Many of the chikunda were originally chattel slaves, raised to the status of soldiers, traders or administrators of parts of the prazo as a client or unfree dependent.
The minor states in and around the Zambezi River valley were brought under closer Portuguese control as a result of the Scramble for Africa, which required colonial powers to bring territories they claimed under their jurisdiction, the doctrine of "effective occupation".
[1] The prazo holder was responsible for administering justice in the land comprised in his grant and also collecting taxes from its inhabitants, out of which he was supposed to pay an annual rent to the crown, and to maintain sufficient armed retainers to keep the peace.
[2] The prazeiros only rarely removed the local chiefs resident on their estates, preferring to retain them as subordinates, and few attempted to start commercial agriculture, but expropriated the surplus products of their peasants and also profited from the trade in ivory and slaves.
[9] However, although many chattel slaves were acquired by capture or purchase to undertake agricultural work, mining or as house-servants or craftsmen on the prazos, it was normal from the mid-18th century for the retainers who became soldiers or administrators to offer themselves as voluntary unfree dependents in return for protection and a prospect of advancement and enrichment.
By the mid-18th century, the term chikunda, which probably derives from the bantu word kunda means “to conquer”,[10] was reserved for the armed clients of the prazo owners, and other designations were used for personal or household slaves.
[17][18] Some chikunda did manage to break away from their masters, leave their prazo and hunt for ivory in the Shire valley, where they competed with Yao traders in the mid-18th century [19] The great Mozambique drought of 1794 to 1802 and subsequent droughts and smallpox epidemics lasting into the 1830s destroyed the agricultural economy of the Zambezia prazos, as the cultivators could not feed themselves, let alone produce surpluses to maintain the chikunda and prazeiros.
Many chikunda deserted their prazos and some formed armed bands seeking any means to survive, so worsening the situation created by drought.
Each aringa consisted of a wooden stockade, supported by earthworks in the form of a ditch and bank, often with inner walls protecting the more important sections of the town.
[33] The chikunda had ceased to be clients of the prazeros when the Zambezia agricultural system had collapsed, and they were now recruited through gifts of modern weapons, land or wives, and retained by being allowed to share of the profits of slave raiding.
[35] Each of the Zambezia states had a significant force of chikunda divided into regiments, usually based near the borders of its territory to facilitate slave raiding and as protection against external threats.
[39] Portuguese attempts to co-opt the rulers of these minor Afro-Goan and Afro-Portuguese states into the colonial system by granting them full legal title to the land they occupied, tax exemptions and even sums of cash generally failed.
[40][41] Until 1868, the governors of Mozambique and Tete had few troops of their own and preferred to use the chikunda of any prazeiros loyal to the Portuguese government or from any minor state opposed to whatever ruler they targeted, rather than using soldiers from metropolitan Portugal or Goa.
These nominally loyal chikunda had been used with some success in the 1850s against slave trading by the Sultan of Angoche and the Pereira family, but two families continued to give the Portuguese governors trouble: the Vas dos Anjos in the Lower Shire and the da Cruz, who ruled a section of the middle Zambezi in Manica and Tete provinces, centred on the aringa of Massangano.
Between November 1867 and May 1869, three more expeditions were sent against Massangano, with increasing numbers of troops from Portugal and Goa, artillery and assistance from the chikunda of the de Sousa state of Gorongosa.
Da Cruz chikunda harassed those Portuguese forces that had to march overland to Massangano and their supply lines to such an extent that they could not invest the aringa.
Although the da Cruz were subsequently left in peace for about 20 years, and recognised as effectively autonomous, they made little use of their military successes and never became more than a bandit state, based on the slave trade and the tolls it could impose on river traffic, as they occupied a sparsely-populated and infertile area.
The most successful of these may have been José Rosário de Andrade, known as Kanyemba ("the ferocious"), who began assembling a private army in the 1870s and settled in the region of Bawa, two hundred kilometers west of Tete, from which he either traded with or raided the surrounding countryside.
[50] Although the Portuguese Minister of Marine, Andrade Corvo, who also had responsibility for the overseas territories, attempted bilateral negotiations with Britain in 1879, 1882 and 1884 to fix the Ruo River (now the south-eastern border of Malawi) as the northern limit of Portuguese rule, these talks were overtaken by the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 and its requirement for effective occupation rather than claims based on early discovery or more recent exploration.
Rhodes' troops arrested de Sousa in 1890 and drove his chikunda out of parts of Barue and Rupire before the definitive Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1891 assigned virtually all the contested areas to Portugal.
In Zambezia, the cipais, or armed police, of the Mozambique Company gradually asserted control of the area comprised in the company's charter, taking over the chikunda's police and tax gathering roles, but it took until 1902 before the last of the chikunda states came completely under Portuguese control[58][59] One of the last such states was the so-called Military Republic of Maganja da Costa.
[60] After the deaths of João Bonifacio Alves da Silva in 1861 and of his brother Victorino Romão in 1874, the territory they had controlled evolved into a form of chikunda republic, with effective power devolved to the captains of each aringa.
However, the Portuguese raised a much larger force, mainly of auxiliaries from the Nguni peoples, that broke the back of the rebellion by the end of 1917, although fighting on a smaller scale continued through 1918.