Mutapa Empire

A hunter who came north for salt

formationDrafted from Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa, c. 1400-1902 (1988)

Long before any Portuguese ship reached the coast, the stone-building state centred on Great Zimbabwe was already declining - worn down, in Mudenge's account, by some combination of civil war, overpopulation, falling gold production and a trade route grown harder to navigate. As it weakened, Karanga hunters, refugees and traders began drifting north out of its old heartland toward the salt deposits of Dande and the Zambesi valley, a region already linked by Muslim traders working inland from the new sultanate of Angoche. Tradition remembers one of these arrivals as a man of outstanding ability named Mutota, an elephant-hunter of the Nzou Samanyanga clan who built alliances through marriage and trade with the Tonga, Tavara and Mbara peoples already settled there. Mudenge is careful about how much weight this tradition can bear - the surviving king-lists, he notes, name barely half the rulers who probably actually reigned before 1490, and stories told of Mutota may compress the achievements of several forgotten generations into one - but the pattern the tradition describes, a Karanga newcomer converting marriage ties and control of Dande's salt into growing regional authority, is what founded the state the Portuguese would later call monomotapa's empire.

A son who inherited by conquest

Mutota's own succession was remembered as contested and strange: before his death he was said to have required that any son wishing to rule first commit incest with his daughter Nyamhita, a condition Mudenge treats as a garbled legend rather than established fact, but one that in the tradition marks out Matope, alias Nyanhehwe, as the son ruthless enough to take the throne over a rival brother. Once established, Matope did what the tradition remembers him for: he went to war. His armies pushed east to the Rwenya river, subjecting Tavara and Tonga communities along the way, and extended his family's influence, through a sister given in marriage to a local power-broker, into the territory that became the Barwe kingdom - a chain of conquest and alliance that Mudenge's sources say had reached the Indian Ocean coast by the time of Matope's death. Neither Mutota's rise nor Matope's conquests can be pinned to a reliable year; the documentary record Portuguese factors would start keeping did not begin for another two generations. But by the time it does begin, the state it describes - stretching from the interior salt pans Mutota had first coveted to a coastline his son's armies had never needed to cross the sea to reach - was already old.

The people of the sun

expansionDrafted from Theal, Volume I: The Portuguese in South Africa, 1505-1700 (1907)

When the Portuguese built their fort and trading station at Sofala in 1505, the dominant people of the country between the Sabi and Zambesi rivers were the Makalanga - "the people of the sun," in Theal's own translation of the name. Their territory ran from the Indian Ocean coast far into the interior, further than any Portuguese observer of the period could say with confidence, and their paramount chief was known to the newcomers by a title Theal records simply as monomotapa. Portuguese writers took the word to mean "emperor," though Theal is careful to note it was apparently unknown in the Makalanga's own dialect - possibly adopted from a neighbouring people's word for lord or possessor of a mountain stronghold, since the ruler's own great place stood close to the mountain the Portuguese called Fura, now Mount Darwin, which he would not permit outsiders to climb.

Theal, Volume I: The Portuguese in South Africa, 1505-1700 (1907) · Willem Blaeu · Public domain

A trade already old

The Portuguese arrived expecting to intercept a gold trade that had run through Muslim merchants at Sofala and Kilwa for generations before any European ship reached the coast. Early factors' reports - Pedro Vaz Soares in 1513, Francisco de Brito in 1519 - describe a country where gold and ivory moved inland to coastal traders through networks the Portuguese barely understood and repeatedly failed to redirect to their own factory, hampered as much by internal Bantu wars that closed the trade routes as by any Muslim rival. The empire the word monomotapa named was, by the time written Portuguese records begin, already an established, functioning state whose own gold had built the stone architecture at Great Zimbabwe generations earlier - a history no Portuguese chronicler recorded, because none of them knew it had happened.

