page_title: Barotseland
section_title: British colonisation
hierarchical_section_title: Barotseland / History / British colonisation
caption_attribution_description: English: Wana Wena (Mwanawina II), the new king of the Marutse, from the book Seven Years in South Africa, volume 2, page 357
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: Barotseland's status at the onset of the colonial era differed from the other regions which became Zambia. It was the first territory north of the Zambezi to sign a minerals concession and protectorate agreement with the British South Africa Company (BSAC) of Cecil Rhodes. This was prompted by Lewanika's fears of an invasion by the Matebele under Lobengula.
  By 1880, the kingdom was stabilised and King Lewanika signed a treaty on 26 June 1889 to provide the kingdom international recognition as a State. After the discovery of diamonds, King Lewanika began trading with Europe. The first trade concession was signed on 27 June 1889 with Harry Ware, in return King Lewanika and his kingdom were to be protected. Ware transferred his concession to Cecil Rhodes of the British South Africa Company. Seeking the improvement of the military protection and with the intention to sign a treaty with the British Government, King Lewanika signed on 26 June 1890 the Lochner concession putting Barotseland under the protection of the British South Africa Company.  At that time, there was European administration in Southern Rhodesia, in Nyasaland further East, and the beginnings of European administration in what was then called North-Eastern Rhodesia (centred on Fort Jameson, now Chipata) and also North-Western Rhodesia - basically Barotseland. Later, these two were administratively combined as simply "Northern Rhodesia", later divided up in five Provinces and Barotseland, which was treated slightly differently from the rest.
  Later Lewanika protested to London and to Queen Victoria that the BSAC agents had misrepresented the terms of the concession, but his protests fell on deaf ears, and in 1899 the United Kingdom proclaimed a protectorate and governed it as part of Barotziland-North-Western Rhodesia.
caption: Mwanawina II, king of the Lozi people in 1876–1878
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