Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Politics of the Court and Bush
Springs of Political Authority 1
The Kinga in their Region 7
Circulation 9
Chapter Two
Domain and Realm
The Way Things Worked 14
The Domain as a Chiefdom 18
(a) Allegiance and Munificence 20
(b) The Princely Office 23
(c) Centring the Polity 29
Problems of Scale 32
Competition and Systematic Change 37
Court & Bush: The Kinga Shift Dimension 44
Antipolitanism 51
Chapter Three
Roots of Kinga Law and Right
Rule of Right, Rule of Law 54
Law & Social Structure in the Northern Realm 60
Lords & Landlords 68
The Logic & Spirit of the Law 72
Division in the Western Realm 77
Magoma 80
Rival Princes 83
Dynastic Claims 85
ii
Chapter Four
Concepts of Sanga Power
Kinga-Nyakyusa Expansion 92
History vs. Genealogy 95
Political Vitality 99
Conditions of Manipulative Power 102
Political Logic: Kinga / Mahanzi Differences 105
Social Control 107
The Ruling Establishments 110
Reassessing Domain & Realm 111
Chapter Five
War Patterns: Politics & Ethics
War as Structure 115
War in the Social Memory 118
Territories 124
Profits of War 129
Faces of War 133
Heroics 135
Kyelelo of the West 139
Later Adventures of Kyelelo 145
Sham, Bluff, and Sacrament 149
Chapter Six
Prince and Priest
Bush Doctor—Court Priest 154
Autochthonous Lore—Immigrant Authority 161
Localism and Ambience 163
Gardens, Boundaries, and Antidotes 167
Chapter Seven
The Paranoid Prince
Managing Social Danger 189
An Exiled God 198
The Would-be-gods 210
References 229
iii
THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER ONE
1
each component household fits in its one-and-only place. Achieving the
same result in an amity-based society, where men form their alliances
without reckoning on kinship, entails a ‘politics of amity’ which mainline
anthropology hasn’t a model for. In this book I don’t offer such a model but
concern myself with the empirical stuff on which it might be based. The
well-known ‘segmentary lineage’ model accounts for the way new house-
holds are given each its one-only spot in a comprehensive topological model
of political space in what then amounts to a trans-local community. A
‘segmentary amity’ model (if that is what we need) should do the same. In
Twin Shadows I compared Kinga in a set series of reference frames with
other peoples described for the Sowetan (for ‘southwestern Tanganyika’)
region. In Four Realms my focus is still comparative but restricted to
political process. I use the Nyakyusa studies of Godfrey and Monica Wilson
again, and again make their Nyakyusa a foil for my efforts to understand
the Kinga. I further pursue my theme of the ‘antipolitan ethic’—the moral
position common to the men of both Kinga and Nyakyusa protostates—
which allows that a man’s gift of loyalty to a ruler is retractable for cause.
An earlier, ancestral community, such as would have been in
place in the region early in the seventeenth century, would have
continued to develop for some generations less politically and cultur-
ally than demographically. As late as 1800, if I could have observed it,
I expect uKinga would have passed muster as an acephalous micro-
culture (in French and more intuitively, a peuplade ), an autonomous folk
community with a distinctive culture of its own. Each local settle-
ment within the larger community, however, would have had its peculi-
arities, reflecting its own autonomy and self-sufficiency in everyday
affairs. The presence of political authority would be more noticeable in
some than other local communities, but a segmentary order would be
developing—most local settlement areas would be articulated with a
central settlement where moots would be held.
2
from any vantage point outside of family membership. By the time
they must deal with each other as adults of the same sex, parent and
child in daily interaction generally make do with the softer sanctions
of reciprocity, and authority comes to be scarcely detectable. Father
and son, elder and younger brother may have to settle their disputes
as strangers do, depending on special institutions of peer-dealt
justice. But the essential feature of acephalous social structure is
that the socializing groups are domestic units or compounds recog-
nizing mutual dependence and agreed to hanging onto it in face of
trouble.
3
realm during my fieldwork. It was an act of self-help by an injured
party from a neighbouring political domain, and was considered to
settle accounts. The matter was never brought to court, having been
resolved within the rules of the game in the ‘bush culture’: the local
ruler at the time had more to lose by getting the incident into the
colonial record books than by letting it pass unsanctioned. But the
occurrence itself discloses the rather special pattern of history
which marks Sowetan history. It is easiest to understand when it is
considered as a temporal series of structural overlays. Rather than
the new way of doing things replacing the old, you get an accumulation
of law. An injured party can revert to an older scheme when the
current institutions of government are inefficient or inaccessible. In
this case, too, we have the evidence that the overlay pattern is as old
as the institution of the royal courts among Kinga. The direct
approach to redressing a tort—self-help, the transactional sanc-
tion—had to be one of the earliest ruling court’s targets in its take-
over of the jural system. That it nonetheless persevered perhaps
twelve generations later should not surprise.
Kinga in colonial times (as always before) would not have seen
their courts exercising authority in a style calculated to erode the
substance of justice rendered. In their hearings the final decisions
were backed by the authority of high office, but always rendered in a
manner dramatizing a consensus of peers, so capturing its legiti-
macy. To be “tried in open court” describes the Kinga court case
exactly: the facts being quickly established, most of the talk you will
hear is from the public, assigning judgement. When the tide of opinion
falls back, the judgement is ready in the hands of the ruler. In this way,
the kind of authority a traditional chiefly figure could exercise was
set apart as an extraordinary instrument, different in kind to the
ordinary authority exercised within a household. It was a power, like
4
witchcraft, to which ordinary men don’t aspire. In the case of the
Kinga ‘high prince’ unkuludeva , the dangerous nature of this power was
dramatized in special ways, including the sequestering of the ruler’s
person. At a hearing in a princely court the ruler’s presence was felt
not seen; the court’s decision remained tentative until the lay magis-
trate had amply reported it to the prince, and returned to the court
to render it final. Procedures in lesser courts were not so elaborate
but evoked the same principles.
5
ciple, impartial coverage. In a fully centralized system, as Thomas
Hobbes was so careful to note, the political problem is only negative—
how to keep the top offices (or power élites) in check. Looking back
from this end of our millennium to seventeenth-century England I see
at once that the governments Hobbes could have had in view were—
and I look away from the matter of scale—a good deal closer in style
to the Kinga than to ours. The crisis of that century had to do with
the balance of power in a monarchy formed from hitherto autonomous
regional kingdoms. Kinga in the nineteenth century were engaged in
testing the potential of a centralizing ‘kingship’ and of limiting
regional autonomy, all on a smaller scale. The three centuries and
more since Leviathan have given us plenty of practical experience with
the problem of authority and power, but for most of us only a dimin-
ished sense of its transparency. Still, since the great source of
complication in our own world has been the growth of bureaucratic
government and industry, we can set much of our experience aside.
One of the problems facing the world’s first politician was that
of holding people. When a moment’s dissatisfaction is enough to
prompt a man to pull up stakes and go off on his own or join another
group, authority has no firm dimension in time. Even the tightest
agnatic kinship systems do allow exit, but they so limit its marginal
value (to a discontented or frustrated man of the lineage) that the
rate of exodus is small. Universalization of authority is by definition
not complete until belonging is forever, but practical political systems
do not try to reach so far into the regions of the soul. It is enough
that the thought of exit be unattractive to anyone with a stake in
the system. In great urban societies personal mobility may even be
protected by the laws of the state, but in the politics of particu-
larism freedom has a different meaning.
6
traditional laws of the sea. While the captain’s broad authority
remains tied to the time-scheme of a voyage, the crew’s obligations
are contractual. If the captain’s sovereignty is universalistic in
quality, it is not so in quantity, being limited in time. But let the ship
be outlawed and the terms of the contract change. If the captain’s
authority is to survive at all, it must become genuinely political. The
pirate ship is a mock state. Let a man jump ship, he loses his stake.
But on the mountain slopes of Kingaland, freedom to walk out has
never been so tightly foreclosed. With half a day’s walk from the court
centre you are in the bush and have the freedom of an acephalous
culture. The social contract between yeoman and lord is limited by
this.
