In the six years that Livingstone remained working with the Tswana tribes of what was to become known as Bechuanaland, he gained one single convert: the Kwena chief Sechele. But it hardly counted as a success. When Sechele announced his intention to become a Christian and forsake all but one of his wives, the reaction of his own people was overwhelmingly hostile, as Livingstone recorded in his diary:
Great commotion in the town. All seemed to be in perplexity. Complete cessation of work. Women all remained at home, although on every other lawful day they are seen going to the gardens in crowds. The men seemed downcast and dismayed. A large meeting in the khotla [meeting place]. Many spoke fiercely, so much so as to surprise the chief himself. Next morning he resolved to call the people together generally to explain his conduct, and say if they wished to kill him to do so immediately.
A few months later, Sechele’s role as a Christian lapsed.
Like other missionaries working in Bechuanaland, Livingstone was caught up in the conflagration of Boer raids coming from the Transvaal. He was outraged at evidence that Transvaal Boers were seizing hundreds of children to serve as ‘apprentices’ and stirring up antagonisms among rival Tswana tribes in order to benefit from the ensuing mayhem. Several missionaries, including Livingstone, responded by supplying the Tswana with guns. In February 1846, Livingstone wrote to Robert Moffat in Kuruman telling him that Sechele ‘is greatly in love with your rifles’. When the Transvaal Boers publicly accused Livingstone of gun-running, he denied it. The culmination of the feud came in 1852, when Transvaal Boers attacked Sechele’s kraals, killed thirty-six tribesmen, abducted two hundred women and children, stole three thousand cattle and destroyed Livingstone’s house in Kolobeng, along with his medical equipment and library. The purpose of the raid was to punish Sechele for refusing Boer demands to stop British traders and hunters from passing through Kolobeng to the north, circumventing their own territory.
Livingstone was away at the time. But as a result of his experiences with the Kwena, he developed an abiding dislike of the Boers. In his writings, he stoked up anti-Boer sentiment, referring to them as ‘white thieves’ and complaining of their mendacity, greed and stinginess, thus adding to the mutual hatred between British missionaries and Boers. And he repeatedly called on Britain to prevent the Boers from closing the ‘missionaries’ road’ into the heartland of Africa.
Although Livingstone’s career as a missionary in Africa was largely a failure, his subsequent explorations of the interior made a significant impact abroad. In 1851, travelling once again with William Oswell, he reached the Upper Zambezi near the village of Sesheke, and became obsessed with the idea that the river could be used as a highway to bring commerce, Christianity and civilisation to the benighted population. Between 1852 and 1856, accompanied by a team of porters, he covered some 2,500 miles, suffering numerous bouts of fever, often short of food and close to collapse, travelling first from the Upper Zambezi to the Portuguese port of Luanda on the Atlantic coast, then returning eastwards and following the Zambezi to Quelimane on the Indian Ocean coast. Along the way he passed by the mile-wide falls that local inhabitants call Mosioatunya – ‘the smoke that thunders’ – which he named the Victoria Falls, after his queen. Visiting London after his epic journey, he described parts of the Zambezi hinterland, such as the Batoka plateau, as ideal for colonisation; it could be reached, he said, by steamers sailing up the river from the coast. Britain accorded him a hero’s welcome.
Basking in the acclaim, Livingstone persuaded the British government to appoint him as leader of an official expedition to ascertain that the Zambezi was navigable. Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition lasted for six years, from 1858 to 1864, and was marked by one disaster after another. The river delta and the Lower Zambezi were a maze of shifting sandbanks and mudflats and shallow waters, infested by malarial mosquitoes. Their steamer, the Ma-Robert, frequently ran aground and had to be hauled afloat by hand. Livingstone’s team was soon afflicted by fever and by quarrels. It took six months of punishing toil for them to assemble at the Portuguese outpost of Tete, 300 miles inland. Exploring further upriver, Livingstone came across the Kebrabasa gorge, an impassable stretch of cataracts running for twenty miles, that he had missed on his previous journey downstream.
