page_title: Barotseland
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Barotseland / Geography
caption_attribution_description: English: Zambezi river and Barotseland — Zambia. Français&#160;: Les principales villes du Barotseland.
context_page_description: Barotseland is a Kingdom between Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Angola. It is the homeland of the Lozi people or Barotse, or Malozi, who are a unified group of over 20 individual formerly diverse tribes related through kinship, whose original branch are the Luyi, and also assimilated northern Sotho tribe of South Africa known as the Makololo.
  The Barotse speak Silozi, a language most closely related to Sesotho. Barotseland covers an area of 126,386 square kilometres, but is estimated to have been twice as large at certain points in its history. Once an empire, the Kingdom stretched into Namibia and Angola and included other parts of Zambia, including its central Copperbelt Province, south-west of the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga Province.
  Under the British colonial administration, Barotseland was a Protectorate of the British Crown from the late 19th-century. The Litunga, the Lozi word for the king of Barotseland, had negotiated agreements, first with the British South African Company, and then with the British government that ensured the kingdom maintained much of its traditional authority according to the Litunga.
context_section_description: Its heartland is the Barotse Floodplain on the upper Zambezi River, also known as Bulozi or Lyondo, but it includes the surrounding higher ground of the plateau comprising all of what was the Western Province of Zambia. In pre-colonial times, Barotseland included some neighbouring parts of what are now the Northwestern, Central and Southern Province as well as Caprivi in northeastern Namibia and parts of southeastern Angola beyond the Cuando or Mashi River.
caption: Map showing the principal towns of Barotseland
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