7
of uniformly agricultural settlement. I have elsewhere shown that a
comparative ethnography of the Kinga and their neighbours can
justify our grouping them conceptually as a single regional culture. If
it was partly for convenience it was mainly to distinguish the cultural
from the less well-defined geographic region that I have collapsed a
longer phrase, giving me a ‘Sowetan region’ and a ‘Sowetan political
archipelago’ within it, comprising Hehe, Bena, Kinga, and two
Nyakyusa-speaking protostate systems. The Kinga rank, among the
dozen or more Sowetan peoples who were generally recognized by
colonial powers, middling as to population but fairly high with respect
to security, general prosperity, and political development. Each of the
four Kinga realms was governed by a prince of royal blood, and the
princes though styling themselves as perpetual brothers persist-
ently fought. Each realm was composite, consisting of the capital
domain which was the seat of the prince ( unkuludeva ) and lesser
domains whose rulers are lords ( untwa , pl. avatwa ). These last gener-
ally shared nominal kinship with the royal houses but exercised a local
sovereignty which stopped the princely authority at their borders in
every connection except those of ritual recognition and its material
expression in tribute.
8
so that in the formative period of adulthood men lived and slept with
men, women with women, in the kind of association which is grounded
in propinquity and mutual choice not the ascriptive ties of birth.
Everyone had fast friends and a wide personal circle among his or her
gender peers. This protracted bachelorhood for both genders neatly
served the needs of the royal Sanga courts, and can hardly be
explained in any less political way.
Circulation
Should we consider that Kinga, with their court/bush
dichotomy, had evolved a stratified society? This is a key question
concerning the degree of complexity their political economy had
attained, and the answer seems to press accepted theories about
the origin of states. But it is an awkward matter to settle in plain
terms. What is the most elementary form of class stratification?
There are semantic difficulties—a distinction worked out for occupa-
tionally variegated societies may be useless in the Tanganyika high-
lands. Even holding scale and technology constant, systems of
stratification differ a lot from one culture to another. The same
terminology which yields a lucid analysis of one case may only confuse
the next. Efforts to extend the concept of caste to the New World
and pre-colonial Africa offer a case in point. The simplest of human
societies is not without a vertical status dimension, and this will
naturally grow as structural complexity is added, locking in local pecu-
liarities.
9
circulation which the princely courts were able to sponsor.
One point which can be set right at the start is that the Sanga
were only in the very loosest sense a ‘ruling clan’ or even a ‘ruling
class’. Strictly, the Kinga had no clans at all, since there were no
unilineal descent groups which regulated marriage. Local Sanga ruling
lines considered themselves exogamous, but in practice extended
their exogamic regulation no farther than was dictated by common
Kinga incest rules. Political marriages between Sanga courts were
sometimes undertaken, and may well have been common. Even the hint
of preferred endogamy which the known cases offer turns the mind
from ‘clan’ to ‘class’ in any event. The ethnography of the Kinga, like
that of the culturally related Nyakyusa, suggests the use in English
of labels such as ‘ruling group’ or ‘nobility’ or ‘aristocracy of birth’; but
any such labels (including ‘kingship’) should be taken with salt. ‡
The Sanga royals were not the only élite group in Kinga society.
Their importance would be obvious to any observer, though. Kinga are
known by an own (given or chosen) name and a surname which is ordi-
narily a patronymic. In most parts of the land in 1960 eight or ten
surnames would have included almost all the residents, but only the
Sanga were an important grouping in all parts. They were generally the
largest, comprising in all a third of the Kinga people. At one place
young men even talked of abandoning use of the name because they
felt it said nothing about their kinship connections. It is widely
admitted that the Sangas are so many not through natural increase
alone but through a kind of fosterage or identity-patronage which
suited the political strategies of the Sanga courts in traditional
times.
Royal kinsmen are more numerous, comprising all Sanga who can
claim genealogical ties to a living ruler. In 1900 they must have been a
more visible social class than they were in 1960: I had difficulty
judging from reports because disinterested informants were hard to
find, and whatever special prerogatives royal kinsmen may have
enjoyed seem to have been subtle.
10
reward such a man by bestowing on him a royal princess and along
with her the right to bear and pass on the Sanga surname.
11
himself at court to demonstrate that he could be worth his keep. This
he would usually hope to do by participating in cattle raids or equiva-
lent exploits and excelling in the “schools” of war—or he might have a
vocation as a minstrel, an alternative path to honour. The height of
success for a warrior at court was to be taken into the royal guard
avanyigoha ; but the guard was not separately quartered, nor was a
royal Sanga in any way preferred to a commoner, as each man’s true
prowess was a matter of public knowledge. I was told that a royal
Sanga who proved a coward would be left in war to guarding women. A
commoner of the same cast would simply not have or seek to gain
entrée at court.
12
to be illegitimate, and there was normally a peaceful deployment of
personnel. It was the realm which comprised the setting within which
an efficient political economy might evolve.
13
THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER TWO
14
Greece, imagined in a formative stage. Up to a point, such models may
be apt, if one will grope backward (say) from the Mycenaean ascend-
ancy, imagining the polis of pre-urban, proto-state times in the
Aegean world. Have in mind that even a thousand years later Aristo-
tle would see agriculture as the occupation of our kind.
15
there a more pristine version of the Kinga bush culture prevailed, and
militarism had no standing. What became uKinga under colonial rule
comprised an unusual variety of microclimates and ecologies, all
imposed by a broken terrain. In more accessible parts the Sanga
system had a profound effect on the bush culture but without quite
annulling the autonomous nature of the two lifestyles, court and
bush. Politically, the Sanga courts were buffered by their marginally
settled frontiers but poised to protect the hamlets from which the
court recruited its age-class of warriors.
16
change continued in living memory: the same institutions, beginning
to form centuries ago, were still on the make. Warfare between the
realms and within two of them could still go out of control.
17
territory with a capital village and a ruler who could claim a monopoly
of legitimate force in that territory and was recognized by its people
as competent to receive and negotiate with an emissary from abroad.
Although there was a concentration of daytime population at the
capital, and at least one court village in the Eastern realm seems to
have been well enough palisaded and otherwise hastily fortified to
offer substantial numbers a temporary refuge in case of attack, the
military aspect of settlements was generally not obtrusive. People
mostly lived then in small clusters among their fields, as the bulk of
them still did two or three generations later. The palisades I know
from oral history were royal enclosures meant to protect the ritual
privacy of the prince’s sexual life, not the public safety. Domestic
compounds were in precolonial times stoutly fenced against vermin
but hardly against enemy attack—war, pursued Kinga-style, was not
such. Still, the domain was the solidary entity to which a Kinga must
belong in the event of war, and particularly in case of fighting within
the realm itself, which arose from time to time despite nominal claims
of unity. Jurally, the realm was closer to an alliance than a corporate
entity, but psychologically when a realm was strongly ruled the tilt
may have been the other way. Bachelor men were held to a court by its
attractions not by roots in the soil, and the liveliest courts had the
most to offer in spoils and high times. Kinga youth in 1960 knew the
war games of yore as their supreme sport.
18
have predicted the Kinga court, which embodied the rule of law and all
the features of a ceremonial centre; but we are looking at redistribu-
tional aspects of the Kinga system first.<<[lit]
19
only arise from fear of war and witchcraft. But I do find reason to
assert that these are old and characteristic motives throughout
Eastern Bantu civilization and underlie the social contracts of many
peoples other than the Kinga. I turn now to examine the way the three
kinds of transformation proposed in the model were exhibited in prac-
tice.
20
man or his ancestor was ‘sent out to rule’ that bit of the bush world.
The cow was the most impressive of the marriage goods offered
to a prince. Cattle didn’t thrive in Kinga country, evidently for a vari-
ety of reasons including specific poverties of the soil. Still a prince
must have an impressive herd, and this was kept in circulation even
though he ordinarily received no bridewealth for his own daughters,
who were not for courting but were given away in return for stalwart
21
service. In substitute, he took cattle from the bridewealths of his
subjects, wherever they were sufficiently prosperous to own what
were, by bush-Kinga standards, luxury animals. Where possible the
cow taken would be a productive female and would not be sacrificed
but exchanged by the prince for a bullock from his herd, reckoned suit-
able for slaughter. Cow’s milk was no part of an ordinary daily diet.
