Cattle-keeping, rain-shrine cultivators of the middle Zambezi valley, the Batoka plateau and the Kafue flats — the Tonga (Batonga/Batoka), the closely-related Ila of Bwila and their Lundwe, Lumbu and Sala neighbours. They had no paramount king: authority lay with village headmen and famous rain-shrine chiefs such as Monze, whom Livingstone met in 1855. Raided in turn by the Makololo, the Lozi under Lewanika and the Ndebele, they were never conquered by a single state before the British South Africa Company.
Not an ending: Batonga chiefs appealed to Bulawayo in 1897 and a B.S.A. police post went up near Monze; a Company station followed on the upper Kafue in 1900, folding the Tonga and Ila into North-Western Rhodesia. The peoples remain — the Gwembe Tonga were forcibly resettled for the Kariba Dam in the 1950s and Tonga and Ila communities are numerous in southern Zambia and around Binga in Zimbabwe today.
The standard two-volume ethnography of the Ila and their Tonga kin, opening with a chapter-length definition of the Ila-Tonga country and its history of raids.
Colson's fieldwork among the middle-Zambezi valley Tonga before the Kariba resettlement; the polity-specific study of Tonga social and political organisation.