Istwa Nou

Trade across the eastern half of the Congo basin ran on an institution usually translated as secret societies. Their members were the merchants who moved the goods, together with leading figures from the chiefdoms and small kingdoms the routes passed through. Women could belong as well as men. The societies stretched from the Lomami River east to Lake Tanganyika. Secret here meant roughly what it means among Masons: ranks a member advanced through, rituals marking each advancement, and observances reserved for those who had reached a given standing. The practical effect was security. A merchant travelling with cargo could call on hospitality and protection in each district he entered, because in every district there were members of his own society or of one allied to it. Goods therefore crossed a patchwork of independent polities, including polities at odds with each other. With no single state anywhere in the region, this was the machinery that made distance trade possible, and it was made of obligation.

By the early centuries CE the country around the Upemba depression, where the Lualaba River runs through southern Congo, had become a serious industrial district. It produced iron, iron goods and salt, and shipped them north along the Lualaba and the Lomami into the trading networks of the central Congo basin. Then the region added a second metal. Ironworking Bantu communities living to the south, at the edge of the basin, sat on top of the copper deposits of southern Congo and northern Zambia, the ground later called the Copper Belt, and they worked out copper smelting for themselves. Nobody taught them. Copper then moved out in both directions, north up the rivers of the Congo basin and south through the Zambezi. Three commodities, iron, salt and copper, produced with African technique and carried on African rivers, supplied a continental market. The system was working while Rome still stood, and no standard account of the ancient world mentions it.