Propuestas de solución a las zoonosis ambientales

After the middle of the nineteenth century, the patterns of history in central Africa changed suddenly. A period of increased violence and instability un- settled the equilibrium in which a set of stable kingdoms could cohabitate as semi-isolated entities in or around the vast Lunda Empire. The origins for these new patterns must be sought in the fact that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the relationship and level of exposure of the peoples of Zambia and Katanga to external contacts took a different turn. Previously, contacts with a wider world, which had thus far been exclusively commer- cial, had mainly taken place through intermediaries: go-between groups such as the Imbangala. However, from 1840 onwards, there was a variety of new external pressures, coming from both west and east, in the form of newcom- ers, some of whom turned out to be conquerors. Incidentally, this period of

18 Although the initial political impulses from Luba probably reached the Lunda country in the first half of the sixteenth century, and although some external trading may have begun at a similar period, the Lunda kingdom did not emerge as a structured state before 100 years after that. See Gray & Birmingham (1970: 20).

violent convulsions coincides with the beginnings of European exploratory interests in the region. By the time the first Europeans effectively worked to- wards setting the wheels of colonialism in motion, they were confronted with a different balance of power than had hitherto existed. In 1800, there had been four main ‘centres of authority’ in central Africa: the main Luba king- dom, the main Lunda kingdom, the kingdom of Kazembe and the Lozi king- dom.19 _{By 1900, all these kingdoms had, to all intents and purposes, fallen.} 2.5.1 In the West: The Cokwe

In the western half of Katanga, in Kasai, and in the southern parts of the Kwango-Kasai area, those responsible for the disruption of Luba-Lunda pat- terns of life were the Cokwe. In a very short period, from about 1852 to 1887 according to Vansina, they had overwhelmed all the Lunda groups. Yet, until 1850 they had been the opposite of ubiquitous (Vansina 1962b: 385, 1966a: 216). They were originally a small group of hunting nomadic peoples who lived near the headwaters of the Kwango, Kwilu and Kasai rivers. They had been involved in trading ivory and wax, and arms-trafficking, among oth- er activities, with the benediction of Lunda chiefs. In the process, they had been able to hold sway over a large stretch of territory, their expansion fol- lowing the lines of the trade routes on which they were active (Bustin 1975: 16; Vansina 1966a: 216). By the mid-1860s the Cokwe virtually controlled a large corridor extending as far north as Tshikapa in Kasai in a way that cut off the Mwata Yamvo from the westernmost part of his empire. At the same time, in the 1870s, the Lunda aristocracy was undergoing serious dynastic troubles. The Lunda king was facing the growing insubordination of Mdum- ba, the then sanama (governor of the southern Lunda provinces). Mdumba eventually had the Mwata Yamvo killed, took his place and, with this act, inaugurated a period of dynastic strife that allowed the Cokwe to eat away at the Lunda homeland. In a series of invasions between 1885 and 1888, Lunda territory and trade networks were taken over by the Cokwe, leading to the complete collapse of the Lunda state (Bustin 1975: 15-18).

2.5.2 In the East: The Yeke

At the same time as the Cokwe were advancing in the west, both the author- ity of the Luba king and what remained of the Mwata Yamvo’s control over the Kazembe eastern domains were being shattered by the empire-building

19 The Lozi Kingdom was located on the upper Zambezi, in the West of what is now Zambia. It had little contact with Mwata Yamvo. See Roberts (1976: 96-99).

