European and African interaction from the 15th through the 18th century

The Imbangala

New warlords emerged at the head of bands of starving refugees, who from the late 16th until the 18th century swarmed down from the hills, fought one another, and devastated the settled kingdoms. By the end of the 16th century well-organized military bands of marauders, known as the Imbangala, began to appear along the coast south of Luanda. In their eagerness to swell slave numbers, Portuguese governors allied with these war bands, and together they dealt the final blow to the Ndongo kingdom about 1622. By that time the Imbangala had retreated to the middle Kwango, where they founded the kingdom of Kasanje. Over the next two centuries this kingdom replaced Ndongo as the chief slave-trading entrepôt between the coast and the east, where the highly centralized and militarist Lunda kingdoms became increasingly important in supplying slaves by the 18th century.

The Chokwe

As the Portuguese were penetrating inland from Luanda at the beginning of the 17th century, they also moved southward. In 1617 they established a colony at Benguela, which, as in the case of the Kongo kingdom, was annexed as part of Angola in the 19th century. Expansion inland from Benguela, however, like the initial expansion farther north, was spearheaded by Afro-Portuguese slave traders, who used southern ports to outflank Portuguese control. As the slave frontier moved south, the process of constructing and then destroying slave-trading warrior kingdoms was repeated. Those who were not crushed by the process sought safety in woodlands and swamps or joined new heterogeneous communities of refugees, like the Chokwe (“Those Who Fled”) of the western savanna. These new communities often became slave raiders themselves.

The Ovimbundu

Through the 18th and early 19th centuries the slave trade remained at the centre of Angola’s economic existence, with Benguela replacing Luanda as the chief port. As a result, the Ovimbundu kingdoms on the Bié Plateau, which probably were formed by refugees from the Imbangala and Mbundu kingdoms in the late 16th and 17th centuries, displaced Kasanje as the main source of slaves. The expansion of plantations in the New World doubled the numbers of slaves exported in the last third of the 18th century, when trade routes stretched as far as the Kunene River in the south and met up with the routes from Mozambique.

Although a brief Dutch occupation of Luanda in the mid 17th century did not seriously challenge the Portuguese hold over Angola, Dutch, British, French, and Brazilian manufactures increasingly undercut those of the Portuguese, and after 1763 the French became the chief traders on the southwest coast. Portuguese attempts to maintain their position led to Ovimbundu resistance and drastic Portuguese intervention in the Benguela hinterland in an attempt to install compliant rulers in the 1770s. Despite military victory, the Portuguese were unable to control the Ovimbundu effectively until more than a century later.

The Zambezi valley

In the Zambezi valley the Portuguese penetrated the Mutapa state, with its heartland in the northeast between the Zambezi and Mazoe rivers. Portuguese records shed some light on the complex world of African politics to the north and south of the Zambezi River, which provided an unbroken waterway 300 miles into the interior. By the 1530s the Portuguese dominated the trade exits from the coast and had established fortresses and trade fairs along the Zambezi and on the plateau, where Africans came to exchange ivory and gold for beads and cloth. After 1541 Portuguese residents at these outposts elected representatives who were delegated certain powers by the Mwene (ruler of) Mutapa. Individual Portuguese and Goans also were able to get land grants and judicial rights from local rulers, which enabled them to extract tribute from the local population. These early grants formed the basis of what became known as the prazo system of landholding. Between the 17th and 19th centuries prazeros became immensely powerful and interfered in local African politics, creating an Afro-Portuguese society in the lower Zambezi valley independent of either African or Portuguese jurisdiction. Assisted by slave-soldiers known as the Chikunda, Afro-Portuguese warlords engaged in the slave and ivory trade, unsettling a wide area of east-central Africa.

The effect of Portuguese traders along the Zambezi valley on the Mutapa state was minimal until the late 16th century. In the 1560s, however, their hold was probably strengthened with the appearance in Zambesia of people known as the Zimba, a term applied to any marauders. They seem to have been Maravi people, who had first migrated from Luba territory to the southern end of Lake Nyasa in the 14th century. There they broke up into a number of chiefdoms, usually under the paramountcy of the most powerful chief, who controlled the rain shrine at the heart of the local religion. The reasons for the emergence of the Zimba are far from clear, however. The Maravi attacked chiefs friendly to the Portuguese, as well as their settlements at Sena and Tete and on the coast. By 1601 the Mwene Mutapa was forced to call on the Portuguese for assistance, and this led to almost a century of increasingly disruptive Portuguese intervention in the affairs of Shona kingdoms to the south of the Zambezi.

Other southeastern African states

Although attempts to drive the Portuguese from the Zambezi valley were unsuccessful until the late 17th century, when they were driven out by the armies of the Rozwi kingdom, this appearance of Portuguese power was deceptive: the Portuguese never had the resources to control the interior, and it was the Afro-Portuguese prazeros and the Rozwi Changamire dynasty who truly exploited the Mwene Mutapa’s weakness.

