This article analyses the lived experience of the Chikunda people of the Zambezi hinterland in the pre-colonial period. It investigates, in particular the Chikunda diaspora in the nineteenth century, when the disintegration of the prazos of the lower Zambezi in the middle of the nineteenth century, resulted in these former military slaves of the Portuguese escaping in large numbers into the communities of the interior or to establish autonomous communities "beyond the gaze and control of the Portuguese colonial state". It argues that the Chikunda diaspora is "part of a larger pre-capitalist migratory pattern" of "transfontiersmen" namely, those who were usually victims of class or race oppression, such as slaves, deserters, criminals and conscripts, who fled from their natal societies across ecological and political frontiers. Their migration differed from that of other groups in a number of ways such as the illegal or extra legal character of their migration, the intent of the fugitives to sever permanently their ties with their natal societies and the absence of women in their midst. The Chikunda diaspora, it is contended, bears many similarities with other transfontiersmen experiences in Latin America, the Caribbean and China and offers a useful way of reconceptualising both the dynamics of cultural interchange between the transfrontiersmen and their host societies as well as providing "an important gender dimension to the study of interactions beyond the periphery".
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