The manner of the kill for a bullock at a princely court was orgi-
astic. The animal, being led to a great height above the dance ground,
would be run down the hill in a state of frenzy by the young braves
avanyakivaga armed as for war. The game was to slaughter the beast
on the hoof, each rival group making as if to carve out its share of the
meat (one of the four quarters or the head and neck) without actually
stopping the creature’s career until it had been driven in. It is said
men could be killed or maimed in the fracas without bringing it to a
halt. All the action only added to the spectacle, and the expendability
of men emphasized the extent to which, as the prince’s followers,
they had become kinless. There could be no litigation or rancour over
such deaths. The prince played a political game with his cattle, in
which the imongo cow was one link. Cows kept in the royal herd were
actively productive. Male calves were often awarded to servicemen
settled in the periphery, in return for continued attendance at court,
and would be reared to full size by them. When the prince required a
bullock for slaughter the farmed-out animal would be called in and
replaced with a female from the royal herd—an animal some of whose
offspring would eventually return, in completion of the cycle, as
imongo.
This game was facilitated by the ecology and pattern of settle-
ment. The uneven fertility of the country made it likely the central
power would arise in the richest section of a territory, allowing a con-
centration of cattle there though elsewhere their viability was mar-
ginal. The more settled quality of the central section also reduced
vulnerability to predators, furred and clawed or otherwise. The
slaughter of a bullock was obligatory as part of the ceremonial recep-
tion of imongo. The main beneficiaries were the residents of the court
village, particularly guardsmen, and guests—the rumour of a feast
would bring former avanyakivaga in predictable numbers from their
scattered hamlets. The redistributive aspect of this ritual transac-
tion was powerful. The spectacle of an orgiastic killing, the festival
atmosphere, and the open hospitality of the feasting and dancing
which followed, were bound to swell the prince’s reputation for munifi-
cence. They served to balance but would never disarm his quotidian
image as a harsh authoritarian. In Kinga country sound travels won-
22
derfully, and the sound of dancing works like a magnet on the mind
even at a great distance down the long valleys. Analytically, the redis-
tributive trick is again accomplished, and directed not to a private
party but the public at large, dramatizing the pull of the court.
23
what may be quite properly assumed for some Eastern Bantu cul-
tures, the corporateness of small agnatic lineages, doesn’t apply to
the Kinga. Marriages were not generally arranged, and the idea of
compensation was not applied to the loss of the product a man may
have enjoyed as a free contribution from his daughter. Kinga institu-
tions, and not least the autonomy fostered in women by their life in
the isaka (here, the bachelor women’s hostel which was a prominent
feature especially of the court villages), severely qualified the validity
of any claims men might lay to possessing an effective lineage organi-
sation. When Kinga say “the original Kinga bridewealth” was just two
hoes they are, elliptically, betraying recognition of the economic
growth fostered by the princely courts and tacitly accepting the
rationale of a tax to support them. I found no evidence that lineage
power ever had been sufficient to have established and sanctioned a
bridewealth conceived as capital-goods exchange. We may know little
about the way ‘capitalistic’ bridewealth systems evolve, but the
vested interests which keep them in being are surely corporate, and
for Kinga tradition the only such corporate groups were not lineages
but the political establishments found at courts.
24
There was a notable ambiguity in 1960 in Kinga use of the word
isaka , which in some parts of the land had been retained for the pri-
vate girls’ houses and elsewhere had come to be used for a public
hostel of more general description. The ambiguity reflects change but
also disparity in the influence which the old court culture had
attained in different areas. With the decline of courtly influences,
bush culture predictably revived. With the pax britannica the politics
of bridewealth took on a new importance in bringing currency into
Kinga country from abroad. Accepting the need for bridewealth funds,
expatriate workers dedicated themselves to saving for their mar-
riage or, after the fact, paying it off. In this way the business of
making marriages continued to mobilize resources and to do so in a
manner significant at least for Kinga political identity and morale. At
the level of deep structure political balance was still nourished by the
economics of marriage.
25
men were free of home chores, women were the food producers, and
bachelor women produced a surplus from the soil. It would be foolish
to argue that the court establishments deliberately promoted homo-
sexuality, female diligence, and extended bachelorhood as a solution
to recruitment and logistic problems. We are not dealing with the kind
of society which subjects major features of the life-cycle and gender
career to diktat. But we are dealing with a rather special kind of soci-
ety nonetheless: one in which the political establishment co-opts
youth, fostering an extended bachelorhood in the court villages, and
even directing a neo-local settlement pattern. Even the pattern of
peer-socialization, rearing children from weaning apart from the
parental domicile, so distinctive of Kinga culture at the courts and in
the bush, is hard to conceive as a feature of pre-chiefly times. In all
this, if women be pawns they are no more so than children and men.
26
men of their own or affinal families, in a pattern of mutual dependence
and concern which stabilized social relations under what might other-
wise have been anomic conditions of change and absenteeism. The new
institution developed out of the old through a series of historical
transformations in which the social interest in marriages was not
lost, but the locus of concern transferred from court to people in
consonance with the decentralising trends of the first half of the
twentieth century. The failure of British-sponsored court authority,
in spite of repeated efforts, to control the rise of bridewealths
bespeaks the change which had taken place and points the contrast
to earlier political conditions. Because of the size of the transac-
tions by the end of the 1950s, when there was not a single private
Landrover in Kingaland albeit men were paying for their brides the
price of a usable vehicle, the debt-network entailed in a marriage
would ordinarily go well beyond the limits of the individual ‘lineage’
settlement ilitsumbe. Indebtedness was beginning to knit together all
the households of one domain through a web of bilateral, oral con-
tracts. By contrast, when the princely courts were intact the unity
of a domain was vested in a common allegiance and conscious depend-
ency, of which the later British-sponsored law-courts were real but
faint reminders.
In the old culture the strategy for ruling a domain would have
been to diminish the self-sufficiency of outlying settlements enough
to create a measure of reliance on the centre, compatible with the
prince’s need for a monopoly of force. This wanted a superstructure
which would catch the imagination of the people at the same time
that it functioned in satisfactory style on the practical plane. All the
prestige and spectacle of the ceremonial centre, and all the impact of
the ritual controls and medicines thought to be concentrated there,
would never convince a farmer whose fear of hunger had outrun his
faith in the system. Fear sets a man’s thoughts running in the witch-
craft mode. All criticism of authority then becomes deeply implicit,
the explicit accusations being nebulous at least until vindicated by
divination, which for Kinga would (or should) always be done at court.
But witchcraft suspicions are so far synergic with discontent as to
be distinctly political in their implications.
27
hardly do without that non-situational, internalized political faith-in-
other, charisma, which we usually if not very cleverly consider to be a
function of inherent personal qualities. It seems instead to be a char-
acter projected through collective behaviour upon the person of a
leader (and willingly, of course, reflected back) in order to resolve per-
sonal insecurities arising among ordinary people. The fit of the public
image to proven personal qualities is usually rather loose. But by
denying disconfirmations and shamelessly exaggerating the leader’s
capacities (and always in a manner which clearly lays out for him the
image he must maintain) the fullest responsibility for the future is
thrust upon him and his office, while the commoner and his powers of
dissent are correspondingly debased. In this way a kind of atonement
is achieved, as fear of one’s peers is allayed while faith in a collective
future is confirmed.
28
with modern press agentry. They kept the high prince secluded in a
hive of vitality which spoke for his own, a stockade full of vigorous
women and their infants, with whom he had unceasing business, grati-
fying and begetting. In several domains I was told that a Kinga lord
could choose to retire on account of age and live on privately. In the
case of genuine impotence I suppose he would be obliged to, though no
Kinga priest would tell me so. The principle on which all were agreed
was that the fertility and munificence of the prince were two aspects
of a single quality which every incumbent of the highest office must
evince.
