Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa

2. The Colonial Net: Chiefs on a Colonial Border

62 2 The Colonial Net Chiefs on a Colonial Border A global ecological history might be written, one central episode of which turned upon the mis-match between English and alien notions of property in land and the imperialist essays in translation. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common From the boardrooms of the European capitals, where in the 1880s European diplomats and rulers shared what King Leopold II once termed the “magnifique gâteau africain,” the Luapula Valley must have seemed a tiny morsel.1 Avid readers of missionaries and explorers like David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley probably knew the names of Lake Mweru and the Luapula River. After all, in 1873 Livingstone had died near the Luapula, which he believed to be the source of the Nile. It was also home to “King Kazembe,” described by occasional Portuguese expeditions into the interior.2 Yet it was hardly a focus of the negotiations between the European diplomat-entrepreneurs at the series of conferences responsible for the division of Africa. Only several years later, when the conquerors “pacified” local rulers and surveyed the land, did the colonists gain an idea of their proclaimed possessions.3 In Mweru-Luapula, the nature of conquest led to the disintegration of some of the more powerful precolonial polities. Msiri, the most prominent Katangan ruler in the late nineteenth century, was the first to fall to Belgian mercenary forces. By the late nineteenth century, Msiri was involved in several conflicts; he had to quell frequent revolts by clients, and his army was drained by an ongoing war with the Swahili trader Shimba on Kilwa Island. He dealt with the increasing number of Europeans by playing them off against one another and negotiating different treaties with the Congo Free State and the BSAC. After an altercation during negotiations, one of King Leopold’s mercenaries, Captain Bodson, shot and killed Msiri, leading to the collapse and disintegration of his tribute and trade polity. In King Leopold’s Congo Free State, there was no Luapulan leader who remained powerful enough to take advantage of colonial conquest and reconstitute a following. Instead, Plymouth Brethren missionary Dan Crawford created a community of converts out of some of Msiri’s former subjects and slaves; others fled and took refuge in their clans’ villages.4 On the other side of the Luapula River, the conquest and incorporation of Mwata Kazembe’s eastern Lunda kingdom into the colonial state went more smoothly and gave shape to local colonial institutions. Mwata Kazembe X Kanyembo Ntemena (reigned from 1884/5–1904) held back the agents of the BSAC for a number of years. In 1892, Ntemena paid tribute to the BSAC representative, Alfred Sharpe. Over the next few years Ntemena had contacts with Europeans, including Dan Crawford, who visited his capital, and a rubber trader whom he had permitted to build a house nearby. However, after the BSAC administrator Dr. Blair Watson established a post on the Kalungwishi River, near Lake Mweru, Ntemena became more antagonistic. In 1897 he refused to accept European rule and did not allow a British flag to be raised in his kingdom. He successfully repelled a group of local and Swahili soldiers led by Watson. Two years later, in 1899, Alfred Sharpe, then the governor of Nyasaland, returned with a company of Sikhs and Nyasaland armed forces. The colonial forces burned the Lunda capital to the ground. Ntemena escaped with his most important notables by crossing the Luapula. A few weeks later, a missionary escorted him back via Mambilima, where Henry J. Pomoroy had established the Johnston Falls mission in 1897–98. Ntemena agreed to BSAC suzerainty, and he rebuilt his capital at Mwansabombwe.5 The conquest of the Luapula Valley ruptured and then recreated the terrain of resource politics. Tenure rights, forms of ownership, and control over resources that developed during colonialism grew out of the engagement between colonial officers, the Kazembe Kingdom, Lunda aristocrats, and owners of the land and lagoons. In the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia, as in most of colonial Africa, colonial authority rested on African “chiefs.” In the Luapula Valley, the Kazembe royal family allied themselves with the British colonial regime and displaced Lunda aristocrats and owners of the land and lagoons as managers of what colonial officers thought was “tribal” property. The The Colonial Net 63 Kazembes proved more able to adapt to conquest and more...