Rather than admit failure, Livingstone turned his attention to the Shire River, a tributary joining the Lower Zambezi, about a hundred miles from the coast. A Portuguese trader in Tete, who had travelled in the area, told him it was fed by a vast lake north of the Zambezi known as Nyasa. As he travelled up the Shire River, Livingstone once again encountered a stretch of rapids running for thirty miles. He nevertheless decided that, despite the rapids and the evident hostility of local inhabitants, the Shire highlands would be an ideal place for European traders, settlers and missionaries to colonise. As a result of Livingstone’s recommendations, a group of missionaries arrived on the Zambezi in 1861 intending to set up a mission station there.
The Universities Mission to Central Africa had been formed by missionary enthusiasts responding to speeches that Livingstone had made at Oxford and Cambridge in 1857, appealing for young men to dedicate themselves to a life of service in Africa. They were led by a bishop, Charles Mackenzie, a ‘muscular Christian’, who had worked as a missionary in Natal. Their early enthusiasm for the task, however, soon evaporated. The area around Magomero that Livingstone had chosen as the site for their mission station was engulfed by a chaotic mix of tribal warfare, famine and slave raids. Caught up in the fray, the bishop joined in attacks on hostile Yao villages. ‘People,’ Livingstone observed in his journal, ‘will not approve of men coming out to convert people shooting them.’ Malaria was a constant hazard. In 1862, while waiting to meet Livingstone at a rendezvous in marshlands on the Shire River, having lost all medical supplies, Bishop Mackenzie succumbed to a fatal attack of fever. Livingstone’s long-suffering wife, Mary, who dutifully arrived on the Zambezi in 1862, died within a few months. Realising that nothing more was to be gained by prolonging Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition, the British government terminated it. The Universities Mission collapsed soon afterwards. The London Times commented caustically: ‘Dr Livingstone is unquestionably a traveller of talents, enterprise and excellent constitution, but it is now plain enough that his zeal and imagination surpass his judgement.’
By 1870, southern Africa was still regarded as a troublesome region with few prospects, much as it had been for fifty years. Then in 1871, prospectors exploring a remote area of scrubland in Griqualand, just outside the Cape’s borders, discovered the world’s richest deposits of diamonds. Fifteen years later, an itinerant English digger stumbled across the rocky outcrop of a gold-bearing reef on a ridge named by Transvaal farmers as the Witwatersrand. Beneath the reef lay the richest deposits of gold ever discovered.
PART VII
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THE TUNES OF ZANZIBAR
Lying twenty miles from the mainland, Zanzibar, in the nineteenth century, became the greatest commercial centre on the coast of east Africa, a meeting place for slave traders, ivory dealers and spice merchants and a base from which European explorers could venture into the vast uncharted territories of the African interior. Its anchorage was crowded with Arab dhows and square-rigged merchantmen, Americans from Salem, Spaniards from Cuba, French slavers from the Mascarene Islands, Indiamen from Bombay. From his palace on the island, the sultan of Zanzibar, an Omani Arab, claimed authority over trade routes stretching far inland, as far as the great lakes of central Africa. ‘When they pipe in Zanzibar,’ it was said, ‘people dance on the shores of the great lakes.’ Throughout the nineteenth century, the tune that Zanzibar called was for ivory and slaves, in ever growing numbers.
Omani Arabs based in Muscat had become overlords of the Swahili coast after challenging the fading presence of the Portuguese there. In 1698, after a three-year-long siege, they captured Fort Jesus, a massive stronghold overlooking the harbour at Mombasa that the Portuguese had built in the sixteenth century. Att
empts by the Portuguese to regain control in the eighteenth century soon failed. Portugal was left with tenuous possession of islands along the coast of Mozambique and a strip of territory along the Lower Zambezi valley that Portugal referred to as Zambesia. However, Portuguese officials in the Zambezi valley exercised little authority beyond the outposts of Sena and Tete. In the vast hinterland, settler families known as prazeros – descendants of Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese hunters and traders – acted as independent warlords, running huge estates using slave labour and maintaining slave armies to exact tribute from the indigenous population. Although they kept Portuguese names and titles and continued to profess Christianity, they were barely literate, spoke in local dialects rather than Portuguese, believed in witchcraft, practised polygamy and presided over their domains in much the same manner as African chiefs. When the Portuguese authorities attempted to curb their power, they were beaten back and defeated.