29
concession is conditional and it is made only in the context of chiefly
competition for popular following. (I do suppose the Enlightenment
philosophers were right in assuming that freedom is the pre-social or
‘default’ condition of a human community—about which more later.)
Intermittently citizens will doubtless arise and demand their due.
When they are gathered in numbers, as they must often be if author-
ity is to be confirmed in a face-to-face polity, discontent can easily
explode. That does not have to happen, only to prove itself possible,
for the people to sense their overwhelming power. In precolonial East
Africa all free adult males were offensively (and equally) armed, and
numbers were strength.
30
ming dance out in the otherwise deep quiet of the bush, which seems
to call one away from the ordinary centres of existence to a perch
above them, a temporary but total autonomy. At the capital one
learned to accept, on converted terms, collective dependency. ‡‡
31
as a polity without internal war. The lesser prince would send not bring
the tribute. This personal abstention marked the boundary of a self-
contained domain, and at the beginning of schism must often have
constituted the manifesto of an untsagila (lieutenant) putting up a
new barracks and proclaiming himself untwa (lord) of a petty domain.
The dramatic significance of personal subjection was crucial—the
true polis was the domain, the realm was a confederation and far less
secure.
Problems of Scale
How grand an establishment could a Kinga prince afford to
maintain? It would be easier to include scale in our model if we had—
what we do not—an accurate set of estimates from German times.
Direct statements of recall or hearsay from 1960 could occasionally
be checked against conditions as I could reconstruct them on site;
but figures remain in the air. In our favour is the evident fact that
most Kinga local populations by 1960 had recovered to precolonial
levels but probably not gone beyond them. This speaks to the ques-
tion of overall population size for what became the British jurisdic-
tion named Ukinga—say, fifty to sixty thousand souls. Still we are in
the unfortunate situation of having to reach quantitative conclu-
sions from qualitative analysis.
32
in the end must have been logistic.
In seasons of heavy clearing and turning the soil all the men
then as in 1960 were turned out to work in the fields—fighting forces
would have been dispersed then simultaneously in all domains of the
four realms of Kingaland and bordering areas of the highlands. But for
much of the year the economic contribution of the bachelor Kinga
male was, apart from occasional engagements with construction or
crafts projects, restricted to clearing land, hunting (for meat and for
the long- or short-term protection of fields and livestock), raiding,
and repelling or discouraging raids on local herds and flocks. Most of
these activities allowed a man wide license as to schedule, ambience,
and degree of commitment. My reconstruction has to be based on the
fragmentary information questioning could evoke. The main con-
straint on residence for an unmarried man was access to cooked
staple foods—adult men didn’t prepare their own meals.
33
prince or his predecessors, or offspring of the priestly families, and
would be fed from family fields they helped to till. Altogether, the
answer to the question of minimal scale for one of these royal courts
has to be given in terms of a core, a casual complement, and a full
muster. Although the prince of a realm or lord of any domain would be
impressively polygynous by Kinga standards, the lord at Maliwa would
unlikely have more than ten living wives, including those inherited. The
prince of a realm might well have the double or more. There would have
been two or three men versed in priestcraft at Maliwa, each with sev-
eral wives; and at a higher court the numbers would increase propor-
tionally. There would always be a few private households at any court,
and various clusters with their plantings nearby.
34
informants for other domains as well.
35
elor men under chiefly rule, their numbers augmented by the system-
atic postponement of marriage. The key in the case of the Nyakyusa
was privileged polygyny, based on the reservation of cattle and brides
to politically privileged elders—men who had officially ‘come out’ as
members of a mature age-village. Nyakyusa fields were tilled and
Nyakyusa cattle were kept mainly by the owner’s sons and their
peers, while women’s productivity from an early age was domestic. By
contrast, the economic engine in the Kinga case was the segregation
of young women and the intensification of their agricultural produc-
tivity. At the larger court villages the concentration of labour in the
princely harem alone was formidable. When to their productivity is
added the youthful energy of their daughters, who would begin pro-
ducing a surplus of food easily a decade before their marriage, and the
work of widows and wives of collateral royal or priestly lines, the
assembled workforce represented an economic resource of remarka-
ble potential. May we assume 150 women in good health? Further
assume that each produces only enough food for an average family,
including one adult male, and the produce of their fields ought to suf-
fice for keeping 300 men the year round, as the number of dependent
children in such a community was always artificially low by (cross-cul-
turally) ordinary ‘family’ standards. Nyakyusaland has been described
in telling detail as a political community organised for the benefit of
“men and elders,” and yet also as a community of peers focused in an
ethic of “good company”. Ironically, it is this society, which gives
women the easier economic lot, which appears to give them the less
satisfactory sense for themselves and their modality of being. Kinga,
partly by way of the balance effected through circulation, but partic-
ularly through the immunities associated with a genuine bachelor
status for both sexes, created a social system in which the industry
of women, and the high morale and moral autonomy which made it pos-
sible, were as prominent in their own way as the political and jural pre-
eminence of men. ‡‡
36
associated with the modalities of family and peer values. But where
Nyakyusa might be torn between the obligations imposed by kinship
and community—the classic instance being the funeral dance where
youths of rival villages might so easily clash—peer and family life had
different locales for the Kinga. Men learned to shift between them, if
not quite without hurt, usually without violence. While the overall
scale of Nyakyusa political society, taking in all the dialect communi-
ties north of the River Songwe who shared the diagnostic ‘age-village’
system, by Contact was two or three times that of the Kinga com-
munity, the tradition need not be rejected that, with respect to
development of a ‘chiefdom’ configuration, historical priority belonged
to the highland people. Mature Kinga men were not hell-bent, as
Nyakyusa were, upon the accumulation of herd-animals, wives, and
offspring; though they assiduously cultivated the arts of war, the
expansion of their four realms by dint of those arts may indeed have
been a gradual, even a comparatively peaceful process. ‡
37
the higher-level realm organization. But the intensive emphasis on
internal amity which was characteristic of Nyakyusa at European
Contact (and is matched only by the theatrical bellicosity of their
intergroup rivalries) suggests a level of politicization which may not
have been much older than the warlike pressures stimulated first by
the Ngoni trespasses of 1840 and after. Charsley summarizes the
developing military capability of the Nyakyusa in the half century
before German missionizing began, holding that a few princes became
strong enough to beat off invaders without depending on broad alli-
ances. Since a prince to command a large force must (given the
Nyakyusa political cycle) always personally consolidate his realm by
dint of arms, we may suppose that impressive power-building did
occur within several Nyakyusa realms during the period in question.
But it seems not to have extended to them all. ‡
38
does now in the rather proud retrospect I got in the 1960s. ‡
39
umes of Monica Wilson and state the impression I have from her, that
a very considerable conformity of philosophy and conduct was
imposed by age-village peers on their members; that women and
young men felt subtly but implacably tyrannized by their (especially
male) elders; and that I could never have described a code of ‘Kinga
values’ with as little hesitation as she describes the Nyakyusa code
under her five headings: good company, dignity, display, decency, wis-
dom. None of these headings seemed to hit the mark for any Kinga
community I knew, though individuals might score high on such counts.
Kinga, in any event, don’t just tolerate eccentricity and refrain from
personal criticism but attach importance to a person’s right to
choose a less-used path, to keeping one’s own counsel. ‡‡
40
The earliest and even the latest British district records paint
all the Kinga as I have painted Maliwa: an isolated and conservative
people. As a Briton’s-eye view, that is not wrong. You have only to dis-
count entirely the migrancy rate of the men and the wide perspective
they brought back of the Tanganyikan people as such, and to ignore
evidence of Kinga political competence. In pre-Contact times Kinga
were insulated by their geography and the adequacy of their defenses
from the worst ravages of alien war parties but were certainly in
touch with events beyond their borders. They were themselves an
expansive and militaristic people. Sanga were spreading their rule
southward, eastward, and westward; they were chronically skirmish-
ing with the Sangu and even hired Sangu mercenaries for an inter-
necine Sanga war. Kinga raiders often by-passed or raided with
relative impunity the less-organised and less-militaristic Wanji set-
tlements to the north, which must have closely resembled the bush
communities from which the Sanga segmentary state had grown. On
the northeastern marches a number of Mawemba settlements were
pleased to shift allegiance from the dominating Kinga to the Bena,
when an opportunity appeared under the British. Some others (I
often heard) played chameleon right through the colonial era, paying
tax at neither court. These independent mountain people and the Kisi
of the Nyasa/Malawi lakeshore were ethnic groups who remained
intact under Kinga hegemony; but two or three peoples before them
must have been assimilated, coming to know themselves within a few
generations only as Kinga. As much is suggested by the pattern of
Kinga dialects, and by some diversity of local traditions about origins.
