Marching down the unmapped Zambezi in 1856, walking from tribe to tribe on his long journey back to the east coast, David Livingstone would hear the last sad echoes of the Monomotapa. This obscure chief “of no great power,” and subject to another who was equally obscure, the Portuguese had “formerly honored… with a guard, a fire of numbers of guns on the occasion of any funeral, and he was also partially subsided.” But now, adds Livingstone in his journal, “the only evidence of greatness possessed by his successor is having about a hundred wives,” although “when he dies, a disputed succession and much fighting are expected.”

            The decline and fall of the empire of the Monomotapa, as of other states and centralized types of African rule, did not necessarily mean-any more than it meant in western Africa-a disappearance of the culture on which it was based. Here one needs to review the evidence with a carefully measuring eye. To European pioneers and prospectors in the nineteenth century these unknown lands might seem a desperate wilderness; to the public at home, schooled now by generations of contemptuous slaving clichés, they seemed much worse than that. But the facts were otherwise.

            Some of the southern Iron Age cultures continued to grow and develop and expand for a long time after early contact with the Portuguese. The elaborate ruins of Dhlo Dhlo and Khami, of Niekerk and Inyanga and Penhalonga, even the last levels of Mapunguebe, all belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: while the Mambo line of Ba-Rowzi rulers which had established itself at Great Zimbabwe in the first years of the seventeenth century would continue into the first decades of the nineteenth.

            And then European estimates, understandably enough, varies with the beholder. Vasco Da Gama and his contemporaries might be deeply impressed by the civilization of the costal cities they found and wrecked. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that European estimate had changed, vastly changed; because Europe, with a couple hundred years of industry and science behind it, had also changed, while Africa had not only failed to keep pace but here and there had fallen back. Slave trading on an altogether unprecedented scale had done its degrading work, by now, both on the slavers in Africa and slavers in Europe. Many of the since familiar slogans of a “natural African inferiority” were stamped on European minds. Much of the fabric of African civilization, at least in costal regions, was rent or ruined and seemed to justify contempt.

            Yet intelligent European judgments about central Africa, even in the nineteenth century, remained at variance with the manifold mythology of “African savagery and chaos.” They show, if fitfully and fleetingly, something of the nature of the slow-evolving concentration of power which had laid the foundation of a mature Iron Age society in this southern isolation. There survives an account of an altogether agreeable encounter between a brave little Portuguese expedition, headed by Major Monterio and Captain Gamitto, an the course of the ruler of Lunda in the southern Congo-that Muata Cazembe whose lineage went back by tradition into a remote past.

            Gamitto’s story-an admirably modest one considering how far this expedition had gone beyond the beaten track-is enlivened by a donkey. No such beast, it would appear, had yet been seen in those parts; but Gamitto rode one down a broad beaten highway into the Cazembe’s capital. Clad in a uniform of white trousers and the nankeen jacket, with scarlet cords and tassels and an otter-skin cap, he himself was also much applauded by the welcoming crowd; but the donkey carried off the day, for it had panicked at the noise and ran away with him. This was apparently taken in good part, and added to his welcome.

            “On the morning of November 29, they were summoned into the presence of the Muata Cazembe, entering a spacious court already filled with an immense crowd…

            “The soldiers stationed [here] were the garrisons of Lunda, consisting of about four or five thousand men, all armed with bows and arrows and spears: the nobles and officers wearing in a leather scabbard suspended under the left arm a large straight two edged sword, called pocue, about eighteen inches long and four inches broad… and all standing apparently without any military discipline.” At Sofala, more than three hundred years earlier, Barbosa had seen just such haughty nobles wearing swords slung on the left side.

            Gamitto and his friends found the Muata throned in some state, and “clothed with and elegance and sumptuousness such as the Portuguese officers had never witnessed in any other native potentate.” He was wearing a feathered “mitre” about a foot high, brilliantly red, and encircled with a diadem of stones of various sorts and colors. “At the back of his head, and rising from the nape of his neck, was a fan-shaped ruff of green cloth, fastened by two small ivory pins.”

            On his shoulders this monarch of the fare interior wore an ornamental cape, badges of royalty that were bands of blue cloth trimmed with fur, light-blue beads on his forearms, and a yellow cloth from waist to knees, “wound abundantly about him and fastened with an ivory pin.” Gamitto found the whole get-up of “great elegance and good taste.”

            Ranged in ceremonial ranks about him were officers of the court, soldiers, licensed fools, royal wives and lesser wives, and other chiefs and counselors. The manners of the Muata, who seemed to be about fifty, “were majestic and agreeable, and his state and style of living were, in their way, showy. Most certainly it was not to be imagined that so much etiquette, ceremony and ostentation would be met with in the sovereign of a region so remote from the sea-shore, and among a people so apparently savage and barbarous.