On the Swahili coast, the end of Portugal’s involvement in the region enabled Omani Arabs to re-establish a purely Muslim trading system linking coastal towns in east Africa with the lands of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and north-western India. The main trade, as it had always been, was in slaves and ivory. The volume of traffic in slaves taken to northern-bound destinations, according to modern estimates, was relatively modest. In the seventeenth century, it amounted to about 1,000 a year, or 100,000 in all. In the eighteenth century, the numbers reached about 4,000 a year, with an estimated total of 400,000. The main destination for ivory exports was India. Ivory was commonly used in India to make marriage bangles, which formed an integral part of Hindu and Muslim wedding ceremonies. On the death of either marriage partner, they had to be destroyed. As India no longer produced enough local ivory to meet its own requirements, African supplies were needed to fill the gap. African ivory, moreover, was softer and easier to work than Indian ivory. India’s elite far preferred African ivory for luxury items to Indian ivory which was comparatively brittle and tended to discolour.
The scope for trade, however, was confined mainly to a narrow coastal strip. Beyond the coast lay a barrier of arid and inhospitable thorn scrub known in KiSwahili as the nyika – the wilderness – thinly populated by herdsmen and hunters who sought to ward off intruders. Only a trickle of trade reached Swahili ports from the African interior.
Then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the pattern of trade began to change. Needing slave labour for their sugar plantations in the Indian Ocean islands of Île de France (Mauritius) and Île Bourbon (Réunion), French traders initially relied on a supply from Madagascar, 800 miles to the east, but next turned their attention to the east coast of Africa. The Portuguese trading post on Mozambique Island became an early point of contact. Responding to increased demand on the coast, Yao traders in the Lake Nyasa area expanded their regional trading network to supply both slaves and ivory.
The French also gained a foothold at the ancient Swahili city-state of Kilwa. In 1776, a French slave trader, Jean-Vincent Morice, persuaded Kilwa’s ruler, Sultan Hasan, to sign a treaty agreeing to provide him not only with a regular supply of slaves but a former palace to use as a base for his commercial activities. The treaty read:
We, King of Kilwa, . . . give our word to Monsieur Morice, . . . that we will provide him with 1,000 slaves a year for twenty piasters each and that he will give the King a tribute of two piasters per head of slaves . . . This contract is made for 100 years between him and us . . .
Morice also made two voyages to Zanzibar in the 1770s, taking off 1,625 slaves. Other French slave traders followed in his wake, creating intense competition. Traders from Brazil also entered the fray.
The increased demand for slaves and ivory encouraged African traders from the highlands of Unyamwezi (in central Tanzania) to pioneer new routes to the Mrima coast, opposite Zanzibar, a journey taking three months. Like the Yao, the Nyamwezi had developed an expertise in long-distance trade. They were well known in the region as ivory porters but they quickly adapted to supplying slaves as well. In 1811, a British naval officer, Thomas Smee, reported that the major source of slaves and ivory at Zanzibar was the Nyamwezi. The duty on slaves and ivory exported from Zanzibar went directly to the coffers of the Omani government.
As well as benefiting from the growing traffic in slaves and ivory, Zanzibar began experiments with clove production. Cloves originated in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. For centuries they grew nowhere else. In about 1770, clove seeds were carried to the Mascarene Islands. According to Zanzibari accounts, cloves were introduced to Zanzibar by a prominent Omani merchant with links to the Mascarenes in about 1812. By the 1820s, cloves were being harvested on several Omani-owned plantations on Zanzibar with the use of slave labour. The crop was lucrative. Profits were as high as 1,000 per cent. As the plantations expanded, so the demand for slave labour increased, providing another stimulus for traffic from the mainland.
The growing prosperity of Zanzibar prompted Oman’s ruler, Seyyid Said, to take a personal interest. In 1828, accompanied by a flotilla of warships and dhows, he paid his first visit to the island and set out to transform it from a minor outpost of his empire into a commercial hub. An enterprising businessman in his own right, he took a direct lead in promoting the clove industry, acquired several plantations for himself and developed dozens of others using slave labour. By 1840, two-thirds of clove production came from his estates. He found Zanzibar such an attractive base, compared to the barren coastlands of the Persian Gulf, that in 1840, he decided to forsake Muscat and transfer his government to the island.