In this way, the internal Kinga mosaic was a microcosm of the whole
Southwest region of Tanganyika, a world with great scope for and
acceptance of individual differences—and alive, as it seems always to
have been, with debate about its future.
How recent a date might we plausibly put upon the origin of the
Sanga political system we have discussed? While Sanga genealogists
projected it back to the beginnings of Kinga time, some fourteen
dynastic generations, a skeptical argument may be mounted. The
segmentary order of the four realms proved its flexibility in the colo-
nial years, surviving some quantum dislocations. There is no reason to
suppose it was not just as flexible in precolonial times. Evidently, it
would have evolved on top of a less comprehensive system, incorpo-
rating in a new superstructure the main lines of political architecture
already evolved on a lesser scale. Thus each realm at the end com-
prised a plurality of domains, one of them serving as the capital on
the familiar African pattern of primus inter pares . At a more inclusive
level, the protostate ordered its several realms in the same way. We
41
can’t reject the possibility that it is the domain not the realm which
is as old as Kinga political identity. In times of unopposed expansion
into uncleared woodlands it is easy to imagine that the face-to-face
polity represented the summit, that taxes and tribute were truly
nominal, and the way open for a burgeoning settlement on the fringes
of one domain to set itself up as another simply by withholding its
participation in bonding (rank conceding) rituals.
From what could still be seen in 1960, and from scattered tes-
timony, I judge it was always a Royal Sanga and ‘court culture’ custom
to establish one’s domestic privacy and public standing with a stout
bamboo enclosure. Considered as a practical matter it helped to keep
goats and people (inside) apart from vermin; considered as a gesture,
though even toughened old bamboo is not the stuff of a stockade, it
said something like, “Every Sanga a potential ruler!” Another thing it
certainly said was, “Every ruler a polygynist!” It is possible we may one
day learn from archaeology that, as distinct from fences for the four-
legged, stockades and the level of militarization they represent were
unknown even in the capital domains before the period of Ngoni intru-
sions in the 1840s. Then, as the Germans appear to have judged,
these stockades would have represented a sort of fort, symbolic if
not altogether practical, as well as a seraglio. By the time the Ngoni
scavenger bands were affecting the Kinga, the Sangu had already
been mobilized as a powerful counter-force and Bena-Hehe communi-
ties were subject to mounting pressure from rising Ngoni kingdoms in
Songea and western Njombe. In Kinga social memory their encounters
with the Ngoni were stand-offs, the Ngoni were at least once granted
passage but no plunder. Such memories operate so as to legitimate
Sanga rulership. Perhaps this would have been the case in earlier
times as well, at the first dawning of the idea of a highland-wide polit-
ical order. It is a poor propagandist who can’t eventually turn an
embarrassment into a credit. ‡
However the time scheme might have been (and I must bow to
some future scholar on that), the Sanga régime would have been the
product of systematic change generated by the competitive organi-
zation of the Southwestern region as a whole, and its several ecologi-
cally zoned sectors in particular. Sanga militarism revolved around
warlike competition not unsystematic or inadvertent conflict, and
around what we might call the routinization of heroics. Should we add
‘predatory expansion’? Better ‘assimilative expansion’, as the
essence of the Sanga innovation was to expand the sphere of a court
by recruiting men from the bush, socializing them to the ways of that
court, and “sending them out to rule” the bush again. Sanga expansion
42
was more extractive and reconstructive than predatory. Evidently
the analytical conception of social competition or rivalry has its pri-
mary reference to a segmentary system, whether we focus on a pair
of siblings, a peer-group of Kinga goat-herds or gregarious maidens, a
hamlet, a domain, a realm, or the Kinga protostate in its fullest devel-
opment. Relations between Kinga and neighbouring peoples over whom
they exercised no control were only ‘segmentary’ in a crude way. Thus
Kinga shared a series of holy places with Nyakyusa peoples and at
least one with Bena: there were mechanisms for stabilizing relations
at an ideal level even while random, directly destabilizing interaction
continued to characterize actual border areas. ‡‡
In effect, as one moves outward from the local domain, the ‘nat-
ural’ face-to-face polity of the region, to look at its putative subjec-
tive notions about more and more distant neighbours, one moves
from structure to no-structure, segmentary order to predatory
order, closed competition to Darwinian, a framed and seemingly pre-
dictable to an unframed and seemingly accidental—presocial—basis
of order. But the subjective transition is never realized: the nearest
neighbours often have tempestuous relations, the farthest enemies
still are conceived in a higher-order frame as neighbours with admira-
ble human qualities. The substance of social structure is found in pre-
cisely such ideas and feelings as these about political and cultural
kinship, common interest and common standards, adding up to relat-
edness. The Kinga people, like peoples everywhere, had humane as well
as occasionally barbarous relations with neighbour peoples of their
region. To assume they did not or that they did not knowingly emulate
their neighbours in any traits they found to covet or admire, is to
assume the cultural isolation of an African ‘tribe’ in face of massive
contrary evidence.
43
and stylistic emulation can produce a regional condition of pattern
rivalry selecting for system, organizational efficiency, and morale-
maintenance. Whatever in a particular case contributes to these
ends—from the plainly material to the plainly ideal innovation—will
eventually become a general property of the regional culture if it is an
exportable trait, or an ingrained element in the system of one
enlarged local culture if it is not. The end result of a fairly competitive
regional process should be the evolution of political communities of
increasingly complex organization and augmented scale. They will bear
strong family resemblances but without losing each its ingrained indi-
viduality. It is a project of my ethnography to show that the case of
the Kinga and their broader region comfortably lends itself to this
paradigm.
Roles run deep in the human psyche. The main obstacle to gain-
ing general acceptance of that, and turning well-planned study to the
matter of role strain and its opposite, role fulfilment, has been that
individual psychology takes roles for granted as a quasi-environmen-
tal issue, and naturalistic observation is usually focused on structur-
ally situated action, not the actors themselves. The penetration of
human experience in every cultural context by social roles, the ineluc-
table sociality of the self, and the idiosyncratic rationalization of
motive through ‘badly’ or ‘oddly’ coded early and continued socializa-
tion are three compatible conceptual approaches to inner human
experience. Taken together, I believe they form the coherent basis of a
distinctive science of the structure of human experience.
44
But the premises of that science would have to be informed by
the idea of culture. That is the notion that human social systems
comprise a unique domain of study, owing to the irreducible singular-
ity of events we call actions. As for the duality built into the tradi-
tional Kinga culture, what is important is to see that for Kinga the
life-cycle for either gender normally entailed a prolongation of youth-
ful experience—informed by homophilia—well into adulthood, followed
by rustication to a more settled life informed by domestic duties and
more selective attachments. This meant for the bachelor maiden a
profound shift in moral strategy. Her move was from a focus on rec-
ognition within a broad-based peer network, combined with junior
status in cooperative work for her mother’s kitchen, to birthing and
rearing young in an independent domestic setting. Kinga women still in
1960 were full-time, enthusiastic gardeners, and combined that work
with maintaining fast friendships with age-peers by setting up their
fields in friendship clusters. For the bachelor male the shift came per-
haps a decade later in life, and entailed retirement from the barracks
experience at court to life in a small hamlet, shared with a fast set of
friends, and oriented to the role of elder. Life in the bush was a cleaner
break from the bachelor world for women, who were fully busied with
nursing and supporting a family. For men the shift was not a full break
from the court life. As jurors, they were now able to gain respect in an
unathletic fashion from their elder peers. They visited about, seeing
friends from their youth. They took part in the same turf-turning
teams they had joined as boys. They could take pride in their house-
building, craft work, and firm connections outside the home hamlet.
