The twin institutions of positional succession and perpetual kinship—the Ruund trademark contribution to the precolonial political history of the central savanna—were certainly endogenous innovations.13 Jan Vansina has recently called them “a stroke of genius.”14 Positional succession and perpetual kinship established permanent links between offices rather than individuals, and this meant that the Ruund kingdom “ideally consisted of a web of titled positions, linked in a hierarchy of perpetual kinship” and occupied by people of different background.15 Because these institutions could be adopted without disrupting preexisting social structures, they became wonderfully effective means of imperial expansion. Subordinate hereditary positions could be created for real or honorary sons of a given Mwant Yav; their descendants—no matter who they were, or how far they lived from the Ruund heartland on the upper Mbuji-Mayi River—would continue to acknowledge the original connection, quite independent of the actual biological relationship that would eventually obtain between them and the successors of the Ruund king by whom the appointment had first been made. The integrating effects of positional succession and perpetual kinship were reinforced by another Ruund technique of rule: the recognition of the role of the “owners of the land.” The distinction between “owners of the land” and “owners of the people” was rooted in the ancient political culture of the savanna, but the Ruund systematized it and broadened its application in the context of an imperial strategy. Both in Ruund and Ruund-influenced Lunda states, the leaders of autochthonous groupings were not eliminated or marginalized. Rather, they were granted important ritual prerogatives. Ruund and Lunda political rulers were the “owners of the people,” dealing with the nitty-gritty of daily governance. But, though they were largely excluded from the sphere of temporal government, the “owners of the land” were still accorded a glorified position in the new dispensation. This was partly because they were believed to be in contact with the spirits of their ancestors, who exercised forms of supernatural authority over the districts they had first colonized.16
Thus, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, while the Luba sacred kings (Mulopwes) expanded their sway by favoring the accession of select peripheral lineage heads and incorporating them into the bambudye, a cross-cutting secret society which they controlled, the workings of positional succession and perpetual kinship helped bring into being a Lunda “Commonwealth.” The “commonwealth”—a definition which Vansina advocates in preference to the more traditional one of “empire”17—consisted of a network of independent, though interconnected, polities. While their leaders claimed real or putative origins among the Ruund, and though they recognized the Mwant Yavs as the fountains of their prestige, these Lunda kingdoms were not ruled from a single center and did not form a single cohesive territory. The “commonwealth,” in fact, consisted of a series of dominions ruled less by Ruund proper than by elites who had adopted Ruund symbols of rule and principles of political organization.
This Lunda sphere of influence—the extent and workings of which were first reported upon by the famous Angolan pombeiro, Pedro João Baptista, at the beginning of the nineteenth century—was crisscrossed by tributary and exchange networks and covered a large swathe of the central savanna. Its easternmost marches were occupied by the kingdom of Kazembe, founded as a result of the collapse of a Ruund colony on the Mukulweji River towards the end of the seventeenth century and the subsequent eastward migration of a heterogeneous group of “Ruundized” title holders.18 In the west, the holders of the Kinguri, the royal title of the Imbangala kingdom of Kasanje, dominating the middle Kwango River since the seventeenth century, also claimed Ruund origins and—as will be seen below—became the Mwant Yavs’ principal trading partners in the eighteenth century. In the south, smaller Ruund-inspired Lunda polities took roots along the Congo-Zambezi watershed. Early written evidence shows that “travelers” from the Lunda-Ndembu polity of the Kanongesha (“Canoguesa”), near the present-day border between Zambia, Angola, and Congo, were wont to take “tribute” to the Mwant Yavs in the 1800s.19 There is no reason to believe that the southern Lunda of the Shinde and related titles, further to the south, would have behaved any differently.
Political change was not necessarily the result of diffusion or borrowing. Processes of state formation could be more insular and self-contained than in the Luba and Ruund/Lunda cases. The Luyana (later Lozi) state is a good case in point. Its rise owed very little to external influences, but was instead shaped by the complex politico-economic requirements of the upper Zambezi floodplain. Unlike the Upemba Depression (and much of the central savanna), the upper Zambezi floodplain could support cattle keeping. Yet, in other respects, the two ecosystems were comparable, for the Luyana heartland, too, consisted of a special environment that needed to be closely managed if its economic potential was to be fully realized. Annual floods compelled the people of the plain to build their villages, grow their crops, and herd their cattle on both natural and artificial mounds. At the height of the floods, however, even such mounds had to be temporarily abandoned and temporary residence taken up on the plain’s forested margins. These conditions favored the development of a particularly centralized form of administration. Not only did the Luyana monarchs (Litungas) become “director[s] of the public works of the kingdom,” but control over the allocation of scarce natural and man-made mounds also gave them an important means with which to buttress their power and position.20
The floodplain’s large labor requirements were met by means of internal slavery—historically much more pervasive in Barotseland than anywhere else in the central savanna21—and through the makolo system. The makolo were military and, especially, labor units to which all the inhabitants of the floodplain belonged from birth.22 They, too, worked as a means of royal centralization, for in the eighteenth century members of the royal family were seemingly replaced as makolo leaders by appointive officials. In time, the creation of new makolo and related headships became an exclusive royal prerogative. Thus, makolo leaders ended up forming what Mutumba Mainga calls a “bureaucratic aristocracy,” whose elevated social status depended solely on its alliance with, and loyalty to, the kingship.23 A system of territorial governorships overlapped the makolo. Like the heads of the latter, the officials in charge of specific districts were also selected on the basis of merit rather than birth. Their functions were probably mainly judicial, since it was the makolo chiefs who controlled people “for purposes of raising an army, collecting tribute and recruiting labour.”24 The marginalization of the members of the royal family to the advantage of the Litungas and their officialdom had one important consequence. Deprived of accessible outlets for their ambition, Luyana princes began fiercely to compete for the biggest prize of all: the position of Litunga. This was especially the case during interregna or following successful conspiracies. In this, the kingdom of the Luyana resembled that of the Luba, among whom royal heirs were similarly barred from assuming positions of territorial responsibility. In the nineteenth century, protracted civil strife would become a feature common to both polities.
All of these centralized organizations—the Luba and Ruund nuclear kingdoms, the “members states” of the Lunda “Commonwealth,” and the Luyana polity—partook of a political economy in which rights over people, including bonds of political loyalty, were predicated on the transfer of material goods.25 Thus, a key function of rulers was to act as redistributors of resources—be they internal resources accumulated through tribute or, increasingly as we shall see, imported commodities resulting from participation in long-distance trading networks. On the upper Zambezi, for instance, the people of Bulozi, the floodplain heartland of the Luyana state, required such forest products as wood for canoes and bark for ropes. They, of course, also needed to secure access to the higher lands to which their villages were moved when the floods made the plain uninhabitable. The residents of the forest, on the other hand, turned to the floodplain for fish, cattle, and milk. This set of converging interests meant that the Luyana kings were strategically placed at the center of networks of accumulation and redistribution that ensured the circulation of the products of complementary ecological and economic zones. By controlling and manipulating such networks, the Luyana Litungas brought into being webs of dependencies and obligations that structured their power and broadcast it beyond the circle of their immediate