Fifty baptisms in a single morning

peakDrafted from Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa, c. 1400-1902 (1988)

On 1 January 1561 the Jesuit missionary Goncalo da Silveira arrived at the zimbabwe of the young monomotapa Negomo Mupunzagutu, sent by Portugal and Rome with a single aim: the conversion of the emperor himself, on the theory that a Christian monomotapa would favour Portuguese traders over the Muslim merchants who still dominated the interior gold trade. Negomo received him with striking honour, seating him on his own private rug in quarters normally closed to outsiders, and offered him gold, land, cattle and women - gifts Silveira repeatedly declined, wanting nothing but the emperor's own conversion. That refusal, so contrary to what Negomo expected of any man, seems to have done more to win the young ruler's confidence than any gift could have. After sixteen to eighteen days of instruction, Silveira baptized Negomo and his mother, giving the monomotapa the name Dom Sebastiao after Portugal's own king; within weeks he had baptized 250 to 300 more people of rank across the court. Mudenge records how far the news of an African emperor's conversion travelled - special thanksgiving services in Rome, an account inscribed on a bronze plate a century later when a later monomotapa followed his example - proof, to a Portuguese audience, that the whole missionary enterprise was working.

A wizard with a dead man's bone

The court factions Silveira's influence displaced did not accept the defeat quietly. Mudenge describes an alliance of threatened Shona religious leaders, Muslim traders and a rejected dignitary turning Negomo against the priest with two charges: that Silveira was a Portuguese spy sent to map the land for a future invasion, and that he was secretly allied with Negomo's own rival Chipute, plotting to unseat him. They added that his baptismal water was sorcery, and that Silveira himself was a wizard who carried a dead man's bone to bring drought and death on the country. Negomo, shaken, consulted diviners who confirmed the charges. Silveira sensed the change and prepared for death rather than flee - distributing his belongings, hearing nearby Portuguese in confession - and on the night of 15 March 1561, seven or eight men strangled him in his sleep on Negomo's order and threw his body into the Musengezi river. Fifty people baptized that same day were nearly killed alongside him before Negomo's own newly Christian nobles talked him out of it.

Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa, c. 1400-1902 (1988) · Adriaen Melaer · Public domain

What the murder actually settled

Silveira's death did not restore the old religious balance he had briefly upset, and it did not end Portuguese ambitions at the monomotapa's court - if anything, his killing became the pretext Portugal used to send an armed expedition into the interior under Francisco Barreto within a decade. What it did settle, for a generation, was the question of whether the empire's throne could be won by persuasion alone: after Negomo, no monomotapa risked so open an embrace of a single foreign faction again, and the contest for influence over the throne that had killed a Jesuit in 1561 continued instead through trade concessions, marriage and, within a century, open war.

A hundred thousand men nobody saw

peakDrafted from Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa, c. 1400-1902 (1988)

Silveira's murder gave Portugal the pretext it wanted for outright conquest, and within a decade a nobleman who had governed India led an army inland to take the gold mines by force. It came back defeated without ever meeting the monomotapa's own main army in the field - a failure that shaped Portuguese policy toward the empire for the next half-century, and that Negomo himself, the same ruler who had ordered Silveira killed, spent his own remaining years managing rather than repeating.

An expedition sold as a crusade and meant as a mining venture

Portuguese scholars consulted on the legality of the war built their case on the Mutapa's supposed persecution of Christians and toleration of Muslim traders - traders, in fact, that Portugal's own captains at Mozambique had been selling firearms to for years. The real motive was simpler. Reports of gold at Manyika and silver further inland had reached Lisbon, and with Spain growing rich on its American mines, Portugal wanted a comparable prize of its own. Francisco Barreto, a former governor of Portuguese India and friend of the murdered Silveira, was given command, with the flower of the Portuguese nobility volunteering and four Jesuits attached to the column. The expedition left Lisbon in April 1569 and did not reach Sena, on the Zambezi, until December 1571 - delayed for a year and a half at Mozambique Island by disease that killed over a hundred of his men before he had even begun the campaign proper.

A war against the wrong enemy

Rather than march directly on the monomotapa's own court, Barreto's Jesuit confessor persuaded him to first attack the Tonga of Samungazi, a Mutapa tributary accused of killing Portuguese traders. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. Barreto's roughly 650 arquebusiers marched into Samungazi's territory in July 1572, at the start of the dry season and just before harvest - the worst possible timing against a peasant army that could starve an invader by simply retreating with its own grain. Three separate engagements against Samungazi's forces, some numbering over ten thousand warriors armed with little more than spears and cattle-hide shields, cost Barreto forty dead and left the survivors so weakened by thirst, hunger and disease that he abandoned the campaign without ever reaching Samungazi's own capital. Of the roughly 650 men who had marched out with him, only 180 were still alive when the column limped back to Sena. Barreto himself, by his own companions' account broken by the failure, died there in May 1573.