All of a woman’s time might be scheduled by her productive duties.
Men had more time free for a special diversion, cross-talk over beer.
45
owned to by the self. Though there are inter-psychic moments in all of
this, the main transformations are in-psychic and intensely private.
They occur as the unseen context of action, occupying nanoseconds
of consciousness (so ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ in still-current
academic discourse) but accumulating over the years as ineradicable
and idiosyncratic complexity—what in a technical language now begin-
ning to seem too simple we still allude to as ‘personality’.
46
informant’s discussion of role-expectations can replace an informed
observer’s account of the way the informant and colleagues actually
live. That is like saying all moms are alike in a traditional society. But if
neither ‘culture’ nor ‘social structure’ alone offers the right prompts
it is perhaps because they need to be brought into the perspective of
a social psychology which relates self to both deep motivation and
role.
47
tances, experience (confirming or disconfirming) of comparable situa-
tions, and distinct socialization histories (personalities). The
definition of the situation which prevails is generally one which will
sustain consensual action, though that is hardly guaranteed. Social
situations are resolved only through interaction, which must be dealt
with analytically as a stochastic process. The outcome of symbolic
interaction is at best a matter for intuitive or wishful speculation as
it plays within the definitional frames of the separate actors as each
sets about exploiting a fresh situation. ‡‡
48
ing an unremitting, emotionally intense participation with family, kin,
and community in increasingly adult role capacities. Socialization in
this light is seen to be a process which does not terminate with child-
hood but continues (for the adult, only more reflexively) to social
death, always occurring within the context of structured roles and
role-sets. It is true enough that the special demands of a role can
strain the personal resources of an individual who somehow does not
nicely ‘fit in’ to the (frozen) script supplied. I tried without much suc-
cess to explain to some Kinga men why it is that in Ulaya (Euro-kind’s
world) a ‘latent homosexual’ may be ‘trapped’ by marriage. But the
obverse of role strain is role exploitation. You do not have to be a (lit-
eral or figurative) slave driver to enjoy the power your community
accords you over your immediate inferiors. You cannot possibly enjoy
the prestige of being a brilliant mathematician, the lush income of a
popular media performer, or the private satisfaction of having helped
someone worth helping without first cultivating the role-relation-
ships through which such rewards are attained. In this connection a
‘role’ may be as big as a career, engendering a level and quality of aspi-
ration unimaginable outside the world of possibilities this role has
created. Court culture opened up for Kinga men, particularly, a poten-
tial for self-realization such as we usually do not associate with
small-scaled traditional societies.
When a young man felt himself called from the bush to a Sanga
court he went seeking adventure or, as our tales have it, seeking his
fortune, and he would have had his head full of the court lore which
herd boys endlessly spun. When, as much as two decades later, the
same man left the court for marriage and the civilian calling of a bush
settler, he would be seeking his fortune again albeit with a different
sort of lore in his head. From that time forward he would be able to
shift between the two adult careers the Sanga régime fostered for
men, whenever the season of war or other circumstance demanded it.
Bush and court in this manner defined a major shift dimension of
Kinga culture, prominently affecting men and, in part through them,
the fortunes of women. Without role pluralism the whole pattern of
delayed marriage, bachelorhood, and erotic inversion for either sex
would have been finally unworkable.
49
to them. These are, roughly drawn:
BUSH
Property: the basis of personal security lies in the right to till good
fields, in stores of produce, and the health of family members. Goats are,
but houses are not, counted as wealth.
COURT
50
ent with a high rate of circulation and an easy shifting of roles, which
they made between court and bush.
Antipolitanism
It was a feature of the court/bush division in Kingaland that the
court took over political work which in another version of Eastern
Bantu civilization might have been assumed by kin groups, while these
hardly developed beyond the level of family. While polygyny was no
royal prerogative, big compounds were a sign of special political
status or ambition. If there were localized patrilineages worth men-
tion they were minimal or, where local descent groups had flourished
in the bush in the past, atrophied. The lack of overriding kin ties to any
particular place made it easy for a man who was restive under local
authority to leave his jurisdiction in favour of another; and since the
same freedom of movement, favoured by the voluntaristic basis of
association under bush values, applied to jurisdictions at any level of
inclusiveness, the net result was a degree of political emancipation
which might seem to fly in the face of the regimentation and (nomi-
nally) unchecked tyranny which was characteristic of the higher court
centres.
51
and because sanctions must reward or punish real behaviour, not
imaginary. The founding myth of the Lwembe cult, the court religion of
the Kinga, revolves about a banishment of this kind, but banishment
of a magically dangerous royal, a younger brother with extraordinary
gifts. The lesson is about the control of social danger and the nature
of Sanga power, not citizenship: by the act of banishing his brother,
the High Prince at Ukwama has irreversibly alienated a godling and
lost crucial protective powers of the Sanga throne. In the myth as in
reality, royal power is invincible to challenge from below but is also
immutably local and mystically indivisible. It is in this way that the
Lwembe religion of the Sanga court sets its mandate against the
popular. When you turn back with this to the Nyakyusa ‘witch’ banish-
ment, the meaning I find is that the community may change its mind
and want their fellow back on side. ‡‡
52
forms, among which sophisticated patterns of opposition, symbiosis,
and alliance may develop.
53
THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER THREE
54
from Kinga jurisdiction, and the introduction of monetary fines.
While British officials considered the introduction of court clerks
and books a major contribution, the records mainly served the
European’s need for documentation. The local courts felt no need to
refer to case records for precedents, particularly since the
necessary abbreviation of such records, and the taxonomic reifica-
tion of ‘precedents’ they induce, made them obviously inferior to the
elders’ collective memory. The courts could easily handle even the
problems of establishing and retiring money debts without writing.
Kinga law in 1960 was old and well entrenched and directly useful for
inquiries into the spirit of Kinga culture in past times. For clarity, I
may indicate the approximate date (1860, 1900, 1960) to which
ethnographic statements refer, but radical change of the sort which
must alter the spirit of the laws really begins only after 1960 with
national independence and the end of indirect rule. ‡
It is arguable that all laws deal with limiting cases, ideal types
to which a court will expect actual offenses or claims to have no
better than a loose fit. But ‘primitive law’ is less binding on a court
than written or recited codes which sanctify detail at the expense
of the spirit of fair play. Kinga substantive law is (ca.1960) treated
by the courts as formulating only what everyone knows about rights
and wrongs; and with one exception the court does not assume an
ordinary person would transgress the law in ignorance or carelessly.
Kinga law informs a world set apart only from women, children, and
rustics who do not make a habit of attending court. The men who do
attend are pulled there not pushed, as the court is a school which
deals with the stuff of life in a way which deeply preoccupies the
moral sense. Motive and circumstance are much inquired into, and
the popular sense of right is confirmed in the rulings.
55
waylaying youths who had just returned with their pockets full from
migrant labour abroad. The logic is not unlike that of the Kinga father
who demands five times the new legal limit in bridewealth.
56
to be furnished with ample fields of several types close by his
dwelling-place; his own claims to the land will be unambiguous; his
several sons and daughters will be amicable, loyal, and undeniably his
own. In such ideal circumstances any reasonable man will give
adequate land to his son as soon as the young man is of age, in order
to keep him at home, where he will naturally want to be. Presumably,
every community knows of one or two fathers and sons who seem to
conform to this type. But it won’t be they who test the law. ‡‡
57
on the adjustment of contradictory claims not the legal classifica-
tion of acts this embarrassment doesn’t arise, and the touchstone
of the Reasonable Man has broad scope. To this extent, because
African courts are normally seeking “compromises” not “decisions”,
the impression is justified (which a reading of Gluckman gives) of
courts less rule-bound than our own and more concerned with equity
than upholding the law against popular doubts about its dignity. ‡‡
58
social structures we will be satisfied with rules: that is, formula-
tions which, though practical products of key Kinga ideas, do not
directly communicate them. But in my view the great risk is simply
that the system of social control will be reduced to a skeleton of
laws and customs, its logical and psychological bases being ignored.
