INDIVIDUALS, TALENT, AND COMMUNITY IN PRECOLONIAL AFRICA

Over the last two decades, studies of precolonial societies have transformed our understanding of the relationship between knowledge, power, and community in the deep past. In an early, influential contribution to this scholarship, Jane Guyer and S. M. Eno Belinga argued that the familiar model of precolonial politics, ‘wealth in people’, was best understood as the composition of ‘wealth in knowledge’ by leaders building communities with good prospects for the future.Footnote ⁸ The shift beyond the accumulative valuation of followers bolstered research already underway on how Africans crafted dependencies through both the control of material resources and the manipulation of speech and knowledge, diffusing power across networks with multiple nodes of authority and diversifying followers’ opportunities for affiliation.Footnote ⁹ Dynamic histories explore the paths by which leaders and followers invented clans, royalty, guilds, and healing cults around historically contingent ideas about what it meant to be a particular kind of person, such as a skilled drum-maker, a descendant of a divine ancestor, an infertile woman, or a proven hunter.

Underlying this scholarship is the cultivation, recognition, and transposition of individual distinction. The ‘wealth in people as wealth in knowledge’ model explains how reputations for talent intersected with leaders’ political aspirations and scholarship on heterarchical political traditions illuminates how adepts’ investment in their own networks of obligation and dependency could undermine leaders’ efforts to consolidate power. Indeed, such processes may well have contributed to the persistently decentralized character of Botatwe societies.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, this scholarship does little to elucidate the experience of those cultivating reputations before or in the absence of a process whereby control of distinctive talents came to be a source of formal power. While we know a great deal about the politics of knowledge among leaders and groups of followers, we know decidedly less about the cultivation of individual distinction among peers.Footnote ¹¹ This is particularly true of renown below the level of cultural heroes, founder figures, or charismatic and ritual leaders.

These questions open up a methodological dilemma: how do we historicize individual distinction in the deep past with a methodology, comparative historical linguistics, that cannot recover the actions of singular individuals from the past? Though early Botatwe-speaking societies certainly had no vocabulary to articulate a vision of the self in the sense of the autonomous, liberal subject developed in Renaissance Europe, they could and did speak about the relationship between personal distinction based on the uneven distribution of skills and knowledge, the changing contexts of its recognition, and modes of affiliation organized around the principles of obligation and dependency. Reconstructed words provide evidence of how communities talked about people with talents that merited a distinct name over time scales that eclipse the lifespan of any one luminary. The shifting meanings of these words are the residue of earlier debates about how reputedly skilled people were identified, why they were assets, and what they could do as unique kinds of persons. While individuals elude the historical linguist, the history of individualism need not. Importantly, reputation, as a social process, is not merely an academic heuristic. It lies at the heart of regional understandings of the accumulation, storage, and transfer of remarkable capabilities from person to person. By the early nineteenth century, skilled Tonga and Ila craftsmen were presumed to have inherited the talent of an ancestor whose reputation in that craft was still remembered.Footnote ¹² Reputation, then, allows us to think about the politics of knowledge in a conceptual framework that follows Botatwe ideas about relationships between individuals, communities, ancestors, and knowledge.

In the context of the small decentralized Botatwe societies, struggles over reputations reveal a deep history of the informal power of local, even seasonal honorables, of primus inter pares.Footnote ¹³ Though Botatwe-speakers celebrated some talented hunters, *-pàd, we have no linguistic, comparative ethnographic, or archaeological evidence for the early use of such distinction as a basis for the development of guilds or cults of specialists or professionals, as was the case in neighboring societies. Peers’ cultivation, contestation, and commemoration of hunting reputations foregrounds the affective dimensions of hunters’ renown: the excitement of the chase; hunters’ worry over success and their benevolent performances of distribution; dependents’ anticipation, trust, or even ridicule; and remembrances of hunters past.Footnote ¹⁴ The histories embedded in Botatwe hunting lexicon illuminate how communities and individuals struggled to define a once-common form of labor as a path to distinction in the face of developments in the material, technological, and political context of hunting over two millennia, from the spread of farming at the turn of the Common Era to the arrival of the caravan trade in the nineteenth century.

