Zheng’s fleet sailed down to Kilwa, founded by African converts to Islam who invented a mythical descent from a Persian aristocrat from Shiraz. These princes, now intermarried with Africans and Arabs, maybe Omanis, controlled a littoral empire from Mombasa (Kenya) to Sofala (Mozambique), with colonies on the Island of the Moon (Madagascar). When the sultan of Kilwa crossed him, Zheng stormed the city and later sailed down to Sofala. The Swahili monarchs then recognized the emperor of China. After collecting frankincense, ambergris, ivory, more animals (including elephants and ‘camel-birds’ – ostriches), Zheng, now on his seventh voyage, probably died at sea on the way home. Emperor Xuande and his bureaucrats rejected Yongle’s improvidence and docked the superfleets, burning Zheng’s records, confident that Chinese superiority required no connection with the outside world. China would not project global power like this again nor return in force to Africa until the Belt and Road Initiative of 2013.
The Chinese recorded that the Swahilis traded in enslaved ‘savages’ from the African interior as well as in ebony, ivory and gold. Elephants and men were hunted throughout what is today Kenya and Tanzania, but the gold and copper that arrived in Sofala for export across the Indian Ocean came from a kingdom inland: its capital, Zimbabwe,* was a stone city, the oldest one south of the Sahara, founded around 900, its towered and walled Great Enclosure built during the 1200s. Its Bantu-speaking Shona princes were gold traders, cattle herders and pottery manufacturers. They were also owners of golden artefacts and sculpted eagles found there, along with porcelain from China and Persia. By the time Zheng visited Sofala, Zimbabwe was falling apart, its ruler Mukwati undermined by a younger prince, Nyatsimba Mutota, who challenged its trade in salt and gold, breaking away to become
The very different worlds of east and west Africa were connected by Saharan trade routes that led to Egypt and the Maghreb, but movement between them was blocked by the intervening vastness of the jungle and savannah. Yet the politics of western Africa was just as dynamic and complex: a few powerful kingdoms and a multitude of smaller entities fought for territory, for control of gold from the Akan goldfields, and for slaves captured in war. Gold and slaves were traded across the Sahara via Arab caravans, probably over six million slaves between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. The Bantu-speaking kingdoms, many of them new, were founded, like their European equivalents, by gifted warlords using personal charisma, bloody conquest and shrewd marriage. Around 1375, when Tamerlane and Hongwu were rising warlords, the biggest of these kingdoms, Kongo, was created by a marriage between two royal families. The king of Mpemba Kasi, Nima a Nzima, married Luqueni Luansanze, the daughter or sister of the king of Mbata, Nsaku Lau. Their sons merged the kingdoms and then, ruling until 1415, conquered much of Angola and Congo (Brazzaville) republic and built a capital, Mbanza, that was soon home to tens of thousands. Chosen always from this lineage, the
Around Mbanza, slaves worked farms – ‘Collecting slaves gave the Kongo kings great power.’ Slavery was an ancient part of African society, ‘widespread because slaves were the only form of private revenue-producing property recognized in African law’, writes John Thornton; in fact slaves were the ‘main form of wealth in central Africa’. But this was not the chattel slavery – the ownership and trading of people and their children – of later European empires. Kongo was founded on expert artisanship with a speciality in blacksmithery. The first king was said to have designed a special forge, but the
