Livingstone traversed Barotseland (or Uluyi, as it was still more anciently called). Makololo porters and soldiers—some of whom were really A-luyi subjects of Sekeletu—accompanied him to São Paulo de Loanda, and turned back with him from Portuguese civilization to deliver him safely again at Sekeletu’s capital, whence, after many adventures on the Tonga highlands and along the cataract-strewn Zambezi, he reached that river’s delta and the settled towns of the Portuguese.
He returned in 1858 and, accompanied by Charles Livingstone and John Kirk, he once more entered Barotseland and sat with Sekeletu and his subordinate chiefs. But Livingstone had become by then more deeply interested in the problems, geographical and political, of Lake Nyasa and the Shiré river, the ravages of the Yao and Arab slave-traders, the courses of rivers west and north of the Nyasa watershed. Barotseland simmered on; scarcely visited by any European—unless it was some stray hunter who had found his way to the Zambezi. At last, in the year 1878, the pioneers of the great French Protestant Mission—notably Monsieur François Coillard—came into the Lake Ngami basin from Bechuanaland, and thence travelled to Upper Zambezi.
They found this former kingdom of Sebituane and Sekeletu ruled intermittently and disturbedly by a young chief of the old Aluyi dynasty—Lewanika. Sekeletu had died in 1864, and a period of struggle then arose in which the Aluyi and allied peoples, with possibly the remnant of the old settlement of the “Barotse” (Ba-hurutse), overcame the fighting caste of the Makololo, killed the males and married the females; and at the end of the struggle—about 1870—-the former dynasty of Aluyi chiefs was re-established.
The French Protestant missionaries (some of whom were Swiss) did much to keep Lewanika and his people in touch with British South Africa, after they were well-established in his country. He was made aware, at the close of the ’eighties, of German ambitions, of Portuguese desires to “protect” his territory—the journeys of Serpa Pinto and Capello and Ivens (1878-1883) had kept him advised of this; and at the same time of the formation of a great Chartered Company which had come to terms with the Matebele Zulus and was extending British political influence over the regions north of the Zambezi.
The “Barotse” people had heard something about the Arabs far back in the 19th century, for Livingstone found an intelligent, enquiring, civil-spoken Arab staying at or near the Barotse capital on the Zambezi in 1855.
Lewanika came to hear of the war with the Arabs in Nyasaland and on Tanganyika into which Germans and English were led, and his sympathies lay with the Europeans. Though Sekeletu had been a slave-trader on rather a considerable scale, Lewanika held such a policy in abhorrence. In 1891 he came to a preliminary understanding with the Chartered Company which has been strengthened by later agreements. In 1902, Lewanika, who had been born and brought up in the heart of Central Africa, travelled via Cape Town to England and was present at the coronation of King Edward VII. He looked a fine and imposing figure in Westminster Abbey, where I—recently returned from Uganda—was presented to him, after the ceremony was over. He had, indeed, as the author of this book says in his introduction, “most charming and courteous manners.” Further, it should be added that in regard to the kingdom of the Barotse, the British South Africa Chartered Company has taken no false step, has incurred no unfavourable criticism, and has received praise for its control of native customs and defence of native rights from the French Protestant and the Church of England missionaries at work in this country and its neighbour states.
The Barotse country, as defined on the sketch map accompanying this book, includes a number of interesting and distinct Bantu languages. It is even possible that a traveller who pushed his explorations to the south-western limits of the kingdom and of the British sphere might find in the valley of the Kwando river a few nomad Bushmen of more normal stature than the stunted Bushmen of Cape Colony, but speaking a tongue of Bushman and not Bantu affinities. The Bushmen were more anciently inhabitants of this land than the Bantu Negroes; but not far away, to the east of Barotseland, we have had a sensational discovery within the last twelve months of a different and peculiar species of man which once inhabited South Central Africa, prior to the penetration thither of the Negro sub-species. This was Homo rhodesiensis, the skull, jaw, and limb-bones of which were found in close association with rudely-chipped quartz knives and scrapers, and with the broken bones of antelopes still living in Rhodesia. The place of discovery was some sixty feet below the surface in a cave at the Broken Hill Mine almost in the middle of Northern Rhodesia. The bones found are attributable to at least two personages, the limb-bones and the skull having belonged to a tall man perhaps not less than six feet in height. He possessed tremendously-developed brow ridges, a feature in which Negro man is as a rule more deficient than the European. These, and the large flat face and comparatively small front teeth and other features, suggest an affinity with Neanderthal man (Homo primigenius) of Europe. Other points show some resemblance to the black Australian. But the brain-case measured in space only about 1,280 cubic centimetres—a capacity much inferior to the ordinary brain-cases of the Neanderthaloids and Australoids, though, of course, there are occasional examples of Australoid women’s skulls that have a brain capacity of under 1,000 cubic centimetres.