HUNTING REPUTATIONS IN ANCIENT SOUTH CENTRAL AFRICA

Though transformations in hunting date to the close of the first millennium, changes in the economic and social salience of hunting and hunters come into focus against earlier developments in Botatwe subsistence strategies. Moreover, reconstructed words indicate innovations developed during the long spans of linguistic stability between divergences and are, therefore, governed by the pace of linguistic change and organized around a periodization developed from the linguistic classification (Fig. 2). As a result, our story begins far deeper in the past, in the Proto-Botatwe era, when the savanna agricultural system was established.Footnote ¹⁵

Fig. 2.

Outline Classification of Botatwe.

Proto-Botatwe-speaking communities diverged from ancestral Bantu speaking societies some three millennia ago in the frontier between the great Congo and Zambezi river basins, probably at the headwaters of the Luapula, Lualaba, and Kafue Rivers.Footnote ¹⁶ The remarkable longevity of this proto-language, spanning fifteen centuries from the beginning of the last millennium BCE to the middle of the first millennium CE, attests to the success of its speakers’ settlements. However, continuity did not preclude inventiveness. In the early centuries of the Common Era, Proto-Botatwe speakers incorporated sorghum into an inherited food system of cultivated root, tree, and legume crops and wild produce, fish, and game. Millet probably followed a few centuries later.Footnote ¹⁷ As Proto-Botatwe speaking farmers opened new lands to cereal farming, they slowly extended the territory of Botatwe speech southward.Footnote ¹⁸ By establishing new settlements away from natal villages and opening their communities to people who did not speak their language, Proto-Botatwe speakers contributed to a process of language change that unfolded across a time scale imperceptible to individual speakers. By the middle of the first millennium, slight shifts in pronunciation, lexis, and grammar distinguished regional speech patterns, marking the divergence of Proto-Botatwe into Proto-Western Botatwe, located southwest of the Kafue floodplain, and Proto-Greater Eastern Botatwe, spoken in the area around the Kafue floodplain. Proto-Greater Eastern Botatwe was a short-lived speech community, spanning only the sixth through the mid-eighth centuries, but its speakers contributed to the diverse subsistence system they inherited from Proto-Botatwe speakers by adopting cattle, though in very limited numbers.Footnote ¹⁹

In adopting cereals and small numbers of cattle, the earliest Botatwe farmers incrementally but profoundly reconfigured labor regimes, particularly around the clearing, planting, weeding, and harvesting seasons, and the daily processing and cooking of grain heads. Cereal agriculture created an annual season of scarcity and the fearsome possibility of crop failure. Hunting, fishing, and foraging remained an integral part of food production, supplementing uncertain harvests and protecting crops and herds. Indeed, for Proto-Botatwe and Proto-Greater Eastern Botatwe speakers farming the southern savannas in first three quarters of the first millennium, the distinction between farming and using wild resources was not particularly clear. These early farmers burned the bush to both drive quarry and open fields, cultivated and harvested garden crops and ‘weeds’, and planted traps alongside sorghum stalks, confounding the distinction between collecting and producing food.Footnote ²⁰

While hunting, fishing, and foraging sustained Proto-Botatwe speakers’ earliest experiments in food production, by the second half of the first millennium, their descendants established successful farms throughout the Kafue region.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, farmers’ achievements underpinned subsequent innovation in the economic and social value of hunting, fishing, and foraging. As part of this innovation, Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe speakers adopted the word *-pàd, ‘celebrated, talented hunter’, in the late first millennium.Footnote ²² The fact that some hunters were more skilled than others was surely nothing new, yet the invention of a word to delineate this category of person was. The distribution and phonological form of this root in languages stretching across the savannas to the northwest, north, and east of the Kafue floodplain demonstrate that speakers of Botatwe, Luban, and Sabi languages innovated the term during a period of contact. In all but Luban attestations, the root is associated with skillful hunting.Footnote ²³ In Ruund, an inherited reflex, cipar (7/8), ‘ability, gift, or talent’, suggests an association between talent and the root dating to the emergence of Ruund in the mid-first millennium, thereby supporting the antiquity of a semantic reconstruction emphasizing the talent of *-pàd.Footnote ²⁴ Other attestations connect *-pàd to the social process of recognizing hunters’ aptitude. For example, Soli, Valley Tonga, and Chikunda speak of cipalu (7/8), the celebratory feasting, dancing, and reenactments performed after a successful hunt. The retention of /p/ and distribution in Chikunda and two Botatwe societies that absorbed Chikunda speakers in the nineteenth century suggests that Chikunda borrowed the root from Sabi speakers and carried it west, probably during the Chikunda warlord Kanyemba's expansion along the middle Zambezi in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ The semantic domain of the root clearly indicates that their reputation for talent in their craft set *-pàd apart from general hunters, who were designated mufwimi in Botatwe languages, the agentive form of the verb ‘to hunt’, *-gúιm- [2].