In addition to gold, the Portuguese were interested in ivory and other mineral resources of the eastern African interior, particularly after 1700, when the gold appeared exhausted. A search for silver mines had led them first into Malawi in the 17th century, and from that point there is direct, though fragmentary, evidence of developments in the region. While the Portuguese records suggest that before 1590 there were no large states in the region, by the first decades of the 17th century a powerful state had emerged under Muzura, perhaps out of an earlier system of small Maravi states at the southern end of Lake Nyasa. Although initially Muzura was assisted by the Portuguese, his power was based on exacting tribute from the Portuguese and their allies south of the Zambezi. In the early 1630s dissident Karanga and Manyika attempted once more to expel the Portuguese from Zambesia; Muzura joined the alliance and unsuccessfully attacked the coastal town of Quelimane. This defeat seems to have ended his challenge to the Portuguese; thereafter he concentrated on controlling the territory in the western Shire Highlands to the north, trading ivory and, increasingly, slaves with the Portuguese to the south.

By mid century Muzura was eclipsed by the Kalonga, whose capital lay on the southwestern shore of Lake Nyasa, while by the turn of the 18th century the rise of the well-armed Yao in the trade between Lake Nyasa and the coast, and of the Bisa as middlemen to the west, contributed to the disintegration of the Maravi confederacy into several more or less autonomous fragments. This process was further accelerated by the wars and slave raids of the 19th century and the introduction of missionaries. By the early 18th century the Portuguese also had penetrated into present-day Zambia, establishing trading fairs at Zumbo and Feira on the Zambezi. Although there were no highly organized broker kingdoms in the area, prazeros traded gold and slaves to the coast.

The declining power of the Portuguese

As in west-central Africa, from the beginning of the 17th century the Portuguese faced increasingly severe competition from Dutch and British ships in the Indian Ocean, while north of Cape Delgado the Arabs also took advantage of Portuguese weakness. In 1631 a series of revolts began on the east coast; by the beginning of the 18th century the Portuguese had been driven from the coast north of the Rovuma River. The Portuguese then turned their attention southward, where they had traded at Delagoa Bay with the local Tsonga inhabitants since the mid 16th century. They were unable to establish themselves at the bay permanently, however, and through the 18th century Dutch, English, and Austrian ships competed for the local ivory while North American whalers also traded there for food and cattle. Local chiefdoms vied for this market, and this competition contributed to the buildup of larger states in the hinterland of Delagoa Bay from the mid 18th century. Doubtless there was also trade in slaves, although the numbers seem to have remained relatively small before the 19th century.

First Khoekhoe-Dutch contact

In 1652 the Dutch East India Company dispatched Commander Jan van Riebeeck and 125 men to set up a provisioning station at the Cape. This outpost soon grew into a colony of settlement. In 1657 the company released a number of its servants as free burghers (citizens) in order to cultivate land and herd cattle on its behalf. Slaves arrived the next year via a Dutch ship, which had captured them from a Portuguese vessel bound from Angola to Brazil. Thereafter slaves continued to arrive at the Cape from Madagascar and parts of western and eastern Africa. Although the company prohibited the enslavement of the local inhabitants, in order to protect the cattle trade, the loosely organized Khoekhoe were soon undermined by the incessant Dutch demands for their cattle and encroachment on their grazing lands and waterholes. As one group became impoverished and reluctant to trade, another would take its place. The climate of the Cape was well suited to Europeans, and their birth rate was high; whereas in Angola and Mozambique the Portuguese were ravaged by disease, at the Cape it was the indigenes who were decimated by epidemics of smallpox, influenza, and measles brought by Europeans.

Boer expansion

By the end of the 18th century, Cape settlers—called Boers (Dutch boer, “farmer”)—were far more numerous than their Portuguese counterparts, largely because of natural increase. Men outnumbered women 3 to 2. Despite the varied European origins of the settlers, their shared vicissitudes and the company’s insistence that all settlers speak Dutch and practice Calvinism led to a certain cultural uniformity and sense of group identity. The settlers began to call themselves “Afrikaners”—Africans. Nevertheless, class divisions in Cape Town and its environs were marked. A small group of affluent merchants and status-conscious company servants lived in Cape Town; in the neighbouring farming districts of the southwestern Cape a wealthy gentry used slave labour to produce wine and wheat for passing ships. Independent small farmers eked out a living on the land, and a number of landless whites worked for others, generally as supervisors.

In the arid interior, economic necessity and ecology dictated a pastoral way of life for the Dutch cattle farmers, or trekboers. The poor soil and inadequate rainfall of the region necessitated vast, scattered farms, and the white population was thus thinly spread over an immense area. Although earlier literature stresses their mobility and subsistence economy, most frontier families occupied the same farms during their lifetime and remained dependent on the market for essentials such as arms and ammunition as well as for luxuries such as tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar.

The greatest barrier to Dutch expansion was the range of mountains inland from Cape Town. Once these were crossed and Khoisan resistance overcome, trekboers expanded rapidly to the east and north, while the company made only sporadic attempts to follow them. The new districts of Stellenbosch (1679), Drakenstein (1687), Swellendam (1745), and Graaff-Reinet (1785) were large and unwieldy, and their centres were far from the expanding colonists. Governmental authority was weak, and on the frontier trekboers were left to crush Khoisan resistance and mount their own defense through the commando system. They became accustomed to handling emergencies on their own and to ruling over their slaves and Khoisan servants and clients as they saw fit, often with a ferocity born of fear. As the settlers expanded, their impact—through forced trade, plunder, and human and cattle disease—was increasingly destructive for the inland Khoisan, who retaliated by stealing settlers’ cattle and burning homesteads.