            Such was the outward seeming of an obscure inland ruler of the nineteenth century; and what was true of the Muata Cazembe’s court and all that it implied in terms of centralized order established law and also true of others. The Bushongo people of the Sankuru rive, also in the southern Congo, and could still tell Today in the first years of the twentieth century of their ”golden age” when Shamba Bolongongo had abolished warfare with the throwing knife, and introduced raffia weaving and other arts of peace. If their history as a state is really shorter than the fifteen centuries suggested by their legends, their magnificent  sculpture in wood is and unmistakable embodiment of long and fruitful social experience.

            After his journeys through central Africa Livingstone repeatedly commented on the peace and security that reigned over great expanses of the interior, and Drapf in east Africa at about the same time would find the same thing. These people might not be anxious for Christian teaching, Livingstone said, but there was ‘no impediment in the way of instruction.” On the contrary, 

“Every headman would be proud of a European visitor or resident in his territory, and there is perfect security for life and property”- he was thinking, of course, of human dangers and not of animals and disease- “in the interior.”

            Missionaries cooking in the cannibal pot would become a standby of European humor. As it happens, only six missionaries of some three hundred who penetrated into east and central Africa before 1894 are known to have been killed by Africans; and none of these, it would appear, was killed by wanton murder. What looked like chaos, in short, was seldom anything of the kind; what seemed like great danger of life was nearly always a huge exaggeration. Life for the traveler in middle Africa was in fact a good deal safer – from wars and human killing – than it generally was in Europe; which may explain, of course, the gentler way in which Africans were accustomed to welcome strangers.

            This safety for foreign travelers, reflecting both a respect for life as well as the general maintenance of law and order, seems all the more remarkable in that these stray Europeans could seldom manage to explain why they had come and what they might want. “Their behavior,” Margery Perham has commented, “was generally unaccountable, and often menacing and improper. Yet these men, utterly dependent and sometimes destitute, were allowed to pass chief after chief and tribe after tribe, at the cost here of some restraint upon their impatient purposes, and there of a persecution for presents nearly always stopping short of violence which was well within the power of these chiefs. They were, on the contrary, not infrequently assisted at the cost of their hosts.”

            Now all this reflects the presence and general recognition, within a pre-industrial society, of reasonable and self-confident modes of life and manners of thought, and suggest, for anyone who cares to ponder on it, how far these peoples of the interior had traveled in creative adaption to their environment. Much else might be laid beside it. The arts of Africa, so often shocking to the Victorian eye, could have come only from societies which had found creative answers to the age-old problem of the one and the many, the individual and the collective. Their philosophies, their thoughts about man and the universe, echoed the same distinctive genius. Neither art nor religion was the crude and wretched thing that suburban Europe, traveling in “darkest Africa,” would generally say it was, neither revealed the shallow growth of yesterday, nor the hopeless gibbering surrender to violence and magic that Europeans would so generally imagine. Here was much that might evoke surprise, and a good deal that would call for help0nothing, in the general structure and conception of society, that could allow a charge of natural inferiority.

            In the middle of the twentieth century one may see all this more clearly. Barred as they often were from many currents and crosscurrents of thought and action that had fertilized and deepened civilization elsewhere, African peoples had moved by their own dynamic of advance, found their own way forward, worked out their own solutions. Stubbornly, slowly, they had gone ahead across the lonely years. Only where the slave trade made its worst ravages were they altogether stopped and their achievements rendered sterile; and much of the far interior was spread that fearful curse.

            The Lozi of western Zambia, for example, were entirely spared it; and Lozi law and order, Lozi conceptions of the judicial process, can be found to support none of the assumptions of paternalist trusteeship. On the contrary, the basis of Lozi legal judgments would emerge, on examination in the twentieth century, as mature and solid as in European or American courts. In both, Gluckman has contended, the judicial process was basically similar. “On the whole,” he goes on, “it is true to say that the Lozi judicial process corresponds with, more than it differs from, the judicial process in western society. Lozi judges draw on the same sources of law as Western judges – the regularities of the environment, of the animal kingdom, of human beings; and custom, legislation, precedent, equity, the laws of nature and of nations, public policy, morality.”

            The fabric of society, therefore, was strong and could survive. Yet it remains true that the states of southern Africa’s Iron Age undoubtedly declined and fell. Their rulers were dispersed or diminished to a shadow of their former greatness. Their strong stone settlements and forts, built across the years, were abandoned to an empty solitude.