The root *-pàd derives from the ancient Bantu verb *-pá, ‘to give’, with the extensive verbal affix.Footnote ²⁶ The extensive affix has been reconstructed on Proto-Bantu verbs with the connotation ‘to be in a spread-out position’.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, the verb literally means ‘to give or send across space’ or ‘to give widely’. In many southern Bantu languages, the extensive affix connotes repetition of an action undertaken on a large scale.Footnote ²⁸ In Ila, the affix invoking habitual, repetitive actions is created by simply inserting –a- before the final syllable to render mwaalu ‘he who repetitively, intensively gives’.Footnote ²⁹ Morphology also reflects the social, discursive nature of ascription: the /–ú/ suffix indicates that the root was used as a verb of quality able to function as an adjective of quality, glossing inelegantly as ‘hunt-ious’.Footnote ³⁰ Further derivation from the verb or adjective of quality produces both the noun of quality, bwaalu (‘huntsmanship’, 14)Footnote ³¹ and the noun denoting a person who embodied huntsmanship, mwaalu (1/2). If the repetitive, intensive connotation of the extensive affix dates to Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe, *-pàd was the consummate huntsman, both a ‘good shot’ and a ‘generous giver’. The morphology of *-pàd supports this polysemy because the verb's object – what the hunter ‘gives’ – can be both his weapon and the game he distributes. Thus, *-pàd poetically captures in one word fleeting scenes of the mwaalu's craft: his spear thrown across great distances, repeated stabbings of the close kill, the rapid firing of a quiver of arrows, and followers’ expectation of his expansive and repeated munificence in sharing meat.

We can infer what knowledge and skills eastern Botatwe communities used to define *-pàd from the context of technological change accompanying its innovation. Hunters speaking Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe and their Proto-Kafue-speaking descendants invented an elaborate lexicon to talk about spearcraft from the mid-eighth to the mid-thirteenth century, a lexicon that suggests these hunters radically transformed both their hunting technologies and the role of hunting in the local economy. The first example of this evidence is an innovation in Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe, *-weja [3], a mode of hunting with spears, possibly throwing spears. This word was used alongside the inherited term *-gúιm-, ‘to hunt with bows and arrows’. By the turn of the first millennium, then, Botatwe communities living near the vast herds of the Kafue floodplains distinguished between at least two forms of hunting: archery and spearcraft. In Ila, the best documented Botatwe language, *-weja also refers to the hunt for economic success and its use to launch and manage one's social position, precisely the process that could produce a term like *-pàd.Footnote ³²

As spearing came to dominate innovation in hunting, Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe speakers developed vocabulary for new types and parts of spears. This efflorescence in spearcraft was likely supported by the development of an intensive smelting and smithing culture from the ninth through the eleventh centuries southeast of the Kafue floodplains, near modern-day Lusaka.Footnote ³³ For example, an ancient Bantu word for spear, *-túmò, was reborrowed at this time in the form *-súmò [4], probably because it now carried an iron point. Similarly, Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe speakers followed their neighbors in applying an ancient Bantu term for ‘stone’, *-tádè, to ‘iron, iron ore, and iron bloom’ but converted the root into noun class 9/10 to produce *(i)ntale [5], novel joints of iron taping or wire. Two new spear points date from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries: *(i)mpula [6], ‘spear point’ and *-bèji [7], a ‘barbless point used on both spears and arrows’ developed from the inherited verb, *-bàij-, ‘to carve’. Innovation in spear construction attests to hunters’ knowledge of environmental conditions and the seasonal and daily habits of game because the increasing specialization of spear points required that a hunter know what animals he expected to hunt before he went into the bush.

