Decline
From around 1870 on the Luba kingdom went into decline. The kingship ultimately had no clearly worked out means of succession, so the kingdom was vulnerable to factional infighting. The Luba were also threatened by pressure from the Nyamwezi, a tribe from what is now Tanzania, moving around Lake Tanganyika, and by Swahili-Arabs, moving inland from the East African coast. The Nyamwezi and the Swahili-Arabs had access to guns and were allies, and this proved decisive. The Luba were not conquered, but the Swahili-Arabs were able to cut their access to trade with the jungle tribes to the north, while the Nyamwezi, under the leadership of the energetic Msiri, encroached on Luba trade to the south, where he set up his Yeke/Garanganze kingdom.
Hemmed in, the Luba now desperately needed guns, just as their economic position was eroding. To try to stem the decline, the Luba went into slave trading on a major scale, selling to the Portuguese in Angola. But the slave trade was slowly dying down, and slaves fetched less and less of a price. Also the Luba were less capable of raiding other peoples, so they began slave raiding among themselves, which sped the disruption of Luba society and the disintegration of political unity. In 1874 Ilunga Kabale was assassinated, and thereafter the Luba royal line was divided into quarreling factions. In the 1880s, much of the eastern Congo fell under the control of the Swahili-Arab adventurer Tippu Tib (Hamed bin Mohammed al-Marjebi), whose men incidentally brought smallpox with them.
Read more about this topic: Luba People
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Families suffered badly under industrialization, but they survived, and the lives of men, women, and children improved. Children, once marginal and exploited figures, have moved to a position of greater protection and respect,... The historic decline in the overall death rates for children is an astonishing social fact, notwithstanding the disgraceful infant mortality figures for the poor and minorities. Like the decline in death from childbirth for women, this is a stunning achievement.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)