Pre-1800: (The Political Economy of Southern Africa Before the Nineteenth Century — Cattle as the Basis of Power, Great Zimbabwe’s Stone Structures and Gold-…

Pre-1800: (The Political Economy of Southern Africa Before the Nineteenth Century — Cattle as the Basis of Power, Great Zimbabwe’s Stone Structures and Gold-Mining, the Mutapa State, and the Southeastern Lowveld Where Ngoni-Speakers Organized in Small Chiefdoms Shaped by Terrain): Cattle were central to the growth of states, the creation of wealth, and the stratification of society south of the Zambezi before the nineteenth century — cattle ownership meant political power and provided the material basis of early chieftainship. Societies were based on polygamy, and economic systems depended on the extensive use of female labor, particularly in agriculture. The dry grassland of modern Botswana witnessed the emergence of some of the earliest chiefdoms, characterized by hilltop settlements combining cattle-keeping and cultivation. A similar socioeconomic system was responsible for the growth of Great Zimbabwe, a Shona state noted for its stone structures that reached its apex in the early fifteenth century, its prosperity also based on gold-mining — a crucial activity on the plateau between the tenth and eighteenth centuries. Great Zimbabwe was supplanted by Mutapa, which took advantage of gold and regional trade networks linking central southern Africa with the Indian Ocean. The southeastern lowveld would become the political powerhouse of the region through much of the nineteenth century. Before about 1700, Ngoni-speakers tended to organize in small chiefdoms, a pattern shaped by terrain — numerous hills separated by river valleys flowing into the Indian Ocean, with a wide variety of grazing and farming resources enabling small family homesteads to exist largely independent of one another.