ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN HISTORY

Pennell, C. R. Morocco since 1830: A History. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Moshoeshoe I and the Founding of the Basotho Kingdom

Moshoeshoe (1786–1870) was the name taken by Lepoqo, son of Kholu and her husband Mokhachane, headman of the small village of Menkhoaneng in the valley of the Caledon River, which today forms the northern boundary between South Africa and Lesotho. While the year of his birth cannot be precisely fixed, 1786 is the date accepted by modern scholars. During his long life he laid the foundations of the Kingdom of Lesotho and died acknowledged as the father of his people, the man who defended their land against the encroachment of European settlers.

His family was not especially important, though a number of stories relate that he was marked out by the influential chief Mohlomi as a man destined for greatness. As a young man he acquired the nickname Moshoeshoe (pronounced “muh-shwee-shwee”), a word suggesting the sound made by the shaving of a sharp razor. This commemorated his skill as a cattle raider who could steal animals as swiftly and silently as a razor shaves hair. His opportunity to found a kingdom came when the Caledon River valley was convulsed in the 1820s by a series of wars which smashed existing political authorities—a period retrospectively named by historians the lifaqane or difaqane. From the west Kora and Griqua raiders with horses and guns penetrated the Caledon Valley, wreaking widespread havoc as they seized cattle and children. To the north of Moshoeshoe's village, the Tlokwa people, led by Queen Regent ‘MaNtatisi and her son Sekonyela, became involved in wars with Hlubi and Ngwane chieftaincies from the neighboring KwaZulu-Natal region. These culminated in Hlubi and Ngwane invasions of the Caledon Valley in the early 1820s and a general reorientation of allegiances. Moshoeshoe emerged as an effective leader who gathered the remnants of many small groups together on the hilltop fortress of Botha-Bothe (sometimes Buthe-Buthe) in or about the year 1822. Here he successfully withstood a siege by Sekonyela's forces. In 1824 he moved his people to a more secure position, on the hilltop of Thaba Bosiu, which he defended against successive waves of attackers.

For the rest of the 1820s Moshoeshoe's primary concern was to restock his herds. Some he acquired by raiding south of the mountains into the territory of the Thembu and the Xhosa. Some he acquired by lending cows to his followers, who were allowed to milk them, while pledging that any calves that might be born would belong to the chief's herds. It was at this time that the name BaSotho (or Basuto) first began to be generally applied to Moshoeshoe's people. As his power grew, he formed new alliances, many of them cemented by marriages (his wives numbered more than 140 by the time of his death). The great accomplishment of this period was his displacement of his rival, Makhetha, who had a much better claim to inherited chieftainship. Makhetha perhaps unwisely allied himself to the Ngwane chief Matiwane and undertook a series of raids into Xhosa territory, where they were routed by a combined force of Xhosa, Thembu, and British forces. By the early 1830s Moshoeshoe had all but eliminated his rival.

The next period of Moshoeshoe's career is distinguished by the alliance he forged with Protestant missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society whose first agents arrived in 1833. Well aware of the defeats inflicted on the Xhosa and other peoples on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, Moshoeshoe was pleased to have men at his capital who could communicate in writing with Cape authorities. He encouraged them to found mission stations throughout the territory he controlled. The missionaries welcomed his protection and wrote glowing tributes to his statesmanship, though they never converted him to their religion. They took his side in his wars against Sekonyela and other military rivals. During these years Moshoeshoe became increasingly powerful, partly because Sotho people who had fled to the Cape Colony during the wars of the 1820s now returned with cattle, horses, and guns they had bought with money earned working on farms. Moshoeshoe adopted a partially European lifestyle and set out consciously to modernize his kingdom by modifying many customs and traditions. He built a formidable military force armed with guns, whose centerpiece was a well-drilled cavalry.

A new chapter opened with the arrival of the first Voortrekkers (Afrikaans-speaking settlers from the Cape Colony) in 1836. Moshoeshoe took at face value their statement that they sought nothing more than safe passage through his territories. Soon, however, they began to settle near important sources of water, often claiming to have bought land from rival chiefs. In 1843, in a bid for British protection against the invaders, Moshoeshoe concluded a treaty with Governor Napier of the Cape Colony that he hoped would lay down firm boundaries. However, in 1848, a new Cape governor, Sir Harry Smith, annexed the entire region of “Transorangia.” British Resident Henry Warden fixed a new boundary line that removed most BaSotho land north of the Caledon. This led directly to a war in which Moshoeshoe's forces decisively triumphed at the Battle of Viervoet Mountain in June 1851. Not long after, Britain decided to transfer the Orange River Sovereignty to an independent Boer government. General Sir George Cathcart determined to reassert British power by attacking Thaba Bosiu in December 1852, but it was Cathcart's forces who learned firsthand what a determined resistance could be mounted by the disciplined BaSotho cavalry.

After the British withdrawal, Moshoeshoe was left to his own devices in dealing with the government of the Orange Free State. He triumphed in the first war of 1858, but was facing defeat in the long second war (1865–1868) when Britain intervened to save the kingdom by annexing it as the Crown Colony of Basutoland. Not long after the annexation, Moshoeshoe died, on March 11, 1870, revered by friend and foe alike as one of Africa's greatest statesmen.

NORMAN A. ETHERINGTON

See also: Boer Expansion: Interior of South Africa; Difaqane on the Highveld; Lesotho: Treaties and Conflict on the Highveld, 1843–1868.

Mosque, Sub-Saharan: Art and Architecture of

The aesthetic features of the Sub-Sahara mosque owe their origins to three primary religious, cultural, and historical interpretations. First, the institution of the Friday congregational prayer, a legal Islamic requirement for all men. Second, the efficacy of vernacular building traditions, especially in relation to the Muslim Mande, Fulani, and Hausa. These three ethnolingustic groups are among the dominant Muslim populations who inhabit Sub-Sahara West Africa; they were most influential and played an active role in the cultural web of interactions, trade, diaspora, and the early nineteenth-century jihad movements.

The third explanation is more closely related to the history of Sub-Saharan medieval dynasties, that is, the Ghana, Mali, Songhay dynasties, and the later nineteenth-century Sokoto and Tukulor Caliphates. Each dynasty played host to the formation of architectural traditions in Sub-Sahara Africa. During the reign of Mansa Musa, the fourteenth-century ruler of Mali best known for his pilgrimage (hajj) to Makkah, Arabia (1324–1325), religious and educational buildings were constructed at Gao and Timbuktu. Upon his return to Mali, Mansa Musa brought an entourage of scholars from the Muslim world, among whom was an Andalusian architect and poet, Ibn Ishaq as-Sahili (d.1346 in Mali). As-Sahili is reputed to have introduced a “Sudanese” style of architecture in West Africa through the commissions granted to him by Mansa Musa. Scholars have since expressed doubt as to whether the architectural works of as-Sahili were single-handedly achieved.

A number of indigenous factors have contributed to the formation of the Sub-Sahara mosque in general and the aesthetic nuances that we find in the Mande, Fulani, and Hausa mosques in particular.

The Mande Mosque

The Mande, and in particular the Dyula, carried Islam southward from the northern savannah to the forest verges in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. They also carried the basic forms of the hypo-style mosque that can be found at Timbuktu, Djenne, Mopti, and San (Mali); Bobo Dialasso (Upper Volta); Kong and Kawara (Côte d'Ivoire); and Larabanga (northern Ghana). These religious edifices are a particular style of rectangular clay building, hypo-style in plan, and uniquely idiomatic in their exterior character. Formal modifications occur in the features of the mosque as it travels from north to south, from Timbuktu to the Côte d'Ivoire and northern Ghana; these modifications pertain to size scale, structure, construction details, and variations in the plan.

Compacted earth construction is used consistently with lateral timber members to reinforce the exterior walls. Protruding timber members also act as scaffolding. The exterior walls are also strengthened by buttressing or with vertical ribs. The ribs also give the appearance of decorative crenellations, termite mounds, or ancestral pillars of varying size as they terminate at the parapet. Wider ribs on the exterior facade and in the center of the qibla-wall correspond to minarets. The flat roofs are reinforced with wooden joists; this is where the muadhhin stands to summon the faithful to prayer (adhan). The courtyard (sahn) is quite small or virtually nonexistent in Sub-Sahara mosques.

The Mande distinguish three functional types of mosques: (1) the seritongo used by individuals or small groups of Muslims for daily prayers, simply an area of ground marked off by stones; (2) the misijidi (masjid), missiri, or buru serves several households for their daily prayers or for Friday prayers; (3) the jamiu, juma, or missiri-jamiu used for Friday prayers, which serves the large community.

The Fulani Mosque at Dingueraye

Amid the fervor of the nineteenth-century jihad movement in the Futa Jalon, Guinea, a unique idiom and expression of mosque architecture was born. The Fulani mosque at Dingueraye is linked to Al Hajj Umar's (Umar ibn Uthman al-Futi al-Turi al Kidiwi, 1794–1864) stay at Dingueraye from 1849 to 1853 and served one of the principal functions of a ribat, a place from which the abode of Islam (dar-al-Islam) might expand.

The Fulani mosque at Dingueraye was the first instance in which the nomadic tent and the organization of nomadic space lent themselves with the greatest of ease to a new mode of spatial orientation. Two modes of spatial orientation are evident: The first is an ambulatory space that surrounds a cube building, the actual mosque. The outer layer of the spatial enclosure is very much like the Fulani sedentary hut enclosed by a palisade wall, which demarcates an edge. In the nomadic tradition this circular space is quite evident. According to local custom at Digueraye this outer layer is changed every seven years, at which time an elaborate ceremony is held for the occasion.

The second layer of space is the cube itself, which has heavy earthen walls and an earthen ceiling supported by rows of columns. A central post supports the exterior roof structure from within the cube, like a great big tree it radiates to its outer roof. But the central post, the perimeter columns, and the thatched roof dome are structurally separate from the earthen cube within.

The mosque at Mamou and Dabola, Guinea, also has central posts that support the roof of the cube. Its inner cube has singular openings in the perimeter wall very much like the openings in Umar's sketch. The position of the central post at Dingueraye and Mamou also approximates to the central element in Umar's diagram. These spatial patterns, the elements they employ, and the image they convey can be described simply as cultural metaphors. They are also concrete renditions of Fulani spatial concepts.

The Hausa Mosque at Zaria

The mosque at Zaria was built at the end of a period of puritanical fever (jihad) and reform, and during a period of religious formation wherein the Sokoto caliphate united the Hausa states under the leadership of Uthman ibn Fodio. In the post-jihad period the ascetic scholars mainly favored the building of mosques.

None of the earlier works of Babban Gwani, a great master builder, match the architectural vitality and structural vocabulary of the vault in the Zaria mosque. However, it is very unlikely that the Babban Gwani actually invented the Hausa vault, but there is no doubt that he made the greatest and boldest use of the vault. It is very likely that Katsina, being at the forefront of Hausa custom and civilization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had developed the vault principles in reinforced earth technology. However, there are hardly any extant pre-jihad structures to support this hypothesis.

Professor Labelle Prussin argues that the vault is actually a synthesis of the Fulani tent armature, which was developed using Hausa skills in earth construction. The Hausa vault and dome are based on a completely different structural principle from the North African, Roman-derived stone domes. On the other hand, the Hausa domes incorporate, in nascent form, the same structural principles that govern reinforced concrete design. The bent armature in tension takes the horizontal thrust normally resisted by buttresses and tension rods and interacts with the compressive quality of earth. It was the development of this technology that permitted the transplantation of the symbolic imagery of Islam and in turn created a unique Fulani-derived architecture.

The increase in earth arch construction was particularly innovative in the post-jihad mosque at Zaria and the palaces of the period. The earth-reinforced pillars and the reinforced Hausa vaults are no commonplace construction. Very few pre-jihad buildings exhibit the structural solutions to an architectural problem of earth construction over such large spans. A more obvious solution can be found in the hypo-style mosques of Bauchi, or the Shehu mosque, Sokoto. Instead, given the program to provide a liturgical space, Babban Gwani in his organizing principle of geometry and structure derived a much more sophisticated and less formal plan than the hypo-style hall.

In determining the ceiling-type for a given building, the importance of the building, followed by the status of the patron, is brought together with the skill of the master mason. In context, a radical departure seems to have occurred from the simple trabeated type of construction which we find in the Shehu's mosque, the Kazuare mosque, and the Bauchi mosque, all built roughly in the same period (1820s) and the much later Zaria mosque (1836). The post and beam structure used to support short spans is quite commonly used in the earlier mosques, that is, Bauchi, and Shehu. They share a tradition with the Mande mosques of Mali and northern Ghana.

AKEL ISMAIL KAHERA

Mozambique: Nineteenth Century, Early

Around 1800 most of the territory that was to be delimited as the Portuguese overseas province or colony of Mozambique later that century (mainly between 1869 and 1891) was the domain of independent African states. The Portuguese territory was a string of settlements with surrounding rural estates on the coast and on the Zambezi. Portugal maintained an administrative center on the island of Mozambique and garrisons at Ibo, Quelimane, Sofala, Inhambane, and Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) on the coast and Sena and Tete on the Zambezi. Intermittently the trade posts of Macequece (Manica) and Zumbo (now Feira, in present-day southeastern Zambia) also had garrisons until 1835, when they were withdrawn owing to threats of attacks and lack of funds to sustain them. Except around Lourenço Marques, which had only been occupied definitively in 1799 or 1800 and only counted military and civilian government servants until about 1815, the settlements were composed mainly of civil populations of local, Indian, and European origin. They were surrounded in 1800 by areas of estates where inhabitants of the Portuguese towns grew some of their food and maintained many of their slaves who seemed to have constituted up to two thirds of the permanent population of the settlements. Except for the fort of Lourenço Marques and the outposts of Macequece and Zumbo, the settlements had municipal status and the free citizens elected a municipal chamber, and a justice of peace, sometimes in conflict with the local military governor. Soldiers were mostly locally recruited and some literate youths held secretarial jobs and were trained as officers.

Mozambique.

Regarding commerce and trade, imports of textiles and other trade goods where paid mainly from the sale of slaves and ivory. Ivory went mostly to western India, where most of the imported cotton textiles and some of the beads for trade were obtained. Slaves were exported mainly to Brazil and French possessions (Mascareignes and the Caribbean) and from about 1837 to Spanish colonies such a Cuba. Some food staples were imported from neighboring African mainland territories and the islands of Comoro and Madagscar.

Interruptions of the trade caused by Napoleonic Wars, a temporary Brazilian import ban on slavery (effective 1831 to c.1836), the general trade depression of 1831–1833, and interference with Portuguese Indian merchant vessels as parts of the activity of the British antislavery campaign around 1840–1845 caused crises in the activity of local Portuguese and Banian (Vanya) traders. Loss of capital around 1845, its emigration around 1831–1845 paved the way to trade capital from Bombay to take a lead in Mozambique in the 1850s and for new elephant hunters and traders from the metropolis and Goa.

In the interior, African chiefs consolidated lineage states. Examples are Cee Nyambe Mataka I in Niassa, who may have started around 1825–1830 Mwaliya near Montepuez in the 1790s, Ossiwa in Alto Molocue somewhere in nineteenth century, the Khosa, Dzovo Mondlane, and the Makwakwas in modern Gaza around 1810, Yingwane and Bila-nkulu near Inhambane possibly from 1780 onward. Those in the south were overtaken by the impact of the mfecane and foundation of new states like Gaza after 1821. Near the Zambezi, descendants of traders and military officers like the Caetano Pereiras and Cruz (Bonga) who had settled in African communities the hinterland of the Portuguese estate in the later eighteenth century area emerged around 1840 as local power holders, often at the cost of local dynasties like Undi. The successors to earlier states like the Mutapa, Barue, and Uteve states maintained their internal cleavages although some candidates occasionally managed to obtain a more prominent position.

The relatively extensive coverage of local events by sources permits us to trace some major droughts and famines as result of events related to the phenomenon of el Niño around 1745–1760, 1790, 1818–1833, 1844–1845, 1855–1862, in addition to Red Locust invasions mainly during the el Niño periods, as well as smallpox and measle epidemics. This and the effects of warfare during the mfecane are supposed to have had such an effect on the population that Gaza King Soshangane was said to have ordered in 1845 to stop the export of slave from his domains.

The independence of Brazil from Portugal in 1822 inspired a revolt of soldiers on December 16, 1822, in the island capital but had few other consequences. From the point of view of Portuguese administration the most significant event ending the period of absolutist rule in the shape of the populist dictatorship of D. Miguel (c.1826–1834) was the successful liberal revolution in Portugal of 1833–1834. It happened to take place during one of the trade crises toward the end of a long period of famines, when local revenues were down and no budget support came from Portugal. Local liberals deposed and substituted governors and imprisoned of some of the most able qualified representatives of the former government. The shortage of priests increased because the new regime also abolished religious orders, retaining the parish priests on the payroll of the crown. The effect of the trade crisis of 1831–1834 is highlighted by two events in the south. The governor of Lourenço Marques, Dionísio Ribeiro, had been executed at the orders of Zulu king Dingane in October 1833. He had been reluctant to meet the Zulu kings demands of tribute from his own stores and of a private trading company. There had been no trade and almost no government funds to sustain the garrison. A year later the governor Manuel da Costa of Inhambane was killed with most of the soldiers and able bodied men from Inhambane (apparently some 280 to 1,000 men) on a foray to recover impounded ivory at a distance of about 150 to 250 kilometers from Inhambane. The settlement itself was never approached by raiders, unlike Sofala, which was attacked by Nguni chief Nqaba in 1836. As a result attempts were made to build or repair fortifications around the main Portuguese settlements except Queli-mane. (The governor of Sofala eventually shifted his administrative capital to the island of Chiloane.)

For the next decade and a half after the liberal revolution of 1834 the authority of the state institutions was very low and the attempts by military governors to reestablish their power (and possible use it for smuggling slaves) was countered by about eight isolated local revolts of the creole garrisons and settlers in the years 1840–1855, some of them apparently inspired by contemporary revolts in Portugal. Free trade policies and more direct control by the metropolis stabilized the administration after 1855. In 1834 control of movements of traders inside the colony was reduced and the establishment of Hindu and Muslim traders in the district capitals was no longer prohibited. They therefore started to spread out after 1838–1840.

GERHARD LIESEGANG

Mozambique: Nguni/Ngoni Incursions from the South

Between the ninth and twelfth centuries, the moister summer rain areas that were adequate for millet-based agriculture in modern South Africa had been occupied by Bantu populations almost to carrying capacity and a number of processes took place to accommodate the population pressure that was building up in the areas less affected by malaria. Increase of social differentiation and of age of marriage, armed competition over farming areas and pastures, emigration and conquests, and formation of larger states seem to have been social responses to these pressures in South Africa and possibly also southern Mozambique. During this period important nuclei the ethnolinguistic or cultural formations as we now know them—Karanga (Shona), northern, eastern, and southern Sotho, Nguni, Tsonga, Tonga—seem to have been formed in southor eastern Africa. Larger states developed in the Karanga area, which extended to south of the Limpopo. Disputes over sucession and land seem to have led to immigration both of Kalanga and Nguni groups to Mozambique south of the Save River. As far as migrations and especially the Nguni group are concerned in mid-sixteenth century the Portuguese encountered already in place a number of chiefdoms in southern Mozambique who according to traditions collected in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries had immigrated from the Nguni (or Twa) areas. In pottery traditions, this identity may not always have been visible and the immigrants were assimilated also linguistically to the Tsonga Chopi and BiTonga groups in southern Mozambique.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw further groups moving north who claimed origin in the south (modern Ngwane or Swaziland and the Middelburg Ndebele areas). Most prominent were the Dzivi and Nkumbe (Cumbana) groups in Inhambane. They rapidly assimilated to the northern Tsonga (Tswa) and Bitonga and were accompanied by other groups from the Limpopo and Nkomati valleys or further south. They include the Bila or Bilankulu (Vilanculos) who had already been moving north around 1720–1730. Their spears and shields and penis sheaths distinguished them from the older Tsonga-Chopi populations north of the Limpopo using bows.

After a period of another sixty years, which registers only local dynastic quarrels and fights for hegemony, a series of campaigns and destructive wars known as mfecane in South Africa spilled over into southern Mozambique. Unlike earlier periods of invasions the mfecane one was dominated by a sociopolitical system equipped with institutions functioning to incorporate individuals and existing political structures at different places and in overlapping institutions in a new sociopolitical system. The development of this system based on an older age-class system seems to have been the result of political competition in southeastern Africa around 1810–1821 that ended with the formation of the Zulu state, which incorporated the parent Mthethwa and remnants of the Ndwandwe state complexes and extended to Swazi and Ndebele. After a period of competition between the Ndwandwe and Mtetwa states—which may have lasted for a decade—decisive clashes had come in 1819–1821. The Mtetwa led by the military commander Shaka Zulu invaded the Ndandwe kingdom after a military victory and forced important groups of the royal lineage and a number of vassal chiefs ruling parts of the kingdom to move away to the north, where at least five almost independent nuclei attempted to survive from mid-1821 onward. The groups of refugees were headed by the exiled king Zwide (who may have died c.1822) and his sons, who chose to turn back until 1827, and autonomous leaders like Ngwana Maseko, Nqaba Msane, Sochangane Nqumayo, and Zwangendaba Jere, who chose to move on and become independent heads of state. Zwangendaba may have had the position of head induna or administrator of the house of Zwide.

Zwangendaba seems to have spearheaded the advance close to the present capital of Mozambique in 1821, passing Matola and later moving to Manhiça, where from 1821 to about 1825, when he moved to the Limpopo valley. Soshangane initiated attacks in Tembe in 1821 and operated in association with Zwangendaba Jere until 1826 or 1829. Nqaba had apparently moved to the area north of the Limpopo by 1823 and in 1826 crossed into the area north of the Savé, where he founded a state that existed for about ten years. He and his warriors, many of them locally recruited, were known as “Mataos,” from which the present-day ethnic designation of Ndau is derived.

The emigration or flight of Zwangendaba from the Limpopo valley to the Venda and Zimbabwean Plateau in around 1827 or 1829, the defeat of Nqaba Msane by Soshangane around 1835–1836, the crossing of the Zambezi by Zwangendaba in 1835 and the Maseko in 1839 left the area between the Nkomati and the Zambezi to Gaza.

Parallel to the establishment of the Gaza state south of the Zambezi came the extension of Zulu rule to southernmost Mozambique from around 1824 to 1835 up to the Limpopo valley engulfing temporarily the Portuguese settlement of Lourenço Marques, which was also the aim of Swazi attacks in 1863 and 1864. The Nguni state of Swaziland exerted pressure east of the Libombos in the period 1840–1865 and maintained some presence there after the partition in 1886. Zulu military influence south of the Bay ended around 1878.

North of the Zambezi, the Nqabas group was defeated and destroyed in the upper Zambezi valley around 1840, but part of Zwangendabas followers and successors under his son Mpezeni and induna Zulu Gama managed to extend their power to Tete and Niassa provinces between 1870 and 1895. Remnants of a Maseko incursion to Niassa in around 1847/1860 stayed in present-day Niassa and Cabo Delgado provinces while the main group settled on the water-shed on the present border between Tete province and Malawi, where the colonial conquest reached them around 1898/1900, after which the could go to war only as auxiliaries in colonial wars.

The new incorporative military and age-grade system of the Nguni after 1820 permitted to establish a more permanent domination and class society with some chances of promotion for the subject population. In contacts with their superiors the subjects used the language of the victors until the defeat of the systems by the colonial conquest.

GERHARD LIESEGANG

See also: Difaqane on the Highveld; Malawi: Ngoni Incursions from the South, Nineteenth Century; Mfecane; Tanganyika (Tanzania): Ngoni Incursions from the South; Zambia: Ngoni Incursion from the South; Zimbabwe: Incursions from the South, Ngoni and Ndebele.

Further Reading

Etherington, N. The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854. London: Longman Pearson Eduction, 2001.

Hamilton, C. (ed.) The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995.

Liesegang, G. “Nguni Migrations between Delagoa Bay and the Zambesi, 1821–1839.” African Historical Studies. 3 (1970): 317–337.

Newitt, M. A History of Mozambique. London: Hurst and Co. RITA-FERREIRA, A. 1974: Etnohistória de Cultura Tradicional do grupo Angune (Nguni). L. M. Memórias do Instituto de Inv. Cient. de Moç. II (247 pp.).

Mozambique: Colonial Period: Labor, Migration, Administration

Although Portugal established a presence in southern Africa long before any of the other European powers, it never had sufficient financial power or people to create a viable administration or to promote economic development. Even the establishment of effective occupation by reason of conquering the indigenous Africans was only completed in 1919. Early attempts to provide a foundation for that occupation and to promote some economic activity followed the Iberian pattern in the American colonies. Areas of northern Mozambique were granted to individuals in the form of prazos, within which the prazeiros had complete control; the right to exploit natural resources and people for their own profit, and in return for the payment of some taxes. The prazos were later replaced by three chartered companies, but Portugal's hold over Mozambique remained precarious, vulnerable to threats of takeover by Cecil Rhodes and Jan Smuts and to division between Germany and Britain. European diplomatic rivalries ensured that Portugal remained the nominal imperial overlord of Mozambique, but in economic terms the colony was dominated by the neighboring Boer republics and British colonies, subsequently the Union of South Africa and, to a lesser extent, Southern Rhodesia.

