John Harrison Clark or Changa-Changa (c. 1860–1927) 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. There he became a prominent local figure, and a partner in the first licensed brewery in Northern Rhodesia. Remaining in Broken Hill for the rest of his life, he died there in 1927.
Early life
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.
Rise to power
Slave-raiding was rife in Mashukulumbwe, with gangs of Arab, Portuguese and mixed Chikunda-Portuguese ethnicity competing for the capture of local Baila and Batonga people for use as slaves. Clark, who became known to the locals as "Changa-Changa", raised and trained an "army" from among the Senga people, and issued these men a vague uniform. How he became a chief is equivocal—Deare asserted that Clark arrived in Mashukulumbwe "on the very day the chief died ... [and] was finally made chief of the tribe". According to a story told by an acquaintance, Harry Rangeley, and partly corroborated by Alexander Scott in the Central African Post in 1949, he became chief by virtue of winning a battle. Rangeley's version has him defeating a rival chief; Scott has Clark coming to the rescue of a Baila village under attack by Portuguese slavers, "liberat[ing] the slaves" and thereupon being proclaimed chief by the grateful villagers.
As chief, Clark secured his authority with his army of Senga warriors, defined and collected "taxes" and oversaw the activities of foreign traders in the area. Locals paid tribute in the form of cattle, and overseas merchants had to obtain a "trading licence" from Harrison Clark before they could operate in his territory. Where a trader was harvesting ivory to sell overseas, Clark levied every other tusk as an "export tax". As well as regulating local trade, Clark encouraged the people to make paths between their villages, and repeatedly defended them against the various slave-raiding gangs. As his Senga troops expanded, he conferred various grandiose titles on himself, including "King of the Senga" and "Chief of the Mashukulumbwe".