During the first quarter of the second millennium, speakers of Proto-Kafue, one of the three speech communities that developed out of Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe, used their ancestors’ advances in spearcraft to transform hunting with spears into a large-scale communal activity. In the process, they innovated words for their preferred quarry and the tools and organization of group hunting. As Proto-Kafue speakers settled into the diverse micro-environments pioneered by Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe speakers, they developed terms for antelope species with strict preferences for wetland margins: *mbololo [8] (kudu), *nalufwí [9] (reedbuck), and a borrowed Kaskazi term, *-jóbé [10] (Zambezi sitatunga). This linguistic dynamism suggests intensive exploitation of the gregarious species being named. Innovations in the technology and organization of communal hunting support this conclusion.

Three words help us to understand what Proto-Kafue hunting might have looked like. The first, *cìlà [11], derives from a word for a very large hunting net, *-kìdà, borrowed by Proto-Kafue speakers from speakers of western Bantu languages to the north and west.Footnote ³⁴ The word was probably borrowed into Proto-Kafue from speakers of Luban languages to the north, further supporting the argument that Botatwe and Luban peoples exchanged ideas about how to hunt successfully in the southern savannas in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium CE. When Proto-Kafue speakers borrowed this word, they adopted it into noun class seven without adding a noun class prefix and used it to talk about a communal hunt, rather than a net.

These communal hunts were probably large enterprises; in the early twentieth century, they drew scores and even hundreds of participants, attracting enough attention from conservation officers to be banned by the colonial government.Footnote ³⁵ While beaters chased animals toward an entrapment – a bog, a long net or pitfall, a fire – other hunters waited there, prepared to spear the animals, a classic formation in battue hunting, or hunting with beaters. Proto-Kafue speakers invented a new generic word for hunting entrapments, *-pàndo [12], by combining an older Bantu transitive verb root *-pànd-, ‘to split’, with the deverbative suffix denoting the action, result or instrument of the verb. Indeed, Tonga and Lenje speakers now gloss the root into English referring to the dry season communal hunt itself. In addition to using *-pàndo, Proto-Kafue battue hunting parties also encircled game, such that the bodies of the hunters themselves served as the entrapment, though this method of hunting was distinct enough from using *-pàndo to merit unique vocabulary. Commencing in two facing lines at some distance apart, one line of hunters advanced, beating the animals forward as both lines curved tighter, encircling the animals. As the hunters closed in, they stabbed their prey. While all modern-day Kafue languages refer to this form of hunting as kuoba banyama, it is impossible to reconstruct the entire phrase through the comparative historical linguistic method. It is only with the noun *ibalo [13], ‘circle of hunters in a battue hunt’ deriving from *-bada ‘ring’, that we have a common root that explicitly refers to battue hunting by encirclement, typical of precolonial elephant hunting.

The material culture of the Kafue and Batoka regions dating from the mid-eighth to mid-thirteenth centuries boasts similarly rich innovation in hunting technologies concurrent with an increasingly intense investment in pastoralism along the southern frontier of Kafue settlement.Footnote ³⁶ Ironworking flourished, with new forms of points, ferrules, and end-spikes. The regional faunal record shifts toward higher mortality rates of gregarious antelope species, hippos, and elephants, all species hunted by groups armed with spears. Moreover, fully-gown adults dominate mortality curves. Archaeologists interpret these faunal assemblages as indicative of the emergence of skillful communal hunting practices. Though wild species outnumber domesticated species in the Kalala Island faunal assemblage throughout its occupation, there is a spike in the ratio of wild to domesticates at stratigraphic levels dated from the last quarter of the first millennium into the mid-second millennium, levels that overlap with the Proto-Central Eastern Botatwe and Proto-Kafue periods, before the ratio returns in the fifteenth century to Early Iron Age levels. Finally, butchery patterns within late first millennium and early second millennium assemblages from the Kafue and Batoka regions exhibit a shift from an earlier pattern in which entire carcasses are represented in the assemblage to specific portions of the carcass being brought back to the village. Beginning in the Proto-Central Eatern Botatwe period and continuing through the Proto-Kafue period, quarry hunted in the Kafue and on the Plateau was selectively, wastefully butchered when bagged.

These changes in game consumption raise the question: why hunt more frequently and more wastefully? The development of extravagant butchery practices may simply reflect the success of innovations in hunting technologies. To be sure, if animals were killed in ever greater numbers but only selectively butchered, hunting was no longer a vital source of protein for ordinary people. It had a new value outside of nutrition. Likewise, the development of words to broadly delineate hunters into categories of talented and ordinary, suggests that hunting was no longer a general pursuit strategically employed by farmers. Rather, some hunting, particularly communally with spears, was part of the work of distinguishing oneself, of acting on the full suite of economic and social aspirations Ila speakers came to associate with the verb *-weja.