Partially to promote greater economic development, partly because of the ineffectiveness of the prazo system, the Portuguese created chartered companies which replaced it. The Companhia da Moçambique was given the right for fifty years to exploit and administer some 62,000 square miles north of the Savé River, including the major port of Beira. The company's financial backers were Belgian, French, and British; many heavily involved in the Transvaal and other parts of southern Africa and including, somewhat ironically, the British South Africa Company.

The Niassa Company and the Zambesia Company were also chartered by the Portuguese. They did not have the same degree of administrative responsibility as the Mozambique Company, and their authority was such that full administrative control was exercised by the Portuguese government virtually exclusively in southern Mozambique, south of the Savé River. This included the port of Lourenço Marques-Maputo on Delagoa Bay, one of the finest natural harbors on Africa's East Coast. That port was the starting point of the development of the economic links with the Transvaal and South Africa which were ultimately to a subimperial relationship in which Mozambique was the subordinate partner, South Africa the dominant.

In 1869, much to Britain's dismay, the Portuguese reached agreement with the Transvaal for the construction of a road linking the republic to Delagoa Bay, finally making a reality of a nonratified treaty of 1858. The road itself was easily built and completed in 1871. The Transvaal saw Delagoa Bay not only as the nearest port of entry and exit for its trade but also, and more important, as a means of access to the coast and world trade that was outside British control. For the Portuguese, the Transvaal represented Lourenço Marques’ only hinter-land of any potential value. To further cement the links between them, the 1869 Treaty also provided for free trade between the two countries.

In the course of negotiating this treaty, the idea of building a railway as well as a road was raised. A concession for the short stretch of line within Mozambique was granted to Edward McMurdo in 1884. For a variety of reasons, including fraud and shortage of money, the line's connection to the Witwatersrand's gold fields was delayed until 1895, the same year in which two other lines linking the Rand to the Cape ports and Durban were completed.

By 1895 the MacArthur-Forrest cyanide process for separating gold from its surrounding rock had ensured the long-term viability of the Rand goldfield, although not even the most optimistic of predictions could have justified building three rail links to the mines. Politics and the understandable desire of the different ports to reap whatever benefit they could from mine-related traffic played a great role in the decision-making process.

Although the mining industry had more lines than needed, it was seriously short of workers, for whom competition had been driving up wages beyond the ability of less profitable mines to pay. In 1896 the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, formed in 1889 primarily in an effort to control the wages spiral, and the Mozambique government agreed the terms on which Mozambicans would be recruited for work. The designated recruiting organization, was the Rand (later Witwatersrand) Native Labor Association (Wenela), set up that same year by the Chamber of Mines. Mozambicans had, from at least 1850, a history of migrating to various parts of southern Africa to seek work in agriculture, construction, and diamond mining. Attracted by higher wages than they could get in Mozambique, they also sought to escape social restrictions imposed on them and, more significant, the harshness of the Portuguese forced labor system. An approved, regularized system enabled the Portuguese not only to exert some control over population movements but also brought in revenue from the capitation fees levied on each recruit; all at virtually no cost to the Mozambique government.

Mozambicans rapidly became the most important single group of workers on the Rand. They also became especially experienced, as they frequently returned to the mines or simply renewed their contracts for extended periods. In 1901, even before the Anglo-Boer War ended, their value was recognized in a temporary agreement incorporating the continued right to recruit labor in exchange for a guarantee of traffic to the railway line to Lourenço Marques and the privileged right of entry of Mozambique goods and services to the Transvaal mining region. This right was reciprocal, and over the years the value of South Africa's exports to Mozambique greatly exceed that of its imports. Ultimately, Mozambique had only its male workers to use as a lever in negotiations with its more economically powerful neighbor. Despite pressure from Natal and elsewhere to end Mozambique's privileged position, that labor remained sufficiently important (some 50 per cent or more of the Transvaal mines labor force) for the arrangements to be incorporated into a formal convention in 1909.

Although the rail link from Lourenço Marques to the mines was shorter than any other, total shipping costs were not necessarily lower. It cost substantially more to ship goods between Lourenço Marques and Europe than was the case with the Cape ports and Durban; handling facilities at Lourenço Marques were not as good, and rates on South African lines were easily manipulated to attract traffic to them. Only the formal agreement ensured that the Mozambique line got any traffic at all, and what they did get attracted the lowest tariffs.

After World War I, efforts to renegotiate the convention failed. Cancellation had little practical effect and in 1928 it was renewed. To meet South African concerns about the working of the port at Lourenço Marques, the South African government secured a measure of control over it administration. South Africa's desire to limit the number of Mozambican recruit was met by restriction on the number of times workers simply renew their contracts without returning home. The interwar period also saw the introduction of deferred pay. A portion of workers’ wages was withheld and paid through local authorities at home, ensuring the payment of taxes and generally the interjection into the local Mozambican economy of money that otherwise tended to be spent on the mines. When the price of gold was allowed to float on world markets, accumulated deferred pay was transferred in gold to the government of Mozambique at an artificially high rate of exchange. The Portuguese could then sell the gold at a profit. This arrangement continued until shortly after Mozambique became independent.

Mozambique could not necessarily rely on continuing high levels of demand for mine workers. The Rand mines only had a finite life, and the new mines opening up in the Orange Free State were not as labor intensive. Other sources of labor opened up in the 1930s with the removal of restrictions on bringing workers from tropical areas. Restrictions had been imposed because of the high susceptibility men from those areas had to illness, notably pneumonia, when they arrived on the Rand, with its relatively hostile climate. Nonetheless, Mozambicans continued to constitute a substantial portion of the Transvaal labor force.

As South Africa felt increasingly vulnerable to pressure from the spread of independence throughout Africa, allowing recruitment to continue was one way of supporting Mozambique as part of the cordon sanitaire around the apartheid state. Mozambique's independence meant that South Africa could and did restrict labor migration, more to Mozambique's detriment than South Africa's. During the antiapartheid struggle, Mozambique could not oppose apartheid too vehemently because of its vulnerability to reprisal and its continue economic subservience to South Africa.

SIMON KATZENELLENBOGEN

See also: Rhodes, Cecil, J.; Smuts, Jan, C.; South Africa: Gold on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1899.

Further Reading

Duffy, J. Portuguese Africa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961.

Harries, P. Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann and London: Currey, 1994.

Henriksen, T. H. Mozambique: A History.

Katzenellenbogen, S. E. South Africa and Southern Mozambique: Labour, Railways and Trade in the Making of a Relationship. Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1982.

Newitt, M. A History of Mozambique. London: C. Hurst, 1995.

———. Portugal in Africa. Harlow: Longman, 1981.

Mozambique: Colonial Period: Resistance and Rebellions

Mozambique was supposedly conquered by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. However, it was not until the nineteenth century, during the “Scramble for Africa” that the Portuguese effectively colonized Mozambique. Landing at the port of Sofala on the coast of the Indian Ocean, in 1505, the Portuguese intended to exploit mineral deposits in the interior. The interior belonged to the Mwenemutapa Kingdom, rumored to have an abundance of gold deposits.

Portuguese traders and merchants were not the first foreign forces in the Mwenemutapa Kingdom. They found that Muslim traders had been trading in the area but the Portuguese used their military might and drove them away and established commercial and administrative centers at Sena, Tete, and Quelimane.

Portuguese presence in Mwenemutapa Kingdom, and indeed in the rest of Mozambique, was never accepted by Africans. In a bid to access mineral deposits, the Portuguese sent a religious mission in 1560 whose aim was to pacify and convert the king and his subjects to the Catholic religion. The mission failed and its leader was killed, as he was suspected of having nefarious intentions. Further attempts by the Portuguese to control Mwenemutapa Kingdom were futile, as they were repulsed. Resistance to Portuguese presence had begun.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Portugal still had not effectively colonized Mozambique as the Portuguese officials entrusted with the colonizing venture were inefficient, being more interested in their own personal gain. To ensure some kind of loyalty and obligation, Portugal relied on individual settlers. These were given title deeds by the Portuguese king for lands they had coveted for themselves. From this system developed the prazo, or crown estate. The owner was known as prazeiro. These prazeiros acted as Portuguese imperial agents and were supposed to pacify the area and rule African kingdoms on behalf of Portugal. The prazos were notorious not only for land alienation but also for exploiting Africans as sources of labor and taxation.

In the seventeenth century, the Mwenemutapa was plagued by internal dissensions, which the Portuguese used to their advantage. They installed rulers of their own choice. It was this interference in the African political system, coupled with land alienation, and an oppressive and exploitative Portuguese system that sparked African resistances, rebellions, and oppositions. Even with Portuguese interference in the African political systems, Africans still resisted in order to assert their independence. Often Africans made alliances with their neighbors in a bid to oust Portuguese rule. Nhacumbiti of Mwenemutapa and Changamira of Rozwi made such an alliance in 1692, and subsequently the Portuguese were driven away. Sometimes Africans showed their resistance by attacking Portuguese commercial and administrative centers, including prazos.

The Portuguese tried to use the Catholic religion in a bid to control some of the African kingdoms. In the eighteenth century for instance, the Portuguese tried to control the Barue Kingdom in this manner. The Barue soldiers defended themselves by attacking prazos and Portuguese commercial centers. Other ethnic groups, notably Sena, Tonga, and Tawara, also resisted the Portuguese presence, protesting Portuguese interference in political and religious autonomy, and the notorious slave armies.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Afro-Portuguese prazeiros of the Zambezi valley were using their Achikunda slave armies to pursue their slave-trading activities, in defiance of Portuguese authority. By then British, French, and Boers of the Transvaal were showing increasing interest in the region of Mozambique, thus forcing the Portuguese to make strenuous efforts, during the 1860s, to bring the whole are more visibly under their control. They faced some of their strongest opposition from rebellious prazeiros who objected to this reassertion of Portuguese power. Nevertheless, a combination of military and diplomatic effort ensured that by 1875, the whole of the modern Mozambique coast was recognized by fellow Europeans as belonging to the Portuguese.

By the time of the “Scramble,” the African kingdoms were not as well organized as they had been previously. They were replete with dissentions. Taking advantage of the situation, the Portuguese regrouped and remobilized, and from 1885 began to gain control of the Mozambique interior. Portugal then proceeded to establish its oppressive colonial system based mainly on forced labor and taxation, which the Africans resisted in various forms. Africans deliberately worked slowly, sometimes feigning illness, destroying agricultural implements or burning seeds so they would not grow. Some, like Mapondera, fled to areas that were not easily reached, from where and with the support of local societies, they attacked and destroyed symbols of Portuguese oppression. These kinds of resistances laid the foundation for national liberation movements of the 1960s such as the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). At other times, peasants simply revolted, destroying symbols of exploitation and Portuguese property and burning plantations. However, these revolts tended to be sporadic and uncoordinated, and therefore easily suppressed by the Portuguese.

One of the most common causes of resistance was taxation. Africans evaded paying tax, because they did not have the means to do so. They fled or hid before tax collectors arrived. Forced labor, or chibalo, also contributed to revolts. African peasants naturally preferred to expend their energies on their own lands, but the colonial system forced them to perform manual duties for the Portuguese. Often peasants staged small scale uncoordinated revolts, save for the 1893 rebellion in Tete, which temporarily united neighboring states in destroying symbols of oppression.

From about 1884 to the early twentieth century, Mozambique witnessed several rebellions aimed at driving out the Portuguese. The Massingire rebellion of 1884 was sparked by tax resistance. The 1897 Cambuenda-Sena-Tonga was the result of a 45 per cent increase in the hut tax. Makanga opposed the Portuguese demand of two thousand males for labor, Tawara wanted to assert the independence of the Mwenemutapa and the Shona in 1904 were against forced labor policies. The rebellions, significant as they were, were ultimately quelled because they were not united or well-organized.

Between 1900 and 1962, the Portuguese continued with their oppressive colonial system based on forced labor and taxation. Thousands of Africans were sent to South African mines and Southern Rhodesian plantations.

From the 1920s through the 1950s opposition to the Portuguese took various forms that included intellectual, rural, worker, church, and finally national opposition to Portuguese colonial system. Leading assimilados and mulattos of the 1920s started a newspaper, O Africano (The African), which spoke against the injustices of the Portuguese colonial system. In the 1950s writers and poets produced works condemning the atrocities of the Portuguese system. Workers also demanded better working conditions and wages and various independent churches expressed anticolonial sentiments. Meanwhile, the rural population continued with its sporadic and uncoordinated resistances.

It was not until the 1960s, when the ethnic and opposition groups united under FRELIMO, under the leadership of Eduardo Mondlane, that there was national resistance. Adopting guerilla tactics with the support of the rural peasants, FRELIMO resisted and fought the Portuguese until Mozambique achieved liberation in 1975.

P. T. MGADLA

Further Reading

Birmingham, D. Frontline Nationalism in Angola and Mozambique. London: James Curry, and Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1992.

Hanlon, J. Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire. London: Zed Books, 1984.

Isaacman, A. and B. Isaacman. Mozambique: From Colonialism To Revolution 1900–1982. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983.

Penvenne, J. African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenco Marques, 1877–1962. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995.

Vail, L., and L. White. Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District. London: Heinemann, 1980.

Mozambique: Frelimo and the War of Liberation, 1962–1975

By the 1960s it was clear that the Portuguese government would not follow the precedent offered by its British and French colonial counterparts in negotiating, relatively peacefully, the terms of decolonization with the rising forces of nationalism in its African colonies, including Mozambique. Too economically underdeveloped to feel confident of retaining the neocolonial reins after its colonies’ independence, Portugal's authoritarian political system at home was also one legitimized ideologically by the myth of empire and by ingrained practices of paternalism. Nationalists in Mozambique (but also in Angola and Guinea Bissau) would have to fight for their freedom against such a recalcitrant colonial power.

In the early 1960s, Tanzania became the central base for nationalists from throughout the southern African region who had come to similar conclusions about the imperatives of their own situations vis-à-vis white minority rule. In Dar es Salaam, encouraged toward unity by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and certain continental leaders like Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah, a number of Mozambicans-in-exile came together, drawn from various of the quasi-nationalist movements then existent in territories neighboring Mozambique, from student and other organizations that had developed, up to a point, inside Mozambique itself, and from more distant exile (elsewhere in Africa, in Europe, and in North America). They moved to form, at a founding convention in September 1962, a more unified and effective organization to be named FRELIMO, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (soon referred to simply as “Frelimo”). Crucial to this development was Eduardo Mondlane who returned from a career of university teaching in the United States and employment with the United Nations to accept the position of first president of the new organization.

With the OAU Liberation Committee backing and by dint of a deft handling of relationships with other potential sponsors beyond Africa, both East and West, Frelimo soon outstripped rival claimants to nationalist primacy. Thus Frelimo was to prove far more skilled than other liberation movements in the region in drawing military assistance from both the Soviet bloc and China; its diplomatic efforts would also garner it an impressive degree of international acceptance, as well as considerable practical assistance for its “humanitarian” programs, from some Western governments (notably from the Scandinavian countries and Holland), churches and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Frelimo's primacy in the eyes of the OAU and others was further consolidated by the movement's advances in military terms. After the training in Algeria of its first military cadres, including Samora Machel (soon to be head of the guerrilla army and later first president of independent Mozambique), the movement launched, in 1964, an armed struggle that would soon drive the Portuguese from large parts of both the Cabo Delgado and Niassa provinces, which bordered on Tanzania. Similar efforts were at first abortive in Tete, but from 1968 Frelimo reengaged more successfully in that province (via Zambia), pushing forward in the early 1970s to the Zambezi and ultimately, bypassing an inhospitable Malawi, into the middle of the country where it began to pose some threat to the Portuguese presence in Manica and Sofala provinces.

Such was the unifying logic exemplified by Frelimo, and the advantages reaped from the consolidation of its legitimacy within Africa and beyond, that only rather marginalized alternative voices were now heard within the broad camp of Mozambican nationalism. Much more apparent were tensions within Frelimo itself. The conventional political practices that had defined the brand of nationalism prevalent elsewhere in Africa seemed ill-suited to the requirements of the guerrilla warfare that was now deemed necessary. In consequence, one wing of the movement (influenced both by its own experience inside the country and by a sympathetic awareness, in those heady days of the 1960s, of the ideas of “people's war” associated with the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions) began to advocate a more deeply grounded process of popular mobilization. The experience of these cadres also drew them towards an anti-imperialist critique of the nature of Portuguese colonialism and of the global capitalist system that framed it, another dimension of their radicalization.

Set against this increasingly leftist, even Marxist, tendency was a nationalist politics that instead emphasized a more exclusively racial reading of the imperatives of the anticolonial struggle and a more opportunist (elitist and entrepreneurial) practice of it. The contradictions within the movement that these differences produced may have helped trigger the 1968 assassination of Mondlane in Dar es Salaam, although the actual bomb that killed the Frelimo president was traceable to the Portuguese police.

Mondlane's death was no doubt a considerable loss to the movement in the long term, albeit one difficult to measure. Like the younger colleagues who would become his successors, Mondlane was certainly moving to the left, but his continuing presence at the heart of the movement might well have moderated the autocratic tendencies that Frelimo would eventually carry into government after 1975. More immediately, however, his death and the question of the succession merely brought into sharper focus an internal power struggle, one in which Samora Machel and the progressive group around him (with valuable support from Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania where Frelimo was then primarily domiciled) prevailed over the more conservative Uriah Simango for the leadership. This elevation of Machel, a considerable military leader and a charismatic force, to the presidency meant a positive consolidation of the practices of armed struggle as well as a confirmation of the movement's leftward trajectory.

Some historians have questioned any such account of Frelimo's forging of effective and progressive purpose during this period. They have emphasized, for example, the importance of regional and racial factors to the movement's internal politics, viewing the group that emerged to power under Machel's leadership as being marked principally by their identity as “southerners” or “mulattos.” Others have chosen to see them merely as constituting an arrogant elite-in-the-making in their own right, albeit one (some would add) self-righteously and uncritically wedded to a modernizing agenda. Such interpretations are almost certainly overstated, although, as regards the latter point, it is probably true that the very successes of the new leadership during this phase of their struggle helped blind them to certain complexities of the transformational project they would seek to realize for their country in the postliberation period.

Opinions also differ as to the extent to which Frelimo had actually rooted itself firmly in a popular base in its “liberated areas,” even in those parts of the country where it had a palpable guerrilla presence. Nonetheless, the beginnings of a project of social transformation and popular empowerment (in terms of education, health, gender roles, even production) that the leadership felt it was witnessing in these areas helped further to radicalize its views as to what a liberated Mozambique could look like under the movement's leadership. It is also true that only a relatively small percentage of the population in the northern part of the country fell under the direct influence of Frelimo activity. Yet there can be little doubt that the movement had earned for itself a substantial credibility in the minds of a large proportion of the country's overall population by the time of the Portuguese coup in April 1974.

The precise reasons for the fall of Portuguese fascism are much debated. Nonetheless, the guerrilla challenge in Africa (and not least in Mozambique) to the regime's colonial project was an especially crucial factor in both draining the Portuguese army's morale and undermining the legitimacy of Marcelo Caetano's regime at home. Frelimo had been able to weather the combination of brutal intimidation (the massacre at Wiriyamu in 1972, for example), construction of strategic hamlets, and launching of “great [military] offensives” (such as the much trumpeted “Operation Gordian Knot”) thrown at it in the early 70s. Then, even after the coup, Frelimo refused to be tempted by the neocolonial blandishments of General Spinola and instead kept the fighting alive until a more radical Portuguese government agreed both to transfer power to the movement and, as occurred in June 1975, to recognize the new nation's independence.

Fatefully, Frelimo had thus come to power with much popular support but without benefit of elections and indeed (so certain was it of its mission to further transform in socioeconomic terms the lives of its popular constituency) with a pronounced distaste for entertaining opposition to what it considered to be its noble purposes. The hierarchical tendencies implicit in its experience of the (necessary) militarization of its struggle but also imbibed from the authoritarian practices of even the most enlightened nationalist leaders elsewhere on the continent no doubt contributed to this predilection. But so too did the movement's heady pride in its victory, its self-confidence, and its unquestioning commitment to the progressive project, deemed to be at once socialist, modernizing, and developmental, that it had forged in the liberation struggle.

JOHN S. SAUL

See also: Mondlane, Eduardo; Mozambique: Machel and the Frelimo, 1975–1986.

Further Reading

Birmingham, D. Frontline Nationalism in Angola and Mozambique. London: James Currey, 1992.

Isaacman, A., and B. Isaacman. Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983.

Mondlane, E. The Struggle for Mozambique. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 1983.

Munslow, B. Mozambique: The Revolution and Its Origins. London: Longman, 1983.

Newitt, M. A History of Mozambique. London: Hurst and Company, 1995.

Saul, J. S. (ed.). A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.

Mozambique: Machel and the Frelimo Revolution, 1975–1986

Cabora Bassa Dam, Mozambique. © Friedrich Stark/Das Fotoarchiv.

After the overthrow of the Portuguese colonial presence in Mozambique, FRELIMO (soon, as a political party, simply “Frelimo”) came to power in 1975 with an ambitious agenda highlighting nationalist, developmental and socialist goals. Although he surrounded himself with a deeply committed and unified team, the key figure in this process was undoubtedly Frelimo's president, Samora Moises Machel. Born in southern Mozambique in 1933 and trained as a nurse, Machel left Mozambique in 1963 to join FRELIMO in Tanzania. After military training, he soon rose to be head of the army and, in the wake of Eduardo Mondlane's assassination and a subsequent struggle for primacy within the movement, to its presidency in 1969. In the liberation struggle he came to play an absolutely crucial role in sustaining and advancing FRELIMO's military challenge to Portuguese rule and consolidating the movement's leftward trajectory. He was a man of enormous charisma, if also one of rather overweening self-confidence, and something of an autodidact in matters of revolutionary theory. He was deeply concerned with transforming and modernizing his country and the condition of its peoples. There can be little doubt that Machel and key leaders of Frelimo, now in positions of governmental authority, thought that this transformation would occur along socialist lines: Machel's speeches were studded with statements regarding the evils of exploitation and the nature of the global imperialist system that allow of no other interpretation of the movement's intentions.

The realization of such intentions would prove to be more difficult. The departure at independence of most of the resident Portuguese (who also engaged in substantial sabotage on leaving) created chaotic conditions, while also underscoring just how vulnerable the inherited economy was, and just how few trained Mozambicans Portuguese colonialism had produced. In addition, Mozambique was to be struck by a range of natural disasters (droughts and floods) throughout Frelimo's early years in power. The new government was prepared to be quite pragmatic in certain respects (e.g., as regards its inherited linkages with South Africa), but the various crises of the transition probably encouraged Frelimo, which in any case was extremely ambitious, to embrace too many tasks at once. Moreover, there was limited room for maneuver for progressives in power in the then polarized world of the Cold War. In such a context, Frelimo's developmental agenda was also distorted by the impact of assistance from the Eastern bloc upon which it became overly, if almost inevitably, reliant.

In the event, the movement was drawn away from the peasant roots of its liberation struggle toward a model that, by fetishizing (with Eastern European encouragement) the twin themes of modern technology and “proletarianization,” forced the pace and scale of change precipitously, both in terms of inappropriate industrial strategies and, in the rural areas, of highly mechanized state farms and (against the evidence of experience elsewhere in Africa) ambitious plans for the rapid “villagization” (“aldeias communais”) of rural dwellers. Debate continues as to how (and indeed whether) a more expansive economic development strategy that effectively linked a more apposite program of industrialization to the expansion of peasant-based production might actually have been realized under Mozambican circumstances. Nonetheless, the failure to do so was to be a key material factor in placing in jeopardy Frelimo's parallel hopes of mobilizing popular energies and transforming consciousness.

Similarly, in the political realm, the authoritarianism of prevailing “socialist” practice elsewhere reinforced the pull of the movement's own experience of military hierarchy and of the autocratic methods conventionally associated with African nationalism to encourage a “vanguard party” model of politics, this being officially embraced at Frelimo's Third Congress in 1978. The simultaneous adoption of a particularly inflexible official version of “Marxism-Leninism” had a further deadening effect on the kind of creativity (both visà-vis the peasantry during the liberation struggle and as further exemplified in the transition period by the encouragement of grassroots “dynamizing groups” in urban areas) that the movement had previously evidenced. Such developments substantially contradicted any real drive toward popular empowerment, tending to turn the organizations of workers, women, and the like into mere transmission belts for the Frelimo Party. It is true that the kind of “left developmental dictatorship” now created by Frelimo witnessed successes in certain important spheres (health and education, for example) and advances in the principles (if not always the practice) of such projects as that of women's emancipation were impressive. Moreover, the regime took seriously the challenges to their emancipatory vision posed by the structures of institutionalized religion, by “tradition” and patriarchy, and by ethnic and regional sentiment. But the high-handed manner (at once moralizing and “modernizing”) in which it approached such matters often betrayed an arrogance and a weakness in methods of political work that would render it more vulnerable to destructive oppositional activity than need otherwise have been the case.

The fact remains that the most important root of such “oppositional activity” lay in Frelimo's fateful decision to commit itself to the continuing struggle to liberate the rest of southern Africa, Rhodesia in the first instance but also South Africa, a point often downplayed by those observers who now choose to underestimate the high sense of moral purpose with which Frelimo assumed power in 1975. It was a choice for which the fledgling socialist state was to pay dearly, however. The cutting off of economic links with Rhodesia helped undermine the economy of Beira and its hinterland (especially when little of the promised international compensation for implementation of sanctions was forthcoming). And the support for ZANU guerrillas in advancing their own struggle prompted the Rhodesians to launch efforts to destabilize Mozambique, notably through the recruitment of renegade Mozambicans as mercenaries into a “Mozambique National Resistance” (the MNR, later Renamo) Then, after the fall of the Smith regime in 1979, the South African state itself chose to breathe fresh life into Renamo while intensifying the latter's cruel program of outright destabilization, characterized by its brutal targeting of Mozambican civilian populations, and its wilful destruction of social and economic infrastructures.

