In 1870, the political economy of Southern Africa was characterised by tremendous regional diversity. The discovery and subsequent mining of diamonds and gold in southern Africa in the 1870s and 1880s was not fortuitous. Africans in southern Africa had prospected for and exploited the gold, copper and iron of the sub-continent since the first millennium AD By the mid-nineteenth century, European explorers were aware that minerals existed in abundance in the Transvaal and adjacent territories. A major justification for confederation and the annexation of the Transvaal had been the danger of a black-white confrontation in South Africa. Both Cetshwayo and Lobengula, king of the Ndebele kingdom north of the Limpopo, feared that Christianity and its new mores would undermine their authority. For people south of the Zambezi, and to some extent even for the Lozi to the north-west, the crucial issue in these years was increasingly what strategy to adopt towards the intruders from the south.