Less meteoric than Shaka but more remarkable was Moshoeshoe, born the same year as the Zulu, leader of the Sotho, herdsmen who suffered bitterly from predations by Nguni and Griqua. Moshoeshoe led his Sotho on a perilous migration to the Qiloane plateau (Lesotho) where he created a stronghold – the Night Mountain, said to grow in the day and shrink in the night – where he withstood attacks by all his rival leaders to create a rich cattle-owning kingdom. Cleverly exploiting the British, he offered himself as a balance to Afrikaners and Zulus, buying rifles and hiring a French missionary, Eugène Casalis, as consigliere.
In a fifty-year reign (it ended in 1870), Moshoeshoe defeated the British, Afrikaners, Zulus and Ndebele. More humane and constructive than Shaka, he was ‘majestic and benevolent. His aquiline profile, the fullness and regularity of his features, his eyes a little weary made a deep impression upon me,’ wrote Casalis. ‘I felt at once I was dealing with a superior man, trained to think, to command others and, above all, himself.’ Out of these wars emerged the present shape of southern Africa.*
Further north, an ex-general of King Zwide and cousin of Shaka, Zwangendaba, led his Ndwandwe on a 1,000-mile trek through Mozambique and Zimbabwe that took fifteen years. After the Zambezi parted for them during an eclipse, they ended by settling in today’s Tanzania where an Omani sultan, Said the Great, was conquering an empire from Somalia to Mozambique, from Kenya to Pakistan.
It all started with two Arab sheikhs duelling with daggers in the Arabian desert.
EMPIRE BUILDERS OF EAST AFRICA: MEHMED ALI AND SAID
In 1832, Said bin Sultan, sultan of Oman, moved his capital to Africa, creating his court on Zanzibar, where he built a palace, Bait al-Mtoni. His rise had started two decades earlier when his father was assassinated; his cousin Badr was appointed regent, backed by the Saudis. In 1806 Said lured the regent to his desert fortress and then ambushed him. The al-Said princes duelled to the death – and the teenaged Said won. As the bleeding Badr staggered into the desert, Said’s cameleteers beheaded him.
Having sliced up his cousin, Said seized Muscat, which his father had helped make one of the entrepôts of the Indian Ocean, then set about the conquest of the Swahili coast of Africa. The al-Said family already owned Zanzibar, which Said had visited as a child. He built a thalassocratic empire, taking Pemba in 1823. In the Gulf he took Bahrain and Qatar but failed to keep them. He then seized the ports of Gwadar (Pakistan) and Bandar Abbas and Hormuz (Iran). In 1837, he seized Mombasa.
But there was a problem: slavery. Said sold slaves to Indian princes, and French planters in Réunion and Mauritius, and kept some for his own cloves plantations. Afro-Omanis hacked their way into the African interior on murderous elephant and slave hunts around Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, into Uganda and Congo. At Kazeh (Tanzania), the Zanzibari slave lords lived sultanically with slaves and concubines, ruling their own Congolese fiefdoms. Later in Said’s rule, Tippu Tip, the twenty-year-old son of an aristocratic Omani mother and Swahili father, led a hundred gunmen into Africa to launch his career as slaving warlord, trader of cloves and much later a player in the European carve-up of Africa.
In 1820, understanding that the British craved security for India, Sultan Said negotiated an alliance with Britain in return for a personal exception to the slaving ban.
The Omani also sold slaves to his northern neighbour Mehmed Ali, who had rescued Oman from the predations of the Saudis and was now determined to conquer his own African empire. In 1820, Mehmed sent an expedition under his son Ismail to destroy the kingdom of Sennar and conquer Sudan. ‘You’re aware your mission has no other aim than to gather negroes,’ Mehmed told Ismail. ‘Slaves are worth more than jewels to us.’
Holding court in his half-lit Cairene divan like ‘a spider in a web’, Mehmed Ali Pasha cultivated an air of mystery, staring at his visitors, speaking portentously. ‘The only books I read,’ he said, ‘are men’s faces.’ Setting up his own printing press, he refused to print Machiavelli, joking that the Italian ‘had nothing to teach him’. He ran everything, promoting his sons but beheading any opposition.*