The conclusion carefully argued by Minter (1994: p.283) stands: that without such external orchestration, Mozambique's own internal contradictions would not have given rise to war. Once launched, however, the war did serve to magnify Frelimo's errors and to narrow its chances of learning from them. Indeed, such was the war's destructive impact on Mozambique's social fabric that what began as an external imposition slowly but surely took on some of the characteristics of a civil war. Given the nature of its own violent and authoritarian practices, Renamo could not easily pose as a champion of democracy (except in some ultraright circles in the West). Nonetheless, it had some success, over time, in fastening onto various grievances that sprang from the weaknesses in Frelimo's own project, Renamo seeking to fan the resentments of disgruntled peasants, disaffected regionalists, ambitious “traditionalists” (e.g., displaced chiefs). Meanwhile, under pressure, the Frelimo state itself buckled, its original sense of high purpose and undoubted integrity beginning to be lost. Thus, by the time open elections did finally occur in the 1990s as part of the peace process, Renamo had gained sufficient popular resonance to present a real challenge to Frelimo, albeit on a terrain of political competition reduced to the lowest kind of opportunistic calculation of regional, ethnic, and sectional advantage.

In the period covered in this entry such outcomes were not yet visible. And yet, by the early 1980s, Frelimo had begun to adapt its domestic policies in a less aggressively revolutionary, more market-sensitive direction. True, this was done (at its Fourth Congress in 1983, for example) in ways that could still be interpreted as realistic adjustments calculated primarily to ensure the long-term viability of quasi-socialist goals. In retrospect, however, they can also be seen as first steps in an effort to placate various Western actors, in particular the Reagan White House, which was now so aggressive in the region and a tacit supporter of South African strategies. By the 1990s such trends would witness a full-scale surrender by Frelimo to the globalizing logic of neoliberalism.

Just how far, had he lived, Samora Machel would himself have been prepared to travel down that road must remain a matter of speculation. Nonetheless, Machel had already presided over the movement's most humiliating capitulation, that to South Africa, as crystallized in the signing of 1984's Nkomati Accord. This pact found Frelimo trading abandonment of its support to the ANC for South Africa's promise to wind down its orchestration of Renamo's destabilizing activities. In fact, South Africa did no such thing, and Machel now proposed a (long overdue) housecleaning of state structures, in particular of the military. He was to perish, however, in October 1986, when his airplane crashed while returning from a meeting in Zambia (a crash which, some continue to claim, may have been engineered by the South Africans). Whatever the disarray and uncertainty that by now characterized Frelimo's overall project, the renowned unity of the movement's leadership core held firm. Joaquim Chissano, himself a veteran activist from the liberation struggle period, was elevated to the presidency.

JOHN S. SAUL

Further Reading

Christie, I. Machel of Mozambique. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1988.

Hall, M., and T. Young. Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique since Independence. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997.

Machel, S. Samora Machel: An African Revolutionary/Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by B. Munslow. London: Zed Books, 1985.

Minter, W. Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique. London: Zed Books, 1994.

Saul, J. S. (ed.). A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.

———. Recolonization and Resistance: Southern Africa in the 1990s. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1993.

Mozambique: Renamo, Destabilization

South Africa's apartheid regime responded to independence and majority rule in neighboring states with a policy of destabilization, in which it covertly fomented war and created economic problems in those states. This had three purposes: to weaken those states and prevent them from supporting the South African liberation movements, to disrupt transport links and keep the countries dependent on South Africa (and thus disrupt the newly founded Southern African Development Coordination Conference, or SADCC), and to demonstrate to its own people and the wider world that black governments were incompetent and unfit to rule. From 1981 this policy received tacit support from the U.S. administration of President Ronald Reagan, which saw which South Africa as an anticommunist bastion standing up to black “communist” governments.

Resistencia Nacional Moçambicana (Mozambique National Resistance, or Renamo) was South Africa's agent in Mozambique, and during the 1981–1992 war, at least 1 million people died, 5 million were displaced or became refugees in neighboring countries, and damage exceeded $20 billion. Renamo was initially set up by the Rhodesian security services in 1976 when Mozambique imposed mandatory United Nations sanctions against Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Renamo's first members were Mozambicans who had been in particularly brutal Portuguese colonial units before independence, and who then fled to Rhodesia fearing punishment. Renamo made raids into central Mozambique, and built up recruits by raiding open prisons in rural areas. The main Renamo bases in Mozambique were captured in 1979 and 1980, and Renamo was largely defeated.

With independence in Zimbabwe in 1980, the remaining Renamo fighters were passed on to South African military intelligence, which set up special bases for them in northeast South Africa. Rhodesia had only used Renamo for harassment and intelligence, but South Africa built Renamo into a major fighting force with extensive training and supplies by boat and plane. South African commandos took an active part in key Renamo sabotage actions. Afonso Dhlakama was selected as the new commander. By mid-1981 Renamo was active in the two central provinces; by the end of 1983 it was disrupting travel and carrying out raids in six of the ten provinces; it required 3,000 Zimbabwean troops to protect the road, railway, and oil pipeline that linked the Mozambican port of Beira to Zimbabwe.

On March 16, 1984, Mozambique and South Africa signed the Nkomati Accord, under which South Africa agreed to stop supporting Renamo in exchange for Mozambique expelling African National Congress (ANC) members. Mozambique abided by the accord, but South Africa did not; support for Renamo was reduced but never stopped.

South Africa wanted to disrupt transport and commerce and destroy economic infrastructure in Mozambique, and it also wanted to destroy the image of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, popularly known as Frelimo. A central plank of its strategy was fear, and Renamo was molded into an effective terrorist force. Frelimo had gained its greatest popularity through its rapid expansion of health and education, so Renamo attacked schools and health posts and maimed, killed, or kidnapped nurses and patients, teachers, and pupils. The goal was to make people afraid to use health posts and send their children to school, and to make teachers and nurses afraid to work in rural areas, thus eliminating Frelimo's traditional sources of support. To disrupt commerce, shops were destroyed and there were brutal attacks on road and rail transport; wounded passengers were burned alive inside buses, but some were always left alive to tell what had happened, thus creating fear of travel. More than half of all rural primary schools, health posts, and shops were destroyed or forced to close.

In 1998 the United States deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Roy Stacey, accused Renamo of carrying out “one of the most brutal holocausts against ordinary human beings since World War II.” Renamo, he said, was “waging a systematic and brutal war of terror against innocent Mozambican civilians through forced labor, starvation, physical abuse, and wanton killing.”

Renamo recruited largely by kidnapping large groups of young people. The Renamo members allowed the most determined of the kidnapped to escape. The rest were frightened into submission, forced to kill, and gradually molded into willing soldiers.

Travel and commerce became difficult in much of the country. By 1985, exports were only one-third of their 1981 levels, and GDP per capita was half of its 1981 level. By 1990, one-third of the population had fled to towns or neighboring countries, leaving rural areas depopulated. By 1992, the United Nations estimated that Renamo controlled 23 per cent of the territory of Mozambique, but only 6 per cent of the population.

Renamo had popular support in some areas, particularly in the center of the country. Peasants were critical of Frelimo for its opposition to “traditional leaders” and, in its rush to modernize the economy, for Frelimo's failure to adequately support the peasantry. The war and deteriorating economy turned many against Frelimo.

In 1992, after two years of negotiation in Rome, the government of Mozambique and Renamo signed a peace accord. Both sides were tired of war, and the ceasefire was quickly implemented. The peace accord implicitly accepted that there would be no truth commission, and thus no punishments would be meted out for atrocities committed during the war. Frelimo demobilized 66,000 soldiers; Renamo demobilized 24,000 adult soldiers and 12,000 child soldiers, according to the United Nations. The peace accord called for a new integrated army of 30,000 men, half from each side, but only 12,000 of the demobilized chose to join the army.

Renamo was recognized as a political party and received extensive donor support in the two years before the 1994 elections to convert it from a guerrilla force into a political party. Many people joined Renamo in that period, seeing it as the only viable opposition party.

Multiparty election on October 27–29, 1994, and December 3–5, 1999, were quite similar. Approximately two-thirds of all adults of voting age voted in each election. Both elections were declared free and fair by foreign observers who also praised the organization of the electoral process. Frelimo and its president Joaquim Chissano won both elections, but Renamo took a significant portion of the votes. Renamo boycotted the opening session of parliament after both elections, claiming fraud, but offering no evidence to support its claim.

In February 2000 southern Mozambique suffered the worst floods since 1895; 700 people died, 40,000 were saved by the Mozambique navy and South African air force, and 500,000 were displaced and assisted by the international community. Although Mozambique's per capita GDP continued to increase, the floods slowed growth in 2000, and the impact continued into 2001.

JOSEPH HANLON

See also: Mozambique: Chissano and, 1986 to the Present; Mozambique: FRELIMO and the War of Liberation, 1962–1975; Mozambique: Machel and the Frelimo Revolution, 1975–1986; South Africa: Apartheid, 1948–1959.

Further Reading

Hanlon, J. Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

———. Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

———. Peace Without Profit: How the IMF Blocks Rebuilding in Mozambique. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996.

Minter, W. Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1994.

United Nations Department of Public Information. The United Nations and Mozambique: 1992–1995. New York: United Nations, 1995.

Vines,A. Renamo: From Terrorism to Democracy in Mozambique? London: James Currey, 1996.

Mozambique: Chissano and, 1986 to the Present

Following the death of Samora Machel in 1986 in an airplane crash, Joaquim Chissano assumed both the presidency of Mozambique and of the ruling Frelimo party in a peaceful and uncontested transition. Chissano successfully led the transitional government to independence in 1974–1975 and was minister of foreign affairs in the postindependence government. Chissano came from the same area and ethnolinguistic group in the south of the country as Machel and his predecessor as leader of Frelimo, Eduardo Mondlane. All were Shanganas (named thus, after a famous Nguni leader) from Gaza province, yet none of the three leaders had a narrow “tribalist” outlook.

South Africa-backed destabilization, supporting the internal Renamo armed opposition, combined with failed radical socialist policies and an extended period of crippling drought, brought the country to its knees. The United Nations launched a series of unprecedented emergency humanitarian appeals for six successive years, beginning in 1987. Mozambique had become the poorest country in the world with a GDP per capita of less than $100. Under Chissano, the move toward the West and away from earlier Marxist-Leninist influence gathered pace. Mozambique joined the IMF and World Bank and attracted increasing levels of aid. By the early 1990s, 70 per cent or more of GDP was accounted for by aid, reflecting the ongoing emergency facing the country. Chissano's pragmatism was to help transform Mozambique into one of the few success stories in Africa, in terms of economic growth, in the final years of the twentieth century.

Chissano also presided over the complex transition from a single-party state to a multiparty electoral system. A new constitution in 1990 set up a multiparty state, along with the mechanisms for direct elections for the presidency and for members of parliament. Efforts were made throughout the 1990s to move away from the existing, extremely centralized, administrative model. Decentralization of state power only proceeded slowly, however, in a context of scarce resources and the prevailing political culture.

Transformation toward majority rule in South Africa reduced external support for Renamo. The war was recognized by both parties to the conflict as a stalemate, and under growing internal and international pressure, peace negotiations began between Frelimo and Renamo in 1990 in Rome. In October 1992, a General Peace Agreement was signed after a long and tortuous period of negotiations and compromise.

The peace process was successfully concluded, 92,000 rival troops were demobilized, and a small unified national army was created. Landmines were removed, and bridges and roads were repaired. A further task involved in the peace process was reintegrating the 2.1 million internally displaced persons and 1.7 million refugees. This was mainly undertaken between 1992 and 1994. Democratic elections were held in 1994. Frelimo won a majority of seats in parliament (129 compared with 112 for Renamo), and Chissano won the presidential vote quite convincingly. Yet Renamo received a clear majority of votes in the center of the country in its historical heartland. Frelimo won a majority in the south and in the north of the country, where its fundamental support lay. Over the remainder of the decade all evidence pointed to an effective transition from war to peace. Yet the need remained for a more even spread of the benefits of peace and economic development across the country if regional tensions were to be effectively managed.

Economic recovery was encouraged by the peace process and privatization. A considerable expansion of private investment took place, mainly in massive projects involving aluminum smelting and iron and steel production, offshore gas, heavy metal sands mining, hydroelectricity, and tourism initiatives. The major impediment to sustainable economic development remained the massive debt burden. A significant breakthrough occurred when Mozambique was chosen for the implementation of the highly indebted poor countries debt relief initiative enabling almost $3 billion of debt to be canceled. The government's strict adherence to the structural adjustment program had won it considerable international support for such a move. Gross domestic product was growing at 10 per cent per annum in the final years of the century. All of the primary schools destroyed by the war had also been restored. Effectively two decades of development were lost by the conflict. Inflation was also brought under control and the dire poverty of much of the population began to be tackled.

Mozambique benefited from active economic cooperation with its neighboring states, particularly South Africa. A major stimulus for economic renewal in the south of the country was the corridor initiative linking the South African industrial heartland of Gauteng with the port of Maputo. Other similar initiatives were planned with neighboring countries to the north. A good deal of the renewed economic well-being felt by the population resulted not only from peace and the opening up of access to the agricultural land of the interior, but also to the end of the decade of drought, which fortuitously coincided with the peace and the democratic elections. Access to land, security, and good rains kick-started the rural economy back to life. Subsistence food and commercialization circuits reopened and the free market policy framework promoted economic initiative.

BARRY MUNSLOW

See also: Mozambique: Frelimo and the War of Liberation, 1962–1975; Mozambique: Machel and the Frelimo Revolution, 1975–1986; Mozambique: Renamo, Destabilization; Socialism in Postcolonial Africa.

Further Reading

Abrahamsson, H., and A. Nilsson. Mozambique: The Troubled Transition. London: Zed Books, 1995.

Ferraz, B., and B. Munslow. Sustainable Development in Mozambique. Oxford: James Currey, 1999.

Hanlon, J. Peace Without Profit: How Adjustment Blocks Rebuilding in Mozambique. Oxford: James Currey, 1996.

Munslow, B. “Mozambique after Machel.” Third World Quarterly. 10, no. 1 (1988): 23–36.

Newitt, M. A History of Mozambique. London: C. Hurst and Co., 1993.

Special Issue on Mozambique. Journal of Southern African Studies. 24, no.1 (1998).

Vines, A. Renamo: From Terrorism to Democracy in Mozambique? Oxford: James Currey, 1996.

Wuyts, M. “Foreign aid, structural adjustment and public management: the Mozambique experience.” Development and Change. 27, no. 4 (1996).

Young, T., and M. Hall. Mozambique since Independence: Confronting Leviathon. London: C. Hurst and Co., 1997.

Mphahlele, Ezekiel (1919–)

South African Writer, Critic, and Teacher

Ezekiel (later, Es'kia) Mphahlele played a central role in the development of African literature and criticism in general, and literary opposition to apartheid in particular. His widely read autobiography, Down Second Avenue, is considered a classic of South African literature.

Born in Marabastad Township, Pretoria in 1919, Mphahlele spent part of his childhood with his extended family in the impoverished rural village of Maupaneng, northern Transvaal, before returning to Pretoria. Urban and rural experiences reflect and shape the ever-present themes of township life and African culture in his writings. Educated at St. Peter's Secondary School in Johannesburg (where schoolmates included novelist Peter Abrahams and PAC leader Zeph Mothopheng) and Adams Teaching Training College, Natal, he matriculated by correspondence in 1942 and worked as a clerk, typist, and instructor at the Enzenzeleni Blind Institute before taking up a teaching post at Orlando High School, Soweto, in 1945.

Mphahlele's first publication, Man Must Live and Other Stories (1946), was the first published collection of short stories in English by a black South African. Critics decried his “unsophisticated” style, but the stories captured the indomitable struggle for survival of poor urban blacks in the face of racial domination. He continued to teach, also gaining a bachelor of arts degree by correspondence from the University of South Africa in 1949. The increasing repression of the apartheid regime pushed him into action. Elected secretary of the Transvaal African Teachers’ Association in 1950 he mobilized African teachers against the Bantu education bill that imposed a highly discriminatory and inferior state education system for blacks. His vocal opposition to “Bantu Education” led in 1952 to his dismissal and banning from teaching and his blacklisting in surrounding countries. He nevertheless obtained work as a teacher for a short time in 1954 in Lesotho and at St. Peter's. In 1955 he joined the African National Congress (ANC) and was briefly active in the organization, but was critical of its inattention to cultural and educational matters.

In 1955, as literary editor and reporter for the influential Drum magazine, he helped raise the visibility of young African writers and reported key events such as forced removals and bus boycotts but, ill at ease in journalism, and objecting to editorial censoring on the white-owned journal, he chose teaching and writing as his life's work. In 1956 he completed a master of arts thesis on black characters in South African fiction at the University of South Africa. Banned from teaching and in search of greater intellectual stimulation, he went into self-imposed exile the following year.

From 1957 to 1961, Mphahlele lived in Nigeria. He taught English and creative writing in the University of Ibadan Extra-Mural Department and interacted with important Nigerian writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. In the 1960s, he traveled widely and helped establish cultural and literary centres, such as the Mbari Writers and Artists Club in Ibadan (1961) and the Chem-Chemi Cultural Center in Nairobi (1963). As an editor of the seminal literary journal Black Orpheus, he was instrumental in forging international visibility for black South African writers. He was part of an influential emerging group of writers, including Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thion'go, who challenged established literary mores. In 1961 he moved to Paris as director of the African section of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an American-sponsored organization. He subsequently lived in Kenya, Zambia, and the United States. He taught and received a doctorate (1968) from the University of Denver and in 1974 became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

In exile Mphahlele published widely. Down Second Avenue (1959) met with great critical acclaim. This autobiographical narrative vividly depicts his personal and community struggles against racism and captures the endemic poverty of black urban life and the oppression of white rule, but also the resilience of Africans. It also provides a glimpse of momentous events in South African history. In The African Image (1962), his first critical work and one of the earliest books of literary criticism by an African writer in English, he elaborated key themes in African literature, though critics pointed to his limited grasp of theory. In the sixties he also edited major anthologies of African literature (African Writing Today and Modern African Stories) as well as publishing his own short fiction (The Living and Dead, and Other Stories [1961] and In Corner B [1967]). Like his prose, his short stories convey the traumas of harsh urban life under apartheid and the little acts of resistance and desperation by ordinary Africans. His most successful stories include “He and the Cat,” and “Mrs. Plum” (about patronizing whites). In the 1970s and 1980s, his literary criticism included Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (1972). He published two novels, The Wanderers (1971), an autobiographical novel dealing with themes of exile, and Chirundu (1979), focusing on political corruption set in a thinly disguised Zambia. His also wrote a juvenile novella, Father Come Home (1984), set against a major event of South African history, the 1913 Natives’ Land Act. However, his novels were not successful. Afrika My Music (1984), the sequel to his autobiography, described his exile and return to South Africa. A collection of his letters, Bury Me at the Marketplace, appeared in 1984.

After twenty years of exile he returned to South Africa in 1977 to teach at the University of the North in the Lebowa bantustan. His return soon after the bloodily repressed Soweto Revolt to a country still ruled by the apartheid system he had condemned proved controversial, and he was criticized by fellow exiles Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi. This diminished his reputation as an unyielding antiapartheid writer but he stressed his need to seek literary inspiration in African culture and landscapes. The apartheid regime annulled his appointment and he was instead forced to work as a school inspector. He later secured a research position at the University of the Witwatersrand where in 1983 he was foundation professor of the Department of African Literature. After retiring in 1988 he continued to write but produced no major works.

Major themes of Mphahlele's creative work and life are alienation and the isolation of exile caused by apartheid and cultural colonization, and the antidote to this malaise, African humanism (or ubuntu), drawn from African culture. Like Ngugi, he sought to “decolonize the mind.” While seeing literature as distinct from politics he found ways to incorporate into his fiction important political themes such as corruption. He also portrayed the strength of African women.

Mphahlele's work was crowned with literary achievements. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize and received numerous awards. But his major impact was on the development of a new approach to African writing. As a strong critic of the limitations of the négritude movement and ardent proponent of the self-assertion of African identity, he indirectly influenced the development of the Black Consciousness movement. An indication of his enduring influence is the continued presence of Down Second Avenue in South African school curricula.

PETER LIMB

Biography

Born in Marabastad Township, Pretoria in 1919. Matriculated at Adams Teaching Training College, Natal, by correspondence in 1942. Took up a teaching post at Orlando High School, Soweto, in 1945. Earned a B.A. degree by correspondence from the University of South Africa in 1949. Elected secretary of the Transvaal African Teachers’ Association in 1950. Dismissed, banned from teaching, and blacklisted in surrounding countries in 1952. Completed an M.A. degree at the University of South Africa in 1956. Taught English and creative writing in the University of Ibadan. Moved to Paris to work as director of the African section of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1961. Taught and received a Ph.D. (1968) from the University of Denver in 1968. Appointed professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. Appointed professor in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1983. Retired 1988.

Further Reading

Manganyi, N. C. Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es'kia Mphahlele. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983.

Mphahlele, E. The African Image. Rev. ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

———. Afrika My Music: An Autobiography. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984.

———. Down Second Avenue. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.

———. The Unbroken Song: Selected Writings. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981.

———. Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Obee, R. Es'kia Mphahlele: Themes of Alienation and African Humanism. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999.

MPLA: SeeAngola: MPLA, FNLA, UNITA, and the War of Liberation, 1961–1974.

Msiri: Yeke Kingdom

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Swahili Arab merchants from Zanzibar extended their trading network deep into East and Central Africa. Although previously active in the hinterland of the Indian Ocean coast, they now moved inland in order to control the rapidly growing trade of slaves, ivory, and other products. Permanent trade centers emerged along the various routes leading to the interior. The most important routes led toward Lake Tanganyika and Lake Mwera where Swahili Arabs were present as early as the 1830s. The main link to Lake Tanganyika crossed the lands of the Nyamwezi and Sumbwa peoples south of Lake Victoria. The Swahili counted these people among their principal commercial partners. In fact, the Nyamwezi and Sumbwa were more than economic auxiliaries; they organized their own expeditions to the heart of the continent. For example, Sumbwa groups reached southern Katanga (Congo-DRC) in their quest for copper, ivory, and slaves. Under the impetus of the talented leader M'siri, whose own father had established friendship pacts with small Katanga chiefs, certain Sumbwa were permanently established in the region around 1850. In Katanga they became known as Yeke, a Sumbwa term for an elephant hunters’ guild.

The region where the Yeke settled was far from the Luba, Lunda, and Kazembe kingdoms that were the great political centers of the time. From the start, the Yeke, who numbered no more than several hundred, had the foresight to establish good relations with their far more powerful neighbors. Relying on their guns and the sense of strategy they had developed in Tanzania, the Yeke gained control of the petty local Sanga chiefs. Unlike other slave trading groups that made no long-term plans, but relied only on force, the Yeke demonstrated a great capacity for integrating themselves into the political, social, and religious fabric of the region. They were especially skilled at utilizing the process of fictive kinship in order to bind themselves to their new allies. Cleverly manipulating kinship as a political tool, M'siri soon had himself proclaimed mwami (king).

During the 1880s, M'siri's Yeke kingdom reached its apogee. At that time the Yeke controlled southern and eastern Katanga where they managed to subdue a number of territories previously attached to the three great neighboring empires. Now, the Yeke state resembled a series of concentric bands. The Yeke exerted direct control over the immediate area around their capital, Bunkeya. Beyond that was a band of territories whose chiefs were obligated to pay tribute in exchange for regalia providing them with legitimacy. M'siri sometimes installed a Yeke resident ruler in these regions while at the same time bringing local princesses or chiefly heirs to be educated at the Yeke royal court. These policies led to the development of a pronounced Yeke presence within and influence upon the Katanga elite. Beyond this band was yet a third region that extended as far as Zambia. In this band, the Yeke sought not stable political centers, but merely commercial products such as slaves and ivory obtained through raids.

The Yeke were ideally situated on the line dividing the Indian Ocean commercial zone from that of the Atlantic zone. Thus, they could negotiate simultaneously with Luso-Angolan and Swahili-Arab merchants. Immense caravans containing hundreds, even thousands, of people regularly passed through the Yeke capital Bunkeya.

By the end of the 1880s, Leopold II, king of the Congo Free State, and Cecil Rhodes, whose operations were the vanguard of British colonialism, competed to gain control over M'siri. Both saw M'siri's capital as the gateway to a region reputed to contain great mineral wealth. Both Rhodes and Leopold organized expeditions, but Leopold was sucessful. In 1891 a fourth Belgian expedition reached Bunkeya. An argument broke out and M'siri died in the course of a shooting incident. M'siri's death coincided with the fall of the Yeke Kingdom. The state was undermined by rebellions led by local people who seized the occasion to emancipate themselves from Yeke control.