Two standing rules can be contradictory in the logical sense of
implying contradictory instructions to an actor in a special situa-
tion. A man cannot always “obey the Prince” and yet “never desert a
brother.” But logic also applies in the movement between rules and
practices. The rule that a nubile maiden may be “reserved” by the fiat
of the Prince implies the practice of withholding public sanction for
private engagements to marry, such as any maid the Prince might
choose would likely have entered already. The practice of secrecy in
courtship is in this way logically implied but never explicit in several
rules and standard practices affecting the status of youth; and
this logical nexus comprises courtship, regarded as a jurally relevant
system or ‘structure’. By focusing on rules apart from praxis we
distort the cognitive map we would approximate. It is in sociology as
in physiology: a better understanding of skeletal structure begins
with recognition that the functional logic explaining the form of any
bone can be grasped only by an observer imaginatively able to supply
the flesh.
The pillars of Sanga power were three: militarism, law, and the
occult. The court culture—the Sanga establishment—had to be seen
to own authority in each of these fields. This wanted effectively
managed spectacle in each field. As for the command of armed force,
the big show was the annual war games. Control of pestilence and
invisible enemies required the court to be seen as the single agency
of communication with supernatural powers; this was achieved
through ceremony—an elaborate calendrical schedule and various
spectacular forms of divination and ordeal. But the everyday source
of legitimacy for the Sanga ruler was his court of law, where his
authority was demonstrated in the settlement of internal disputes
of the kind that can generate conflict between households or
59
hamlets. To see how this self-legitimating secular authority would
have been developed in pre-Contact times (say, 1860) I gathered
what details I could of the political history of the Northern realm,
where the Sanga system had been well established before 1900, and
the Western realm, where expansion remained in progress. ‡
The first stage begins—as nearly as one can estimate—at about the
end of the seventeenth century and comprises a lineage resident at
Uhugilo, a place the Germans found inaccessible. After the Pax it was
accordingly removed to Lupalilo, near the German Boma. This line brings us
to the later decades of the nineteenth century. The names are:
Nyaluvondu
Gigijuka
Usingu
Ngwadilwa
Widunda
Kyavadala
60
status and plying them with tribute [imongo]. This changes when Ilevelo’s
ruler, Mpetsi, assumes that role. The two heirs to Kyavadala are:
Mwalukisa
The elder was ruler at the arrival of the Germans. He died late in their
short period of rule. Wikemana succeeded and remained ruler through most
of the longer British period; he was retired at last for incompetence, and a
lineage stranger installed in the office shortly before Independence in
December 1961. The more recent line, at Ilevelo, continued in office until
national independence [December 1961]. The names are:
Mpetsi (pre-contact)
61
community in effect had stripped him down to this. Mwanadyo, his
age mate, had always been better loved though he was a strong and
decisive man. His bearing in 1960 bespoke the glories of their
common past as Wikemana’s recorded the cares. Mwanadyo was
(had been) a commoner whose stature, judgement, and fighting
ability had won him a key position by the time German administrative
authority began to be felt. Wikemana had only come to power in the
ill-defined years after 1914, when Mwalukisa (I) had disappeared
following savage treatment by the British military. But Wikemana,
for all his heavy reliance on Mwanadyo, had ruled the realm for
something like four decades. I had expected to find him living and
comporting himself a bit more like a prince.
62
Can the same law of deference to power be in one society an
expression of character values, in another independent of them? Can
the same values support sultanism in one century and democracy in
the next? What is certain about Wikemana Mwalukisa is that what
dignity he possessed was not Gandhian: Kinga men don’t conscien-
tiously humble or exalt themselves on a spiritual plane. Old men don’t
espouse a life of renunciation, embracing poverty to school
themselves in virtue. The rules men live by are less introspective yet
at the same time less explicit in their meaning as a system of life. In
religion, and so largely in politics, Kinga are opportunists.
63
power and habit of enforcing its decisions and is unlikely to allow an
appeal: the political styles of court and bush are not the same.
Ikilunga kyale kyavatwa. The country belonged to the rulers. There was no
litigation in the old days as we know it today, for the ruler made the
decisions and all must respect them.
64
political space. But they distinguish (ca.1900) “those who eat
imongo” from those who do not; and among those who receive it they
know well who passes a portion along to a ruler to whom he thus
concedes rank. To be exact, the critical distinction is not who eats
but who legitimately hosts the feast of imongo. Bearers of tribute
always share in the eating. Though “imongo” means he-goat, and in
this context marriage-goat, the law of imongo appears to have
evolved beyond its origins, so that for Uhugilo in 1900 the standard
transfer of a cow, a goat, and a hoe (or an equivalent value in another
form) probably was common. The law was that the recipient of
bridewealth owed imongo to his ruler—the ikikolo family of the bride
was laid under obligation, and the court might call in the debt at its
convenience. In effect, this meant the communalization of the insti-
tution of marriage, since the feasting of a marriage did not just
aggrandize the bride’s house but the court claiming jurisdiction over
it as well. Evidently the standard tax upon a bridewealth was a single
goat, but in the best court circles the bridewealth and tax would
have been appropriately swollen. Some informants recall both sets
of parents, bride’s and groom’s, accompanying the payment.
Mwanadyo claimed that out of a good bridewealth even the bride’s
mother’s father would be feasted by his son-in-law with two goats.
In the ideal type of the “court Sanga” marriage a procession would
have moved to the court as to that father-in-law, and the two sorts
of obligation, to affines and to prince, would be one. Then the volunta-
rism of kinship norms would, to make the ideal case, supplant the
coercion of political authority.
65
received imongo from another lord he was also “prince of a realm.” The
following lays out the relation between Kinga usage and mine:
Two kiKinga words which had no Swahili equivalent are avakuludeva, the
class of royals, and avanyivaha, non-royal courtiers.
66
as well, though the ideal model of domain and realm holds constant in
the Kinga if not in the British mind for the whole time before Indepen-
dence.
67
were generally stiff. When the Germans called all the ‘chiefs of the
Kinga’ together, they were meeting in person for the first time.
Transfers of imongo from domain to realm (1900) were, I presume,
typically solicited in an active manner by the courtier-priests from
the capital and would have been sent on in company with emissaries
of the same fraternity from the lord’s court. The law of imongo could
be no stronger than the power of lord and prince to enforce it, but
where that power was intact the law was no mere theory.
68
at the time enjoyed the favour of Suluvali Mwemutsi, the newly
named Paramount. Confusions in Wikemana’s succession would have
contributed to Ndwanga’s sense of opportunity, but he had been
contesting Mwalukisa’s leadership in the North since before
Contact. According to Ilevelo informants, though (understandably)
not according to the Lupalilo elders in 1960, Ndwanga had been
withholding imongo and styled himself unkuludeva.
69
While in the structural schema of the Kinga world every ruler
was unkilunga landlord in his own locality, many a Kinga landlord had no
status as ruler. In 1960 there arose some agitation against the
laws of land tenure because changes in the national economic
system were tilting the logic of Kinga law, giving unfair advantage, as
the dissenters viewed it, to private landlords. Men might enjoy
rights to farmland well beyond what, after allowing for bachelor
offspring and plural wives, a single domestic establishment could till.
Normally a private person would have obtained these rights by a
combination of inheritance (from father, brother, or father’s
brother) and his own work of clearing new bush and forest. But in
1960 a handful of entrepreneurs had moved into the Kinga-Magoma
borderland, claiming large parcels of hitherto marginal land, for a new
kind of farming. They were growing pyrethrum (daisies) as a cash
crop, using the hired labour of their neighbours and neighbours’ wives.
Dissenters felt the workers had as much right to the land as the
unkilunga in such a case, and should be encouraged to grow their own
pyrethrum. This was eventually the direction the community took,
tilting the logic of the law back to favour a communal over a capital-
istic pattern of tenure. But the case serves to illustrate the role a
land law may play in setting the stage for a superstructure with a
particular cast.