Omani Arabs followed him in increasing numbers, gaining a dominant hold over clove production and the world market in cloves. Clove ‘mania’, as it was called, spread to the neighbouring island of Pemba. The Omani population rose from a thousand in 1820 to five thousand in the 1840s. They became, in effect, a land-owning aristocracy, headed by Seyyid Said’s Busaidi dynasty. A prominent role in mercantile trade was also played by Indian merchants – ‘banians’, as they were known. The first few adventurers had arrived in the early nineteenth century; by 1850, their numbers had reached 2,500. On the adjacent mainland, Swahili and Arab landlords opened up other plantations, using slave labour to produce grain and coconut crops.
Abounding with ambition for his new state, Seyyid Said set his sights on creating a new commercial empire in the African interior. His aim was to gain a monopoly on trade in eastern Africa – principally slaves and ivory – and channel it through his entrepôt at Zanzibar. Since the 1810s, Zanzibari traders had begun to move inland, seeking out opportunities with interior tribes, meeting caravans from Unyamwezi along the way. In the 1820s, they reached the shores of Lake Tanganyika, 850 miles inland, and reported finding lands of potentially fabulous riches where ivory was used for making doorposts and fencing pigsties. The main trading centre in the interior became a Zanzibari settlement at Kazeh (Tabora) near the Nyamwezi capital at Unyanyembe. The traders there lived in considerable comfort. Their houses – tembes – were furnished with Persian carpets and luxurious bedding. They maintained extensive gardens with orchards and pastures for livestock. They imported fine foods. And slaves and concubines attended their needs.
From Kazeh, hunting parties armed with muzzle-loaders and heavy spears spread out across Unyamwezi searching for elephants and slaves. The Nyamwezi participated both as hunters and porters. Ivory caravans sent down to the coast consisted of hundreds, sometimes thousands of porters. Most were hired for the round trip, to carry back merchandise; some were slaves to be sold. In 1848, the Nyamwezi sent a caravan, two thousand strong, to the coast with gifts for Seyyid Said.
Beyond Kazeh, the caravan routes branched out in all directions further into the interior: to the north-west around Lake Victoria to the kingdoms of Karagwe and Buganda; to the south-west around the southern end of Lake Tanganyika to Katanga; and directly westwards to a thriving Zanzibari settlement at Ujiji, a harbour on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, from where traders crossed ov
er to the fabled elephant country of Manyema at the edge of the Congo Basin.
It was along ‘the ivory road’ that two English explorers, Captain Richard Burton and Captain John Speke, set out in 1857 on a journey from Zanzibar to the heart of Africa. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society, their assignment was ‘to penetrate inland’ to an ‘unknown lake’ and then ‘to proceed northward towards the range of mountains [Mountains of the Moon] marked upon our maps as containing the probable source of the “Bahr el Abiad” [White Nile], which it will be your next great objective to discover’.
European interest in discovering the source of the White Nile had been stimulated by journeys into the interior carried out by two German missionaries, Ludwig Krapf and Johann Rebmann. Recruited by the Church Missionary Society, Krapf had arrived in Zanzibar in 1844 and persuaded Seyyid Said to allow him to open a mission station at Mombasa. He envisaged that his remit would take him far inland. ‘It was our duty not to limit our missionary labours to the coast tribes,’ he wrote, ‘but to keep in mind as well the spiritual darkness of the tribes and nations of Inner Africa.’
On a journey in 1848, Johann Rebmann sighted snow on the peak of a mountain that local inhabitants called Kilimanjaro, 175 miles inland from the coast. The following year, Krapf gained a distant view of another snow-capped mountain called Kenia, 300 miles inland; he also heard tales of ‘a mighty inland sea’ that took more than a hundred days to cross.
Their accounts appeared to be similar to the claim made by the Greek merchant Diogenes in the first century that after travelling for twenty-five days inland from the coast, he had arrived ‘in the vicinity of two great lakes and the snowy range of mountains whence the Nile draws its twin sources’. The range had subsequently been named by the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy as ‘the Mountains of the Moon’.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 28