During the following years, the Yeke became the Congo Free State's principle allies in Katanga. This cooperation saved the Yeke from political obliteration and assured the establishment of a large colonial chief-dom ruled by the Yeke kings. Even today, Yeke influence far outweighs Yeke demographic importance (they number perhaps 20,000). M'siri's grandson, Godefroid Munongo, was the minister of interior in the secessionist Katanga government (1960–1963). Subsequently, Munongo occupied many ministerial posts in the government of Zaire. Munongo died in 1992 while participating in the National Conference in Kinshasa. The loss of such a powerful figure was damaging to the Yeke who since then have become the target of criticism. Other inhabitants of Katanga reproach them for not being original inhabitants of the region. The small groups of Yeke who were established outside of Bunkeya in the nineteenth century—mostly north of Lake Mwera and along the Luapula (including the Kitopi and Kashyobwe)—have been dispossessed of their rights to land they once held.

The Tanzania elements of Yeke culture such as their language (kiyeke, a Shisumbwa dialect now spoken only at the mwami's court) are now in decline. Nevertheless, the Yeke maintain their strong sense of identity. Recently, groups of young singers, dancers, and comedians have been established at Bunkeya in order to save and promote their culture. Each December 20, Yeke travel from all over Katanga to assemble at Bunkeya in order to celebrate the death of M'siri. This ceremony takes place at locations linked with the memory of that tragic event.

PIERRE PETIT

See also: Rhodes, Cecil, J.; Stanley, Leopold II, “Scramble.”

Further Reading

Arnot, F. Bihé and Garenganze: Or Four Years' Further Work and Travel in Central Africa. London: James E. Hawkins, 1895.

Legros, H. Une histoire du royaume yeke du Shaba (Zaïre). Brussels: Editions de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1996.

Munongo, M. A. (ed.). Pages d'histoire yeke. Lubumbashi: Mémoires du CEPSI, 1967.

Verbeken, A. Msiri, roi du Garenganze. Brussels: Cuypers, 1956.

Mswati III: See Swaziland: Mswati III, Reign of.

Mugabe, Robert Gabriel (c.1924–)

Zimbabwean Politician and Former Guerrilla Leader

Head of government since independence from white minority rule in 1980, president of Zimbabwe, and leader of the ruling party, ZANU (PF) Robert Mugabe is a member of the Zezuru subgroup of the Shona ethnic cluster, which makes up roughly 80 per cent of the population today. He was born at the Kutanma Catholic mission near Zvimba in Makonde district, in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

Interested in a career as a teacher, he attending Catholic mission schools and worked as a primary school teacher at Kutanma until 1943, followed by stints at Empandeni and Hope Fountain missions until 1950. In that year he won a university scholarship to Fort Hare University in South Africa. Both his tertiary education and involvement with African nationalism began at Fort Hare. He received a B.A. degree in 1951. His education continued at the University of London. Over the next twenty years, partly in and out of prison, Mugabe earned four more university-level degrees in education, economics, law, and administration.

Returning in 1952, Mugabe continued teaching at mission schools, and in northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1955. In 1958 he moved to Accra in Ghana following its independence from British colonial rule to teach and experience African freedom personally. It was during this time that he met and married his first wife, Sally Hayfron. In May 1960 they returned to southern Rhodesia, where Robert became increasingly politically active in the executive body of the National Democratic Party (NDP), a newly formed nationalist movement. He served as secretary for publicity until the NDP was banned.

He served as deputy secretary general of the Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union (ZAPU) under Joshua Nkomo in the early 1960s. During this time, Mugabe was arrested frequently. While out on bail, he managed to flee to Dar es Salaam, ZAPU's exile headquarters. It was during this time, early in 1963, that Mugabe broke with Nkomo and joined the newly formed Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) under the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, serving as secretary general. Shortly after returning to Rhodesia, in mid-1963, he was rearrested and found himself in jail in 1964, when ZANU was banned. For the next ten years, Mugabe was held in prison or detention camps, until his release in 1974 as part of Ian Smith's general amnesty. Late in 1974, Sithole, still in detention, was suspended from ZANU by a vote of the executive committee and replaced as leader by Mugabe.

Following the 1975 assassination of Herbert Chitepo under suspicious circumstances at ZANU's operational headquarters in Lusaka, Mugabe, and Edgar Tekere moved to Mozambique in the wake of the end of Portuguese military occupation. From Maputo they reorganized ZANU and reactivated ZANLA, the military wing of the party. By 1977 Mugabe had become generally recognized as the uncontested leader of ZANU-ZANLA and a leading candidate in the eyes of African leaders for leadership of the still-divided national liberation movement. He was personally involved in both party affairs and military strategy, while traveling widely as key spokesperson in an international diplomatic campaign against the Smith-Muzorewa regime. By 1979 ZANLA had about 20,000 fighters under arms. Mugabe proclaimed himself a Marxist and was generally viewed as the most radical of all nationalist leaders.

In 1976, shortly before the beginning of unsuccessful negotiations with the Smith regime in Geneva, Mugabe and Nkomo had formed the Patriotic Front (PF). In 1978 both leaders participated in another round of peace talks in Malta, where they expressed support for independent elections in Zimbabwe. Terms of an internal settlement agreement, however, were denounced as a sellout by ZANU, which boycotted it. In 1979 Mugabe led the ZANU (PF) contingent to all-party talks at Lancaster House in London, which resulted in an agreement to hold elections.

Mugabe returned to Zimbabwe in January 1980 to stand in the upcoming elections as ZANU (PF) leader, after announcing that ZANU would contest the elections independently of the PF. Nkomo and ZAPU thereafter became a de-facto opposition party, representing the Ndebele speaking ethnic group which comprises roughly 20 per cent of the population. Mugabe stressed national reconciliation and support for all provisions of the Lancaster House agreement, including the twenty (out of 100) reserved parliamentary seats for whites. ZANU won fifty-seven seats, and Mugabe became prime minister, presiding over a coalition cabinet which included ZAPU and whites. Mugabe kept the defense portfolio for himself.

Mugabe proved pragmatic and cautious in honoring pledges for land redistribution so as not to alarm white commercial farmers, who were urged to stay. His policies angered some ZANU hard-liners, particularly former Mozambique comrade Edgar Tekere, who was dropped from the cabinet in 1981. Problems of internal security, fears of assassination, sabotage of military equipment, and South African espionage led to harsh military and police actions in Matabeleland province against alleged “dissidents.” Nkomo, leader of the opposition, sharply criticized these attacks and was demoted in 1981.

Calls for socialist transformation of the economy and party approval of all major government policies intensified in 1982, as did calls to merge ZANU and ZAPU. The resulting political crisis came to a head in February 1982, following discovery of alleged ZAPU (ZIPRA) arms caches on farms owned by Nkomo, who was subsequently dismissed from cabinet. Near civil war conditions persisted in some parts of the country into 1984 and Nkomo fled the country at one point.

In 1984, at ZANU's second party congress, Mugabe increased his pressure for creation of a one-party state in advance of scheduled elections in 1985. ZANU won sixty-three seats, enabling it to amend the Lancaster Constitution. Pressures to merge ZANU and ZAPU continued into 1987 when a unity pact was signed and Nkomo became vice president. The ten-year provision of the Lancaster Constitution lapsed in 1990. White seats were abolished by amendment, an executive presidency was created, and Mugabe was inaugurated in December after he won reelection against weaker multiparty opposition, including Tekere's ZUM. A significant sign of increasing divisions within the ruling party was a vote to reject creation of a formal one-party state that same year. De-facto one-party rule was a given.

Mugabe stood for yet another term as president in 1995 elections, which witnessed a further erosion of formidable opposition party challengers. Economic problems had forced Mugabe to embrace IMF-World Bank structural adjustment policies and drop the socialist economic rhetoric by the early 1990s. Mugabe also began to step to greater prominence in regional and continental relations, serving as chair of OAU. Upon winning reelection, Mugabe made it clear he was not yet ready to consider setting a retirement date, although his health and general well-being were adversely affected by the death of his wife in 1992.

Growing civil society pressures for democratization combined with intensifying economic problems continue to cause major unrest, particularly in urban areas. Major strikes and demonstrations occurred in Harare in 1998 and 1999, leading some to predict the rise of a more serious political challenge to Mugabe, possibly from within the ranks of his divided party. Although he won the 2002 elections, they were decried as deeply flawed by both opponents and impartial foreign observers.

JAMES J. ZAFFIRO

See also: Nkomo, Joshua; Zimbabwe: Since 1990; Zimbabwe: Conflict and Reconstruction, 1980s; Zimbabwe (Rhodesia): Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the Smith Regime, 1964–1979; Zimbabwe: Second Chimurenga, 1966–1979; Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia): Nationalist Politics, 1950 and 1960s; Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, Lancaster House and Independence, 1978–1980.

Biography

Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born at the Kutanma Catholic mission near Zvimba in Makonde district, in what was then Southern Rhodesia. He attended Catholic mission schools and worked as a primary school teacher at Kutanma until 1943, followed by stints at Empandeni and Hope Fountain missions until 1950. In that year he won a university scholarship to Fort Hare University in South Africa. He received a B.A. degree in 1951. His education continued at UNISA and later the University of London. In 1958 he moved to Accra, Ghana. In May 1960, he returned to Southern Rhodesia, and joined the National Democratic Party (NDP). In 1963 he joined the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). In 1974, named leader of the ZANU. First elected prime minister in 1980.

Further Reading

Astrow, A. Zimbabwe: A Revolution That Lost Its Way? London: Zed Books, 1983.

De Waal, V. The Politics of Reconciliation: Zimbabwe's First Decade. Capetown: David Philip, 1990.

Herbst, J. State Politics in Zimbabwe. Harare: University of Zimbabwe, 1990.

Kriger, N. “The Zimbabwean War of Liberation: Struggles Within the Struggle.” Journal of Southern African Studies. 14/2 (1988): 304–322.

Mandaza, I., and L. Sachikonye (ed.). The One-Party State and Democracy: The Zimbabwe Debate. Harare: SAPES Books, 1991.

Martin, D., and P. Johnson. The Struggle for Zimbabwe. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.

Mitchell, D. African Nationalist Leaders in Zimbabwe: Who's Who. Salisbury, 1980.

Moyo, J. N. Voting for Democracy: Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe. Harare: University of Zimbabwe, 1992.

Mugabe, R. Our War of Liberation: Speeches, Articles, Interviews. Gweru: Mambo Press, 1983.

Ranger, T. O. “The Changing of the Old Guard: Robert Mugabe and the Revival of ZANU.” Journal of Southern African Studies. 7/1 (1980): 71–90.

Sithole, M. “Ethnicity and Factionalism in Zimbabwe National Politics, 1957–79.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. 3/1 (1980): 17–39.

Smiley, I. “Zimbabwe, Southern Africa and the Rise of Robert Mugabe.” Foreign Affairs. 58/5 (Summer 1980): 1060–1083.

Smith, D., and C. Simpson with I. Davies. Mugabe, Harare: Pioneer Head, 1981.

Stoneman, C., and L. Cliffe. Zimbabwe: Politics, Economics and Society. London: Pinter, 1989.

Muhammad Abdile Hassan: See Somalia: Hassan, Muhammad Abdile and Resistance to Colonial Conquest.

Muhammad Ali: See Egypt: Muhammad Ali, 1805–1849: Imperial Expansion; Egypt: Muhammad Ali, 1805–1849: State and Economy.

Muhammad V: See Morocco: Nationalism, Muhammad V, Independence, 1930–1961.

Muhammad Al-Sanusi: See Libya: Muhammad Al-Sanusi (c. 1787–1859) and the Sanusiyya.

Muhammad Ture: See Songhay Empire: Ture, Muhammad and the Askiya Dynasty.

Muhammed bin Hamed: See Tippu Tip.

Multinationals and the State

Multinational corporations (MNCs), also called transnational corporations (TNCs), have increasingly engaged the attention of the international academic community for obvious reasons. Besides the fact that the MNCs were key agents in the shaping of the present world economic order, the continuing conflict between the MNCs and governments in the present age of economic globalization echoes the old debate over collective destiny, or common humanity, and national sovereignty. The crux of the matter has been how to achieve order and sustained good relations between the MNCs and the state. While the relationship between the home state and the MNCs forms part of the general matter under consideration, our primary concern here is the relationship between the host state and the MNCs.

As an international business enterprise with corporate headquarters in the home state and subsidiaries abroad, the MNCs were established with the motive of maximization of profits, that is, to serve the basic interests of the stockholders. As global business entities, they have the capacity to wield enormous financial muscle, advanced technology, and marketing skills to integrate production of goods and services on a worldwide scale.

Any discussion on the MNCs and the state in post-colonial Africa must necessarily commence with an acknowledgement of the continuity of the colonial practice of economic exploitation and domination of the host state in the immediate postindependence era. Since the relationship between the MNCs and the colonial state is outside the scope of this discussion, we can observe in passing that the MNCs and their cosmopolitan home governments were in an unholy alliance of economic domination of the African continent and thus got themselves enmeshed in the ocean created by the Machiavellis of this world. The continuity of the culture of domination in the postindependence period made the concept of neocolonialism gain currency in African discourse. As a new form of colonization, whereby the postcolonial states remained economically dominated by the former colonial masters and new external economic actors, the MNCs played roles which were more exploitative than anything else.

For the purpose of illustration, we shall take specific examples from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The irksome economic domination of the state by the MNCs is evident in the example of Libya. There, King Idris, a conservative, allowed the operation of the MNCs on extremely generous terms, compared with those demanded elsewhere in the oil-producing world.

In Egypt the situation was no better. Before the ascendancy of Gamal Abdel Nasser to the Egyptian seat of authority, Egypt, for all intents and purposes, was a playground for European MNCs. In Liberia the MNC American Firestone stood like a colossus. At one point, Firestone set up its own security system, and technically became a state within a state.

The discoveries of gold, diamonds, and other minerals made South Africa a theater of multinational rivalry. The ascendancy of the American MNCs in South Africa was achieved through a complex interplay of the creation and manipulation of postwar multilateral donor institutions and trade agreements, adroit gold and dollar diplomacies, and the use of trade-related U.S. federal agencies like the Export-Import Bank. Indeed, by the 1950s, the U.S. MNCs had deeply ensconced themselves in nearly every sector of South Africa's economy.

With the rise of economic nationalism, African nation states rejected the status quo and did everything within their powers to reign in the multinationals. In Eygpt, President Nasser adopted radical leadership. His example appealed to many young African nationalists. In Libya a group of young officers led by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi deposed King Idris in 1969 while the latter was undergoing treatment in a Turkish spa. During May and June of 1970, Libya forced the oil companies operating on its soil to cut back production thus tightening the squeeze on Europe. In the negotiations that followed, Occidental Petroleum and other companies were compelled to yield to the demands of the Libyan government. By April 1971, through the instrumentality of increase in the posted price and share of the profit, Libya was receiving about 80 per cent more revenue than in the previous twelve months.

As the owners and patrons of the MNCs felt the effects of regulation, partial nationalization of MNCs, and the stringent measures placed on the operation environment of the MNCs by their African hosts, they realized that they could no longer play the game by the old rules of gun-boat diplomacy. Thus, they placed the matter on the global agenda. In this regard, the United Nations Economic and Social Council, in a resolution adopted on July 28, 1972, requested that the secretary general appoint a commission to carry out a study of the role of MNCs and their impact on the process of development as well as their affect on international relations. The group was also to formulate conclusions to be used by governments in making their sovereign decisions regarding national policy and to submit recommendations for appropriate international action.

In 1973 the UN organized a conference on the problems and prospects of the multinational corporations. Trends such as nationalization and expropriation, restrictive measures aimed at MNCs, the reservation of a substantial sector of the economic realm for nationals only, attempts by host countries to gain participation and control of policy making, production, and pricing of goods and services were addressed. Since that time, MNCs have taken steps to correct mistakes of the past and to negotiate directly with the their hosts for new arrangements. Consequently, the policies, guidelines, and priorities of the host countries have been largely implemented.

In the final analysis, it is pertinent to state that the relationship between the MNCs and their African hosts have ranged in character from hostility and resentment to willing or reluctant cooperation.

PAUL OBIYO MBANASO NJEMANZE

Further Reading

Behrman, J. N., and R. E. Grosse. International Business and Governments: Issues and Institutions. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Caves, R. E. Multinational Enterprise and Economic Analysis. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Choucri, N. “Multinational Corporations and the Global Environment.” In Global Accord: Environmental Challenges and International Responses, edited by N. Choucri. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993.

Hull, R. W. American Enterprise in South Africa: Historical Dimensions of Engagement and Disengagement. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Versi, A. “Globalisation and Africa.” African Business. 258 [October 2000]: 7.

Mummification: See Egypt, Ancient: Funeral Practices and Mummification.

Munhumutapa: See Mutapa State, 1450–1884.

Museums, History of: Postcolonial

Almost all African countries had a national museum at the time of independence. The majority of these museums were started by the various colonial administrations in these countries. This is not to say Africans had no interest in preserving their cultural heritage. There were indeed institutions, if only sometimes informal, that were responsible for this important task of propagating and preserving the cultural heritage. There were also individuals or groups of individuals who were responsible for the preservation of their societies’ cultural heritage for posterity.

The national museums of the colonial era have continued to exist into the postcolonial period, but with very little or no development at all in some countries. There are exceptions, of course. Egypt has had museums from as early as 1863 and they have been multiplying ever since. South Africa has a number of regional museums. There are also several museums in every city and at least a museum in every sizable town in South Africa. There are also local history museums and in some areas, there are specialized museums like mine or military museums at various related locations. Countries like Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria also have made notable strides in their museum development. There are also countries like Botswana, which may not have multiplied the actual number of their museums but have nevertheless developed more programs at their existing museums. Botswana's mobile museum program, Pitse ya Naga, covers the entire country, visiting schools and local communities at given intervals.

Major museum development has, however, taken place in West Africa since independence. Many countries in West Africa have multiplied the number of their museums. Nigeria, for instance, now has at least forty-one museums. Ghana has twenty-one, Senegal fifteen, Côte d'Ivoire and Benin have twelve each. Mali has eight, while Guinea, Gambia, Liberia, and Burkina Faso have five museums each. The majority of these museums are museums of ethnography, or a combination of ethnography with history, archaeology, and/or natural history, but there are also many specialized museums, including military museums. Normally working against all odds, many African museums have successfully integrated more fully with the community they serve, instead of operating as foreign tourist attractions.

Many of the expatriate curators who initially ran national museums were replaced by indigenous African curators soon after independence. Although African curators were appointed to these posts and other museum positions, no funding was made available for them to do what they were supposed to do as museum professionals, apart from covering their recurrent expenditure, especially by way of salaries.

African museum professionals began creating regional and sometimes continentwide organizations to spearhead their professional concerns. Just before independence there was an organization for museologists in Africa, The Museums Association of Tropical Africa (AMATA/MATA), which survived until just after independence. Its last formal meeting was held in 1972 in Livingstone, Zambia. When UNESCO set up its Monuments and Museum Division, it came to the rescue of many African museums. UNESCO subsequently funded the establishment and administration of the Regional Conservation Center in Jos, Nigeria, for the training of African museum technicians, a field that badly lacked skilled personnel in many African museums after independence. The Jos Centre has trained quite a number of Africa's museum conservation technicians over the years.

In 1986 the southern African countries (except for South Africa, then run by the apartheid regime) set up the Southern African Coordination Conference Association of Museums and Monuments (SADCCAMM), bringing together museum professionals from at least seven southern African countries.

Similarly, West African museum personnel who had been quite active in the AMATA/MATA before its demise setup a new organization, the West African Museum Program (WAMP). WAMP has since been very active in bringing about regional collaboration and exchange of information and ideas between museum professional in Africa. Together with ICOM, WAMP published a directory of museum professionals in Africa, a very useful and handy sourcebook. Information on WAMP and its publications, and on a number of participating museums in its activities can now be accessed on the Internet.

Several other programs and projects have taken place in museums in Africa since the early 1980s. The Swedish African Museum Program (SAMP) is a training program between Swedish and African museums, which was launched in 1984. Its aim is to “develop a model for museums co-operation, by exchanging skills, information and sharing experience through solidarity across borders.” The program has registered considerable success and many African and Swedish museums have benefited from this two-way training and exchange program.

The ICOM program, which used to conduct museum conservation courses in Italy, has since relocated these Prevention in the Museums of Africa (PREMA) courses to Africa and are now being hosted and conducted in different African countries annually. Several African museum professionals and museums are benefiting from these PREMA courses by training their personnel at technician level.

In 1991 the American Social Science Research Council also announced their competitive “African Archives and Museum Project: 1991–92” grants, for the preservation and documentation of archival and museum resources for scholarly use. This program attracted a total of ninety-five applications from African museums. Six museums from Zaïre, Cape Verde, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, and Zambia were awarded grants through this program.

Several regional workshops and conferences have been held and resolutions adopted mainly to draw African governments’ attention to both the important role African museums can play in national development programs, cultural and national identity, as well as in fostering national unity and education. These professional gatherings have also highlighted the financial plight of the majority of African museums. However, because the situation on the ground is often that of a single national museum in many countries, it has been very difficult to enforce these resolutions on individual African governments. Several African national museums are usually under Home Office ministries such as community welfare, tourism, education, or home affairs, so they are always competing for funds with service-provider departments like prisons, police, or immigration. Since museums have nothing quantitative to put back into the national treasury, they have always come last in government spending priorities.

Museum professionals in Africa have now realized that they have to look elsewhere for funding if they are to carry out their mission. Thus, they are now targeting both regional and international programs that provide funding and grants. Organizations such as the European Union, SIDA, NORAD, the Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation supply funds for cultural institutions. A number of African museums have been able to obtain funds for research, documentation, and preservation of artifacts in their custody from such bodies.

Currently, there are a number of museum programs offering some form of professional assistance to African museums. These include Africa 2009, a ten-year program run jointly by UNESCO, ICCROM, and CRATerre-EAG concerned with conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is also PREMA, ICOMOS, and AFRICOM. This last program grew out of a 1991 African museum professionals encounter in Lome, Togo, and later on in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. AFRICOM works on a continentwide level to connect African museums with worldwide funding organizations. The program supports initiatives in training and education, exhibitions, fighting against illicit traffic of African cultural property, and supporting networks and future prospects in the field of museum development in Africa. It has the full support of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and UNESCO.

DAVID KIYAGA-MULINDWA

Further Reading

Afigbo, A. E., and S. I. O Okita. The Museum and Nation Building. Oweri: News Africa Publishing Co., 1985.

Ardouin, C. D. (ed.). Museums and Archaeology in West Africa. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

ICOM/SIDA/WAMP. What Museums for Africa?: Heritage in the Future. Rome: ICOM, 1992.

ICOM/WAMP. Directory of Museum Professionals in Africa 1993/94. Darkar: ICOM/WAMP, 1993.

Museveni, Yoweri Kaguta (c.1944–)

Political Scientist, Former Guerrilla Leader, and President of Uganda

Considered by many as a leading figure of the “new generation” of African leaders, Yoweri Museveni was born into a family of Hima cattle herders, a clan of the Ankole people of southwestern Uganda in about 1944. He was named Museveni in honor of the Abaseveni, those Ugandans who served in the Seventh Battalion of the King's African Rifles during World War II.

Early in Museveni's childhood his parents converted to Christianity, and from the age of seven he was sent to school. At Kyamate Primary School he met Martin Mwesiga and Eriya Kategaya, who were to become two close colleagues in the adult political struggles that lay ahead. In 1962, while at Ntare Senior Secondary School in Mbarara, Museveni became a born-again Christian, but in 1966 he broke with established Christianity over the missionaries’ refusal to allow the Scripture Union to debate his motion condemning Ian Smith's Universal Declaration of Independence (UDI) in Rhodesia. For some time he had been unhappy with some of their biblical interpretations, and in particular he believed that their stand of evading “worldly” issues and condemning all violence, even as a means of liberation, was immoral. By this time Museveni had developed an interest in Ugandan politics. He and his student colleagues condemned the sectarian basis of much of Ugandan party politics: the DP (Democratic Party) and UPC (Uganda Peoples Congress), as they saw it, being primarily divided along a combination of religious and tribal sectarianism.

In 1967 Museveni went to the University of Dar es Salaam to study political science. He preferred Dar es Salaam to Uganda's own Makerere because he perceived it to be politically more radical and he saw Tanzania under Nyerere as the one African country that provided clear support for the liberation movements of southern Africa. Finding most of the university's staff not radical enough, Museveni founded the student discussion group, the University Students African Revolutionary Front. He made contact with the Mozambican liberation movement, FRELIMO, and met Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel and Joachim Chissano. In 1968 Museveni led a small group of students to visit the liberated zone in northern Mozambique. Contacts made at this time were to prove invaluable in the future when Museveni and his colleagues needed military training in guerrilla warfare.

Upon graduating in 1970 Museveni got employment in the President's Office in Kampala as a research assistant and he briefly joined UPC. Although professing to have distrusted Obote and the UPC since the mid-1960s, Museveni claims in his autobiography to have harbored a faint hope at this time of changing the UPC from within.

Within forty-eight hours of Idi Amin's coup d'étât in January 1971, Museveni and four colleagues crossed into Tanzania intent on mustering support for a protracted liberation struggle. They made their way to Dar es Salaam, but Museveni at this time failed to gain Nyerere's support for any kind of struggle which did not entail the re-instatement of Obote as President of Uganda.

Through the 1970s Museveni was active in covertly recruiting sympathizers inside and outside Uganda, organizing military training, mostly in Mozambique, and infiltrating arms into the country. He took part in Obote's abortive raid into Uganda in September 1972, and in this and other clashes with Amin's men a number of his close friends were killed. When the Tanzanians finally invaded Uganda in 1979, Museveni accompanied them with a well-trained force of Ugandan exiles under his command.

