Barotseland

by D. E. C. Stirke

In general, Barotseland, east of the main Zambezi and of its great north-western affluent the Lungo-e-bungo, seems to possess the mammal and bird fauna of Northern Angola, Southern Congoland, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Moçambique is richer—up to the Shire river—in possessing the Black (I used to think also the White, and perhaps was not wrong) Rhinoceros, and a few other creatures found also in Eastern Equatorial and in Trans-zambezian Africa. Otherwise Moçambique remains rather an unsolved problem, as to why and how it served as an interruption in the spread of the vertebrate fauna of Pliocene and Pleistocene North Africa down to South Africa, an extension which as regards West-Central and Western Africa may have been barred by the former enormous area of dense forest growth.

In botany, as in vertebrate zoology, Barotseland is part of the region which lies between the Kwanza and Zambezi rivers on the south, and the main-stream of the Congo on the north, from Lake Mweru to the Atlantic Ocean. It has a sufficient rainfall, from 22 inches in the south-west to 42 inches in the north-east, to maintain a fairly luxuriant flora as well as powerful rivers. North of the confluence of the Kabompo and the Liambai or Liba (the Upper Zambezi), there seems to have been seventy years ago a luxuriant belt of forest stretching northwards and occupying the mountainous region between the Liba-Zambezi and the Kabompo or Lulafuta.

The average elevation of the Barotse Valley, south of this confluence, ranges from a little under 3,000 feet at Sesheke to about 3,600 feet at the juncture of the Zambezi and the Kabompo; but the forested country between these rivers must rise in part to at least 4,500 feet. The richness of this forest seems to have made an immense impression on Livingstone in the middle of the ’fifties. Up till then, coming from South Africa through Bechuanaland, he had at most seen scattered trees with occasionally a fine solitary umbrageous specimen, or a palm thicket. But above the confluence of these two rivers he evidently plunged (when he had to land) into a woodland comparable with the splendid forests of the Congo or the Cameroons. His Missionary Travels contains some very good word-painting of the grand growth of the trees, the deep gloom of the forest depths as contrasted with the shadeless glare of Bechuanaland. In spite of the incessantly rainy weather—and in this little-explored region the yearly rainfall must be far in excess of the modest estimate quoted by travellers in the Barotse park-land and plateaux—Livingstone found considerable pleasure in here seeing—for the first time—the real forest display of Central Africa.

North of the Zambezi-Kabompo junction Livingstone noticed the increasing growth of the bamboo on the uplands, as a skirting of the great display of tropical forest which so deeply impressed him as he followed the northward course of the main Zambezi. This—or these—bamboos recur on the elevated plateaux of Eastern Barotseland, and extend over a good deal of the upland on either side of the Upper Kafue, as well as over the five thousand feet crest of the Congo boundary. No doubt they may also be observed within the north-western limits of Barotseland. They are seemingly of the same types as the bamboos of Nyasaland and the elevated portions of Northern Rhodesia south of Tanganyika, and in such case belong to the Oxytenanthera and Arundinaria genera. The only other genus of arboreal bamboo in Africa is Oreobambos; but that, I think, is confined in its range to Abyssinia and the Snow mountains of East Equatorial Africa.

The forests of Northern Barotseland have one or more species of wild plantain (Musa) and either wild or introduced examples of the oil palm, where the rainfall is over fifty inches per annum. This may have been introduced from Congoland or Northern Angola by the natives, who in the north of the Barotse country are so closely connected with the peoples of the Congo basin; or as in the case of North Nyasaland and Zanzibar Id., it may be a separate species or sub-species of the Elaïs genus.

According to the reports of later travellers, there is much woodland and scrub on the higher land—4,000 to 4,500 feet—on the west side of the Zambezi, south of the Kabompo-Zambezi junction. This woodland is also repeated, less markedly, to the east of the great river where the land likewise rises. The Mankoya country (Eastern Barotseland) has a larger, steadier rainfall than Sesheke and the southern regions; and the Mashukulumbwe table-land, and the valley of the upper Kafue are said to be well and regularly watered countries. The more scattered growth of trees (occasional fine and large trees are common) seems due to human intervention. The natives of the Lukona province, towards Angola, are a wilder, less intelligent race than folk of Tonga kinship on the east, and not so eager to promote tree planting. Bulovale (the region between the Luena and Kabompo rivers) and north of the Kabompo up to the boundary of the Zambezi watershed are well forested regions.