Innovation in the economic and social value of hunting developed in the context of – and probably contributed to – major transformations in trade at the close of the first millennium. Communities from Shaba to the Tsodillo Hills acquired glass beads and shells through indirect long-distance trade routes linked, ultimately, to the Indian Ocean. Concomitantly, south central Africans increased regional trade to circulate salt, iron, and copper. By 1300, inventive smiths were forging copper currencies to facilitate expanding central African trade. Botatwe hunters circulating the fruits of their labors, innovative hunting technologies, and ideas about the social value of expertise within regional networks of fellow hunters may well have sought to participate in broader regional experiments with novel forms of elitism of the sort Lubans were attempting at Sanga by the eleventh century.Footnote ³⁷ Yet, Botatwe speakers wove the new opportunities enjoyed by *-pàd into older ideas about knowledge and power in a manner that did not hinge on controlling hunters’ status through associations like the guilds and cults that developed among neighboring societies or binding this older form of distinction as a legitimizing force underpinning subsequent ideologies of royalty embodied in the hunter-founder figures of charter myths.Footnote ³⁸ Although future research might date the Botatwe practice of inheriting ancestors’ skills to these early periods of regional experimentation with hunters’ privileged status, Botatwe speakers articulated hunters’ reputations for prowess with lineal politics in a flexible way, as they did with other talents, requiring demonstrated achievement on the part of the prodigy before recognizing the endowment of an ancestors’ skill.Footnote ³⁹

The ‘wealth in people as wealth in knowledge’ concept helps us imagine why local leaders and peers recognized and celebrated distinctive hunters for the meat, skins, security, excitement, and renown they brought to the community. Unfolding outside the familiar regional pattern of specialized professional and ritual institutions holding political power, the recognition of Botatwe hunters’ reputations foregrounds the process of distinguishing peers, a process with strikingly affective power in small-scale communities. Transformations in the meaning of *-pàd after the divergence of Proto-Kafue demonstrate the persistence of the affective stakes for *-pàd and the communities who esteemed them, even as the economic and political basis of hunting reputations drastically changed.

REDEFINING DISTINCTION AND ENDURING RIDICULE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

By the middle of the thirteenth century, Proto-Kafue diverged into familiar Botatwe languages: Tonga, Ila, Lenje, and Sala. Though this thirteenth century divergence marks the latest date to which we can reconstruct words through the application of the comparative linguistic method, linguistic evidence can still tell us something of the subsequent history of the speakers of languages produced by the divergence of Proto-Kafue. While diachronic phonology and historicized distributions yield information about the extent and direction of circulating words, objects, and ideas, we must create careful arguments about the dating of these exchanges by linking them to events described in other historical records, such as the arrival of new languages to the region. Transformations in hunting vocabulary after the divergence of Proto-Kafue elucidate Botatwe experiences during the watershed processes of the late second millennium in south central Africa: the extension of the caravan trade inland and the political upheavals associated with the mfecane.

The geography of trade networks throughout the first half of the second millennium put Botatwe speakers in the hinterland – the supply lands – of trade centers like Ingombe Ilede and Nqoma, and the trade routes that extended from those sites across central and southern Africa. In the last centuries of the second millennium, however, caravan traders transformed regional patterns of ivory circulation and shifted the frontier of direct trade inland. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many regional leaders and aspiring Big Men had tied their fortunes to ivory and slave caravans arriving from either coast. Among non-participants, the caravan trade wore away at established nodes of authority at all levels of political and social organization, from household heads to royal courts. Slave raids paralyzed small communities of south central Africa even as they provided others with new opportunities for consolidating authority and wealth in the form of slaves and foreign trade goods, particularly guns and cloth.Footnote ⁴⁰