Museveni served in the interim governments of Yusufu Lule and Godfrey Binaisa, but he was unhappy at the intrigues and lack of consensus then emerging. Ultimately, he supported the removal of both these interim presidents, but he was frustrated to find the old sectarian party politics of the 1960s revived. With Obote back in Uganda from May 1980, Museveni hurriedly formed his own party, the Uganda Patriotic Movement, to oppose him. After the deeply flawed election of December 1980 brought Obote back to power, Museveni declared the election “rigged” and took to the bush to fight his long-threatened liberation struggle.

The war was launched on February 6, 1981, with an attack on Kabamba barracks, to the west of Kampala. The attack by twenty-seven armed men failed to take the armory and Museveni led his men in some captured trucks by a circuitous route to the Luwero Triangle to the north of Kampala. Over the ensuing years of conflict and hardship, lessons were learned and under Museveni's leadership and training a well-disciplined National Resistance Army (NRA) was built from scratch. A National Resistance Movement (NRM) was formed under Museveni's chairmanship and a ten-point program was drawn up as the guiding principles for government once victory was achieved.

When Kenya's President Moi tried to broker a peace between the NRA and the Okello regime that had seized power from Obote in July 1985, Museveni used the Nairobi peace talks to stall for time while his men positioned themselves for the final assault on Kampala. The city fell to the NRA on January 27, 1986, and two days later Museveni was sworn in as president of Uganda.

On coming to power, Museveni placed a high priority on army discipline, national reconciliation, and economic reconstruction. The well-disciplined army soon gained wide respect among civilians, in marked contrast to the fear and contempt that greeted the sectarian and ill-disciplined armies of Amin, Obote, and Okello. Museveni instilled in the army a clear respect for human rights and for law as well as order.

On the economic front, financial discipline and economic liberalization were well established, and Museveni was instrumental in persuading parliament to approve the return to Ugandan Asians of assets seized by Amin in 1972. In his view, they were experienced businessmen with capital and a commitment to Uganda and thus an important part of his plans for the country's economic growth. Museveni's vision of the future entailed a large free trade area of eastern, central, and southern Africa as the only way to promote real African industrial and commercial development. To this end he was instrumental in the revival of the East African Community in Arusha, Tanzania, in January 2001.

National reconciliation and economic growth and reconstruction have proceeded well in the southern half of the country, but until the northern half, the home of Obote and Amin, is brought more fully into sharing the economic advantages of the south, Museveni's claims of national inclusivity remain somewhat hollow. Attacks in the north by dissident rebels who operate from bases in Sudan and eastern Congo have severely tested the Ugandan army which, ironically, Museveni himself had originally built out of small, mobile bands of guerrilla forces. Additional rebel attacks across the western border from the turbulent Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaïre), prompted Museveni in 1998 to authorize the Ugandan Defense Force to cross into the Congo and pursue the rebels and their supporters there. In doing so Museveni embroiled Uganda in an ongoing civil war, which likewise involved the army of Rwanda. Whatever the strategic interests of Uganda in its neighbor's civil war, the Ugandan army's involvement in the Congo (until its withdrawal in 2003) has raised serious doubts about Museveni's much-vaunted judgment and integrity.

Politically, Museveni still holds out against multiparty politics as being likely to lead to sectarianism. The strategic and economic support that he continues to receive from Britain and America ensure that he is almost unique in Africa in not being pressured into accepting the multiparty prescription. His inclusive, nonparty “movement” system is, however, unlikely to survive his final five-year term, which began with his reelection as president in March 2001.

KEVIN SHILLINGTON

See also: Obote, Milton; Uganda: Amin Dada, Idi: Coup and Regime, 1971–1979; Uganda: National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the Winning of Political Power; Uganda: Obote: Second Regime, 1980–1985; Uganda: Reconstruction: Politics, Economics; Uganda: Tanzanian Invasion, 1979–1980.

Biography

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni was born into a clan of the Ankole people of southwestern Uganda in about 1944. Attended Kyamate Primary School from age seven. Attended Ntare Senior Secondary School in Mbarara. Became a born-again Christian in 1962. In 1966 broke with established Christianity. Began studies in political science at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1967. Graduated in 1970, took employment in the President's Office in Kampala as a research assistant. Sworn in as president of Uganda on January 29, 1986. Elected to his final, five-year term as president in March 2001.

Further Reading

Hansen, H. B., and M. Twaddle. Changing Uganda. London: James Curry, 1991.

———. From Chaos to Order: The Politics of Constitution-Making in Uganda. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1995.

———. Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development. London: James Currey, 1988.

Ingham, K. Obote: A Political Biography. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Museveni, Y. K. Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda, edited by E. Kanyogonya and K. Shillington. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.

———. What is Africa's Problem? Speeches and Writings on Africa. Kampala: NRM Publications, 1992.

Music: Postcolonial Africa

In Africa today traditional, popular, and international music forms are found as accompaniments to a variety of activities. Traditional music transcends age, gender, and social class. It serves a formal function in various social and religious rites and is pervasive as an entertainment form. Popular music blends local and global influences and is most fashionable among urban youth. Popular music forms have been influenced by African American music such as rock ‘n’ roll, soul, rhythm and blues, reggae, and hip-hop, and by Caribbean music forms like calypso, rumba, and meringuemaringa. They are also characterized by the increased use of Western instruments, including electric guitars, horns, saxophones, and keyboards. Musicians integrate foreign sounds with indigenous styles to create new Africanized forms such as Congo jazz and soukous, burgher highlife, juju, Afro-beat, mbalax, mbaqanga, Afro-reggae, and African hip-hop.

In Central Africa, musicians living in and around Leopoldville and Brazzaville incorporated Afro-Cuban rhythms into their music and created Congo jazz, a popular music form that influenced new music styles throughout the continent. By the early 1960s, Congolese musicians such as Docteur Nico, Tabu Ley, and Manu Dibango began applying new guitar-playing techniques to the electric guitar and singing in the vernacular. In addition to the guitar, Congo music relied on an interplay of horns and percussion to create a sound that reflected new influences from abroad, including the American soul of James Brown and Aretha Franklin. Congo music quickly made inroads into the world music scene under the name soukous, one of its earlier dance forms. Spurred by the exodus of African musicians from the former French colonies to Europe, the popularity of soukous grew rapidly in the 1980s. One of the most popular musicians was Kanda Bongo Man, who moved to Paris in 1979 to escape the deteriorating economic conditions in Kinshasa. He worked to develop his own brand of soukous, increasing the pace of the music and reducing the size of the band by eliminating the horn section.

Bards (jeliw) of the Diabaté family playing ngoni. Kéla, Mali, 1976. Photograph © David C. Conrad.

In West Africa, highlife music was the most popular music at the time of independence, especially in the former British colonies. By the mid-1960s, however, soul and rhythm and blues became more attractive to urban youth and popular music began to move in a new direction. Ghanaians resident in London formed the band Osibisa in 1969. They mixed highlife with rock ‘n’ roll and became famous within Africa and abroad. Later in the 1970s, Ghanaians living in Germany created another offshoot of highlife by adding synthesizers and electronic percussion instruments to earlier forms. They dubbed the new music “burger highlife” because they lived in the city of Hamburg.

In Nigeria, juju music also underwent major changes in the postindependence era. By the 1970s, Ebenezer Obey and King Sunny Ade, the most popular juju artists who gained fame through international tours, combined elements of traditional Yoruba music, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and American forms. The lyrics added social and religious commentary and the bands sometimes featured up to six or seven electric guitars linked together in a complex rhythmic pattern. No music from West Africa, however, can rival the status achieved by Fela Anikulapo Kuti and his Afro-beat during the 1970s and 1980s. Fela's music drew elements from African forms, particularly Congolese music and highlife, as well as African American soul and rhythm and blues. His bands were huge, consisting of horns, guitars and basses, keyboards, and percussionists, as well as a dozen singers and dancers. His lyrics, like the music, merged aspects of African and western cultures. Fela often sang in Pidgin and never hesitated to use his music to provide social and political criticism.

In the former French colonies of West Africa, Congolese styles dominated the popular music scene during the 1960s. In the following decade, however, mbalax, emerged in Senegal. It incorporated influences from calypso and Cuban music, African American soul and funk, as well as the previously dominant Congo forms. Mbalax utilizes local languages and instruments, including the kora (harp), the balafon (xylophone), and various percussion instruments. One of the most popular mbalax artist is Youssou N'Dour. Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, and Benin also saw a rising number of popular musicians in the late 1970s. The Malian, Salif Keita, blends elements of traditional griot music with West African, Cuban, and Spanish influences. He includes traditional instruments of Mali but also uses guitars, saxophones, and keyboards. Other popular artists achieved success as well. Combining local influences from Benin with rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and funk, Angelique Kidjo has become one of the most prominent female singers today. Her songs focus on important social issues and her African-inspired funk now attracts a large following.

South Africa, with the unique conditions imposed by the long history of apartheid, has produced unique music styles. Under apartheid, most blacks were forced to live in townships where new music forms emerged. These included marabi, a keyboard style originating in the 1920s. Another form, mbaqanga, has undergone many changes, but the various forms have all relied on a heavy bass and lead guitar to produce popular dance rhythms. During the 1970s, mbaqanga incorporated elements of rock music and was popularized by Juluka, a rare multiracial band that began with a Zulu guitarist, Sipho Mchunu, and an English-born musician, Johnny Clegg. Some of the most heralded musicians, realizing the impossibilities of working within apartheid-era South Africa, moved abroad. Miriam Makeba, known as the Empress of African song, left South Africa in 1959 and became one of the most famous female singers in the entire continent. She was a vocal critic of apartheid but, after its fall, was welcomed back to her home country. The trumpeter and vocalist, Hugh Masekela, also left South Africa and later toured with Fela and performed with Paul Simon on the Graceland tour.

The most popular forms of music in urban Africa at the turn of the millennium grew out of Jamaican reggae and western rap and hip-hop. During the early 1980s, reggae grew popular among urban youth, in part, because its lyrics proclaimed themes of mental and physical liberation for Africans everywhere. African musicians incorporated the ideologies of reggae but blended the rhythms with their own musical traditions to create a distinct musical idiom. Born in Côte d'Ivoire, Alpha Blondy has achieved success in African and international circles with his Afro-reggae. Others like Lucky Dube and Kojo Antwi blend reggae sounds with local influences to enhance the popularity of reggae among urban African youth.

In the 1990s African musicians began to fuse American rap and hip-hop with local rhythms and language to produce African variants that can be found in most every major city. One variant, South African kwaito, developed in the townships and mixes hip-hop, rhgthm and blues, and house music with local beats to give it more of a South African sound. Another variant, hiplife, contains undertones of highlife and has become immensely popular among Ghanaian youth. The vernacular lyrics of African rap and hip-hop express the identities of youth and relate to the conditions of everyday life in Africa. The influence of music from outside of Africa has had a profound influence on the development of African popular music forms. International styles, however, have not replaced traditional styles, but have rather fused with them to form new and unique popular styles that reflect the creativity of African musicians.

STEVEN J. SALM

Further Reading

Collins, J. Highlife Time. Accra: Anansesem Publications, 1996.

Coplan, D. In Township Tonight: South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre. Longman and Ravan, 1985.

Stewart, G. Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos. New York: Verso, 2000.

Waterman, C. Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Wolfgang, B. Sweet Mother: Modern African Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Muslim Brotherhood: See Egypt: Salafiyya, Muslim Brotherhood.

Mutapa State, 1450–1884

The Mutapa state was established in the fifteenth century following the decline of Great Zimbabwe in the south. Swahili and Portuguese traders were in contact with it from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. Located in the northern part of the Zimbabwe Plateau, south of the Zambezi, its territorial limits have been exaggerated by earlier cartographers and chroniclers, who misled historians into thinking that it was an empire stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Kalahari Desert. From the early sixteenth century, the state controlled the northern limits of the Zimbabwe Plateau and the adjacent Zambezi lowlands. Kingdoms such as Manyika, Barwe, Uteve, and Danda are thought to have severed from the state. By the nineteenth century it was confined to Chidima, in the Zambezi.

Written evidence for the Mutapa state comes from the Portuguese, who entered the Zimbabwe Plateau at the beginning of the sixteenth century and compiled eyewitness as well as second-hand accounts of the state. The documents are inherently biased, as they focus mainly on trade and court politics. Oral traditions impart diverse information about the people once controlled by the state. Since the 1980s, archaeological work has been conducted in the northern Plateau and Dande, north of the Zambezi Escarpment, to identify the settlements connected with the state.

Oral traditions on the origins of the Mutapa state speak of migrations from Guruuswa, identified with the southern grasslands. The migrating parties were searching for salt deposits in the Dande area of the Zambezi. Its founders, according to traditions, conquered and subdued the Tonga and Tavara of the lower Zambezi, and the Manyika and Barwe to the east. Historical evidence suggests they initially settled in Mukaranga, the Ruya-Mazowe basin, before the sixteenth century, and conquered and integrated preexisting chiefdoms. This was necessitated by the need to control agricultural land and strategic resources, mainly gold and ivory, firmly placing the new state within the Indian Ocean trade network. Archaeological evidence links the rise of the Mutapa state with the demise of Great Zimbabwe in the fifteenth century. Since then stone buildings of the architecture similar to that used at Great Zimbabwe appeared in northern Zimbabwe. They represented major centers expressing a culture that spread from the south. These have been identified as royal courts. This was prompted by the increasing importance of the Zambezi River in the Indian Ocean trade initially channeled through Ingombe Illede. After 1500 there was a concentration of people in some areas such as Mount Fura and the adjacent Mukaradzi River to take advantage of incoming traders. Portuguese documents identify this area as Mukaranga, and its inhabitants as Karanga. They were part of the Mutapa state when the Portuguese arrived at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Portuguese sources refer to Mutapa royal capitals as zimbabwe. These courts, although imprecisely located, are described as “big,” and “of stone and clay.” The Portuguese also observed numerous large towns and villages, some as big as three to five kilometers in circumference, with houses spaced within a stone throw of each other. The king lived in several houses separated by courtyards. These capitals had an approximate population of 4,000. Archaeological evidence locates most zimbabwe on the Plateau south of the Escarpment before the mid-seventeenth century.

Mutapa history from 1500 is dominated by Portuguese attempts to interfere with court politics, civil wars, conquests, and trade. The Tonga reacted to the Portuguese invasion of about 1570 with stiff resistance. This was followed by the Zimba invasions from Maravi, north of the Zambezi. From about 1600 to 1624, the Portuguese fought in civil wars involving Mutapa Gatsi Rusere, subduing the state, and from about 1629 to 1660s they turned its rulers into mere puppets.

Trading centers appeared since the late sixteenth century, where the Portuguese and Swahili middlemen exchanged with the locals Asian beads, glazed ceramics, and cloth with gold and ivory. Massapa, Luanze, and Dambarare seem to have been frequented most, compared to others found in the entire plateau area dominated by the state. Archaeological evidence from Baranda, which coincides with the Portuguese trading site of Massapa located in the Mukaradzi valley, show indigenous material culture similar to Great Zimbabwe, confirming a link between the Mutapa state and the former. Here the Portuguese maintained a permanent resident, tasked with negotiating terms of trade and monitoring Portuguese movement in the state.

Decline of trading activity in the state was due to Portuguese political interference, attempting to conquer the state. During the early seventeenth century civil war by rebels opposed to the ruling Mutapa and fuelled by the Portuguese seriously challenged central authority. The 1630s report lawlessness by some Portuguese prazo holders who raised private armies to rob or enslave people. Private fortifications are also reported.

Unstable conditions continued to up through the 1660s, seriously undermining trade in the eastern and central parts of the plateau, forcing traders to move further westward to open new markets. These too were abandoned subsequently. There was also loss of agricultural production, depopulation of the gold producing areas, and unregulated external trade. This undermined the authority of the rulers as it also encouraged revolts by peripheral groups that included the Portuguese prazo holders in the Zambezi. Fortifications arose in most parts of the state, and this is confirmed by archaeology. In the Ruya-Mazowe basin, more than 100 poorly coursed stone enclosures with loopholes (small, square openings probably used for peeping or as firing out points) are located on hill and mountaintops. These are probably the hill refuges used by rebels against Mutapa-Portuguese attacks. There are also reports of earthworks or wooden stockades (chuambos) built by the Portuguese. Toward the 1680s, conditions worsened, with disease decimating the human population in the area. The Portuguese were forced to leave the state. By the late seventeenth century the state had lost control of areas south of the Zambezi Escarpment.

The Mutapa state shifted toward Dande, north of the Zambezi Escarpment, during the early eighteenth century. The new state was limited in extend. To the eastern frontier, between Tete and the lower Mazowe, were the Portuguese prazos that it constantly attacked or occupied until the 1850s. Politically it was unstable as seen by quick successions and the civil wars fought between houses contending for the throne. Smaller, semi-independent polities controlled by some subrulers emerged in Dande and Chidima. Despite these, it survived because of its military strength, and ability to adapt well to new political circumstances. The Chikara religious cult of the Tavara was highly influential in regulating civil wars. Capitals were constantly mobile due to security considerations, severe droughts, and heat. As a result they accommodated few people, only court officials, royal wives, and a garrison of about 500 fighters, except during times of war. During difficult periods, especially from around 1770 to 1830, it still managed to suppress revolts, fight prazo holders, and gain land.

In the nineteenth century, the Mutapa state survived the potentially destructive Ngoni invasions, serious droughts, and increased Portuguese attempts to reoccupy the lower Zambezi. However, after 1860, Portuguese prazo holders and their Chikunda armies began to assault the Mutapa state, invading it and forcing it to pay tribute. By 1884 the demise of the state seems to have been completed.

INNOCENT PIKIRAYI

See also: Great Zimbabwe: Origins and Rise; Ingombe Ilede; Manyika of Eastern Zimbabwe; Nyanga Hills; Torwa, Changamire Dombo, and the Rovzi.

Further Reading

Axelson, E. The Portuguese in South Africa, 1600–1700. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1964.

Beach, D. N. The Shona and Zimbabwe, 900–1850: An Outline of Shona History. New York: Heinemann, 1980.

———. A Zimbabwean Past: Shona Dynastic Histories and Oral Traditions. Gweru: Mambo Press, 1994.

Garlake, S. P. Great Zimbabwe. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.

Mudenge, S. I. G. A Political History of Munhumutapa. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1988.

Pikirayi, I. The Archaeological Identity of the Mutapa State: Towards an Historical Archaeology of Northern Zimbabwe. Uppsala: Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis, 1993.

Pwiti, G. Continuity and Change: An Archaeological Study of Farming Communities in Northern Zimbabwe, AD 500–1700. Uppsala: Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis, 1996.

Randles, W. G. L. The Empire of the Monomotapa from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Gwelo: Mambo Press, 1975.

da Silva Rego, A., and T. W. Baxter, eds. Documents on the Portuguese in Mozambique and Central Africa, 1497–1840. Lisbon: Centro de Estudes Historicos Ultramarinos and the National Archives of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1962–1975.

Theal, G. M. Records of South Eastern Africa. Cape Town: C. Struik, 1898–1903.

Mutesa (Kabaka) (1856–1884)

Buganda Monarch

Mutesa epitomizes the traditional Buganda monarchy. However, his reign and person also marked the passing of old monarchism and the coming and embracing of enlightenment in Buganda, as the kingdom faced a new world.

Mutesa succeeded Kabaka Suuna as king in 1856, after a marvelously staged maneuvering and jostling for the throne by the elitist oligarchy at court. Being an insignificant prince, and therefore the least expected to contest the throne, the chiefs and promoters of other more eligible princes were caught unawares, only to finally accepted Mutesa as king.

Mutesa and his dignitaries. © Das Fotoarchiv.

By this time, there were already many Arab traders in Buganda. Mutesa wanted Buganda to be the terminus of all trade, rather than a thoroughfare. He coveted the monopoly to redistribute trade goods, especially firearms, to his neighbors.

Mutesa spoke both Kiswahili and Arabic and could read and write Arabic. At the time of his death he could converse with missionaries in English and translate to his courtiers in Luganda. He adopted Islam, outwardly observing all its rituals, but refused to undergo circumcision. In 1867 he decreed the Islamic calendar as official in Buganda and demanded the use of Islamic etiquette at court. The presence of Arab slave hunters from Khartoum in neighboring Bunyoro became a potential threat to Buganda and of great concern to Mutesa. He was persuaded to back a losing Bunyoro prince, but his forces were badly repulsed by Kabarega. By 1871 Mutesa had a minimum of a thousand armed troops.

Mutesa was suspicious of the activities and motives of Richard Gordon, who was openly working for the khedive of Egypt, intending to extend the Egyptian Empire into the Lake Region. Under these circumstances, therefore, political alliance with Sayyid Bargash, sultan of Zanzibar, made good political sense. In 1874 Cahille Long got Mutesa to sign a document, the contents of which he did not understand, but which amounted to ceding his kingdom to the khedive of Egypt. In April 1875 Mutesa tactfully jointly received both Gordon's agent, Ernest Linant, alias Abdul Aziz, and H. M. Stanley with the hope of playing them off one against another. In his dealings and discussion with both Stanley and Gordon's agents, Mutesa constantly demanded that Bunyoro remain as a buffer zone between Buganda and Egyptian territory to the north.

The famous 1875 Daily Telegraph letter by Mutesa calling for missionaries to come to Uganda was a result of these politicoreligious discussions with Stanley. However, evidence clearly shows that Mutesa's major concern was to have a group of European allies in his kingdom who would assist him when faced with the Egyptian (Gordon's) expansionist threat. His accommodating attitude to, and encouragement of, subsequent missionary enterprise in Buganda was part of his defense policy.

In 1877 the Egyptian threat became real when Nuehr Aga arrived with troops in the Buganda capital at Rubaga to claim the kingdom for the khedive, on Gordon's orders. Aga met very stiff resistance from Mutesa, and ended up as his captive. As a show of strength, Mutesa rounded up some seventy Muslims, who were executed publicly for Nuehr Agas benefit. However, Mutesa avoided open confrontation with Gordon who eventually sent Edward Schmitzler, alias Emin Pasha, to Rubaga to negotiate Nuehr Aga and his troops release by Mutesa.

The arrival of both the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Roman Catholic White Fathers missionaries in Buganda in 1879 provided a good opportunity for Mutesa to revive his long-term objective of getting both arms assistance and political alliance with a superior European power against threats of Egyptian encroachment from the north. Mutesa quickly noted the denominational and personal differences between the missionaries and exploited these to the fullest in achieving his personal aims. While he maintained relations with the Zanzibari Arabs, whose trade offered him the only sure supply of goods and arms, he also feigned conversion to Christianity to get maximum benefit from all foreigners in his country. Mutesa derived great satisfaction in staging impromptu theological and political discussions at his court between Muslims, Protestant missionaries, and Catholic missionaries.

Dr. Kirk, the British resident representative in Zanzibar, had promised Mutesa British intervention to ensure Buganda's independence in face of Egyptian aggression. Kirk's friendly gesture inspired Mutesa to try to enter direct negotiation with the British government; he decided to send an embassy to England. Three emissaries of Mutesa were escorted to England by CMS missionaries and were received by Queen Victoria in 1879. They returned to Buganda in 1881 with presents and messages of good will from Queen Victoria to Mutesa, but with no practical proposal of a political alliance between the two kingdoms, which was a great disappointment to Mutesa.

When, after the rise of Mahdism in Sudan in 1880, Gordon finally withdrew the southern garrisons in the Somerset Nile region, the Egyptian threat, which Mutesa had persistently felt, dissipated, leading to a sudden and dramatic change in his attitude toward the Christian missionaries who had refused his constant appeals to engage in trade. Christian missionaries henceforth suffered great hardships, including physical attacks on their persons.

One can only but guess what Uganda would have been like today if Mutesa was not the kabaka of Buganda and the person that he was at the time of the arrival of missionaries and subsequent European contact and colonization of Uganda. Mutesa's determined resistance to Egyptian domination saved Buganda from a possibly ravaging struggle for independence. Alternatively, Buganda could have become embroiled in the Mahdist upheavals with unpredictable consequence, as happened in the Sudan. Mutesa's decisions to ally with Britain, as opposed to France, may have determined the relatively liberal and unrestrictive relationship Britain had with Buganda, and subsequently with colonial Uganda.

Mutesa passed his kingdom on intact to Kabaka Mwanga, his son. The Mutesa I Foundation was started to commemorate Mutesa's achievements. The organization recognizes Ugandans who have made significant contributions to the development of their country.

DAVID KIYAGA-MULINDWA

See also: Uganda: Early Nineteenth Century; Uganda: Mwanga and Buganda, 1880s.

Biography

Mutesa was born in 1856. He was one of the sons of Kabaka Suuna. Mutesa's mother was sold into slavery by Suuna. She entrusted her son to another king's wife, Muganzirwazza Nakkazi Muzimbo, who eventually became very dear to him. He was born as Mukabya, but later took on the names of Walugembe Mutesa. He took the throne in 1856. He died in 1884.

Further Reading

Ashe, R. P. Two Kings of Uganda. London: Frank Cass and Company, 1970.

Church Missionary Society. The Victoria Nyanza Mission Chwa II. Capt. H. H. D. Basekabaka Ababiri, W. M. Mutesa I ne D. Mwanga II Busega Mengo; G. W. Kabajeme 1922.

Grant, J. A. A Walk Across Africa. London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1878.

