SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This study seeks to throw new light on Lozi history partly by exploiting new sources, written and oral, and partly by asking new questions. A thorough examination of the Lozi's concept of their own history reveals the existence of complex and detailed variants of oral Tradition, whose character is fully discussed in this thesis. These different variants of tradition can be used to illuminate many of the crucial problems of Lozi history. In addition this thesis draws upon a variety of written sources, some of them hitherto unused by historians. It seeks to combine the written and oral and oral material to produce a coherent interpretation of Lozi history, and at the same time to explore the character and reliability of each type of evidence by comparing and contrasting, as well as by supplementing the one with the other. The main emphasis of this thesis is on the attempt to establish the nature lines of development of the Lozi traditional structure and institutions from time of the founding of the present Lozi dynasty, probably in the mid-seventeenth century. It also endeavours to show how external factors affected this structure, and the extent to which such external factors were themselves exploited by the Lozi, and especially by king Lewanika. The arrival of Mbunda immigrants at the end of the eighteenth century of the Makololo invaders in about 1840, and of the Europeans whether as missionaries, traders, empire builders or administrators, are the main external factors considered. In the past , writers on Lozi history have tended to treat these external factors factors as distinot from the main internal development of the structure of the Lozi state. In this thesis the survival of the Lozi state into the twentieth century is examined and explained in terms of the interaction of internal and external factors in Bulozi.