Colonising society in eastern and southern Africa

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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
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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
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102 africans: the history of a continent
7.Colonising society in eastern and southern Africa.
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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
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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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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110 africans: the history of a continent
These dynamics help to explain the history of the second major region of
East Africa, the high-rainfall area around the Great Lakes. Bantu-speaking cul-
tivators occupied only the best-watered parts of this region until late in the
first millennium ad,when grain farmers with growing cattle herds moved into
the higher and drier grasslands. Linguistic evidence suggests a multiplication
of words relating to cattle and to bananas, which probably became the staple
crop of the best-watered areas at this time. The pottery of the first millennium
also gave way to a cruder, ‘rouletted’ style with links northwards to Nilotic
peoples, although there is no linguistic or other evidence to suggest immi-
gration. The first indications of a larger-scale society come from Ntusi and
Munsa, grassland sites where concentrations of some hundreds or thousands
of people with both agriculture and cattle existed from at least the eleventh
century. They have yielded glass and sea-shell beads, which may be the earli-
est evidence of contact between the Great Lakes region and the Indian Ocean
coast. At Bigo (Defended Place) in the same region, huge earthworks enclosed

over three hundred hectares of pasture between the thirteenth and sixteenth
centuries, but with no exotic goods and indications rather of greater emphasis
on cattle. Bigo was once thought the capital of the first state in the Great Lakes
region, but there is no evidence of a hierarchy of settlements of different sizes
indicating state-formation, as on the Zimbabwean plateau. That emerged dur-
ing later centuries, after a Nilotic clan, the Bito, had moved southwards into
the grasslands of western Uganda, perhaps in the late fifteenth century, and
gradually created a kingdom of Bunyoro, which combined their own pastoral
symbolism with Bantu terms for authority presumably taken from earlier and
smaller chiefdoms. Although Bunyoro’s spearmen raided neighbouring peo-
ples, royal power was probably slender until the eighteenth century, when a
ruling class of Bito and prominent pastoralists and cultivators began to extract
tribute from the rest of the population. This may have provoked resistance, for
several provinces broke away during the late eighteenth century.
Bunyoro’s most troublesome neighbour was Buganda, on the northwestern
shore of Lake Victoria where heavy rainfall enabled bananas to support a rel-
atively dense population, but cattle diseases inhibited pastoralism. Bunyoro’s
traditions claimed that their first king’s younger brother founded Buganda, but
some Buganda traditions and linguistic evidence suggest that the kingdom was
an essentially Bantu creation. When it can first be glimpsed during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, it was little more than a confederacy of large patrilineal
clans on the lakeshore within fifty kilometres of modern Kampala, led by a king
(kabaka)who had no royal clan but relied on his mother’s kinsmen and his
loose suzerainty over all clans. Buganda’s subsequent history was dominated by
territorial expansion, chiefly at Bunyoro’s expense. During the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, this created a kingdom of largely homogeneous culture
extending some 250 kilometres around the lakeshore and up to 100 kilometres
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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 increas-
ingly individualised society. Older political offices were gradually detached
from clan control and the royal household expanded into an administration.
Eventually even most village headmen were appointed outsiders, although the
older central provinces remained a jungle of private jurisdictions where the
Kabaka had limited power. The core of social organisation was military: a chief
was a fighting man and every freeman could choose the commander he would
serve in return for protection and land to cultivate, forming rival chains of
personal loyalties akin to those of Ethiopia. The political system was similarly
open, competitive, and focused on the throne, which at the end of the eigh-
teenth century ceased to pass from brother to brother, generally by succession
war, and was instead inherited by a young prince designated by his father and
the leading chiefs, rival princes being killed. The court also redistributed spe-
cialised products received as tribute from each province. Territorial conquest
was changing a clan society into a militarised state with patrimonial offices.
Bunyoro’s aggression may explain why another major kingdom of the Great
Lakes region, Rwanda, also took clearer shape during the eighteenth century.
Its distinctive feature was that cultivated hills were interspersed with valley pas-
tures. Although many inhabitants combined cultivation and livestock-keeping,
amore specialised pastoral group also emerged. They were probably not immi-
grants, for they had no migration traditions and spoke the same language and
belonged to the same clans as the cultivators. Yet modern study has shown
that as a group the descendants of Rwanda’s pastoralists are significantly dis-
tinguished genetically by blood groups, capacity to absorb milk, and perhaps
Y-chromosome profiles.
6
One possibility is that their ancestors included the

region’s early Cushitic pastoralists. By the seventeenth century, both cultiva-
tors and pastoralists controlled small chiefdoms. At that time a new pastoral
group, probably retreating from Bito aggression, conquered a territory around
Lake Mohazi that was to be the nucleus of the Rwandan kingdom. Its expan-
sion during the eighteenth century to incorporate surrounding chiefdoms was
due mainly to the creation of armies of trained spearmen, who were mostly
of pastoral origin, were drawn from all parts of the country, were bound to
their king and chiefs by ties of clientage, and were supported by designated
lands, herds, and ancillary cultivators. This distinction between fighting men
and their ‘servants’ probably evolved into the distinction between Tutsi and
Hutu, Tutsi having originally been an ethnic term for one group of pastoralists
and Hutu a generic term for servants or rustics. In the late eighteenth century,
however, these distinctions remained nascent, the social categories complex,
and the kingdom relatively small.