Gray, J. M. “Mutesa of Buganda.” The Uganda Journal. 1, no. 1 (1934): 22–50.

Kiwanuka, M. S. M. Mutesa of Uganda. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1967.

Speke, J. H. Journal of the Discovery of the Nile. London: W. M. Blackwood and Sons, 1863.

Stanely, Sir H. M. Through the Dark Continent. London: Sampson Low, Saston, Scarcrow and Relivton, 1878.

Mwaant Yaav: See Lunda: Mwaant Yaav (Mwata Yamvo) and Origins.

Mwanga: See Uganda: Mwanga and Buganda, 1880s.

Mwata Yamvo: See Lunda: Mwaant Yaav (Mwata Yamvo) and Origins.

Mwenemutapa: See Mutapa State.

N

Nama: See Namibia: Nama and Herero Risings.

Namibia: Nineteenth Century to 1880

Southwestern Africa between the Kunene and the Okavango rivers in the north, the Orange River in the south, and the Kalahari to the west saw large-scale social restructuring and the final integration of its communities into the world market during the nineteenth century. The onset of missionary activity combined with the repercussions of Portuguese colonialism to the north and the advancing Cape colonial frontier, prior to more active German colonization after 1884. Induced by the nature of the area, the dominant modes of subsistence were foraging and pastoralism, with its concomitant social organization. Only in the north, where available rainfall allowed for agriculture, were sedentary forms of social organization possible.

The area to the north of Etosha was, by the 1800s, populated by different groups of agro-pastoral, Bantu-speaking Ovambo kingdoms, with considerable variation among them in terms of language and social custom and ranging from highly centralized kingdoms to rather loosely structured polities. Oral history, which is borne out by linguistic evidence, suggests that these communities were related to several groups of pastoral Herero, living in segmentary societies oft the partly mountainous area south of Etosha, between the Kalahari and Namib Deserts. This area was also known as Damaraland during the nineteenth century. Interspersed in economic and environmental niches were Khoisan-speaking Damara communities, whose mining and smithing skills provided them with a means of survival. Their history remains clouded, however. Khoisan communities, both larger pastro-foraging groups (Khoekhoe/Nama-speaking) as well as smaller groups of hunter-gatherers (San), peopled the southern stretches and exploited the least favorable environment of the area.

Since around the 1790s, groups of Oorlam raiders had crossed the Orange River from the south. On account of their long history in the colonial context of the Cape, these disenfranchised groups, who usually had originated from illicit master-slave sexual relations, brought with them not only the experience of colonialism but also important political, social, and religious institutions, which in the end would facilitate their suzerainty in southwestern Africa. Along with mother tongue variations of Khoisan, they spoke Cape Dutch, adhered to Christianity, had horses, arms, and wagons. Through all this, they provided the first link to the expanding world economy through the Cape nexus. This facilitated social change and provided lasting political influence in the encountered communities across the Orange River. Missionary activity, mainly by the German-based Rhenish Mission Society, was greatly facilitated by this development.

By the 1840s the Oorlam had established themselves in the south and, with a hegemonial position at present-day Windhoek in the center of the area, were ruled by the Afrikaner Oodam clan under their most important leader Jonker Afrikaner. Their economic base rested on yearly cattle raiding expeditions, of which the neighboring Herero communities around Windhoek and to the north bore the brunt, but which were organized as far as the northern Ovambo communities. This in turn sparked long-term social change, class differentiation, and political centralization among the Herero. As this process unfolded, mining interests, arms, ivory, and cattle trading made the establishment of Walvis Bay as an entrepot to the territory feasible. The bearers of this trade together with the missionaries, who by the 1850s were firmly established among the Herero as well, provided the Herero with weapons to such a degree that the Nama-Oorlam hegemony was effectively challenged and crumbled after 1860. Guns and the increasingly developing markets for cattle that could be provided from Hereroland in the wake of the mineral revolution in South Africa resulted in a distinct process of pastoralization of the Herero with the attendant development of separate, more centralized chief-doms, one of which would over time be perceived to be paramount, the Maharero chiefs.

Namibia.

Ever-growing numbers of European traders and hunters operating in the area from the 1850s, particularly around Otjimbingwe and Omaruru, effected these developments as well. Sexual unions, but more often than not intermarriage and the establishment of families, left traces. The offspring of these families would very often be the most suitable agents of acculturation and negotiators of innovation and change in the economic, religious, and political spheres: translators, secretaries, and evangelists for the mission and the local rulers. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Cape Dutch was used widely as a lingua franca in diplomacy, church, and trade.

The void created by the downfall of the Oorlam hegemony around Windhoek enabled the Baster, the last of such disenfranchised groups from the Cape, to move to the north and to settle at Rehoboth south of Windhoek in the early 1870s. This development, and the arrival of Boer trekkers from the Transvaal in search of yet more land led the Herero to invite colonial annexation by the British Cape Colony in an attempt to curb developments that were clearly perceived to be detrimental. The declaration of a protectorate over Walvis Bay and its surroundings in 1876 was a result of this.

In the 1870s and 1880s southern Nama groups reemerged on the political scene, again in their own fight. When Hendrik Witbooi, in a move inspired by divine intervention, tried to lead his community to a more northerly area, he was challenged by the by-now well-armed, rather wealthy, and organized Herero. This in turn often sparked decades of guerrilla warfare waged by the Witbooi Nama. It was in this situation, which again threatened the mission's endeavor after decades of only tenuous successes in their work, and given the background of heightened colonial awareness in Europe, that German missionaries started to agitate for colonial annexation. The German merchant Adolf Luderitz finally succeeded in concluding a treaty with a local ruler at Angra Pequena, which was known to be fraudulent. However, as the “Scramble for Africa” raised European political desires and anxieties, it was taken by Chancellor Bismarck as a stepping-stone to declaring the region a German protectorate. To fulfill the requirements of the Berlin Congo Conference of 1884, Germany started to erect a colonial administration from 1885 and to conclude treaties with a series of local rulers.

On account of their relative geographical inaccessibility, the Ovambo communities in the north were affected by the developments in the south far less, and only after the Finnish Mission Society started to make tenuous inroads in the 1870s. Processes of social stratification and large-scale pauperization led to a certain degree of feudalization, both of which were fully under way by the time of German annexation.

WOLFRAM HARTMANN

Further Reading

Dedering, T. Hate the Old and Follow the New: Khoekhoe Missionaries in Early Nineteenth-Century Namibia. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Veflag, 1997.

Lau, B. Namibia in Jonker Afrikaner's Time. Windhoek, Namibia: Archeia, 1987.

Moorsom, R., and W. G. Clarence-Smith. “Underdevelopment and Class Formation in Ovamboland, 1845–1915.” Journal of African History. 16, no. 3 (1975).

Williams, F.-N. Precolonial Communities of Southwestern Africa: A History of Owambo Kingdoms, 1600–1920. Wind-hoek: Archeia, 1991.

Namibia (Southwest Africa): German Colonization, 1893–1896

Germany's initially very limited colonial penetration of late nineteenth-century Namibia was made possible by Britain's lack of attention to it, and by the severe isolation of its various communities and the serious divisions and conflicts between them. German economic and political activities in Namibia began in the 1880s as the efforts of a Bremen tobacco merchant, Franz Adolf Eduard Lüderitz, to acquire land and wealth through concessions from Nama leaders and the unexpected actions of the imperial chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, that led to the declaration of a formal German protectorate. German Protestant missionaries of the Rhenish Missionary Society entered Namibia much earlier, in the 1840s, and established stations and influence among the Herero and Nama, but not in the north.

The old German fort in the Etosha, about 1930. © Das Fotoarchiv.

Lüderitz sent his young business associate Heinrich Vogelsang to Cape Town and Angra Pequeña (an inferior harbor, transferred by Britain to the Cape Colony in 1884), where he arrived on Lüderitz’ trading brig Tilly in April 1883. During the next months, Vogelsang persuaded the local chief of the Bethanie Nama, Josef Fredericks, to sign agreements transferring the land on the bay and then an extensive hinterland in exchange for money, rifles, and toys. With his agent raising the German flag at the renamed Lüderitzbucht and referring to the region inland as Lüderitzland, Lüderitz renewed a request he had made earlier to Bismarck for official recognition and protection.

In 1883 and 1884, Bismarck approached the British government cautiously over the status of Angra Pequeña, only to suddenly extend protection to Lüderitz’ Namibian claims on April 24, 1884, an event that can be said to have inaugurated Germany's overseas colonial empire during the “Scramble for Africa.” Bismarck soon extended this foothold into a larger Namibian colony. The crews of two naval vessels raised the German flag along the coast, at Angra Pequeña, Swakopmund, Cape Cross, and Cape Frio in August, enabling Germany to claim the entire coastline, except for Walvis Bay, from the mouth of the Orange River north to the Cunene River. To include the hinterland in the colony, Bismarck ordered his consul general for West Africa, the noted explorer Gustav Nachtigal, to secure protectorate treaties from the African chiefs.

In 1885 Lüderitz formed the Deutsche Kolonial-Gesellschaft für Südwest-Afrika but quickly lost control of it. His funds dwindled, causing him to sell off his concessionary rights to the company. He died in a boating mishap near the mouth of the Orange River in 1886. The company that eclipsed and survived him also obtained a number of mining and land concessions from the German government. Despite its recruitment of a small police force to safeguard gold operations near the Swakop River, the company was unable to locate significant mineral deposits or compel the Herero and Nama leaders to accept its control. Official representatives at first fared little better. Nachtigal's successor so far as Namibia was concerned, the first imperial commissioner of German South West Africa, Dr. Heinrich Göring, initially obtained agreements with African rulers, including Chief Maherero of the Herero. Angered by the inability of the Germans to prevent attacks from his Nama enemy, Hendrik Witbooi, and influenced by his Cape merchant ally, Robert Lewis, Maherero in 1888 renounced his agreement with Göring and forced the imperial commissioner to relocate his headquarters to the safety of the Walvis Bay enclave.

By 1889 German colonialism in Namibia was at a virtual standstill. Seeking to establish a degree of control in the center of its nominal protectorate, Germany sent out a small military contingent under Captain Curt von François, with orders to establish outposts but avoid fights with Africans. Landing at Swakopmund in January 1889, von François built a fort inland at Tsoabis. The following year he received reinforcements and built a second fort, known later as the Alte Feste, further inland, at Windhoek. In 1891, von François replaced Göring as imperial commissioner and transferred the colonial headquarters to Windhoek, which remained the capital of South West Africa during the German and South African occupation periods.

Relations with Namibians remained the key to German penetration of the territory. Maherero, the Herero ruler, renewed his recognition of the German protectorate and died in 1890. With his succession hotly contested, the Germans were able to adapt a strategy of divide-and-rule in Damaraland. Hendrik Witbooi, however, refused to submit to German overrule, and von François determined to destroy him. Additional reinforcements in early 1893 allowed the Germans to undertake a military campaign against the Witboois. von François attacked Hendrik Witbooi's camp at Hoornkranz on April 12, killing a number of his followers, mainly old men, women, and children. The Nama chief and most of his armed men survived the Hoornkranz massacre and fled to the Naukluft Mountains. Facing criticism in the Reichstag over von François’ actions, Chancellor Leo von Caprivi sent out Major Theodor Leutwein, a military college instructor, as his special commissioner to investigate and possibly take control of the colony. Leutwein arrived at the start of 1894 and, with reinforcements, defeated Hendrik Witbooi. Witbooi signed a protectorate agreement with the Germans and served them as an ally for the next decade.

Leutwein took charge of the colony and turned his attention to the Herero, imposing a frontier for them that allowed German settlement in southern Damaraland. The succession to Maherero's chieftainship was contested between Nikodemus, his strongly independent nephew, and the younger and more pliable Samuel Maherero, his surviving son by a fourth wife. Unlike Nikodemus and many other Herero, Samuel accepted Leutwein's boundary, and the Germans supported the unpopular claim of Samuel to his father's chieftainship. Garrisoning Okahandja deep in Herero country, Leutwein during the brief “War of the Boundary” in May 1896 attacked and defeated Samuel's opponents, Nikodemus and his eastern Herero followers and the Mbanderu under Kahimeme. He then executed their leaders as rebels and confiscated their lands and herds as state property. An additional four hundred soldiers arrived in mid-1896 to ensure Germany's control of Namibia south of Ovamboland.

Alongside their divide-and-rule policy toward the Namibians, the colonial officials encouraged German and Afrikaner settlement in central and southern parts of the protectorate. In Berlin the Syndikat für Südwestafrikanische Siedlung recruited and sent the first twenty-five families to settle in the Windhoek region in 1892. A similar number arrived the following year. Military veterans began to receive tracts of land in return for their service. In 1896 the syndicate obtained an official grant of 20,000 square kilometers for German colonization in the districts of Windhoek, Gobabis, and Hoachanas. The severe rinderpest epidemic that arrived the following year further impoverished the pastoral peoples of the central and southern areas, facilitating land alienation and settler colonization in the years prior to the great uprisings of 1904–1905. By 1897, 2,628 Europeans, mainly German officials, soldiers, missionaries, and settlers, resided in Namibia.

LOUIS W. TRUSCHEL

See also: Colonial European Administrations: Comparative Survey; Colonialism: Ideology of Empire: Supremacist, Paternalist; Colonialism: Impact on African Societies; Namibia: Nineteenth Century to 1880.

Further Reading

Aydelotte, W. O. Bismarck and British Colonial Policy: The Problem of South West Africa 1883–1885. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937.

Bley, H. South West Africa under German Rule. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971.

De Vries, J. L. Mission and Colonialism in Namibia. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1978.

Esterhuyse, J. H. South West Africa 1880–1894: The Establishment of German Authority in South West Africa. Cape Town: C. Struik, 1968.

Namibia (Southwest Africa): Nama and Herero Risings

The Nama and Herero risings against German colonial administration in German South West Africa turned out to be the most important historical event in the history of present-day Namibia. Though interrelated and of the same genocidal consequences for both Nama and Herero, they were two different wars of which only the Herero war has found its way into debates and publication. Both can only be understood in the context of the developing German colonial state in southwestern Africa, however.

Protocolonialist influence and European imperial influence had been at work in southwestern Africa for about one hundred years before formal, and later effective, German colonization. Germany, compelled by the dynamics of the “Scramble for Africa” declared southwestern Africa to be a German protectorate in 1884. Starting at Angra PequeMa and driven by the Bremen merchant Loderitz for the next decade, German officials, backed by a small military contingent and aided by missionaries and traders, set out to conclude nominal treaties of protection with local rulers and communities, which were either accepted, negotiated, or contested depending on local circumstance, political expediency, and historical experience. Both Hendrik Witbooi of the Nama and Samuel Maharero of the Herero exploited these developments and, assisted by the colonialist need for centralized political ruling structures, styled themselves paramount rulers. Wind-hoek, an existing settlement, was established as military and administrative headquarters in 1890.

In the 1890s the German-African treaties of protection were challenged in a number of insurrections, most notably so by Hendrik Witbooi with guerrilla warfare. Theodor Leutwein, who took over as the colony's first formal governor in 1893 ruthlessly established German colonial overlordship with military means and skillfully applied “divide and conquer” policies among the different communities. In 1894 Witbooi signed a peace treaty with Leutwein, starting a decade of German-Nama collaboration. Maharero's position as paramount chief of the Herero was consolidated. He effectively started the administration of the territory's central and southern areas with the installation of an executive and a judiciary. A closely-knit web of police stations for surveillance and control was established. The northern reaches of the territory remained largely untouched for much of the decade due to geographical inaccessibility and health reasons. Legislation was still largely effected in Germany. Active and planned colonization was embarked upon with the assistance of commercial and mining companies. Large tracts of lands, taken in the military campaigns of the 1890s and, declared as crown land, were used for settling German colonists. Ex-military personnel from the campaigns often chose to remain in the colony, married into local communities and either acquired land and stock through this or set themselves up on farms provided from confiscated, so-called crown land. The reverberations of the South African War (1899–1902) resulted in another wave of white settlers that were displaced by that conflict and chose to settle themselves in the southern parts of the territory.

During the 1890s and into the first years of the twentieth century processes of dispossession and indebtedness of African communities accelerated through exponentially growing trade and fraudulent credit practices between Germans and Africans. This was compounded by the Rinderpest pandemic of 1897–1898, with its ensuing effects of famine and subsequent droughts, and a general situation of lawlessness. Especially the sale of land by chiefs, in an attempt to retain political power and spurred by the pressures exerted by conspicuous consumption, helped to create a class of landless and impoverished, who in turn were desired by the growing, predominantly agrarian colonial economy.

Tensions between Herero and settlers grew and while the governor led a military campaign to quell a minor insurrection by the Boncleizwarts in the southern part of the territory, the Herero, led by Samuel Maharero, took up arms in January 1904. Sparing women, children, missionaries, and non-Germans, the Germans were surprised by this attack, and most male settlers were killed. Within two months the German forces had regained the military initiative with massive logistic and material reinforcements from Germany. When Leutwein was superseded by General Lothar von Trotha, because the former was blamed by settlers and colonial circles in Germany for leniency and the outbreak of the war, the situation had already calmed down. In this situation politicians were clamouring for a peaceful solution of the conflict to ensure that a steady supply of labor for the colony's economy was not annihilated, and missionaries started to argue for mercy, offering assistance to the colonial state in the pacification effort. von Trotha, however, enforced the Battle of Hamakari near Waterberg in August 1904, where a majority of the Herero had gathered. An already demoralized and exhausted enemy was thus forced to flee through the waterless Omaheke into the Kalahari Desert in an attempt to reach safer havens across the Bechuanaland border. Unknown but small numbers of refugees, including Samuel Maharero, reached Bechuanaland.

von Trotha's infamous Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order of October 1904, ordered the removal of the remaining survivors of the conflict from German territory. Every Herero found inside German borders, with or without arms and cattle, was to be killed, regardless of whether man, woman, or child. This order was in effect until December 1904 and repealed when it was realized how impractical and counterproductive it was, given the local circumstances and necessities. The remaining survivors in the colony were, with assistance of the missions, systematically collected and incarcerated in concentration camps, where another substantial number died due to unsanitary conditions and weakened health. An estimated 80 per cent of the Herero nation did not survive this conflict.

During the later stages of the Herero German war in October 1904, the Nama, under the leadership of Hendrik Witbooi, took up arms. The German forces could retaliate immediately in full force on account of the termination of the hostilities with the Herero and by early 1905 had succeeded in quelling this rising as well. The death of Hendrik Witbooi in military action left the Nama without their military and political leader. However, groups of Nama continued to keep German military forces at bay with guerrilla tactics until 1909, especially under the leadership of Jakob Morenga. Only an estimated 25 per cent of the Nama population survived this war. Scorched earth policies, concentration camps, and even the deportation of large numbers of Nama to other German colonies in Africa were responsible for this genocide.

A strict labor legislation was almost immediately enacted to permanently disenfranchise and dispossess the Herero and Nama and to counter the detrimental effect of the war on the labor market. Every individual above the age of eight had to wear a metal tag around her/his neck, which made rigid mobility controls thus possible. The Ovambo, among whom unknown numbers of Herero had found refuge during the war, were drawn into the colonial labor economy by more diplomatic means. On account of their military strength, due to their connectedness into the Portuguese economic networks, but by now also under attack in pacification campaigns waged by Lisbon, these were considered with respect by the German colonial administration. A series of treaties, concluded separately with different rulers regulated relations and the labor flow from Ovamboland to the colony.

A dependable labor flow became ever more important since the discovery of diamonds in 1908 in the south of the colony had started a phenomenal economic boom in the colony. This made German South West Africa the only German colony ever to realize a financial surplus. This growth of course happened on the background of an already burgeoning economy started by substantial numbers of ex-servicemen on land confiscated after the wars with large herds of confiscated cattle and cheap, conscripted labor. Still, substantial numbers of workers for the construction of railways and the diamond mining industry had to be acquired from the Cape Colony.

German colonialism came to an end in German South West Africa, when the Union of South Africa decided to join the war effort in 1914 and assist Great Britain against Germany. The Union Defence Force enforced a ceasefire in July 1915 near Khorab in the north of the territory, after which the territory was governed under military law until 1920. With the campaign against and final defeat of King Mandume of Oukwanyama in Ovamboland in early 1917 this northernmost part the territory was finally subjugated and brought under colonial domination. Processes of social and economic reorganization and restructuring among the Herero, and Nama, already under way during the last years of German influence, continued and received stimulus when South Africa, during its first years in GSWA, tried to present itself as a more benevolent colonizing force than the Germans. This served to underscore South Africa's attempt at being declared the mandatory guardian once the war was over. German colonial power was finally ended when South Africa was made the mandatory power “on behalf of his Britannic Majesty” under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in early 1919.

WOLFRAM HARTMANN

See also: Namibia (Southwest Africa): German Colonization, 1893–1896; World War I: Survey.

Further Reading

Bley, H. Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1894 bis 1914. 1968, Münster: Lit Verlag, 19?

Drechsler, H. Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft. Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Impenalismus (1884–1915). Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1966.

Gewald, Jan-Bart. Herero Heroes. A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923. Oxford, James Currey, and Ohio University Press, 1998.

Katjavivi, R. A History of Resistance in Namibia. London: Currey, 1988.

Namibia (Southwest Africa): South African Rule

The Germans gave the name “South West Africa” to the protectorate they acquired in 1884. Their territory expanded until it included all of what is now Namibia, except for the port of Walvis Bay, which had been annexed by Britain in 1878 and brought under Cape, then South African rule from 1910. In 1915, during the World War I, South African troops conquered the territory from the Germans. The South Africans took over the name South West Africa and applied to it the entire country, including Walvis Bay. From the late 1960s an alternative name, Namibia (from the Namib desert), was adopted by the United Nations, and in the 1980s the South Africans came to accept the new name, though they used “South West Africa” as well, even after the decision to withdraw from the territory was made in 1988.

After five years of South African military rule, the territory was granted as a C-class mandate to South Africa by the League of Nations in 1920. South Africa continued many German practices, extended the system of reserves, and introduced more white settlers from the Union. Resistance by the Bondelswartz and other indigenous people was put down harshly. Though in terms of the mandate, South Africa was supposed to govern the territory in the interests of the inhabitants, South African rule was highly oppressive, and there was no effective check on what South Africa did in the territory.

When the League of Nations dissolved during World War II, the South African government of Jan Smuts hoped to be able to annex the territory, and formally applied to the newly formed United Nations (UN) in 1946 to do that, but its request was refused, largely on the grounds that the indigenous people had not been adequately consulted. The UN instead asked South Africa to place the territory under its trusteeship system, which provided for eventual independence for trust territories. When South Africa refused, a long-drawn-out legal battle began, in which the International Court of Justice at The Hague handed down a series of judgments on the status of South West Africa. In 1966 the Court decided that it had no legal standing in a case which turned on whether South Africa was governing the territory in the spirit of the mandate. The UN General Assembly then unilaterally terminated the mandate, a decision that was, a few years later, ratified by the Security Council. In 1971 that ratification was supported by an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, which ruled that South Africa's rule of the territory was illegal, and it should withdraw. In the same year a general strike of Namibian workers represented a new and massive example of resistance to one of the main pillars of South African rule, the contract labor system.

In the face of these developments, the South African government decided to abandon its policy of seeking to incorporate the territory to a greater and greater extent into its own administration, as a de facto fifth province, along with the creation of Bantustans there on the South African model. It decided instead that the territory should remain as one entity and be given a form of “independence” under South African auspices. An ethnically based advisory council was established, and in 1975 a conference of ethnic representatives was called together in the Turnhalle building in Windhoek. When it seemed that the Turnhalle might lead to the South African government granting “independence” to a local client group, a Western Contact Group was formed, consisting of the five Western countries then members of the UN–Security Council, to press for a form of independence that would mesh with the UN demand for a transfer of power to the people of the territory (UN–Security Council Resolution 385 of 1976). By April 1978 a formula had been worked out providing for joint UN–South African administration during a transition period in which the UN would provide a monitoring team and a force to keep the peace. The South African government accepted this plan in April 1978, probably without any serious intention of ever implementing it. Numerous reasons were advanced in the years following by South African government spokesmen to explain why the plan (embodied in UN Security Council Resolution 435) could not be implemented: the alleged partiality of the UN, the composition of the UN force to enter the territory during the transitional phase, the monitoring and location of the military bases of the People's Liberation Army of Namibia, the army of the South West African Peoples’ Organizaation (SWAPO), and, from 1981, the presence of Cuban forces in Angola.

Operating from northern Namibia, South African military forces, and from 1980 South West African forces under South African command, launched raids against SWAPO bases in southern Angola. Brutal repression was used in northern Namibia to try to destroy SWAPO, while at the same time the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA) and other political groupings were built up in an attempt to form an anti-SWAPO alliance. Finally, as the result of an agreement signed in December l988 between South Africa, Angola, and Cuba, providing for the withdrawal of the Cuban forces from Angola, the date for implementation was fixed for April l989. From that month, the South African administrator general worked with the UN special representative in preparing the way for an election held in November, after which the remaining South African troops withdrew from the territory. The South African administration remained in place while a Constituent Assembly deliberated on a new constitution. With that agreed, Namibia became independent in March 1990 and the South African administration finally withdrew. The country's most important port, Walvis Bay, became part of Namibia by agreement with the South African government on March 1, 1994.

CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS

Further Reading

Department of Information and Publicity, SWAPO of Namibia. To be Born a Nation. London: Zed Books, 1981.