activities of a new group, one that was to leave a deep mark on Katangese folklore: the Yeke. Appearing practically out of nowhere, the Yeke established a kingdom that, though short-lived – it existed from about 1856 to 1891 – be- came, for the duration of its existence, the most powerful state in south-cen- tral Africa (Hempstone 1962: 22-23). The Yeke were originally Nyamwezi traders who came to Katanga from north-western Tanzania, presumably to buy ivory to bring to the east coast (Wilson 1972: 581). By 1800, some Nyam- wezi had already found their way to Kazembe’s capital, and from the 1850s onwards, one of these Nyamwezi traders, Msiri, obtained permission to set- tle permanently in Katanga. Once the permission was granted, Msiri and a band of followers made alliances with local neighbouring chiefs and soon started to extort ivory from them, eventually seizing control of the copper mines. Msiri also established close trade relations with the traders of both the Indian and Atlantic oceans, which allowed him to be constantly well supplied with firearms (Reefe 1981: 172-180). Thus armed, Msiri’s armies were able to incorporate all the possessions of Kazembe west of the Luapula into the new Yeke state between 1865 and 1871 while tribute collectors were placed next to all major Luba kings and chiefs (Vansina 1966a: 230-234). In this way, Msi- ri had obtained near absolute political power and a kingdom of his own. His type of kingship, though it borrowed from the Lunda-Luba type, was not le- gitimised through ritualistic or magical means. Instead, it rested solely on the principles of commercial supremacy and military abilities, used as tools to maintain a strong centralised and hegemonic state (Legros 1996: 197). From 1884 to 1887, Msiri was at the height of his power and his capital, Bunkeya, became the new epicentre of trade in central Africa (Reefe 1981: 181). For the Luba Empire and what remained of the Kazembe kingdom, the growth of Msiri’s conquest state was very bad news. Msiri had established his conquest state in southern Katanga, close to the south-eastern frontier of the Luba Empire, at a time when the Luba, like its neighbours, were coming under increased pressure from various sources. The Luba Empire had hitherto not been seriously affected by the development of a transcontinental economy, its location deep inside the interior protecting it from direct disturbances by this trade before the nineteenth century (Legros 1996: 108). Yet, internation- al trade was the reason for the Luba kingdom’s ultimate collapse as traders gradually chipped away at the empire’s most distant client states. First, Ar- ab-Swahili slave and ivory traders from the east African coast moved into the eastern regions of the Luba Empire, as well as into its north-eastern frontier zone, undermining the authority of the centre in those areas. Then, Ovim- bundu slave and ivory traders coming from Angola did the same as they were penetrating the empire’s heartland from the southwest (Wilson 1972: 587). As a result of all these processes, by the time the first Belgian expeditions

reached Luba in 1891, the empire’s frontiers and heartland had already been disjointed (Reefe 1981: 159). As for the Kazembe kingdom, it too entered into conflict with its greedy Yeke neighbours. Not only had the Yeke’s invasion considerably reduced the territorial extent of the kingdom and effectively cut off Kazembe’s links with the Mwata Yamvo and Angola, the remnants of Ka- zembe’s territories were being further encroached upon by some of his for- mer allies, trading partners or tributaries. In the northwest, Kazembe’s access to copper and ivory started being challenged by the Luba kingdom, which, in a last-ditch attempt at survival, was seeking to assert control over trading routes (Wilson 1972: 587). Meanwhile, to the south, the Bemba were also ag- itating. The Bemba, in contrast to other groups, had benefited greatly from the east African trade. Their infertile homeland had nothing to offer in terms of minerals or agricultural products but they hunted elephants and by 1880 they also exported slaves. This allowed the Bemba to become a larger and more cohesive entity, thereby making it difficult for a weakened kingdom of Kazembe to prevent Bemba slave-raiders from impinging on the north-east- ern plateau (Roberts 1976: 120-123). Thus, the Kazembe kingdom, which in 1800 had been the most extensive and powerful in Zambia, had by 1870 seen its territories reduced and its authority greatly diminished.

