaning ‘to clear by cutting’. Like Xhosa chiefdoms, their small units divided repeatedly as unsuccessful princes broke away to clear another tract of bush. Alternatively, tradition might picture the chief as descended from astranger, typically a hunter or herdsman, whose qualifications to rule were neutrality in local disputes and the possession of resources to attract follow- ers. Many such traditions personalise interaction among peoples of different cultures who lacked shared custom and needed political authority to resolve disputes. In the Shambaa country, a mountain block rising from the plains of northeastern Tanzania, long-established, Bantu-speaking Shambaa cultivators were threatened during the early eighteenth century by immigrant pastoralists, possibly Cushitic refugees from Maasai expansion, whose scale of organisa- tion was wider than that of small Shambaa chiefdoms. Tradition tells that the organisation of a kingdom embodying and defending Shambaa culture against this threat was the work of Mbegha, an immigrant hunter who by prowess and political alliances with local chiefs convinced the Shambaa to make him their king. The history of the Western Nilotes reveals a similar pattern, for whereas those who settled in an unoccupied area of Uganda as the Padhola had no political authorities, the Kenya Luo, who had to counter earlier Bantu and Nilotic populations, created several small chiefdoms. Possession of cattle was especially advantageous in this situation, for no other scarce, storeable, and reproducible form of wealth existed by which to gain political clients or to acquire wives without exchanging kinswomen. Cattle gave their owners a crucial demographic advantage. [...]... 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 111 inland Kabakas drew booty and tribute from conquered provinces and appointed agents to govern them, thereby creating appointive officers to rival hereditary clan heads At the same time the settlement of Ganda clansmen in conquered lands broke up the clans’ territorial solidarity and created an increasingly individualised society Older political... respect for femininity also survived in the culture of the Luba and Lunda, both probably originally matrilineal Patriarchal, cattle-owning societies suffered acute generational tension Initiation rites through which elders dominated the young and prepared them for adult suffering by demanding unflinching endurance of pain were especially prominent among pastoralists So was the custom, shown by linguistic... Cape and the San forager-hunters of the mountains and deserts enclosing it to the north and east Place-names suggest that in the first millennium ad Khoikhoi may also have ranged to the southeastern coast in modern Transkei, while San hunted throughout southern Africa, but P1: RNK 0521864381 c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 127 expanding... region supplanted recently arrived Luba rulers in Ufipa, east of Lake Tanganyika Eastern Africa s two main streams of political innovation had met food production and the family The settlement of the land was an even more dominant historical theme in eastern and southern Africa than in the west It had begun later, mainly with the Bantu expansion, and it took place in an environment where differences of height... creation The society was entirely male and gave solidarity to men living in their wives’ villages in this matrilineal and uxorilocal society It also controlled the young and defended village interests against political rulers Similar relationships with nature were also central to art Woodcarvings earlier than the eighteenth century do not survive, but the rock art of southern and eastern Africa illustrates... ‘What are you eating?’ was the standard Tswana greeting But even those in high-rainfall areas lived in fear of dearth Buganda had a goddess of drought, Nagawonyi, and both Rwanda and Burundi had long famine histories Elaborate precautions were taken to minimise risk: exploitation of multiple environments, diversified and drought-resistant crops, interplanting, granaries, livestock as a famine reserve, the... varieties ‘Even in the interior of the country they know of inoculation’, it was reported from Kilwa in 1776:15 study of the techniques suggests that they were learned from Arabs in East Africa and from Portuguese in Southern Africa, although the methods used may have been taken from indigenous medicine Eastern Bantu languages, like those of their western cousins, had a common word for cupping as a medical... ancient in southern Africa, for male figures outnumber females by at least five to one in San rock-paintings and male hunting almost excludes female foraging as a subject, although later anthropological studies have suggested greater equality The cultural importance of cattle strengthened P1: RNK 0521864381 c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa. .. quick-growing kidney beans and maize made possible the demographic growth underlying the expansion and consolidation of kingdoms.8 Intensive cultivators colonised land only gradually, clearing upwards into the forests or down towards the plains By contrast, cultivators and pastoralists in the dry woodlands and grasslands, although probably less numerous, were P1: RNK 0521864381 c06 CUNY780B-African 114 978 0... although the institution P1: RNK 0521864381 c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in eastern and southern Africa 121 also contained much paternalism East Africa had probably exported slaves since at least the tenth century, mostly to the Persian Gulf and India, perhaps on the scale of about a thousand a year Most became concubines, servants, or soldiers; in the fifteenth . continent 7 .Colonising society in eastern and southern Africa. P1: RNK 0521864381c06 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:50 Colonisation in. two were interspersed in eastern and southern Africa, where faulting and volcanic action had left dra- matic local variations of height, rainfall, and environment.