1.32 Africa: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 5/7)

Savannah south of the congo basin

Luba-Lunda was ruled by Mwata Yamvo and Mwata Kazemk. The ancient kingdom of Mwene Mtapa in the region of modern Zimbabwe was rivalled by the Rozwi state of the Changamires. The last people to inhabit the city of Zimbabwe, which was already somewhat decadent, were apparently driven out about 1830 during the Zulu wars, which will be discussed in the next paragraph. Into the vacuum so created, the Ndebeles tribe swept in from the original Zulu area in the south. On the west side of the continent the Portuguese had coastal settlements in what is now Angola, but after the abolition of the slave trade in 1840, the colonies collapsed and the number of white men there dropped from 3,000 to less than 1000 by A.D. 1850. (Ref. 175 , 176 , 8 , 35 , 83 ) (Continue on page 1057)

The cape area

An expedition along the Orange River in 1801 revealed a city of 10,000 people in the territory now called Botswana, which is surrounded by desert. Although millet and some legumes were used, the people relied chiefly on cattle, using the milk in a curdled state.

Both Dutch and British had started settlements near the Cape at the end of the 18th century and in the early years of the 19th they came in contact with a great southward migration of the Bantu-speaking blacks from central Africa. These included multiple tribes such as Swazi, Zulu, Pondo, Tembu, Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana. There was cattle raiding along the line of the Fish River and fighting between the Dutch and the natives had broken out in 1779 to last over a hundred years. After the British officially came into power at Cape Colony by treaty with the Batavian Republic in 1814, they decided to secure the line of the Fish River by colonization. Between 1820 and 1821 some 5,000 people were brought there from Great Britain. English began to replace Dutch as the official language, the judicial system was remodel ed on the English pattern and Dutch currency was replaced by English. But Anglicisation was not completely successful as the Dutch clung tenaciously to their own culture and institutions so that the only result of the new policy was to harden those differences of opinion, especially on the native question.

When the English missionaries got slavery abolished in 1833, the settlers were indignant.

The first crisis came in 1834 when hordes of blacks swept over the Fish River frontier, laying waste the country and destroying the farms. The governor, Sir Benjamin D'Urban, drove them back and annexed the territory to try to prevent future trouble, but the missionaries forced abandonment of that plan and prevented any compensation for the damaged farms. Thus was provoked the Great Trek, in which about 5,000 Boers (Dutch), with women, children and cattle, set out into the unknown, some going as far as 1,000 miles inland, to get away from the British. Many were attacked by Matabele and the Zulus and all endured thirst and famine.

At about that same time, the empire of the Zulus, under Chaka and his successor Dingaan, began a war of blacks against blacks, crushing all other tribes in the area and leaving a trail of devastation, rotting corpses and burned villages. Most of modern Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natal were denuded of population. The massacres of thousands of natives thus gave the Boers room to move, although in great peril. They, themselves, finally crushed the Zulus in a great battle at Blood River in 1838 and then established the Republic of Natal in the region east of the Drakenburg range, with Andries Pretorius as its first president