Negomo, watching from the highlands

Throughout the disaster, Negomo Mupunzagutu - the same monomotapa who had ordered Silveira strangled eleven years earlier - stayed well clear of the fighting and let the Tonga absorb the invasion meant for him. When Barreto's beaten army sent an embassy asking permission merely to pass through to the Manyika goldfields, Negomo answered with calculated generosity: he offered a hundred thousand of his own warriors to help finish off the rebellious Tonga, an offer so alarming in its scale that the Portuguese envoy hastily declined it and asked only to be left alone. No one on the Portuguese side had needed to guess what an army that size, deployed instead of merely offered, might have done to Barreto's column. Command passed to Vasco Fernandes Homem, who abandoned the direct approach entirely and led a fresh expedition through Manyika in 1574-75 instead, trading for gold rather than conquering for it - a pattern of accommodation with Mutapa power that would hold for the rest of Negomo's reign.

A poisoned end, and a general's son inherits

Negomo ruled for roughly forty years in total, dying sometime between 1586 and 1589; his own chief wife is said to have taken poison and died alongside him, a practice the sources describe as customary at a monomotapa's death. He was succeeded not by one of his own sons but by Gatsi Rusere, son of Nyandoro Mukomohasha and probably Negomo's own general - a succession that passed over Negomo's son Mavhura Mhande, who had expected to inherit from his uncle in turn, and set up the family rivalry that would erupt into open war within his own reign.

A tyrant and a rival

contractionDrafted from Theal, Volume I: The Portuguese in South Africa, 1505-1700 (1907)

The Makalanga throne changed hands by force more often than by settled inheritance. Theal records an earlier usurpation in vivid detail - a monomotapa named Mokomba killed by his own favourite Tshikanga, who put twenty-one of Mokomba's own children to death before Mokomba's surviving relative Kesarimyo raised a force, killed Tshikanga, and took the throne himself - and the pattern repeated in the early seventeenth century with the reign of Gasilusere, whom Theal describes bluntly as "addicted to the use of dacha, and... a cruel, passionate, faithless tyrant." Gasilusere executed his own general-in-chief for a retreat the man had not been responsible for, alienating a large section of his own people in the process - the kind of rule that left a throne perpetually vulnerable to whichever rival could raise the strongest army.

Civil war and a Portuguese-made king

That vulnerability broke into open war under Gasilusere's son and successor Kapranzine, who showed open hostility to the Portuguese traders his father had tolerated. In November 1628 Kapranzine ordered every Portuguese in his territory killed; the intended victims, warned in time, fled to fortified trading posts at Masapa and Luanze and held out against the monomotapa's own armies until reinforcements arrived from the Portuguese settlements at Sena and Tete. Rather than simply relieve the siege, the Portuguese and their allies proclaimed a rival claimant, Manuza - a relative of Kapranzine's whose own inclination toward Christianity, encouraged by the Dominican friar Manuel Sardinha, had earned him Kapranzine's jealousy and the Portuguese's favour - as the rightful monomotapa, and marched against Kapranzine under a banner of the cross. Kapranzine was defeated, regrouped, attacked twice more, and was beaten back each time; Manuza took the great place and was acknowledged paramount chief by most of the surrounding clans.

A throne signed away

On 24 May 1629 Manuza put his new authority into writing, signing a document that formally acknowledged himself a vassal of the King of Portugal - the first time a reigning monomotapa's own throne was placed under a European crown by treaty rather than left as an independent, if friendly, trading partner. He promised free passage for missionaries, respectful treatment of Portuguese officials without requiring gifts or ceremony, open commerce, and no shelter for fugitives from Portuguese justice. It was not a conquest - no Portuguese army occupied the Makalanga heartland, and Manuza's own authority over his people remained real - but it converted what had been an independent empire's diplomatic relationship with a coastal trading partner into a formal, if distant, subordination that would shape the monomotapa's own standing for the rest of the century.

