The Zambezi: A History is published by Hurst. 
The Zambezi became a war zone during the “Scramble for Africa”, the struggle for independence and the civil wars that followed the departure of colonial powers.
Through the lens of previously unused Portuguese manuscripts, The Zambezi: A History sheds light on the Portuguese and British colonial rule over the people of this region. The book illustrates the culture of the people who lived along the river; their relationship with the states formed on the high veldt; and the ways they have adapted to the vagaries of the Zambezi itself. Here is an excerpt.
***
One of the strangest stories in the history of the Zambezi revolves around the Portuguese conviction that there were silver mines located just upstream of the Cahora Bassa rapids. The search for these mines would dominate Portuguese relations with the Monomotapa for much of the 17th century, and numerous expeditions were sent to find and take possession of them. Yet there are no silver deposits in eastern Africa, and this remains an almost inexplicable example of self-delusion passed down through three or four generations.
The Portuguese first started to talk about silver mines when Francisco Barreto’s army was sent to east Africa in 1569. At approximately the same time, Paulo Dias was granted a captaincy in Angola and rumours began to circulate about a mountain of silver called Cambambe in the west African interior. Barreto’s successor, Vasco Fernandes Homem, heard that the Zambezian silver mines were located upstream of Tete near Chicoa. He sent a strong expedition, but no mines were found, “for no [African] dared to point out the exact situation of the mines, as they were in great fear that the Portuguese, after discovering them, would take their lands from them”. Eventually, some Africans buried two lumps of silver ore weighing four or five pounds each at a location that they subsequently revealed to the Portuguese. The Africans then vanished, and the Portuguese dug in vain for the mine they thought they had been shown. The search ended in disaster when the soldiers sent to Chicoa were all massacred.
In this account are all the elements that were to characterise the Portuguese search for the mines: the Portuguese start with the belief that there are mines in or near Chicoa; they send an expedition; the Africans refuse to show them where the mines are and lead them on false trails; eventually, the Portuguese obtain samples of ore, which yield fine silver, but find no mines; the Portuguese retreat, baffled. This pattern would repeat itself again and again over the course of the next century and a half.
It was not until after the wars of 1629-32 in the interior that the Lisbon authorities at last sent out a team of expert silver miners under the command of Andres de Vides y Albarado. Albarado reported that the mines did indeed exist and were very rich. However, when he visited Chicoa himself, he had exactly the same experiences as his predecessors. Various people were produced who were alleged to know the location of the mines. One inconveniently disappeared. Another claimed he had to dream where the mines were. Meanwhile, all the places where the miners dug yielded no silver.
When António da Conceição wrote his Treatise on the Rivers of Cuama in 1696, he stated that once again silver mines had been discovered, and he was entirely confident that the silver these would yield would not only pay for the expenses of the government in east Africa but would also help restore the fortunes of the Estado da India.
So what, one might well ask, was going on? Why were the mines so frequently “discovered” and yet somehow never yielded any returns, or could never be precisely located?
Reports that the silver ore discovered was very rich and even “almost pure silver” makes it very unlikely that genuine discoveries of silver-bearing ground had been made. This was certainly suspected by many contemporaries. António Bocarro, writing in 1634, said, “it has been ascertained that these lands are not of a nature to contain silver mines”, while Manuel Barretto in 1667 wrote of “the pretended mines of Chicova… where Dom Estevão de Ataide found silver buried in great quantities, but not formed there”. Moreover, the only time we know of that experienced miners investigated the possible presence of silver deposits, nothing was found. However, this scepticism did little to discredit the belief that silver was there, and there in quantity. The evidence for this was the frequent discovery of samples; the manufacture of silver objects for use in churches, the houses of residents and the court of Monomotapa; and the evidence that soldiers were sometimes paid with this silver.
It has been said that the genius of successful fraudsters is to know exactly what the public most wants to believe at any moment. Following the discovery by the Spanish of Potosí (the mountain of silver in Bolivia) and the mines in Mexico in the 1540s and 1550s, the Portuguese became obsessed with finding similar mines in Africa, which they already knew to be rich in gold.
However, a successful fraud needs fraudsters as well as gullible victims. It was believed that silver discoveries would be rewarded with honours, grants, the sending of soldiers and trade goods and even advances of money. António Gomes recorded that when Diogo Simões Madeira first reported his finds of silver, “he was called Excellency by some, Your Honour by others, thinking of him already a Count or Marquis.” It was also in the Africans’ interest to pretend they knew where the silver was, since they often received rewards and gifts on the promise of revealing the mines. Monomotapa Mukombwe himself wrote to the king of Portugal saying that two Africans had come to him claiming to know where the mines were, “and I spent some cloth and cows on them only to find out where it might be and after they had taken that from me, they left without saying where it was and went to cheat the Portuguese.” According to Francisco de Souza, who wrote in 1710, an African called Manuel persuaded the Monomotapa to make him a chief, after which he said he would reveal the mines.
How was the fraud carried out? It is clear that samples of silver, allegedly assayed and smelted in the Rivers, did from time to time reach Goa and Lisbon, but these were almost certainly fashioned from the silver patacas (Spanish coins) which were common on the coast and formed the currency of international commerce in the Indian Ocean, or from other silver objects. The same is probably true of the silver items found in the houses of the Portuguese and worn as jewellery at the court of the Monomotapa. António Gomes heard a story about the Peruvian miner Andres de Vides y Albarado. He had a smelter with him and together they “began to make a big fire and in the end they took about two silver patacas. A few months later D. Andres and the smelter had a fight, and we learnt that the silver came from a fork of D. Andres”. DM
Excerpted from The Zambezi: A History (C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd). Footnotes have been removed for ease of reading. The book is available at a retail price of R540.