These bony remains of Rhodesian man may have been living creatures as much as forty thousand or as little as ten thousand years ago: there is not enough surrounding evidence to fix the date of them more precisely. All we can say is that the bones of the beasts they hunted and ate are nearly if not quite identical with those of existing species. Probably at the time when this big-browed, gorilla-faced man was alive, the Upper Zambezi, which flows through Barotseland three or four hundred miles westward of Broken Hill Mine, formed a great longitudinal lake in the heart of the Barotse[2] country, the greater part of which still remains very swampy. And when it issued from this expansion it joined the Kwando, the Okavango, and the Zuga to form a vast lake in what is now the North Kalahari Desert. The Guay river was then the Upper Zambezi and the Kafue river joined it as now.
The Kalahari Desert which well nigh ruins the north-western part of South Africa is probably “younger” as a desert even than the Sahara—and the Sahara Desert is a thing of yesterday, possibly much more recent than the existing human species. In the days when Rhodesian man with the huge brow-ridges, long, ape-like face and poorly developed brain ranged across all of Northern Rhodesia that was not under water, he might have passed between the vast Zambezi Lake on the west and the sources of the Guay on the east, and have wandered down into a green, tree-besprinkled South Africa, where he was no doubt killed out by the smaller but far more cunning Bushman or the intelligent Strandloopers who painted pictures on the rock surfaces like their relatives of Europe, the Crô-Magnon men. Long after these antecedent types of invaders had died away came in the vigorous Negroes...? Two thousand years ago? ... who spoke Bantu languages. Whether, between the Strandloopers, Bushmen and Hottentots who invaded the southern portion of South Africa thousands—who yet can say how many?—of years ago and the Bantu Negroes of yesterday (so to speak), other races entered and dwelt in southern and South-Central Africa, we do not know. I have given reasons elsewhere for premising that the flocking south from Equatoria of the Zulus, Bechuana, Karaña, Nyanja, Tonga, Luyi, Hérero, Angola, Luba, Lunda, Yao and Makua tribes and their allies and embranchments was quite a recent episode in the history of Africa, perhaps not more than two thousand years old. We have at present absolutely no knowledge of the incoming of any other type of inhabitant later than the Hottentot and before the Bantu; though there may have been many Negro immigrants belonging to neither group linguistically.
Barotseland, as its recent past becomes revealed to us from the second half of the sixteenth century, seems to have had as a dominant people the Aluyi; and as other tribes of importance the Tonga group (Ila-Tonga-Subia) in the south and south-east, the Luena or Lubale, Mbunda, and Lujazi tribes of northern Barotseland and the adjoining parts of Angola, the Nkoya-Mbwela peoples of eastern Barotseland; and a section of the southern Luba folk. Sporadically there has also occurred a strong invasion of the Lunda people (Ma-bunda) into the northernmost basin of the Zambezi, but it is doubtful whether these immigrants penetrate into the political limits of Barotseland. Similarly a section of another vigorous South Congo people has colonized the Northern Zambezi basin; the Luba, who are known in North-Eastern Barotseland as the Kahonde or Kaondi. Then again the enterprising, uppish, cheeky Va-chokwe or “Ba-joko” traders—once the slave-traders of South Congoland and Eastern Angola—circulate through Northern Barotseland and add yet another type of Bantu language to its markets and meetings.