Annual report on the social and economic progress of the people of Northern Rhodesia.

  • Great Britain. Colonial Office.
Date:
[1938]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report on the social and economic progress of the people of Northern Rhodesia. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tributaries are the rivers Kafue and Luangwa. With the excep¬ tion of these river valleys, the Territory consists of a table-land varying from 3,000 to 4,500 ft. in height, though in the north¬ eastern portion, and especially in the vicinity of Lake Tan¬ ganyika, the altitude is greater. History. The little that is known of the early history of Northern Rhodesia is very fragmentary and is gleaned from the accounts of the few intrepid travellers who penetrated into this unknown Territory. The Portuguese Governor of Sena, Dr. Lacerda, encouraged by the report of the half-breed Fereira who returned from Kasembe's capital, close to the eastern shores of Lake Mweru in June, 1798, left Tete for the north. He was accompanied by Fathers Francisco, Jose and Pinto, 12 officers and 50 men-at- arms, but failed to reach his goal, and died within a few miles of Kasembe's capital. Father Pinto led the remnants of the expedition back to Sena, and it is from Dr. Lacerda's diaries, which Father Pinto with great difficulty saved, that the first authentic history of what is now North-Eastern Rhodesia was taken. Dr. Lacerda was followed in the early nineteenth cen¬ tury by two Portuguese traders, Baptista and Jose, who brought back stories of the great interior kingdom of the Lunda, which extended from Lake Mweru to the confines of Barotseland and included the whole of the country drained by the Upper Congo and its tributaries. This kingdom is reputed to have lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Very few historical facts are known about it, but the name of Mwatiamvo, the dynastic title of the paramount chief, is associated, like Mono- motapa, with many half-legendary stories. Neither of these expeditions was of any great geographical value and it was not till 1851, when Dr. Livingstone made his great missionary journeys and travelled through Barotseland and in 1855 dis¬ covered the Victoria Falls, that the civilised world had its first authentic information of Northern Rhodesia. Other and later explorers who brought back stories of the barbarism of the Natives, of the wealth of game, and of the glories of the Victoria Falls, were Serpa Pinto, Cameron, Selous and Arnot. From the very early days when the hordes of migratory Bantu swept southward from Central and Northern Africa, Northern Rhodesia has been subject to constant invasion from stronger tribes on its borders, so much so, that the vast majority of the present Native population, though of Bantu origin, is descended from men who themselves invaded this country not earlier than 1700 A.D. One or two small tribes, numbering now only a very few thousand, such as the Subia on the Zambesi, are all that remain of the inhabitants of Northern Rhodesia prior to that