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Raiders and Traders: 19th Century

Most of the nineteenth century was marked by the increasing significance of trade in the interior and between the interior and the Zanzibar-dominated coast and by the influence of that trade on the politics of ethnic groups directly and indirectly affected by it. Another development, independent of the largely east-west movement of commerce was the arrival in Tanzania of the Ngoni, a raiding people whose origins lay in South Africa, their relatively swift movement from smith to north, and their political impact on the peoples they touched.

Interior trade had to some degree characterized relations between groups for centuries, and by the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth some regional net-works, for example, that centered on LW on Lake Tanganyika, provided a substantial range of goods produced by a number of specialists. Moreover some items, of which ivory was perhaps the most significant, had reached the coast from the interior through links between regional networks, and other items moved in the same way from the coast to the interior. Indeed the Nyamwezi had made their way to the coast by the end of the eighteenth century, thus bypassing the step-by-step movement from one region to another.

Specialization and trade notwithstanding, the great mass of Africans still relied on and were chiefly engaged in subsistence agriculture, and many who were specialists or traders retained their bases in the subsistence economy, engaging in their specialties only part-time. Local markets for the exchange of foodstuffs did exist, but food production primarily for the market was rare. Later in the nineteenth century when a fairly large number of Africans, Arabs, and Swahili required provisioning because of their full-time involvement in commercial activity, some Africans did engage in food production to meet their needs.

Often, however, these were slaves. Although most Africans were not producing for the market or engaged in trade, many were directly or indirectly affected by the development of commerce, either because they were enslaved or because of political developments stimulated in one way or another by trade or the presence of aliens in their midst.