Hayes, P., et al., eds. Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment, 1915–1946. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.

Leys, C. and J. Saul, eds. Namibia's Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995.

Vigne, R. A Dwelling Place of Our Own: The Story of the Namibian Nation. London: International Defence and Aid Fund, 1975.

Woode, B., ed. Namibia 1884–1984: Readings in Namibia's History and Society. London: Namibia Support Committee, 1988.

Namibia (Southwest Africa): League of Nations, United Nations Mandate

In December 1920, after five years of military administration, South Africa was granted the former German South West Africa as a C- class Mandate by the League of Nations, which meant that the territory was to be administered as if it were an integral part of the mandatory power. The new administration emphasized four policy aspects. First, it downscaled the administrative presence to about a quarter of what it was during the German heyday. At one stage the total civil service numbered just over two hundred. This lack of administrative capacity, while ostensibly cost-effective, meant that much of the draconian oppressive legislation it passed could not be implemented, suggesting that much of this legislation served to encourage interpersonal settler violence. Second, it changed the settler demographics. About half the German settler population were either deported or left voluntarily, at the same time “poor whites” from South Africa were encouraged to settle in the mandate.

After 1923 Germans were encouraged to become, in effect, “dual citizens” of both Germany and South Africa, and while the number of Germans rose, it did not do so as fast as the Afrikaner elements and this issue defined the tone of the settler-dominated “Legislative Assembly” inaugurated in 1925. The administration decision to encourage and to subsidize Angolan Afrikaners to resettle in Namibia not only threatened the German-speakers, but it also signaled the end of a balanced budget, since each new farmer was subsidized to the amount of approximately 2,500 pounds. Third, the administration pursued a policy of segregation based on the South African model. A “native reserve” was created in each magisterial district where idle and surplus blacks could be located and which would form a source of inexpensive labor. Fourth, transport and communications were expanded and incorporated into the South African system. Not only was the railway line expanded to Gobabis in the east of the territory, but more important, it was linked to the South African system; the operation of the railways and harbors was taken over by the South Africa Railways and Harbors Board, which had the effect of reorienting the territory in terms of trade and cultural domination away from Europe and toward South Africa.

These deployments were framed by an atmosphere of settler insecurity. Rumors enhanced the situation. Indigenous resistance, epitomized by the Bondelswarts Rebellion in 1922, the Rehoboth Rebellion in 1924, and the Ipumbu Affair in 1932 were suppressed using military aircraft especially brought in from South Africa for this purpose. Generally, however, the global economic depression coupled to drought and floods served to minimize capitalist development during the interwar years. Mining, fishing, and farming formed the major sectors of economic activity and, to service these, increasing use was made of contract migrant labor.

Fears of a possible Nazi incursion in 1939 led to a 300-strong South African Police contingent being sent to the territory and the incorporation of the police into the South African Police. Shortly thereafter the banking currency in the territory was also switched to South African.

World War II had relatively little direct impact on this region. About a thousand German males were interned and a small number of Africans did military service mostly as guards in South Africa. After the war there was a massive expansion in settler farming and “native administration” was incorporated directly into the South African equivalent. South Africa did not recognize the United Nations as the legal successor to the League of Nations and proposed to directly incorporate the territory. As part of this process it tried to implement most of the apartheid-like recommendations of the Odendaal Commission (1964) which greatly expanded the public service by creating twelve second-tier “ethnic administrations.” Various rulings by the International Court of Justice were inconclusive until 1971, when it finally found that South Africa's presence there was illegal. This political uncertainty, in addition to hindering investment also had important ecological consequences as many speculators bought land and then overgrazed it in an effort to benefit from the South African meat market.

Resistance to South Africa's overrule became clear and increasingly well organized after World War II, spearheaded originally by Chief Hosea Kutako who, with the assistance of the Rev. Michael Scott, made petitioning the United Nations an effective tool. In the early 1960s political parties, like the South-West African Peoples’ Organization (SWANU), were formed explicitly to promote independence, their importance underlined by the killing of people protesting removal from the Windhoek Old Location late in 1959. SWAPO commenced its armed struggle with a skirmish in 1966 and guerrilla and border war continued in increasing intensity up to independence.

In late 1971 Ovambo contract workers went on a massive and successful strike. This event created minor concessions but more important led directly to large numbers of refugees fleeing the country who provided many of the SWAPO cadres. In the face of increasing international pressure various internal political configurations were unsuccessfully offered by South Africa.

The international independence struggle was closely tied to the antiapartheid struggle, and as divestment and boycotts started affecting the economy of both South Africa and its major trading partners, the five Western permanent members of the UN Security Council (and major trading partners) served as mediators in trying to implement UN Resolution 435, which called for free elections in Namibia. Their efforts, abetted by a worsening economic crisis in South Africa and an unwinnable border war and coupled to the collapse of the “Second World” or Socialist Bloc eventually led to the arrival of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in April 1989. This transition is widely held up as one of the major successes of the UN system. The closely monitored elections were held in November 1989 and won by SWAPO, which took power when the country finally became independent at midnight on March 21, 1990.

ROBERT J. GORDON

Further Reading

First, R. South West Africa. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Hayes, P., et al. (eds.). Namibia under South African Rule. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.

du Pisani, A. SWA/Namibia: The Politics of Continuity and Change. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1985.

Wellington, J. South West Africa and its Human Issues. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Wood, B. (ed.). Namibia 1884–1984: Readings on Namibia's History and Society. London: Namibia Support Committee, 1988.

Namibia: SWAPO and the Freedom Struggle

The struggle to free South West Africa (SWA) from South African rule was crucially framed by the internationalization of the question of the territory's future. SWA was originally ceded to South Africa as a League of Nations mandate, but in the 1940s the UN refused the territory's formal annexation by South Africa. Instead, after extensive negotiations, the General Assembly terminated the mandate (1966), declared South Africa's occupation illegal (a reading later [1971] endorsed by the International Court of Justice), and established a Council for Namibia to exercise formal trusteeship over the territory. In practice, South Africa would successfully defy the UN by continuing its occupation until 1990.

Under such circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that Namibians, as they developed initiatives (a remarkable range of them for so small a population) to liberate their country, focused first and foremost on this international terrain: the Herero Chiefs Council played an important role in early Namibian initiatives at the UN, for example. Meanwhile, additional foci of opposition began to emerge in the late 1950s. A group of left-wing intellectuals crafted the South West African National Union (SWANU) from previously existing student organizations. But it was the South-West African Peoples’ Organization (SWAPO) that would now place itself at the very center of the nationalist movement.

The roots of SWAPO's precursor, the Ovamboland Peoples’ Organization (OPO), lay in the community of Ovambo migrant laborers working in South Africa and within SWA itself, but from 1960 OPO adopted a more inclusive nationalist strategy signaled by its new name. Confirming OPO president Sam Nujoma as SWAPO president, it began to relocate the center of gravity of its operations into exile in Tanzania. There, with the failure of unity efforts, SWAPO moved skillfully to gain exclusive international status for itself as voice of the new Namibia-in-the-making. SWAPO's courting of the OAU and its Liberation Committee, combined with its promise to launch military activity within SWA itself, led, in 1964, to SWAPO gaining OAU recognition as the “sole and authentic” representative of Namibia. Then, as pressure against South Africa's occupation of SWA mounted at the UN, SWAPO was granted, in 1973, the status of “authentic representative of the Namibian people” by the General Assembly.

Efforts to consolidate international support for Namibia were crucial, of course. South Africa was to try various schemes to legitimate its hold on Namibia, including the Odendaal Plan of the late 1960s for the “bantustanization” of Namibia, and the 1975 launching of the Turnhalle process designed to give the appearance of some devolution of power to Namibians themselves. Moreover, even though these various “reforms” failed, they were complemented by savage repression that was far more successful. True, some space was allowed for oppositional political activity in the southern and central “Police Zone” of the country, although SWAPO activists were harassed even there. In the north, the violence committed by the South African Defense Force and attendant locally based special forces (especially the notorious Koevoet) was even more extreme. This was particularly true of densely populated Ovamboland, which also provided the staging grounds for South Africa's many incursions into Angola against both the MPLA government and SWAPO (the massacre at SWAPO's Cassinga camp in 1978 producing as many as 900 casualties, for example). It is true that from the time of their first operation at Ongulumbashe in 1966, courageous guerrillas penetrated the country sufficiently often to earn the attention of the South Africans. Nonetheless, SWAPO was never able to mount a serious challenge to South Africa's military grip on Namibia.

From exile, the SWAPO leadership continued to strengthen its centrality within the emergent Namibian polity, its international status complementing its popular credibility internally. This helped sustain common cause against the apartheid state's presence in Namibia and its various schemes, albeit, some would argue, at the cost of permitting a damaging degree of control by the external SWAPO over strategic initiatives inside the territory. These costs were perhaps most visible in the late 1980s, when organizations of workers, students, women, and churchgoers who sought momentarily to broaden the terms of internal struggle and the autonomous empowerment of civil society along lines then being exemplified in South Africa were effectively discouraged from doing so by the exile leadership. Even more certain, however, were the costs of the leadership's ruthlessness in crushing tensions within its own ranks in exile. SWAPO members who questioned SWAPO's practices in exile were first imprisoned, with help from the Tanzanian authorities, in the 1960s, but the movement's internal crisis in Zambia (where SWAPO had shifted its base to in the 1970s) was much more serious.

Inside Namibia, the early 1970s had witnessed a vast popular upsurge (the dramatic strike of migrant workers in 1971–1972 and an impressive wave of youth-inspired resistance throughout the country). When this revolt was crushed by the South Africans, thousands of young Namibians went into exile to join the liberation movement. They soon discovered a SWAPO that many of them considered to be militarily ineffectual, undemocratic, and corrupt. In 1975 they called for a congress, as promised at SWAPO's previous 1969 Tanga congress, to discuss such matters. Nujoma instead persuaded the Zambian army to arrest some 2,000 of these new arrivals, while also having the putative leaders of this “coup” jailed in Tanzania with the connivance of his fellow presidents, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere.

The SWAPO leadership largely whitewashed these events in a subsequent internal investigation while continuing with its pragmatic course of pursuing external backing. SWAPO had long since cornered Soviet support, for example, and was prepared to make various left-sounding pronouncements to seal this relationship, even as it complemented these with more moderate assertions aimed at other potential constituencies overseas. More difficult to finesse was the further playing out of the movement's authoritarian tendencies, which erupted, once SWAPO had shifted its center of operations to Angola in the 1980s, in a wave of often arbitrary incarcerations, torture, and even murder at its Lubango base of hundreds of alleged “spies” from within the movement. Set in a context of military frustration and considerable paranoia, these developments evidenced a security apparatus now almost completely out of control, its reign of terror manifesting ethnic, intraethnic, and regional tensions as well as the targeting of the more educated among SWAPO's cadres. As this deadly machine began to close in on even the most senior of the SWAPO leadership in the late 1980s, the movement was very close to the point of self-destruction.

Meanwhile, Namibia's broader fate had became hostage in the 1980s to the Cold War machinations of the United States. After 1977 a Security Council-based “contact group” of five Western powers largely took over the Namibia issue at the UN, rejecting further sanctions against South Africa but promising to facilitate resolution of the issue with the apartheid regime. This group in turn soon yielded to pressure from the United States to “link” Namibia's fate to the ending of Cuban support for the Angolan government (itself under siege from South Africa, with American backing) and thus helped stall international progress on Namibia. It was therefore fortunate that by the end of the 1980s the apartheid government, now facing (after its failed siege of Cuito Cuanavale) a costly military stalemate in Angola, was also seeing a need to reconsider its intransigent strategies closer to home. It now become party to negotiations over Namibia that (in a context which also registered the Soviet Union's own waning interest in southern Africa) finally realized the implementation of Security Council Resolution 385 of 1976, which called for UN supervision of free and fair elections in Namibia as a prelude to independence.

Significantly, SWAPO was largely excluded from these negotiations. Nonetheless, the movement had managed to so consolidate its political credentials within Namibia, and especially in the northern, more populous, Ovambo-speaking part of the country, as to be a near-certain winner once the complicated process of clearing the ground for elections was finally realized. In the event, SWAPO won forty-one of seventy-two seats in the UN-supervised elections of November 1989, permitting the new assembly to unanimously elect Sam Nujoma the first president of a liberated Namibia. Independence itself came on March 21, 1990.

Encouraged by new realities, both local and global, to abandon many of its more overtly authoritarian practices from exile as well as the socioeconomic radicalism that some of its earlier rhetoric implied, SWAPO now came to preside over a liberal-democratic constitutional system and a full-blown market economy. The darkest side of the movement's past practices seemed likely to reemerge only if any lack of success of that economic strategy were to polarize social contradictions dangerously and/or if a political opposition were to emerge credible enough to jeopardize SWAPO's electoral grip on power—which, among other things, would threaten SWAPO's military, security, and political elites with a reopening of questions regarding the movement's abuses of power in exile.

JOHN S. SAUL

See also: Nujoma, Sam.

Further Reading

Bauer, G. Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996. Athens: James Currey Ohio University Press, 1998.

Becker, H. Namibian Women's Movement, 1980 to 1992: From Anti-Colonial Resistance to Reconstruction. Frankfurt: IKO, 1995.

Dobell, L. Swapo's Struggle for Namibia, 1960–1991: War by Other Means. Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1998.

Emmettt, T. Popular Resistance and the Roots of Nationalism in Namibia, 1915–1966. Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1999.

Heywood, A. The Cassinga Event. 2nd rev. ed.Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia, 1996.

Leys, C., and J. S. Saul. Namibia's Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995.

Namibia: Struggle for Independence, 1970–1990

There is a view (expressed in the work of Lauren Dobell [1998], for example) that the struggle for independence in Namibia was largely fought outside the country, chiefly by the diplomacy of the externally based South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) leadership. Within the country, certainly, SWAPO faced massive organizational problems, not only because of the way the population was dispersed across the land but also because the group's attempts to organize were met with harsh repression and violent reactions. Nevertheless, at certain moments the internal struggle played an important role in the process which eventually led to independence.

One of these moments came in 1971. After the International Court of Justice ruled that South Africa's rule of the territory was illegal, the two main Lutheran Church leaders wrote an open letter to the South African prime minister, John Vorster, which presented a stance of open support for independence; this was the first time that the churches had identified themselves with the movement for independence. Within months, from December 1971 to March 1972, a major strike took place that involved up to 13,000 contract workers, the backbone of the Namibian labor force. The external SWAPO leadership was taken by surprise by the scale of the strike, but quickly tried to capitalize on it. The new political consciousness born of the strike helped motivate the SWAPO Youth League to campaign against the imposition of the Bantustan policy in the north. The increasing resistance within the country to South African rule, and the threat of further mass action, undoubtedly played a part in the Vorster government's decision to shift ground and accept the idea of independence for the de facto colony. But South Africa wanted to control that process, to bring into office an independent Namibia—a government that would support, and not challenge, South African interests.

SWAPO was never banned in Namibia because of the international status of the territory, but its internal leadership suffered constant harassment at the hands of the South African authorities, and on a number of occasions its key officials were jailed; some of them were tortured and in September 1989 a top official was assassinated. As the increasingly vicious war in the north intensified, so repression elsewhere grew harsher. But in the mid-1980s, thanks to the reform program of the South African government, new space opened up for protest politics. The South African government knew that without international recognition of Namibian independence, the conflict with SWAPO would not end. It was not prepared to implement the Western plan for a transition to independence, accepted by the United Nations in September 1978, because it would almost certainly bring into office a SWAPO government, and it sought to create in the territory an anti-SWAPO front that could form an alternative to SWAPO. It therefore influenced a group of internal parties to form the Multi-Party Conference (MPC) in 1983, a wider grouping than merely the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, which had won the internal election of December 1978. The MPC then pressed for the establishment of a Transitional Government of National Unity (TGNU), which came into office in June 1985. There was no new election, but to give the TGNU some legitimacy, more freedom of expression was allowed, and SWAPO began to organize as it had not been able to for over twenty years. It now again held mass rallies, and a new leadership, returned from imprisonment on Robben Island, organized the first effective trade unions. The Namibian Union of Mineworkers under Ben Ulenga formed the backbone of the National Union of Namibian Workers, and the SWAPO Youth League gained a new lease of life.

In the crucial year 1988, when South Africa at last began negotiating the implementation of the Western plan, there were widespread protests within the country, beginning in the north, where scholars at schools next to army bases protested against their proximity to the bases and called a school boycott. The school boycott spread throughout Ovamboland and into other areas, and workers began to give their support to the students. This growing internal crisis was one factor, argues Brian Wood, for the South African decision to go ahead with the implementation of the Western plan and to withdraw from Namibia.

After a delay of over a decade, implementation began on April 1, 1989, and a large United Nations presence entered the country to supervise the election that took place in the first week of November that year. SWAPO emerged victoriously, but with only 57.4 per cent of the vote, and not the two-thirds majority that would have enabled it to write the constitution for the new country on its own. By February 1990 the new constitution had been accepted, and the country became independent on March 21, 1990. Any account of the road to that independence must allow some space for internal resistance and mass protest in extremely difficult circumstances.

CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS

See also: Namibia (Southwest Africa): South African Rule; Namibia: Independence to the Present; Namibia: SWAPO and the Freedom Struggle; South Africa: Homelands and Bantustans.

Further Reading

Cliffe, L. (ed.). The Transition to Independence in Namibia. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Riener, 1994.

Dobell, L. Swapo's Struggle for Namibia, 1960–1991: War by Other Means. Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1998.

Leys, C., and J. Saul. Namibia's Liberation Struggle. London: James Currey, 1995.

Peltola, P. The Last May Day. Helsinki: Anthropological Society, 1996.

Soggott, D. Namibia: The Violent Heritage. London: Rex Collings, 1986.

Wood, B. “Preventing the Vacuum: Determinants of the Namibia Settlement.” Journal of Southern African Studies. 17, no. 4 (1991).

Namibia: Independence to the Present

When Namibia became independent on March 21, 1990, numerous heads of state from around the world attended the celebrations held in the Windhoek stadium. But international attention soon dissipated, in part because nothing dramatic happened in Namibia. Some had feared that far-right-wing elements would try to destabilize the new government, but this did not occur. One of the main features of Namibia in its first decade since independence was its relative political stability.

The South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), the main liberation movement, that had gained less than two-thirds of the vote in the pre-independence election of November 1989, won over two-thirds in the next general election in December 1994, and retained its dominance in the December 1999 general election. The main opposition party, the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, remained crippled by its association with South Africa and with Namibia's apartheid past, and steadily lost support. Mishake Muyongo, former vice president of SWAPO, took over as leader of the DTA from Dirk Mudge, but then left to take up the leadership of the separatist Caprivi Liberation Front. With some thousands of other Caprivians, he fled from Namibia to Botswana in late 1998, and was subsequently granted asylum in Denmark. A group of his supporters staged an armed attack on Katimo Mulilo, the chief regional center in Caprivi, in August 1999. This was the greatest threat to Namibian sovereignty since independence, but the attackers were quickly defeated. Allegations of human rights abuses by the Namibian security force against Caprivians then hurt Namibia's image, and tourists canceled visits in large numbers, but by September it seemed the threat was over.

Botswana's relations with Namibia remained cordial, despite the long drawn-out dispute between the two countries over the island of Katsikili/Sidudu on the Chobe River. When the two countries could not agree on the matter, it was referred by their governments to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for adjudication. Judgment in Botswana's favor in late 1999 was accepted by the Namibian government.

Another major development in 1998 was the establishment of a new political party, the Congress of Democrats (COD), under the leadership of Ben Ulenga, former trade unionist and long-time SWAPO member. He had been appointed Namibia's high commissioner in London but was unhappy when SWAPO approved the idea of changing the constitution to allow Sam Nujoma (the president) to serve a third term as president and was critical of Nujoma's decision to send Namibian troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo in support of Laurent Kabila, for no clear reason other than to add support to the intervention of Namibia's close partners in the Southern African Development Community, Angola, and Zimbabwe. The COD obtained the support of many intellectuals and members of the Windhoek elite.

Those disillusioned included some who pointed to creeping authoritarianism on Nujoma's part, and who disliked SWAPO's dominance of the political scene. Many former members of the SWAPO armed wing, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia, had returned to Ovamboland and not been able to find work. While some were absorbed into the police and the army, others claimed that the government had forgotten about them.

The continuing Angolan civil war meant that throughout its first decade of independence Namibia could never take the stability on its northern border for granted, but despite this, much economic development took place there, as ties between northern Namibia and southern Angola grew ever closer. It was on that border that the government planned a major hydroelectric scheme at the Epupa Falls, which not only threatened the lands on which some of the seminomadic Himba people lived, but was also much criticized by environmentalists. After the opening of the trans-Caprivi highway, which opened up the northeastern part of the country, the Kuwaiti government promised to fund the extension of the railway north from Otavi to the Angolan border. Nujoma himself had hopes of another port being built close to Ovamboland, but nothing more than a feasibility study was undertaken.

One objection to the Epupa scheme was that a new energy source had been discovered off the southern coast: the Kudu gas field, which could come on stream sooner, and send gas to Cape Town in South Africa for processing. Namibia remained highly dependent on its natural resources, and for some years in the mid-1990s its fishing industry fell on bad times, as the fish stocks declined. Although by the end of the decade they had recovered considerably, the falling price of uranium meant that production at the giant Rossing mine had to be cut back, and in 1998 the Tsumeb copper mine was closed, with the loss of thousands of jobs. Only diamonds retained their sparkle throughout the decade, in the middle of which the South African-based De Beers had made an agreement with the Namibian government for a partnership, creating a new company, Namdeb, in which the government held a 50 per cent stake. As this suggested, any idea of nationalizing the mines had disappeared after independence, as the country adopted orthodox capitalist policies. One of its successes was in creating economic enterprise zones, where tax was low and labor flexible. By the end of the 1990s, a number of such zones were in existence, at Walvis Bay and other places, providing the country with a small manufacturing sector, mostly producing export goods.

Most of Namibia's exports continued to go to South Africa. Relations with that country remained good, after the negotiating forum in South Africa had in 1993 agreed that Walvis Bay, Namibia's leading port, which the South African government had always claimed as its own territory, could be incorporated in Namibia. After some months of joint administration, the handover of Walvis Bay took place. When President Nelson Mandela came to office, he offered to take over the apartheid debt, which the Namibian government had inherited at independence. After long negotiations, this was done and over R700 million wiped off. The two countries worked together in the Southern African Development Community, and the two presidents paid a number of visits to each other's countries. One new threat they both had to face was the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS infections: by 1999 an estimated 15 per cent of all Namibians between the ages of fifteen and fifty were infected. By then, the total population was an estimated l.6 million.

Although the investment conference held in New York City in June 1990, shortly after independence, did not attract as much foreign investment as hoped, the government continued with investor-friendly policies and orthodox economic policies. The first SWAPO congress held on Namibian territory, which met in December 1991, did not challenge the leadership on central issues. A land conference held the previous June had begun to raise the tricky issue of land redistribution but in the years that followed very little was done to give effect to its recommendations. As it came to power, the SWAPO government had proclaimed national reconciliation as its policy. As the years passed, critics said that the only reconciliation they could see was with the small minority, at the cost of the black majority, most members of which still lived in poverty.

Namibia would not agree to participate in the South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the publication of Siegfried Groth's Namibia: The Wall of Silence, which told of the atrocities carried out in SWAPO's camps in Angola, provoked much controversy. Nujoma lashed out at the Beyond the Wall of Silence (BWS) organization, which had been established to campaign for the truth about what had happened in SWAPO's camps in Angola during the war to come out. Whites in particular were accused of undermining the government. While the media remained free, there was little probing of news or investigative journalism, and the government mostly remained tight-lipped about its policies. As Namibia entered the new millennium, it was clear that much time and effort would be needed to create a democratic culture.

CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS

See also: Mining, Multinationals, and Development; Namibia: SWAPO and the Freedom Struggle; Nujoma, Sam.

Further Reading

Bauer, G. Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.

Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Surveys. Namibia. London: EIU, 1990–1998.

Groth, S. Namibia: The Wall of Silence. Cape Town: David Philip, 1995.

Leys, C., and J. Saul. Namibia's Liberation Struggle. London: James Currey, 1995.

Napata and Meroe

Napata and Meroe were the most important centers within the Kushite Empire, which flourished from the eighth century BCE to the fourth century CE. The exact meaning of the term Napata is unclear, but it probably designated a locality rather than a single site. Although there is some evidence for occupation in the Kerma Period, the earliest structural remains are those of a small temple, begun by the Egyptian Pharaohs Horemheb (1323–1295BCE) or Seti I (1294–1279BCE) and completed by Ramesses II (1279–1213BCE). Epigraphic evidence, however, records that a fortress with a shrine of Amun within it was constructed by Thutmose III (1479–1425BCE). Amenhotep II (1427–1400BCE) records that he sacrificed seven captive prisoners on his return from a successful campaign in southwest Asia and had the body of one of the victims hung on the walls of Napata.

Napata became a place of great religious significance to the Egyptians. On the right bank of the Nile stands Jebel Barkal, an isolated and prominent mountain with a sheer cliff-face over 100 meters high and a detached pinnacle 80 meters high. The Egyptians identified this mountain as the southern home of their state god Amun, calling it the “Pure Mountain.”

