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Kasongo-Tongoni: a nineteenth-century caravan town in Maniema, Democratic Republic of Congo
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The Central African Rainforest was long thought to be a green desert. Intensive archaeological research during the last decades has shown the contrary. The rainforest of the Congo bassin has a long and rich history, but its heavy vegetation cover made it difficult to find evidence of human settlements. Indeed, an overview of archaeological collections held at the RMCA (Royal Museum for Central Africa), shows that, before the 1980's, very few sites were reported for the Rainforest area of DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). Since then a series of river-born reconnaissance have shown that there were sites aplenty in the Inner Congo Basin. Latter surveys along the Congo River and its tributaries further East, between Bumba and Kisangani (DRC), indicate that this is also true in the North-Eastern part of the Congo River. Our results show that the region's archaeological record consists primarily of pottery finds associated with old soil horizons or pottery arranged in pit-structures, with lithic assemblages being relatively rare. This work offers a first assessment of the past 2000 years of human occupation in a region that was an archaeological terra incognita. In the process, we also confirm a powerful research strategy, combining forestry inventories with systematic archaeological sampling. Recent work in forestry showed that there was not a single primeval rainforest, but rather a patchwork of forests. This approach allowed us to access inter-fluvial portions of a dense rainforest environment and provided essential data for the regional chrono-stratigraphy.
En septembre 2015 et janvier 2016, suite à une initiative
du gouvernement de la République démocratique
du Congo concernant la « Route de l’esclave » (http://
www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/
themes/slave-route/), des enquêtes historiques et des
prospections archéologiques ont été menées à l’embouchure
du fleuve Congo entre Boma et Moanda (Figure 1).
Par ailleurs, des compléments d’enquêtes et de prospections
ont été réalisés à Muidi près de Kinshasa, dans une
autre région connue pour la traite des esclaves.
History, archaeology and memory of the Swahili-Arab in the Maniema, Democratic Republic of Congo - Volume 94 Issue 375 - Noemie Arazi, Suzanne Bigohe, Olivier Mulumbwa Luna, Clément Mambu, Igor Matonda, Georges Senga, Alexandre Livingstone Smith
In the second quarter of the 19th century, Zanzibari traders, of Arab or Swahili stock, made their way into inner East Africa, in search of ivory and slaves, to be found in great supply in the Lakes Kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro and Bujiji. Relying on a line of trading posts along the trails leading from the Swahili coast to Tabora and further to lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, the Zanzibari traders in Buganda, Bunyoro and Ujiji, made great profits without major trouble till the late eighties. The coming of European missionaries to Buganda and to the North of Lake Tanganyika together with the partition of East Africa into British and German sphères put an end to the slave and, later, ivory trade. However such a long period of daily contacts between muslims and the inhabitants of the Kingdoms where they had settled had important results from the economie, cultural, religious and political point of view, as well as in everyday life. New crops were started new ways of dressing taken up. Kiswahili became a true lingua franca. Buganda was about to become an islamic state, headed by a muslim kabaka when European soldiers put a stop to this great political and religious stir in the interlacustrine districts.
This article examines nineteenth-century British documentation on the Central African village Nyangwe and its inhabitants produced by the three British explorers (David Livingstone, Verney Lovett Cameron, and Henry Morton Stanley) who visited this settlement in the 1870s. In doing so, the article has four principal objectives. First, the article extends recent work on nineteenth-century African urbanization to consider how such urban history might be written with recourse to representations of Nyangwe in the archive of Victorian exploration. Second, the article highlights some of the issues inherent in using the archive for this purpose. Third, the article argues for a new methodology that uses recent historical, anthropological, and linguistic scholarship to link Victorian exploration literature to the local African circumstances out of which that literature emerged. Finally, the article draws on this new methodology to examine Victorian explorer representations of the Wagenya, an African tribe inhabiting the Lualaba River in the vicinity of Nyangwe, and to consider the broader influence of this tribe on the development of Victorian geographical representation and knowledge.
The East African ivory trade is an ancient one: East African ivory is soft ivory and is ideal for carving, and was always in great demand. It figures prominently in the earliest reference to trading activities on the East African Coast. But the great development came in the nineteenth century when an increased demand for ivory in America and Europe coincided with the opening up of East Africa by Arab traders and European explorers. The onslaught on the ivory resources of the interior took the form of a two-way thrust—from the north by the Egyptians who penetrated into the Sudan and Equatoria, and by the Arabs from the east coast of Africa. The establishment of European protectorates and a settled administration in the 1890s ended this exploitation.
During the nineteenth century ivory over-topped all rivals in trade value— even slaves. The uses of ivory were wide and novel—it played the same part in the nineteenth century as do plastics in the mid-twentieth—but it was always a much more expensive article.
Much archaeological and historical research has been devoted to the study of the early Swahili communities inhabiting the East African coast during the late first millennium AD. The practice of Islam can be shown to date back to perhaps the beginning of the ninth century from when the first mosques have been excavated. The economic importance of East Africa for the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean world is apparent from the wealth of imports and exports found in a large number of these coastal sites.African trading systems brought to medieval society high-value commodities ranging from gold, rock crystal and ivory, to slaves and timber. The items were carried across large distances by sea by traders following the seasonal monsoon system around the coasts and across the Indian Ocean. It is argued that the trading settlements were African in culture and origin, but then attracted Muslims who were responsible for occasional local converts from a very early period in the history of Islam. -Author
ABSTRACTS
A number of geographers have recently championed the struggle against Eurocentric theoretical categorizations in geographical research on African cities. At the same time, many whose work has concentrated on African urban geography have felt left out in the more abstract theoretical debates of their colleagues based in the West. I argue for the possibility of confronting Western bias and contributing to broader theoretical debates by creating theoretical constructs derived from the African experience. I develop my argument through an analysis of urban development in Ng'ambo, the African “Other Side” of Zanzibar city, and work toward the creation of meso‐level conceptual guides for understanding Ng'ambo's development derived from the ideas of Ng'ambo residents themselves.
The caravan routes that connected the East African interior to the coast are well known from the nineteenth century, when
trade along them was intense and increasingly formalised. It is understood that this brought important changes in the structure
of society, in people–object relations and in the opportunities for the exercise of power; we also assume that this situation
differed from pre-colonial periods, yet very little archaeological work has examined that assumption. Understandings of the
incorporation of this region into a larger world of commodity exchange have been based upon implicit assumptions about the
role of trade; these often stress the underdevelopment of East Africa. Yet it is necessary to examine the ways in which foreign
goods were made commensurable with valuables and assets in the regional economy before it is possible to discuss the ways
that access to these goods may have affected local power structures. This paper attempts such an analysis, through a focus
on two areas in the interior which have been the subject of recent archaeological field work. By tracing the specific histories
of their interaction with objects before and during the nineteenth century, it examines the assumption that the accumulation
of exotic objects was necessarily the basis of authority. Instead, it will be argued that the ways in which new opportunities
and objects were incorporated were specific and local, fitting within existing schemes of understanding and the authorisation
of power.
KeywordsPower-Prestige goods-Trade-Materiality
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