In the last centuries of the millennium, as Botatwe speakers learned of novel kinds of status materialized in foreign riches that circulated along increasingly prosperous caravan routes, they borrowed terms for a new kind of hunter, the professional elephant hunter, who challenged the older moral visions and forms of material wealth underpinning the status of *-pàd. By the mid-nineteenth century, Bisa and Chikunda nkombalume [14], leaders of highly ritualized guilds of professional elephant hunters, were working in and around the Luangwa and Gwembe valleys.Footnote ⁴¹ Speakers of the easternmost Botatwe languages, Soli and Lenje, had long been in close contact with their neighbors to east, so it is not surprising that they were the only Botatwe peoples to adopt the term nkombalume. Both the documentary record and the new meanings Lenje speakers added to *-pàd (below) suggest that skilled Soli and Lenje hunters sought out and achieved status as nkombalume, thereby legitimately extending the hunting lands of the elephant guilds into Lenje and Soli lands.Footnote ⁴² Lenje and Soli nkombalume probably outcompeted local *-pàd, perhaps by drawing on the specialist knowledge, tools, and trade contacts of the guilds. To the west, Botatwe speakers living along the Machili River and the hook of the Zambezi borrowed a different word for professional ivory hunter: sinyàngá [15]. This word also has its origins in eastern Bantu languages. Originally used in a different noun class with the meaning ‘horn’, the root spread up the Zambezi River with the meaning ‘ivory’, reaching communities west of the Zambezi floodplain. Speakers adopting the root used it to talk about the ‘man of ivory’, sinyàngá, the professional elephant hunter.Footnote ⁴³ Taken together, nkombalume and sinyàngá indicate two distinct zones of intensive professional ivory hunting, each focused on a north-south elephant migration route. Based on the phonology and distribution of attestations, nkombalume spread from the northern Zimbabwe plateau, through the Gwembe, and up the Luangwa River, shifting from a general term for a skilled hunter and brave person to a technical and ritual leader of a professional hunting guild. The sinyàngá who hunted along the corridor west of the Zambezi River and into the swamps of the Caprivi and Chobe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries supplied Ovimbundu caravans.

New meanings attached to *-pàd in distinct Botatwe languages indicate the durability of the social and affective capacities of this category of notable, even as the practical and discursive terms in which one was recognized as a celebrated hunter were increasingly tied to the specialization, even professionalization, of the work. Tonga and Ila speakers living just beyond the geographic frontier of professional ivory hunting networks esteemed *-pàd as an ‘elder’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact, early twentieth-century dictionaries first gloss the term as ‘elder’, but add that the ‘proper’ meaning is ‘hunter’ or ‘senior hunter’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Lenje speakers living on the eastern fringe of the Botatwe area participated in the ivory trade while Tonga speakers in the Zambezi valley inhabited the western periphery of the Luso-African trade networks of the lower Zambezi.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, *-pàd was valued as a ‘friend’ and ‘companion’. The Chikunda ivory hunters who appropriated *-pàd to invent a noun for feasts celebrating successful hunts demonstrate that the meaning of *-pàd was being redefined by both Botatwe speakers and neighbors with great stakes in the business of elephant hunting.

What purpose did it serve Botatwe speakers to use the old root *-pàd in a new way that emphasized affection and respect as the criteria of *-pàd's status and the basis of his relationships with those who validated his status? Botatwe speaking communities may have augmented the inherited meaning of *-pàd because older forms of hunting, particularly *-cìlà communal hunts, were no longer stages for performing expertise to build notoriety. Other adept hunters taking greater risks and reaping higher economic returns were inspiring new words and building up extravagant reputations, eroding the material but not the social or affective basis for the status of *-pàd. Strikingly, speakers drew on familiar social imperatives of cooperation and dependency in developing new meanings for *-pàd, but spoke about relationships like friendship that could stand outside the power dynamics of kinship in organizing the flow of *-pàd's meat and the foreign goods exchanged for skins, horns, and tusks.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, affective alliances like friendships likely facilitated the process by which talented people built up their own personal pools of people and expertise alongside, within, or in the absence of the wealth in people and knowledge composed by lineage heads and ritual specialists, contributing to the decentralization of Botatwe authority. Yet, the political and social turmoil accompanying the ivory and slave trade suggest another historical motive for these semantic shifts, though they could have taken place any time after the divergence of Proto-Kafue in the thirteenth century. Calling on *-pàd as friends, companions, and elders invoked ties of obligation for assistance from esteemed peers with the skill to defend and feed communities and the social position to offer protection from enslavement in the increasingly uncertain, violent context created by the caravan trade.