Upon their adoption of the state god of Egypt, the Kushites held Jebel Barkal in equal veneration and began a building program at the foot of the mountain in the eighth century BCE, which developed into the largest religious complex in their extensive domains. The earliest Kushite temple may have been constructed by Alara (c.785–760BCE) or Kashta (c.760–747BCE). Piye (c.747–716BCE) was responsible for refurbishing and extending the New Kingdom temple of Amun, which on its completion was the largest in the realm. One of the most interesting temples, the Temple of Mut, was constructed, or reconstructed, by Taharqo (69–664BCE). The sanctuary chamber was hollowed out of the rock of the cliff face and decorated with reliefs one of which shows Taharqo making offerings to Amun who is depicted seated on a throne within the “Pure Mountain” itself.

Across the river and a few kilometers downstream, Sanam Abu Dom was the site of another large temple of Amun, with an adjacent palace and massive stores complex. The earliest Kushite rulers were interred at el-Kurru twelve kilometers downstream. Taharqo chose to be buried at Nuri, slightly upstream of Barkal but on the opposite bank, and most rulers from then on into the late fourth century BCE were interred there.

The earliest evidence for occupation at Meroe, which is on the left bank of the Nile and was reached by a direct route across the desert from Napata, is a number of circular timber huts dating to the tenth century BCE. The importance of Meroe was first documented at the time of the Kushite's invasion of Egypt two centuries later. An extensive cemetery, situated on a projecting spur of the plateau four kilometers to the east of the settlement, contained graves, many of which are clearly of wealthy and important individuals. The funerary customs and the artifacts buried with the deceased indicate that these people were subjects of the kings of Kush. By this date Meroe, although displaying a few regional characteristics, was an important and wealthy center of Kushite culture. From the later seventh century BCE Kushite rulers are attested in the city although they continued to be buried at Napata for several centuries thereafter.

During the mid-third and second centuries BCE, an area enclosed by a thick stone wall with projecting towers was constructed in the heart of the city. It was dubbed the Royal City by its excavator. Within were temples, palaces, and the so-called Roman baths, which functioned as a water sanctuary probably connected with festivals performed by the king on the occasion of the beginning of the annual inundation. A new Temple of Amun was erected on the east side of the Royal City. This was the second largest of the Amun temples in the kingdom after that at Napata and presumably was designed to replace the earlier temple of the god at Meroe which had stood on the site of the Royal City. At this time Meroe may have been on a island but, if so, the eastern channel ceased to flow by the beginning of the Christian era and thereafter a processional way flanked by temples was constructed leading up to the Amun temple. Elsewhere in the city most of the dwellings were of mud brick, one building succeeding another over the centuries until they formed a mound up to approximately ten meters in height. On the eastern side of the city there is extensive evidence for ironworking with large heaps of slag being a prominent feature of the landscape.

From the late fourth century BCE onward, most Kushite rulers were buried at Meroe; the pre-eminence of Meroe as an urban center was established. The reason for this move of the royal burial ground from Napata is unknown. It certainly does not represent an abandonment of the cult of Amun at Napata, which continued to flourish. Evidence for building activities at Napata continue for centuries and these include a large palace built by King Natakamani (c.1–20CE) who was also active in the Meroe region. At Napata, immediately to the west of Jebel Barkal, are two small pyramid cemeteries, one group dating to the period around 315–270BCE, the other to the period around 90–50BCE. Some of these are of Kushite rulers who certainly controlled the whole of the kingdom.

Napata may have been sacked by the armies of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty Egyptian ruler Psammetik II in 593BCE, and again by a Roman army under Petronius in 24BCE. The final abandonment of the site presumably occurred upon the collapse of the Kushite state in the fourth century. Meroe may have been occupied by the Aksumites from Ethiopia for a short period at that time. Like Napata, Meroe does not appear to have survived the collapse of the Kushite state, although burials of a slightly later date abound in the area.

DEREK WELSBY

See also: Kerma and Egyptian Nubia; Kush; Meroe.

Further Reading

Kendall, T. A New Map of the Gebel Barkal Temples. In Études Nubiennes. Vol. 2. edited by C. Bonnet, Geneva, 1994.

Shinnie, P. L., and R. J. Bradley. The Capital Of Kush 1. Berlin, Meroitica 4, Akademie-Verlag, 1980.

Török, L. The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization. Leiden: Brill, 1997.

———. Meroe City, An Ancient African Capital: John Garstang's Excavations in the Sudan. London: Egypt Exploration Society Occasional Publications 12, 1997.

Welsby, D. A. The Kingdom of Kush: The Napatan and Meroitic Empires. London: British Museum Press, 1996.

Napoleon: See Egypt, Ottoman, 1517–1798: Napoleon and the French in Egypt.

Natal, Nineteenth Century

A British colony from 1842 until 1910, this region of southeast Africa was so named because a Portuguese navigator, Bartholomew Dias, sighted its coast on Christmas Day (i.e., Christ's natal day) in 1497. For most of the nineteenth century, Natal was defined as the territory lying between the Drakensberg mountains and the sea between the Umzimvubu and the Thukela Rivers.

In the opening decades of the century, the district was caught up in tumultuous wars fought by a number of chieftaincies aspiring to assert hegemony over the region. By 1827 the Zulu kingdom forged by Shaka had emerged as the decisive victor. Some of the chiefs and communities formerly prominent in Natal moved away, but most accepted Zulu rule. The consolidation of power in the hands of a single government attracted the attention of a motley assortment of traders and hunters who were granted permission by Shaka to settle in the districts around Port Natal (modern Durban). Shaka commandeered their services as riflemen in his later wars and rewarded them with presents of cattle. By the time of Shaka's assassination in September 1828, the leading traders had married local women and acquired sizeable followings of servants and hangers-on.

Unscrupulously claiming to have been granted huge tracts of land, the traders attempted unsuccessfully to bring about a British annexation of Natal. Shaka was succeeded by his brother Dingane, who expelled most of the adventurers at Port Natal. During the early 1830s, however, he again allowed traders and hunters to move in.

The British colonial government of the Cape Colony now began to take a serious interest in the Zulu kingdom. Dr. Andrew Smith was sent as an emissary to Dingane in 1832, ostensibly to cement cordial relations. In his private communications, however, Smith argued that it would not be difficult to seize the king's domains. Some of Smith's party were farmers from the eastern districts of the Cape, who marveled at the open green pastures that stretched from the Port Natal up to the Drakensberg. Their reports asserted that the Zulu wars had cleared the land of people and that the territory was therefore ripe for settlement. These statements should not be taken at face value; twentieth century historians have comprehensively exposed them as self-interested propaganda. Nonetheless, the idea of lush cattle lands just waiting to be occupied made a powerful appeal to the imaginations of farmers whose expansion into the eastern districts of the Cape had been halted by the determined resistance of the Xhosa and Thembu people. When land hunger and dissatisfaction with British colonial administration provoked the mass emigration of farmers later known as the Great Trek, the intended destination of most of the so-called Voortrekkers was Natal. They were cheered on by colonial newspaper editors and property speculators who extolled their pioneering spirit and argued that the British government should extend its protection over them.

Dingane was understandably wary of an uninvited, audacious invasion of farmers in 1837. He told the Voortrekker leader, Piet Retief, that he had heard reliable reports that white men had been stealing Zulu cattle and other property. There could be no question of negotiating about grants of land until this property was returned. Retief claimed that the real culprit was the Tlokwa chief Sekonyela. In November 1837 he offered to lead an expedition to Sekonyela's headquarters in the Caledon River valley to reclaim the stolen goods. On his return he sent word to Dingane that Zulu property consisting of 700 head of cattle, 60 to 70 horses, and 30 guns had been retrieved and would shortly be returned to the king. When Retief and his party of seventy farmers and assorted servants arrived at Dingane's capital, they were received with apparent cordiality. The king, however, had determined to halt this invasion in its early stages and had prepared a calculated trap in the guise of a display of Zulu dancing on the third of February 1838. After Retief and his men had been persuaded to leave their horses and guns outside, the king gave the signal that the amathakathi (wizards or criminals) should be killed. The same day, regiments were dispatched to attack all the Voortrekker parties in Natal. They seized huge numbers of cattle and very nearly succeeded in exterminating the would-be colonists. After suffering heavy losses, the surviving Voortrekkers regrouped and determined to defend their de facto seizure of Natal by launching a counterattack on the Zulu king. They were assisted by the Port Natal traders who deserted Dingane and mobilized their small number of African servants and supporters for an assault in March 1838. Although these forces were resoundingly defeated, a better-armed expedition inflicted a catastrophic defeat on Dingane's forces at Blood River, where some 3,000 Zulu men died on December 16, 1838. A standoff ensued for several months. Despite their victory, the Voortrekkers had not succeeded in either of their principal aims, which had been to regain their lost cattle and to negotiate a cession of Natal.

Meanwhile, the British government at the Cape had become alarmed, fearing that the Voortrekkers had unleashed wars that would eventually threaten the stability of their own eastern frontier. A small force was sent to Port Natal in November 1838 for the purpose of arranging a settlement with the Zulu king. It was not their intervention, however, but the defection of Dingane's brother, Mpande, and 17,000 followers that proved decisive. Allying himself with the Voortrekkers, Mpande proclaimed himself king and defeated Dingane's forces in February 1840. The boundary between Zululand and Natal was now set at the Thukela River. A short-lived Voortrekker “Republic of Natalia” with its capital at Pietermaritzburg expired in 1842 when the British determined that for strategic reasons they must hold Port Natal; the Cape governor proclaimed the annexation on May 5, 1843.

The incoming government faced formidable problems. A population of a few thousand colonists was vastly outnumbered by an African population estimated to number 100,000. Under the secretary for native affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, lands known as Reserves were defined for exclusively African occupation and chiefs were made the principal instruments for the administration of justice and the collection of taxes in those areas. The success of this experiment in keeping the peace and defraying the cost of government caused it to be copied in other British colonies of southern, central, and eastern Africa. Shepstone's system also helped to lay the foundations of twentieth-century segregation and apartheid in South Africa by laying down separate legal systems for white and black citizens.

The colonial economy languished until the establishment of extensive sugar plantations in the coastal regions in the 1860s. A shortage of Africans willing to work on the extended contracts required by the sugar planters led to the importation of indentured laborers from South Asia who formed the nucleus of South Africa's Indian population. They were followed by free Indian settlers, including, in the 1890s, the young lawyer Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Africans responded positively to the opportunities presented by a market economy. They grew crops not only in the designated Reserves, but also on purchased or rented land. Others affiliated themselves to the many mission stations established in Natal. In the preeminent century of European evangelization, Natal's accessible location and large population made it a favorite destination for missionary organizations. Especially important were the missions established by English Methodists, American Congregationalists, Swedish, German and Norwegian Lutherans, and the Church of England. Under Anglican Bishop J. W. Colenso, Natal became the scene for influential innovations in missionary practice and theology. Although Colenso was convicted for heresy in 1864, he continued to be recognized by the British government as the official bishop of Natal, using his friendship with Theophilus Shepstone to advance his interests.

This alliance ended suddenly at the end of 1873, when Colenso objected to the harsh punishment Shepstone imposed on Hlubi Chief Langalibalele, who defied an order to account for unregistered rifles held by his people and attempted to flee over the Drakensberg into Lesotho.

The furor raised in Britain by Colenso's accounts of atrocities inflicted on the Hlubi led the Colonial Office in 1875 to suspend Natal's constitution of 1857 and to replace it with one less susceptible to the influence of white colonists. Three years later another crisis arose when the British attempted to federate the various colonies and republics of South Africa. The high commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, who had been sent out to achieve this project, decided that the independence of the Zulu kingdom was a military menace and an obstacle to the economic success of the proposed federation. War was declared in January 1879 and despite unexpected early Zulu victories, eventually ended with the capture of the king Cetshwayo (who had succeed his father Mpande in 1873). An attempt to rule Zululand through thirteen separate chiefs plunged the region into a devastating civil war that ended in 1887 when the territory was officially annexed to Natal, thus extending the northern boundary to the border of Portuguese Mozambique.

In 1894 a concerted campaign by white settlers to achieve self-government was successful and the colony for the first time had an elected prime minister. African interests suffered greatly from the change, as the separate legal system established under Shepstone deprived them of the right to vote, unless they had been specifically exempted from “Native Law.” Only a handful won exemption, ensuring the dominance of white interests. New laws curbed African rights to buy and own land, thus inhibiting the growth of the middle class. As the population grew the Reserves became overcrowded and degraded. By the end of the century people in the Reserves were already becoming dependent on the earnings of migrant workers.

The century ended spectacularly with the outbreak of the second Anglo-Boer War. Invading forces besieged the town of Ladysmith. Following British victory and the Peace of Vereeniging (1902), Natal saw its system of segregated reserves and dual legal system adopted by the entire Union of South Africa.

NORMAN A. ETHERINGTON

See also: Anglo-Zulu War, (1879–1887) Boer Expansion: Interior of South Africa; Mfecane; Shaka and Zulu Kingdom, (1810–1840); South Africa: Confederation, Disarmament and the First Anglo-Boer War, 1871–1881.

Further Reading

Duminy, A., and B. Guest (eds.). Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989.

Etherington, N. Preachers, Peasants, and Politics in Southeast Africa. London: Royal Historial Association, 1978.

Guest, B., and J M. Sellers. Enterprise and Exploitation in a Victorian Colony: Aspects of the Economic and Social History of Colonial Natal. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1985.

Laband, J, and P. Thompson. Kingdom and Colony at War. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1990.

Welsh, D. J. The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845–1910. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

National Party: See South Africa: Afrikaner Nationalism, Broederbond, and National Party, 1902–1948.

National Resistance Movement: See Uganda: National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the Winning of Political Power.

Nationalism: See Colonialism, Overthrow of: Nationalism and Anticolonialism.

Nationalism(s): Postcolonial Africa

The concept of nationalism has been defined as a sense of collective identity in which a people perceives itself as different from, and often superior to, other peoples. Nationalism also implies the existence of a variety of shared characteristics, most notably a common language and culture, but also race and religion, as shown by the rise of Islamic revivalist movements in North Africa and other regions of the world with sizable Muslim populations.

The emergence of African nationalism and African demands for national self-determination (independence) from colonial rule followed a different pattern than its classic European counterparts of earlier centuries. The emergence of European “nations” (i.e., a cohesive group identity) generally preceded and contributed to the creation of European “states” (the structures of governance). The net result was the creation of viable nation-states that enjoyed the legitimacy of their peoples. This process was reversed in Africa. In most cases, the colonial state was created prior to the existence of any sense of nation. As a result, the creation and strengthening of a nationalist attachment to what in essence constituted artificially created African states became one of the supreme challenges of African leaders during the postcolonial era.

The emergence of African nationalism was also unique in terms of its inherently anticolonial character. African nationalist movements were sharply divided on political agendas, ideological orientation, and economic programs. Regardless of their differences, however, the leaders of these movements did agree on one point: the necessity and desirability of independence from foreign control. Anticolonial sentiment served as the rallying point of early African nationalist movements to such a degree that African nationalism was equivalent to African anticolonialism.

The emergence and strengthening of contemporary African nationalisms unfolded gradually in a series of waves beginning in the 1950s with groups of countries becoming independent during specific historical periods. The first wave emerged during the 1950s and was led by the heavily Arab-influenced North African countries of Libya (1951), Morocco (1956), Tunisia (1956), and the Sudan (1956). Two countries outside of North Africa also obtained independence during this period: the former British colony of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1957, followed by the former French colony of Guinea in 1958. This latter case was especially noteworthy in that Guinea was the only French colony to cast a negative vote against a 1958 referendum concerning the creation of a revised “French community of states.” A “yes” vote would have confirmed continued French sovereignty while at the same time granting some degree of political autonomy to Guinea and the other French colonies. The response of the French government was to order the immediate withdrawal of all French aid and advisors from Guinea. Despite the acrimony involved in this latter case, the first wave of African nationalism was marked by a relatively peaceful transfer of power to African nationalists.

The second and largest nationalist wave emerged during the 1960s, when more than thirty African countries achieved independence. The majority of these countries were former British and French colonies in East, Central, and West Africa. All three Belgian colonies (Burundi, Rwanda, and Congo-Kinshasa) also acquired independence during this period, and were joined by the Republic of Somalia which represented a federation of the former British and Italian Somaliland territories. Aside from some noteworthy exceptions, most notably France's unsuccessful attempt to defeat a pro-independence guerrilla insurgency in Algeria and the emergence of the so-called Mau Mau guerrilla insurgency in Kenya, the nationalist movements of the 1960s were also largely peaceful in nature. The departing colonial powers had already accepted the inevitability of decolonization. Questions simply remained as to when and under what conditions.

A third wave of nationalism culminated in 1974. A military coup d'étât in Portugal led by junior military officers resulted in a declaration that the Portuguese government intended to grant immediate independence to the colonies in Africa. Coup plotters sought to end what they perceived as a series of African military quagmires that pitted poorly trained and unmotivated Portuguese military forces against highly motivated and increasingly adept African guerrilla insurgencies: the Frente de Libertacao de Mozambique (FRELIMO, Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) in Mozambique, the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde (PAIGC, Independence African Party of Guinea and Cape Verde) in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde; and three guerrilla groups in Angola—the Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola (FNLA, National Front for the Liberation of Angola), the Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA, National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), and the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA, Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola). The violent path of nationalist movements in the former Portuguese colonies was further complicated in 1975 when Angolan guerrilla groups began an extended civil war over who would lead an independent Angola. The former French colonies of Comoros (1975), Seychelles (1976), and Djibouti (1977), however, achieved independence under largely peaceful terms.

A fourth wave of nationalism gathered strength during the 1980s and was directed against the minority white-ruled regimes in Southern Africa. Since 1948, South Africa was controlled by the descendants of white settlers known as Afrikaners. This minority elite established the apartheid (apartness) system in which blacks and other minorities (roughly 85 per cent of the population) were denied political rights. The apartheid system was eventually exported to the former German colony of Namibia after it became a South African mandate territory in the aftermath of World War I. Similarly, white settlers in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) led by Ian Smith in 1965 instituted a regional variation of apartheid after they announced their Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from British colonial rule.

The minority white-ruled regimes of southern Africa were confronted by nationalist guerrilla-led organizations that enjoyed regional and international support: the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-African Congress (PAC) in South Africa; the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia; and the Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union (ZANU), and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in Zimbabwe. In all three cases, the military struggles were suspended after the white minority regimes agreed to negotiate transitions to black majority rule. Zimbabwe's transition in 1980 was followed by the creation of multiparty and multiracial democracies in Namibia in 1990 and South Africa in 1994.

The fourth wave of African nationalism culminated in South Africa's transition to democracy in 1994 and largely focused on the self-determination of individual colonial states. In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, however, a series of nationalist movements have emerged that seek the self-determination of peoples within individual nation-states. The leaders of what potentially constitutes a fifth wave of nationalism often underscore the historic mistreatment of their peoples as part of their pursuit of two overriding objectives: the secession of their territories from existing African nation-states; and international recognition of their territories as independent nation-states within the international system.

The emergence of secessionist nationalist movements is neither unique to Africa nor simply a product of the post–Cold War era. The end of the Cold War has indeed fostered the reemergence of ethnically based nationalism on a global scale. The most notable outcome of this trend was the fragmentation of the former Soviet Union into fifteen independent republics. As demonstrated by the efforts of Nigeria's Igbo people to create an independent Republic of Biafra at the end of the 1960s, however, secessionist movements have existed in Africa since the beginning of the decolonization process. The post–Cold War era is nonetheless unique in that the demands for the self-determination of individual peoples appear to have increased in both scope and intensity, and the African and international communities appear increasingly willing to entertain secessionist demands. Achieving independence in 1993, Eritrea nonetheless serves as the only successful case of a secessionist nationalist movement during the postcolonial independence era.

The strength and long-term viability of similar secessionist nationalist movements, such as the internationally unrecognized claim to independence of the Somaliland republic, depends on a variety of factors, most notably the responses of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the international community. The OAU historically has opposed any attempts at secession because one of the hallmarks of the OAU Charter is the inviolability of frontiers inherited from the colonial era. Due to the multiethnic nature of most African nation-states, African leaders themselves remain fearful that changing even one boundary will open a Pandora's box of ethnically based secessionist movements and lead to the further Balkanization of the African continent into smaller and economically unviable political units.

PETER J. SCHRAEDER

See also: Identity, Political.

Further Reading

Carter, G. M., and P. O'Meara (eds.). African Independence: The First Twenty-Five Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

MacQueen, N. The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire. London: Longman, 1997.

Neuberger, B. National Self-Determination in Post-Colonial Africa. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1986.

Rimmer, D., et al. Africa Thirty Years On: The Record and the Outlook After Thirty Years of Independence Examined for the Royal African Society. London: James Currey, 1991.

Wilson, H. S. African Decolonization. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.

Nasser: See Egypt: Nasser: Foreign Policy: Suez Canal Crisis to Six Day War; 1952–1970; Egypt: Nasser: High Dam, Economic Development, 1952–1970.

Ndongo, Kingdom of

The Kingdom of Ndongo probably emerged as a consolidated realm in the highlands between the Kwanza and Lukala rivers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Sparse archaeological evidence can only tell us that agricultural populations probably occupied the area after 500BCE, and ironworking was practiced before the Common Era. It is possible that complex societies were already emerging in the early Iron Age, as they did further north.

Traditions of the later sixteenth century placed Ndongo's origins in Kongo, and Kongo royal titles include a “Kingdom of Angola” as early as 1535, but it is unlikely that Kongo played any substantial role in its origin or early development. Ngola Kiluanje, the king identified as the founder in tradition, was said to have expanded the kingdom westward, occupying much of the coastal lowlands on both banks of the Kwanza and coming near to the island of Luanda, which was under Kongo sovereignty in the early sixteenth century.

Shortly before 1520, the king sent an embassy to Portugal to establish relations similar to those of Kongo. The Portuguese sent an exploring party which established itself at Kabasa, Ndongo's capital, until they were forced out of the country for unknown reasons in 1526. Afonso I, king of Kongo arranged for their return to Kongo and then to Portugal.

Many Portuguese merchants, especially from the island of São Tomé, but also from Kongo, established themselves in Kabasa, illegally in the eyes of both the Portuguese crown and the kings of Kongo. By the mid-sixteenth century Ndongo had emerged as a major power in the area, and its armies were fighting against the king of Benguela in the central highlands of Angola, and the king of Songo to the east as its borders expanded. There were probably also border disputes and skirmishes with Kongo in the mountainous “Dembos” region between them, where sovereignty was hard for either monarch to establish.

In 1560 a new Portuguese mission came to Ndongo, led by Paulo Dias de Novais and including Jesuit missionaries. It was not successful either, and Jesuit priest Francisco de Gouveia was held prisoner when Dias de Novais left to return to Portugal in 1563.

In the mid-sixteenth century Ndongo was an extensively networked country. Local rulers, called sobas and descended from ancient families, controlled hundreds of small areas, grouped into several large provinces. The king controlled a large royal district directly next to the capital; several sobas in the area around Kabasa claimed descent directly from Ngola Kiluanji. Rulers also maintained villages populated by dependent peasants (kijikos) who supported the king, his family, military units of the royal army, and officials. There were also traditions of the king making grants of land and subjects to supporters and favorites.

Later traditions suggest that the office of king was hereditary in a single line founded by Ngola Kiluanje, but that succession might also have been by primogeniture, election by the sobas or election by the officials (tendala and ngolambole as well as others). The provinces were supervised by a group of roving officials. The tendala were in charge of administrative and judicial matters, while the ngolambole presided over military affairs.

In 1575 Paulo Dias de Novais returned to Ndongo with a royal grant from Portugal to create a colony on the coast, south of the Kwanza. He offered his services to Ndongo and fought for Ndongo in several campaigns against rebels. In 1579, however, factions in Kabasa allied with Portuguese merchants, who feared Dias de Novais, and perhaps a Kongo interest persuaded the king to massacre the Portuguese and expel them.

Thanks to help from Kongo, Dias de Novais was able to maintain some fortified positions, and he managed to conquer areas around Luanda and the north bank of the Kwanza through naval power and persuading sobas to join him against Ndongo. By the mid-1580s the Portuguese were strong enough to carry the war into the highlands from their base at Massangano. But Ndongo was sufficiently strong that they defeated the Portuguese forces decisively at the Lukala in late 1589. Dias de Novais, abandoned by many of his allied sobas, was driven back from the highlands. An impasse developed, finalized by a peace agreement around 1599 that fixed the border between the Portuguese colony and Ndongo.

During this crucial period, Ndongo was ruled by Mbandi a Ngola Kiluanji, who also worked to centralize his authority while fighting the Portuguese. Fifty years later, tradition represented him as favoring his wife and her brothers against nobles, but this was most likely part of a larger complaint against a policy of including them in decision making and office holding. He was killed in a revolt by being tricked into entering a fight against a rebel, only to be abandoned by his supporters. In any case, this hardly slowed the path of centralization pursued with equal vigor by his son and successor Ngola Mbandi.

On occasion, Portugal aided Ngola Mbandi against rebellious subjects, and a certain amount of competition between the two powers continued until the impasse was broken in 1617 by the Portuguese governor Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos. That year the Portuguese governor brought bands of Imbangala mercenaries from south of the Kwanza and led them with his own army in a series of devastating campaigns against Ndongo. The Imbangala were military groups who lived by rapine, capturing adolescent boys to replenish and augment their numbers; they were very effective soldiers. Between 1617 and 1620, much of the heartland of Ndongo was emptied of its population. Many of its inhabitants were sold to plantations in Brazil and Spanish America. Ngola Mbandi fled to islands in