On the East African plateau, as we have seen, the essential feature of the later Iron Age was the advent of northern influences from the basin of the upper Nile, associated in pottery manufacture with roulette-decorated wares, the wide distribution of which betokened a much more complete occupation of the land by food-producers than had occurred in early Iron Age times. Specifically, it had meant a diffusion both of specialised pastoralism and of mixed cattle and cereal farming among peoples who had until then been almost exclusively vegecultural. On the Central African plateau, in eastern Zambia and Malawi, a similarly abrupt transition took place around the eleventh century, when the early Iron Age ceramic forms, traditionally made by men, were replaced by radically different ones, typified by that called Luangwa pottery, traditionally made by women. This coincided with a corresponding change in settlement patterns away from the concentrated villages of the early Iron Age to a more dispersed pattern, suggesting a change towards a more cattle-oriented style of farming.

In Central Africa to the west of the Luangwa tributary of the middle Zambezi, however, the later Iron Age meant something very different. The key region here was the Shaba (Katanga) province of Congo (Zaïre), where the later Iron Age material culture seems to have resulted from a period of accelerated development within the region itself.