Drawing the ‘natural border’ between Southern and Northwest Rhodesia along the Zambezi had ignored the river people who lived along it. Yet these river people were centrally placed to exploit the new opportunities the boundary provided, and over time, helped to consolidate the idea of the border. Although, initially, the mid-Zambezi river people continued to treat the river as a link in everyday social life and deployed old strategies of crossing as a form of resistance to new demands, colonial state-making nonetheless had an influence. As the violence of being on the contested margins of predatory pre-colonial African states was replaced by the violence of early colonial extraction, the presence of government agents at local level and the idea of the law began to change the fractious internal dynamics of frontier society. This chapter examines the beginnings of a longer process through which the ‘river people’ of the mid-Zambezi were incorporated into two separate colonial states, with a focus on the Southern Rhodesian side of the border.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the role of the law and courts as ‘essential elements in European efforts to establish and maintain political domination’. Yet there were particular problems of establishing such domination in borderlands,3 and in communities lacking strong traditions of centralized authority. My aim in this chapter is to shed light on the way in which the idea of the state began to take hold in decentralized mid-Zambezian society, as the law was used by government agents to bolster their authority and by others to curb abuses of power, and began to constrain the excesses of violence that had characterized frontier society in the late nineteenth century. The chapter draws on early Native Commissioners’ reports and records of criminal cases from the Zambezi valley heard before the district magistrates’ courts between 1905 and 1923. It pays particular attention to the charges brought by and against local government agents, and to a series of murder cases relating to fights at Tonga funerals.

Despite the different processes of state-making on either side of the border, the early decades of colonial rule on both banks were shaped by a common process of economic marginalization and increasing isolation along much of the river valley, which was remote from the new centres of colonial political and economic power, inaccessible from the main contours of the developing colonial transport infrastructure, and depopulated through the effects of the expanding tsetse belt.