2.5.3 Disrupted and Yet Never so Interconnected

By 1890, practically the whole of central Africa had been integrated in some way into the world economy. For old kingdoms such as the Lunda’s and Lu- ba’s, this turned out to be an extremely unpropitious situation as they found themselves seized between what Edouard Bustin calls ‘the advancing tenta- cles of two giant exploitative systems reaching at them from opposite ends of the globe’ (Bustin 1975: 17). Yet, as was mentioned in the previous section, the long-distance trade had the effect of broadening, rather than weakening, the systems of interaction that already existed, at least until the Yeke invasion of the late nineteenth century. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Katanga had still not been entirely integrated into long-distance networks, even if they did export a few particular products. Commerce was dominated by salt and cop- per and was structured along two main routes: a north-south one dominated by the Luba kingdom, and a south-west one, dominated by Mwata Yamvo on the Atlantic side, and by Kazembe on the Indian side. Therefore, since these three main axes worked independently from each other, international commerce had a limited distribution in these areas (Legros 1996: 107-108). In turn, the long-distance trade contributed to the intensification of contacts between the groups controlling these axes. The rulers of the Kazembe king- dom, although politically independent and beyond the reach of the Mwata

Yamvo, were constantly in touch with the Lunda heartland throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a fact that is certainly due in no small part to the long-distance trade. The Portuguese trader Caetano Pereira noted in 1796 that Mwata Kazembe III Lukwesa Ilunga continued to send tribute to his ‘father’ in the form of slaves and copper from southern Katanga (Macola 2002: 43). As late as 1868, Mwata Kazembe VII Muonga Sunkutu planned to send a ‘tribute of slaves’ to his ‘paramount chief, Matiamvo,’20 _{while the latter} reciprocated with a flow of trade items such as mirrors, cowries and beads (Ibid.).

The arrival of the Yeke had a profound impact on the way commerce and trade were approached in Katanga. The very foundation of the Yeke kingdom was commercial, and it drew much of its strength from the long-distance trade. The Yeke connected their newly conquered region to all the interna- tional trading networks that were operating at the time in their original Tan- zanian region. For this purpose, they recycled the local exchange networks they stumbled upon. Through their settling in the Copperbelt region, they found themselves at the point where east and west trade routes met, so that they were able to establish connections between the two sets of long-dis- tance trade networks that, until then, had worked separately. Consequently, Katanga found itself integrated into a structure essentially oriented towards the international market of which the long-distance trade was the princi- pal component (Legros 1996: 109-118). In the first phase of their occupa- tion, which lasted from c.1855 to c.1870, the Yeke busied themselves co-opt- ing traditional Katangese trade based on salt and copper. During that phase the copper trade expanded considerably. By 1867, the leading Bemba chiefs bought copper from visiting Yeke traders from Katanga. Thus, north-eastern Zambia kept receiving copper, even though Kazembe had lost control of the Katanga copper trade by this time (Roberts 1976: 145). In the second phase of Yeke occupation, which culminated in the 1870s, copper was superseded by slaves and ivory. Unlike copper, whose trade requires some level of localisa- tion, slaves and ivory required easy access to large stretches of land in which there was no political, social or economic opposition to tackle. Unsurprising- ly, therefore, the adoption of the ivory and slave trade by the Yeke coincides with their expansionary activities in the 1870s (Legros 1996: 123-124). There- fore, the growth of the international trade and the arrival of intruders had the effect of increasing competition to capture or keep hold of the lucrative new

20 See D. Livingstone (ed. H. Waller), Last Journals of David Livingstone (London, 1874) as quoted in Macola (2002: 43).

trade and bringing many regions in closer touch. This phenomenon led An- drew Roberts to argue that the later nineteenth century saw:

a marked expansion in the scale of social and political relations, in so far as peoples were drawn into the structures of larger kingdoms, and came with- in the orbit of long-distance trade. […]. Ideas and skills circulated widely. […]. The lines of division between peoples were less marked than ever be- fore; their political and cultural identities were increasingly merged in wider groupings. Yet there was no single focus for such imitation and assimilation; instead there were a number of different spheres of influence, which were linked to the outside world by routes which led in all directions (Roberts 1976: 146-147).