The central valley of the Zambezi—“Borotse proper,”[4] as it might be called, the region which the Barotse (really the Aluyi) have so long dominated—ranges from below the Zambezi-Kabompo confluence on the north to the Gonye Falls on the south, and is about 150 miles long and 60 miles broad. It is the bed—most observers think—of the old lake of the Upper Zambezi, and presents to-day an utterly flat and treeless aspect. Then ensue from Gonye to Katima, some eighty miles of rapids or falls. From Katongo to Mambova, past the now world-famed Sesheke, where Livingstone and Oswell first “discovered” the Zambezi, there are fifty miles of navigable river; then two more rapids at Mambova and Nkalata, and then another navigable stretch of some sixty miles to the vicinity of the Victoria Falls. (These lie well outside the political limits of Barotseland, the boundary striking north along the Majili river, ten miles east of Sesheke.) The plain of the extinct lake is much flooded during the winter rains, when a good deal of central Barotseland is under water. The rainy season seems, however, to be tending more and more towards the spring months (the autumn of South Central Africa).

The geology of Barotseland may be summarized thus: In the north-west, north, east and south-east the surface is a red laterite clay, superimposed on granite which in the higher portions obtrudes itself in mountains and hills. The central valley and most of the south-west has a heavy, white, sandy soil, but with a good deal of alluvium laid down on the sand by river courses or in the bed of the ancient lake. There is a basaltic outbreak in the neighbourhood of the Victoria Falls, but this lies outside Barotseland limits. In the eastern half of the country gold, copper—connected with the copper deposits of Katanga—tin, lead, zinc and iron have been discovered, chiefly in regions between four and five thousand feet in altitude.

In this little book and in the first and second volumes of my Comparative Studies of the Bantu Languages (fed from much the same source) our information concerning Barotseland and its peoples has been greatly implemented. But that fact does not conceal from us that the country, its zoology, botany, peoples, and even its geography (to say nothing of geology) are still far too little known. The portions that lie to the west and south-west of the main Zambezi remain almost unknown and undescribed, or are only made known to us in works of travel fifty, sixty, seventy years old, which even if accurate in what particulars they give were written at a much lower level of knowledge than exists concerning Africa in general to-day. We know more about Eastern Angola than we do of Western Barotseland. Recent discoveries concerning Angolan Antelopes, Zebras, Rhinoceroses, and other mammalian types make us eager to ascertain how these discoveries affect Barotseland west of the Zambezi. How far do the Bushman tribes extend into Western Barotseland? Are they of normal human stature, like those of South-East Angola? Do they speak languages akin to the Bushman tongues and use clicks? Have they greatly projecting brows like certain Bushmen of the Northern Kalahari, or are they without brow projections at all but very prognathous in the lower part of the face? What is the full tale of the Bantu tribes of Western Barotseland? Are there still unrecorded Bantu languages on the Kwando river? Do the tongues recorded south-west of the Upper Zambezi by Livingstone, seventy-two years ago, still exist?

Does Livingstone’s great forest between the course of the Upper Zambezi and that of the Kabompo still maintain itself, in spite of the reckless spirit of destruction inherent in all uneducated Negro tribes, who since the imposition of peace by the white man have been largely increasing the area of their settlement in Northern Barotseland? If the forest is still there, in whole or in part, why are no botanical reports and collections available? The botany of Barotseland, in common with its zoology, has never been efficiently explored and reported on since the land was first entered. Cattle apparently prosper in the whole country; yet the tsetse fly exists seemingly everywhere. Does it, north of the Zambezi and west of the Luañgwa, convey no germs? The time—it seems to me—has come when the British Empire, from London or from Cape Town, should have this country examined scientifically from west to east and north to south; not with anything but benevolent intentions towards its natives—Aluyi and Batonga, Basubia and Mabunda, Batonga and Baila, Bankoya and Kahonde, Valujazi and Valubale—but with the earnest endeavour to make fully known its resources and defects, its wonders and survivals, and the relation that Western Barotseland bears to the growing menace of South Africa: the spread of the Kalahari Desert, the drying up of once fully habitable land, the cause of ruin in South Angola, in Eastern Damaraland, and the vast, dead region north, east, south, and west of Lake Ngami.