The Lands of the Bantu

The geography and climate of Africa south of the equator is much less simple than that of the northern half of the continent. Very briefly, however, high and rather dry steppe country runs south from the Ethiopian highlands through the middle of East Africa. It then crosses over towards the western side of the subcontinent, ending up in the Kalahari desert, with the dry lands of Botswana and the Orange Free State on one side and those of Namibia on the other. On the other hand, low-lying and distinctly humid country extends from southern Cameroun right across the northern half of the Congo basin to Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi, and from there it continues down the Zambezi valley to the Indian Ocean coast and round through southern Mozambique into Natal. In general, the steppe country is more suited to pastoralism than to agriculture and, therefore, tends to be only lightly populated. Equally, in the dense equatorial forest, agriculture is only practicable in clearings and beside riverbanks where sunlight can penetrate, and so here again population is very thin and until quite recently was virtually confined to the rivers and the seacoast, where a little agriculture could be combined with fishing. The best conditions for food production are found in the borderlands between the two zones, mostly therefore in the middle of the subcontinent. This is where population is densest and where, by the end of the eighteenth century, the most complex and centralised political institutions were found.