Abstract
If the salt of Katwe (and the strategic trade thereof) occupies a pride of place in the story of the emergence and consolidation of precolonial clan-states in Upper Semliki Valley, this paper attributes to the quest for Semliki Valley’s ivory in the late nineteenth century the most historically consequential mutation of this region of equatorial Africa. This quest for ivory, it is here demonstrated, was animated by bigger economic forces that violently brought the entire Semliki Valley into the orbit of western Indian Ocean world. In the unfolding intricate power contest characterised, to varying degrees, by both collaboration and coercion, ivory caravaners morphed Upper Semliki Valley’s spatial organisation previously mapped off the spatial influence of Katwe’s salt. With this shift in key commodity exchange—from Lake Katwe’s salt to the valley’s elephant tusks—the region now turned into the lands of Wanande (lowlanders) and Wakonjo (highlanders). Marshalling an array of historical sources – oral histories, written biographies as well as written observations of last eye-witnesses – this paper takes issue with the treatment the WaSwahili ivory caravan as an outright malefic force that simply bestowed ruin and desolation, an argument rife in the region’s historiography. Far from arguing for the absolution of WaSwahili caravaners and their associates in the violence that no doubt swept the region, this paper seeks to present anew the context and nature of the displacement of order (economic and political) against which a verdict concerning the actions posed by WaSwahili caravaners in late nineteenth-century East Africa’s interior may be appropriately nuanced.
Discussants:
Dr. Rebecca Glade, Research Associate, MISR
Ms. Mary Muhuruzi, PhD Fellow, MISR
Venue: MISR Seminar Room 1 and virtually via zoom (link to be shared later).
Time: 2:00 - 5:00 PM.
Hard copies of the seminar paper are available for collection at MISR Library. We look forward to your participation in what promises to be a thought-provoking and engaging discussion.