Yeke Kingdom

The Yeke Kingdom, also known as the Garanganze or Garenganze kingdom, was a short-lived but powerful state in Katanga, in the south-east of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo. It existed from about 1856 to 1891 under a single ruler, Msiri, a trader from East Africa who built it with firearms, copper and marriage alliances. For a time it was the strongest state in south-central Africa, and it controlled the main trade route across the continent before it was destroyed in the European scramble for Katanga.

Msiri, whose full name was Mwenda Msiri Ngelengwa Shitambi, was born around 1830 into the Nyamwezi people of Tabora, in present-day Tanzania; in Katanga the Nyamwezi were known as Yeke or Bayeke. Like his father Kalasa, he traded in copper, ivory and slaves along routes run from the Swahili coast under the Sultan of Zanzibar. West of the Luapula River he helped a Wasanga chief against his Lunda enemies and was named as the chief's successor. He then raised an armed following and began to conquer his neighbours.

Guns were the foundation of Msiri's power, and Katanga's copper and ivory paid for them. Because supplies from the east coast passed through rival territory, he opened a western route, sending his nephew to the Ovimbundu and Portuguese traders around Benguela in Angola. He took over the western trade that the Luba Empire had controlled and halted Luba expansion southwards. By the time David Livingstone visited the Lunda ruler Mwata Kazembe in 1867, Msiri held most of Kazembe's lands west of the Luapula, and in 1870 he allied with the Zanzibari trader Tippu Tip to attack and kill that Kazembe.

From his capital at Bunkeya, Msiri dealt with both oceans. Since the Kalahari and the Lozi Kingdom blocked routes to the south and the rainforest those to the north, his kingdom sat astride the only practical east–west trade route. Estimates put its territory at about half a million square kilometres.

Msiri governed through alliances as much as conquest. He is said to have had more than 500 wives, taking one from the village of each subordinate chief; she served as a link to his court but also, according to the sources, as an informant and a hostage. He married into the families of trading partners, including the sister of his Portuguese-Angolan supplier Coimbra, and gave a daughter in marriage to Tippu Tip. European accounts describe his rule as harsh, with mutilations and executions, though the Scottish missionary Frederick Stanley Arnot, who lived at Bunkeya from 1886, wrote more favourably of him, and later writers note that the most hostile accounts came from men serving his enemies. Bunkeya and its villages may have held 60,000 to 80,000 people in 1891.

Reports of Katanga's copper drew rival imperial agents. In 1890 Alfred Sharpe arrived for Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company with a protectorate treaty, but after missionaries advised Msiri to have it translated he sent Sharpe away. In 1891 Leopold II dispatched three expeditions for his Congo Free State. The third, led by Captain William Stairs, reached Bunkeya in December 1891 with about 400 troops and porters. On 20 December the Belgian officer Omer Bodson confronted Msiri at Munema and shot him dead; Bodson was himself mortally wounded. Accounts of the killing differ, and the expedition is reported to have cut off and displayed Msiri's head.

Stairs installed an adopted son of Msiri, Mukanda-Bantu, as a chief over a small area around Bunkeya and restored chieftaincies Msiri had overthrown. Many people fled, and fighting among local chiefs followed. Britain accepted Leopold's claim to Katanga in an agreement of 1894, and the region later passed to the Belgian Congo. The Garanganze chieftaincy survives at Bunkeya, its holders taking the title Mwami Mwenda after Msiri's first name.

Our 1878, 1880 and 1900 maps label this territory "Yeke", in the borderlands of today's Congo and Zambia. The kingdom itself ended with Msiri's death in 1891, so the 1900 map shows the outline after its actual end.