their early 19th-century heartland. Guns, trade and colonial era The success and wealth of Luba people grew in relative isolation because they were far from the eastern and western coasts of Africa, living in difficult to reach terrain. The forests and mountains protected them, as did their neighbors who blocked traders from direct and regular contact with distant international traders, in order to monopolize the gains from trade with international operators. This originally shielded the Luba from the ill effects of the earlier slave trade. Later, however, the Luba people became victims of the slave demand and trading, in some cases selling people from their own lands as slaves. But, by the 1850s, the slavers began intruding into the Luba people lands. Despite a ban on slave trading in the Western world, the eastern and northern parts of Africa, led by Arab-Swahili slave and ivory traders entered into the eastern and northeastern regions of the Luba Empire. These intruders came with guns, experience of running caravans, other tools of raids and wars. Although the weapons of the Luba people were not primitive (they had weapons such as bows and arrows, swords, axes, poison), the intruders had much more advanced weapons. David Livingstone, in his memoir, wrote how amazed the Luba people were with the guns, as they thought they were tobacco pipes, while the gun was the weapon that mowed down large populations of the Luba. The notorious slave and ivory trader, Tippu Tip for example wrote, translates Thomas Reefe, "Luba had no guns, their weapons were bows and arrows; guns they did not know. The guns we have with us, they asked us, "Are they pestles?" The conquest of the Luba people was swift. Msiri, a Tanzanian operator supplying ivory and slaves to the Sultan of Zanzibar, raided and took over the southeastern Shaba region of Luba people. Its other side, the southwestern borders were breached by the Ovimbundu ivory and slave hunters for the Portuguese interests. While slaves could no longer be exported to the Americas, they were used for work and caravan operations within Africa. Breaches from all sides, by better equipped armies, weakened the Luba Empire rapidly between 1860 and 1880s, and accelerated its demise. In parallel, the news of disarray and confusion from many corners of the Luba Empire, led to internal disputes on succession and strategy when the Luba king Ilunga Kabale died in