Examine the importance of trade and religion in the Rozvi state
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Recent studies by the historians of pre-colonial Africa have tended to assume that external trade has always led to the formation or enlargement of states, and was crucial for the continued existence of these states. An example where an uncritical application of the above 'trade-stimulus hypothesis' has led to some distortion of reality has been in the study of the Rozvi empire in Southern Rhodesia in the eighteenth century. Previous students of the Rozvi empire have claimed that the latter was such a loosely connected tribal confederacy that its internal power bases-given as military and religious-were politically so slender that on their own they could not have sustained whatever power the Rozvi ruler wielded. Instead, it is said that the main source of the power exercised by the Rozvi Mambo came mainly from the latter's ability to redistribute the profits of external trade, especially that of the gold trade of which he is said to have had a strictly enforced monopoly. This paper tries to show that the claim that the Rozvi empire was based mainly on foreign trade is not supportable on the basis of the evidence so far advanced. To do this the paper challenges the view that the Mambo had a monopoly of trade. It shows that this conclusion is arrived at through a mis-understanding of the sources. In reality, the Rozvi rulers took part in external trade and influenced it, but they did not possess a controlling monopoly. Rozvi subjects were also free to take part in external trade, provided they obeyed the Mambo's decrees for regulating and restricting possible subversive activities by foreign traders in the Rozvi empire. The picture of the Rozvi empire that emerges from contemporary Portuguese records and oral evidence is that of a relatively stable, virile and powerful polity which from time to time used to despatch expeditionary forces to regions well beyond its territorial boundaries in order to maintain law and order to protect Rozvi trade and political interests. The strength of the Rozvi empire is seen to have come from internal rather than external factors. Cattle rather than external trade appear to have been the most important economic power base of the Rozvi rulers.
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