The Lamba, Slave Raiding and the Advent of Colonial Rule

According to 1969 and 1970 census figures, there are approximately 190,000 Lamba and related peoples living in Ilamba (Lambaland)—one half in Zaire's Shaba Province (formerly Katanga), and the rest in Zambia's Copperbelt and the northeastern tip of the Northwestern Province. The 125,000 Lamba are the largest of these groups, but they are culturally so like their Seba, Temba, Lemba and Lima neighbours that, in Doke's words, 'they scarcely constitute a separate tribe'.^[3]

These groups are all matrilineal in descent, use slash-and-burn cultivation methods, and dwell in small, dispersed villages. They share common myths of origin and ancestral legends, a common pattern of social organization, similar witchcraft and religious beliefs, virtually indistinguishable languages, and a common Lamba Bible. And it seems that all, for at least the past three hundred years, have lived, married, visited and traded with one another across the Zambezi-Zaire rivers' watershed which comprises the contemporary international frontier. Thus they regard each other as common, closely related peoples living under separate chiefs and having separate political administrations.

Of these peoples, however, only the 125,000 Lamba (and 13,000 Seba) acknowledge the chiefs of the Mishishi ('Human Hair') clan—six of these in Zaire and six in Zambia—as customary 'owners' or stewards (abeae ciald ) over much of these Copperbelt lands. It is their chiefly clan and its lore, its perpetual kinship relations, and these chieftaincies' own local histories which serve as the distinctive markers of Lamba identity. It is to these histories that we now turn.

Little is known of Ilamba's pre-colonial history before the cumulative disasters of the late nineteenth century. The first direct mention of the Lamba appears in the Portuguese explorer Lacerda's journal entry for 21 September 1798, by which time the Lamba and their neighbours were apparently trading copper and ivory to Chief Kazembe's Lunda, and to the middlemen of Nsenga country near Zumbo, the Portuguese trading post on the Zambezi.^[4] When Silva Porto and his pombeiros passed through Katanga fifty years later, itinerant Mbundu, Luvale, Bisa and Swahili traders were exchanging calicos, flintlocks and powder for Lamba slaves. Soon thereafter the Sumbwa-Nyamwezi established their Yeke trade empire in northern Katanga. They, along with Chikunda and Swahili slave and ivory traders, began the disastrous cycle of depopulating wars, famines and pestilence which mark the final phase of Ilamba's pre-colonial history.^[5]

Slave raiding here was only ended after Cecil Rhodes decided to challenge Portuguese and Belgian claims to Katangan Ilamba and its reputed mineral

wealth. In 1890 he sent three treaty-signing expeditions to bring Chief Mwenda Msiri's Yeke empire into the sphere of influence of the British South Africa Company (BSAC). And while only one actually reached Msiri, Rhodes's challenge forced the Belgians to take over the unravelling Yeke empire in 1891 and to wrest remaining Katangan territory from the control of well armed bands of Swahili traders. Thus a Belgian punitive expedition, armed with cannon, finally drove Chiwala's band of 200 Swahili traders from their stockade on the Luapula River and into Rhodesian Ilamba in 1897.^[6] By this time, mineral prospecting parties were already at work in the Kafue Hook and along the Katangan border north of Mkushi; within two years, they were operating in both Katangan and Rhodesian Ilamba.

Rhodes's other two expeditions mainly affected the southern (or Rhodesian) Lamba and their Seba and Lima neighbours. The first, Joseph Thomson's smallpox-carrying safari, never reached the Yeke capital, but turned back after signing a vaguely worded treaty in November 1890 with Mwenda Msiri's tribute-paying namesake, 'the important Iramba chief Mshiri', Lamba chief Kabalu Mushili I. The BSAC originally staked its claim to Ilamba's mineral wealth on Thomson's treaty, but later, when the Foreign Office refused to recognize it, the Company had to fall back upon Lochner's agreements with the Lozi king Lewanika, which accepted his brazenly fantastic claims to tributary sovereignty over all of Ilamba.^[7]

These were desperate times throughout Ilamba. In 1884–85 Capello and Ivens found northern Ilamba deserted, as the villagers had fled into the bush or to isolated stockades (amaliaga ) from the threat of Yeke, Mbundu and Swahili slave raiders. Later, still others fled to Lenje or Ushi country further south or east. Sorghum gardens were abandoned during the warfare following Mwenda Msiri's murder, and consecutive plagues of locusts caused such severe food shortages that Delcommune's and Bia's expeditions, in 1891, ate locusts and boiled grasses. Thomson's expedition triggered a smallpox epidemic in 1890, while rinderpest, in 1892–94, killed off the large game animals.^[8] It is little wonder, then, that the Lamba do not romanticize their pre-colonial past. Depopulation is not the stuff of which Golden Pasts are made.

Rhodes's treaty expeditions, however, had two long-term consequences for the peoples of Ilamba, both of which figure prominently in forming the internalresentful dimension of contemporary Lamba identity. First, in the south, the Belgian occupation of Katanga forced Chiwala's Swahili traders to resume their operations from the centre of Lamba chief Mushili's territory, near modern Ndola's railway depot. Slave raiding ended only around 1910, and the Lamba still resent the special favouritism shown these fearsome Swahili 'strangers' (abensu ) by the BSAC administration.

Second, and even more fundamentally, the peoples of Ilamba on both sides of the border still resent their removal to Native Reserves when their lands were appropriated for projected mining and farming developments. While the advent of colonial rule and industrial capitalism probably saved the residents of Ilamba from near extinction at the hands of intrusive slave and ivory raiders, the overall injustices of the early colonial period, including the loss of lands and chiefly authority, remain central focuses in the internal-resentful dimension of Lamba ethnic self-identity. In similar fashion, the stigmatizing, ascriptive stereotypes of the 'backward', 'wild' and 'lazy' Lamba are also rooted in history.