The insatiable demand for slaves forced central African societies to reconfigure how claims of obligation expressed through the rubric of kinship and related idioms of ascriptive social affiliation mediated relationships between strangers. In the early twentieth century, an Ila man explained the likely outcome of a mere solecism in addressing a stranger: ‘Can I claim to be a member of a strange clan that is not really mine? If I did so, and addressed one as “My fellow-clansman”, wouldn't I be rendering myself liable to be enslaved, (because) they would not acknowledge me as their own?’Footnote ⁴⁸ If claims to kinship and clanship were a means of securing protection as the slaving frontier reached the eastern Botatwe region by the middle of the nineteenth century, the rejection of such claims opened up the possibility of enslavement.Footnote ⁴⁹ Though historians of east African slavery have taught us that claims of kinship were a strategy to elide relative degrees of social vulnerability and protect lineage adherents from sale,Footnote ⁵⁰ those with kin may have actually been more vulnerable, precisely because claims of kinship justified the right and sometimes obligation to transform relatives into debt payments and even commodities. As early as 1855, Livingstone lamented the entrepreneurial acumen of Mambari traders who identified a need for iron hoes among Tonga speakers and, thereby, finally ‘induced’ Tonga speakers to sell their ivory and their children.Footnote ⁵¹ Livingstone's observations are echoed in the writings of other travelers and missionaries, who remarked on the sale of mothers, daughters, and sisters into slavery during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵² Africans living along the Zambezi told their own widely circulating stories about the sale of children by parents, even before birth.Footnote ⁵³ If ties of kinship facilitated the sale of relatives, vulnerabilities stemming from one's status as a relative did not terminate with the sale. Some Bwila used their status as kin to claim the right to redeem relatives but, subsequently, recast the act of redemption as the ‘sale’ of the redeemed to the redeemer. Thus, membership of a kin group, particularly for women and children, created vulnerability at both the moment of sale and even the moment of redemption.Footnote ⁵⁴

By the middle of the nineteenth century, claims of kinship in the Botatwe region could serve as the basis for both social support and great vulnerability. Creating ties of dependence and claims for assistance from talented people like *-pàd outside the rubric of kinship allowed Lenje, Tonga, and Ila speakers to demand help outside the idiom that was deployed by powerful people to sell ‘relatives’ both locally and to caravans moving ivory and slaves to the coasts. To claim help on the basis of kinship was to underscore the hierarchies of authority inherent to lineality and make oneself vulnerable to lineage heads. To make claims on local notables like *-pàd on the basis of friendship and the responsibility of elders to help solve the problems of the community was to protect oneself with a different form of affective relationship.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the middle and late nineteenth century, as the frontier of the slave and ivory trades reached into the eastern fringes of the Botatwe speaking area, violence accompanying the political aspirations of the Lozi Litunga ravaged settlements of the Kafue floodplain, the western fringes of the Batoka Plateau, and the Zambezi Valley. Here, too, affective semantic content was added to Botatwe hunting vocabulary. As the Litunga sought to expand his political reach eastwards and restrict Ndebele raids north of the Zambezi, SiLozi speakers added a number of derogatory meanings to words they borrowed from Botatwe speakers to belittle a set of skills that had been highly valued among Botatwe peoples living just beyond the reach of the expanding Lozi polity.Footnote ⁵⁶ The word *-yala [16] was used on the eastern Batoka plateau to describe a kind of hunting undertaken by encircling game. When Lozi speakers borrowed the verb into their language and used it to make a noun, imayala, they spoke of ‘an unlucky person who always comes back empty-handed from fishing or hunting, etc. …’Footnote ⁵⁷ Similarly, when Lozi spoke of sibinda, a word shared by Botatwe speakers, they spoke not of hunters but of ‘ungovernability, fig. strong-headed person’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Finally, Lozi had their own attestation of *-pàd in noun class 3/4, mwalu, which referred to a ‘perplexity, embarrassment, bewilderment’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The density of derogatory meanings added to Botatwe hunting and fishing vocabulary borrowed into SiLozi is unprecedented in other neighboring languages. Perhaps Lozi ridicule was a dual propaganda, both questioning the basis for the status Botatwe speakers extended to *-pàd, and, therefore, the legitimacy of his influence in Botatwe societies and also bolstering the courage of Lozi fighters skirmishing with Botatwe warriors, many of whom were likely *-pàd, for *-pàd excelled in a set of skills that was transposable from hunting to warfare and depended upon with increasing frequency to protect Botatwe communities from the physical, if not the verbal, attacks of the Lozi.