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Giacomo Macola. The Kingdom of Kazembe: History and Politics in North-Eastern Zambia and Katanga to 1950. Hamburg: Lit Verlag, Bd. 30, 2002. xxvi + 292 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. euro20,90. Paper.
In the mid-eighteenth century, a Lunda royal, "Mwata Kazembe," established a centralized state in the fertile lower Luapula Valley. Found at the crossroads of long-distance trade routes that stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans, the kingdom was of interest to Portuguese traders who wanted to join their East and West African colonies and to Swahili traders in search of ivory and slaves. In a later period, the kingdom's realms were divided between British and Belgian colonial administrations; Mwata Kazembe became one of the more influential chiefs in colonial Zambia. All of this has ensured a small but significant place for the kingdom in African history textbooks and a central role in the most renowned (but dated) synthesis of south-central African history, Jan Vansina's Kingdoms of the Savanna (Wisconsin, 1966). It is thus remarkable that Giacomo Macola's The Kingdom of Kazembe is the first full-length study of the kingdom. Macola's empirical contribution is noteworthy; his meticulous interrogation of a variety of historical sources and ability to combine them into a single narrative reflect considerable skill.
Macola argues that precolonial history should be written alongside colonial history, since the "oral...