A bronze plate in Rome

endDrafted from Theal, Volume I: The Portuguese in South Africa, 1505-1700 (1907)

Manuza's own line held the throne for a generation after the 1629 vassalage, and under his successor - who abandoned the family's new Christianity and returned to the old Bantu faith, to the Dominicans' own dismay - the mission's fortunes wavered. They recovered decisively under the reign that followed. Taught by the friar Aleixo do Rosario, the new monomotapa announced his own conversion, and on 4 August 1652 he and his principal wife Luiza were received into the Catholic church along with a multitude of sub-chiefs, the monomotapa taking the baptismal name Domingos. Theal records how far the news travelled: special services at Rome, an account of the baptism engraved in Latin on a bronze plate, a grand thanksgiving service at the Dominican convent in Lisbon. For a European audience convinced of its own civilizing mission, the baptism of an African emperor was proof the whole enterprise was working.

A conversion undone by the sword

The celebration outlived its own occasion by less than two decades. Domingos, Theal notes in passing, was "murdered by his own captains eighteen years later" - 1670, by the arithmetic of the source's own account - a death recorded almost as an aside next to the far more thoroughly documented baptism eighteen years earlier. No conquering army toppled the Makalanga throne in 1670; the monomotapa's own household killed him, the same kind of internal violence that had already claimed Mokomba, unseated Kapranzine, and shaped every succession this account can trace. The empire itself did not end with Domingos - reduced, vassal monomotapas continued to rule in his family's name for more than two further centuries, into an era this volume's own documentary record does not reach - but the arc Theal's book actually follows, from the Sofala trading station in 1505 to a bronze plate in Rome and a murdered king in 1670, closes here: an empire the Portuguese never conquered outright, brought instead, piece by piece, treaty by treaty and conversion by conversion, into a subordination its own rulers kept fighting each other over even as the substance of their independence quietly disappeared.

The empire that shrank to one district

afterlifeDrafted from Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa, c. 1400-1902 (1988)

Domingos's murder in 1670 did not end the line of monomotapas his family had converted to Christianity in Rome's eyes; it ended their ability to rule much of anything. Mudenge traces the province-by- province shrinkage that followed: the Rozvi state had already stripped away Guruuswa in the west by the late seventeenth century, Barwe and Manyika broke off early in the same period, and the Zambesi valley lands were carved up into Portuguese-held prazo estates. By the first half of the eighteenth century the once-continental empire had been reduced to two provinces, Dande and Chidima; by the century's end even Dande was gone, leaving one hot, tsetse-infested district, Chidima, as the sole remaining possession of Mutota's and Matope's successors - the state David Livingstone described unflatteringly under Mutapa Kataruza in the mid-nineteenth century.

A princedom worth annexing

Reduced as it was, Chidima still mattered enough to fight over. Mudenge records a rival succession dispute in 1810 between Chipute and Kandeya, and a further round of civil war and drought under Kandeya I in the 1820s and 1830s; the line continued through Dzeka, Kataruza and a second Kandeya into the 1870s. It was Kandeya II's successor Dzuda who lost what remained of the family's independence outright. In 1884 the Portuguese agents Karizimamba and Firmino Luis Germano attacked Dzuda and broke his power; the following year the remaining lands of Chidima were formally annexed to Portuguese Mozambique, and on 10 May 1887 a Portuguese officer forced Dzuda's own surrender at his stockade on the Hue stream. Dzuda went into exile - the first Mutapa in more than four centuries of the family's rule to hold no territory of his own at all.

A last rising, and a last Mutapa

Exile did not end the family's claim. Dzuda's successor, Chioko Dambamupute, built an anti-Portuguese coalition through the 1890s out of allied chiefs, sympathetic spirit mediums and the Zimbabwean resistance leader Mapondera, whom he made commander of his combined forces. By 1897 they were raiding Portuguese posts as far as Tete; by 1900 they had been joined by the ruler of Barwe and the forces of Massangano; by 1901, Mudenge writes, the movement had very nearly turned the whole Tete district into a liberated zone, and Chioko's dream of recreating the empire of Munhumutapa looked close to real. It ended in 1902, when Chioko was killed assisting Barwe's own fighters against the Portuguese. His heir Kamanika never rebuilt the coalition Chioko had commanded, and with Chioko's death, Mudenge writes, "both the dream and the reality of the historic Mutapa state came to an end" - the fifty-second and last ruler in a line that Mudenge's own count traces back through Matope to Mutota, the hunter who had first come north for Dande's salt some four and a half centuries before.