Slavery at the Cape

The number of slaves increased along with the settler population, especially in the arable districts. Experiments in the use of indentured European labour were unsuccessful, and by the mid 18th century about half the burghers at the Cape owned at least one slave, though few owned more than 10. Slaves spoke the creolized Dutch that in the 19th century became Afrikaans. Many adopted Islam, which alarmed the ruling class. Divided in origin and dispersed geographically, slaves did not establish a cohesive culture or mount effective rebellions. Individual acts of defiance were frequent, however, and in the early 19th century there were two small uprisings. Nevertheless, in Cape Town itself slave culture provided the basis for a working-class culture after emancipation.

Slavery at the Cape is often portrayed as benign, but mortality rates were high and birth rates low; punishments for even minor misdemeanours were fierce, perhaps because adult male slaves greatly outnumbered their owners. Manumission, baptism, and intermarriage rates were also low, although newcomers and poorer burghers married slave women and, more rarely, Khoekhoe women. Cohabitation with indigenous women was more common, especially in frontier districts where there were few white women. The children of these interracial unions, however, took on the unprivileged status of their mothers, so the practice did not affect the racially defined class structure of the society forming at the Cape. By the late 18th century in the Cape most Blacks were servants and most Europeans were masters.

The existence of slavery affected the status and opportunities of the dispossessed Khoisan who entered the labour market in increasing numbers from the late 17th century. Although theoretically they were free, compulsion governed the relationship between master and servant, and the legal status of the Khoisan increasingly approximated that of slaves, especially when, during the wars of the late 18th century, the trekboers were allowed to employ captive women and children. As the Cape became increasingly involved in the world economy, the demand for food for European ships escalated, as did calls for increased controls over Khoisan labour: in 1775 a system of “apprenticing” Khoisan children until the age of 25 was established, and by the end of the century the Khoisan were subject to a pass system similar to that which curtailed slave mobility. As they lost their cattle and grazing areas, the Khoisan became virtual serfs on settler farms, although some groups managed to escape beyond colonial borders.

Khoisan resistance to the Dutch

Khoisan resistance to Dutch colonialism erupted into guerrilla war on three occasions in the 17th century; the first, in 1659, nearly destroyed the settlement. Cattle raids punctuated almost every decade of the 18th century. The raids and counterraids became increasingly violent as the Dutch expanded into the northeast where sheep could be grazed; by the last quarter of the 18th century the colony’s northern frontier was under arms, and numerous settlers had been driven from their lands. Between 1799 and 1803 dispossessed Khoisan farmworkers in Graaff-Reinet, many with horses and guns, rose in revolt, challenging the entire colonial order. The Dutch feared that the Khoisan would attack the arable farms of the southwest, especially as they were joined by Xhosa allies. The intervention of government troops, divisions among Khoisan and Xhosa forces, and sheer bloodletting led to the defeat of the uprising, although it haunted the colonial imagination well into the 19th century. This was the last time the Khoisan fought under their traditional leaders to regain their lost lands.

Xhosa-Dutch conflict

Settler expansion to the Cape’s eastern frontier was blocked by the 1770s when trekboers came up against numerous Xhosa farmers in the area of the Great Fish River. During the 18th century the Xhosa had been embroiled in two major civil wars over the chiefly succession, of which the more important was the dispute, between the paramount Gcaleka and his ambitious brother Rarabe, that split the Xhosa kingdom. After both struggles, the unsuccessful contestants fled west across the Great Kei River, where they bore the brunt of the Xhosa wars against the Dutch and later the British. Various attempts to separate the colonists and the Xhosa were unavailing: in 1778 the Dutch decreed the Great Fish River to be the boundary between the Xhosa and the Dutch, but Xhosa lived in the contested area to the west known as the Zuurveld, while trekboers were embedded in Xhosa territory to the east.

The establishment of the district of Graaff-Reinet in 1785 hardly improved matters. The area of magisterial jurisdiction was vast and its inhabitants unruly. Before the century was over, minor cattle raids had escalated into two frontier wars, the prelude to a struggle that lasted almost 100 years; the trekboers only expanded again after moving north and outflanking the Xhosa. While the Dutch had superior firearms, the Xhosa had superior numbers, and both sides were internally divided. Thus, the first two frontier wars resulted in a stalemate, which ended only when the British acquired the colony permanently in the early 19th century.

By the end of the 18th century, then, when the British took over, the small Dutch East India Company outpost at the Cape had grown into a sprawling settlement in which some 22,000 whites dominated a labouring class of about 25,000 slaves and approximately as many Khoisan, as well as free Blacks and “Prize Negroes”—slaves seized by the Royal Navy and reenslaved in the Cape—in Cape Town and a growing number of Xhosa in the eastern districts.