page_title: John Harrison Clark
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: John Harrison Clark / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: British Merchant. Johnson&#39;s new chart of national emblems, 1868.jpg Johnson's new chart of national emblems. Print showing the flags of various countries, those flown by ships, and the "Signals for Pilots." In the top left corner is the "United States" 37-star flag, in the top right corner is the "Royal Standard of the United Kingdom Great Britain &amp; Ireland"; in the bottom left corner is the "Russian Standard" and in the bottom right corner is the "French Standard." The flags on this sheet differ slightly from those on another sheet numbered 4 [top left] and 5 [top right].
context_page_description: John Harrison Clark or Changa-Changa effectively ruled much of what is today southern Zambia from the early 1890s to 1902. He arrived alone from South Africa in about 1887, reputedly as an outlaw, and assembled and trained a private army of Senga natives that he used to drive off various bands of slave-raiders. He took control of a swathe of territory on the north bank of the Zambezi river called Mashukulumbwe, became known as Chief "Changa-Changa" and, through a series of treaties with local chiefs, gained mineral and labour concessions covering much of the region.
  Starting in 1897, Clark attempted to secure protection for his holdings from the British South Africa Company. The Company took little notice of him. A local chief, Chintanda, complained to the Company in 1899 that Clark had secured his concessions while passing himself off as a Company official and had been collecting hut tax for at least two years under this pretence. The Company resolved to remove him from power, and did so in 1902. Clark then farmed for about two decades, with some success, and moved in the late 1910s to Broken Hill.
context_section_description: Not much is known about John Harrison Clark's early life. The son of a man "in the hardware business" (according to a military officer who knew him, Major G R Deare), he was born in Port Elizabeth, Cape Colony around 1860, and engaged for a time in the Cape Mounted Riflemen during the 1880s. A tall, physically strong man, he wore a large black moustache and was regarded as a fine shot and a capable hunter.
  Harrison Clark left South Africa in 1887, but it is unclear why; according to a story that may be apocryphal, he fled the country as an outlaw soon after his revolver fired—by accident, so the story goes—and killed a man. Whatever the truth, he travelled to Mozambique, then a Portuguese territory, where he made his way upriver along the Zambezi until he reached Feira, a long-abandoned Portuguese settlement at the confluence of the Zambezi and Luangwa Rivers, in what is today southern Zambia. Feira was founded by missionaries from Portugal in about 1720, but by 1887 it was a ghost town. Its last inhabitants had fled amid a native rising about half a century before, and since then it had been deserted.
  David Livingstone, who visited Feira in 1856, described it as utterly ruined at that time, but still conspicuous by the ramshackle monastery buildings on the site. When Clark arrived about three decades later, the Portuguese still maintained a boma (fort) called Zumbo on the opposite bank of the Luangwa, but the surrounding country, then called Mashukulumbwe, was largely wild, and out of the control of any government. Harrison Clark settled at Feira, initially alone. According to a letter he wrote in 1897, he flew the British Merchant Navy's Red Ensign flag over his house.
caption: The Red Ensign, as flown by Harrison Clark over his house at Feira.
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