The law required a tenant to bring the beer, and the landlord
was to claim the land back if this payment was not rendered when
due. A tenant who had tilled a field for three years, rendering
payment, was deemed to have served notice of claim. If at that point
the landlord failed to repossess the field, whether for his own or a
third person’s use, his claim to the land and to any further payment
in produce from the field was allowed to have lapsed. An erstwhile
tenant in this way often got clear tenure either with consent or by
default. As an economic arrangement during the later colonial period,
70
when many landlords might be a decade or more away at migrant
labour, the law of forfeit or default simplified what otherwise could
have been a hopeless tangle whenever a native returned requiring
land to till, or the heirs of a long-absent landowner came to claim
shares. While the law would have functioned in the same way in the
19th century whenever a man went missing, its main economic signif-
icance was as a system for the voluntary transfer of holdings
outside the network of kinship. Within the closed circle of the
localized ikikolo lineage group, land was easily transferred and formal
payments, constituting the acknowledgement of a contract, were
not required. But outside that circle, since transfer by sale wasn’t
countenanced, the law of lease-and-forfeit took its place. An
outsider had to serve a trial period of three years on good behaviour
before being accepted as a tenured neighbour: the logic of such a law
is not purely economic.
71
place which came to be Ilevelo. By his own effort and leadership he
won good land from the forest and established himself as unkilunga
landlord. His people prospered and grew strong. Everything went for
him, in short, as the Sanga mythos would have it go. But if we are to
find a version of this scenario which fits our observer standards of
credibility, I think we must conceive the affair as competitive and
transactional, not authoritative. Ilevelo was the only settlement in
the North, aside from Uhugilo itself, which had attained the standing
of a domain as defined by the assertion of a right to “eat imongo.”
Other settlements near Uhugilo but toward the south and east
were (more or less peaceably) orientated to Ukwama. The Northern
realm was bordered by the exposed highlands of the Elton plateau,
permitting only a thin series of settlements along the northeastern
slopes of the high-mountain ridge separating the realms of North
and West. Nothing in nature imposed a centring of the narrow realm
in the one of its lordly courts or the other, since neither had special
access to a rich hinterland. The man or men tradition calls Mpetsi,
founder of the ruling house at Ilevelo, would have been one of several
at the time, perhaps for a long century before Mpetsi’s final achieve-
ment, all of them establishing client or satellite settlements to
Uhugilo. Mpetsi would simply have been the one who succeeded in
attracting the best following and managing the most renowned
system of ceremonial patronage. He would have become by stages a
petty ruler untsagila and at last commander of a substantial raiding
and fighting force maintained in chiefly style by the redistribution of
meat and beer, of which a steady portion derived from imongo
tribute. Our working model for the emergence of a domain is thus
centred in the transformation of landlord unkilunga by degrees into
untsagila ruler and so, possibly in just a further generation or two,
into untwa lord of a domain, eater of imongo.
72
too persistent when crops were maturing. Priests who could read
and interact with the mischievous rainstones kept in a sacred grove
could intervene in a style beyond the competence of a peripheral
ruler. The motivation of this rendering of tribute to an acknowledged
ceremonial centre must be read on two levels. Below the surface
there is a shifting of responsibility by the lesser ruler to the lord, an
unburdening and deflection of antagonism arising from the fears and
frustrations of ordinary people. The solidarity of the close local
group was favoured. But on the surface antagonism is taken to be
flowing the other way. The troubles of the country are caused by the
displeasure of higher powers, requiring propitiation.
Under Mwalukisa there was only Ndwanga and no others of his rank. The
tribute he brought to Mwalukisa was by way of respect, for he would say to
himself a man must respect his older brother. On receiving a man with his
imongo, Ndwanga would from time to time say, “Let us go on to Mwalukisa.”
In late times the amount of imongo for a man well off would be a cow, a hoe,
and a pot of beer, though three goats would substitute for the cow at need.
The two guardians linked by the marriage go together to the lord Ndwanga,
who sends an important courtier along with them to Mwalukisa. The prince
slaughters the bullock, giving one leg and part of the lung to the father of
the bride and dismissing the father of the groom. But the bride’s father
signals to the other to wait, for he will divide his own share with the other
before they go their separate ways. The courtier who took the party on
from Ilevelo will also get his share, perhaps a leg or lung, which he returns to
Ndwanga. Otherwise the bullock may be split lengthwise in half, the one part
to stay here, the other to return to Ndwanga and his people, in particular of
course to the two older men who have been linked by the marriage.
73
Rules governing the sharing of goods and pooling of labour are
basic to the structure of the local community ilitsumbe, which will be
schematically conceived in kinship terms as a localized lineage group
ikikolo or may comprise several such groups conjoined and recognizing
one untsagila captain. It is a generally acknowledged rule of ilitsumbe
citizenship that a man should never sacrifice a goat without freely
sharing the meat among all men present. Throughout the region and
from time immemorial the killing of a goat has been associated with
sacrifice to one’s ancestors, and the rule of sharing associated with
neighborhood is thus a transform of the rule of sharing with kin.
While kinship for Kinga is reckoned bilaterally, it is men who sacrifice
and always the core of their beneficiary group is an ascending series
of ancestors comprising a putative patriline. But there are no
occasions on which a visible patriline assembles as an exclusive
group. Sacrifice is to placate an ancestral hierarchy. Every sacrifice
is commended ultimately to the universal ancestor Unguluve (though
that name has now been borrowed for the Christians’ god). So far as
I know the Kinga pattern for sacrifice at any level is that the ritual
act should be removed from the public eye. What a man does to
placate an ancestor is not to officiate at a ceremony but to take
himself away into the edge of a wood, sometimes at an ancestral
grave site where he himself is stranger, in order to dedicate a
minimal, prescribed portion of meat to the dead man and invite him
to participate, in this rather private way, in the feast of the living.
The ethic of publicity and non-exclusion applies to the feast itself.
74
spirit, the feast of sacrifice as well. In all this the moral-political
ethic of magnanimity may be seen to be doing double service.
75
demands of other patrons. But human institutions are universally
overdetermined, taking meaning from all the sources of authority in
our lives; and the facet of imongo I find most enlightening was its
ability to use the available ritual symbolism of the regional culture to
create a secular affirmation of the primacy of politics over kinship.
76
Division in the Western Realm
The final moves in the building of the West realm took place
under the British—one might better say, under the noses of the
British—and offers a tale of Sanga politics at its best, though
without the old heroics. The context of ethnic diversity facing the
Kyelelo throne was perhaps no greater than had faced other would-
be Sanga princes before him; but the trail was still fresh enough in
1960 to promise me some insight into the way political entrepre-
neurship actually worked. I begin not with the drama itself but the
setting.
77
relatively spacious and well-protected place. Were the founders, as
the myth says, outsiders? All through the iron age in this region a
certain fraction of any community would have been newcomers. The
‘Sanga system’ comes into being when Kinga begin to find that they
live under a ‘rule of law’ which transcends and can pre-empt social
control by private enterprise—self-help operating under the (far
slacker) ‘rule of custom’. The development and spread of the Sanga
system must have been multi-centred from the very start, and
synonymous with the growth of the court culture.
It is part of the final Sanga myth that the whole Kinga people
had been politically unified before European times. As seen by their
neighbours to the west (Nyakyusa-speakers of the Rift valley in
Tanzania and Malawi) the Mahanzi are in fact the quintessential
‘Kinga’ people. They owned a particularly fertile country. In 1900 they
comprised a compact community, and to judge from German obser-
vations (or alternatively from backward extrapolation of the settle-
ment pattern recorded in British times) they were as densely
settled on the land as the neighboring (non-Mahanzi) Kinga. While I
78
suppose there could have been no such fertile lands left in the hands
of pacifists so late as 1860 (whereas a century earlier that could
have been the predominant temper of these peoples) the Mahanzi
may well claim that war has always been forced upon them. In the
history of the Eastern realm they are known as the bloodiest merce-
naries of the Germans in the Maji-Maji episode. They scourged the
land of males and carried off women who didn’t manage to flee. They
were redoubtable warriors. Ironically, since it was the Bulongwa
missionaries who had made close contact with Mahanzi from the
beginning, Christianity must be said to have prepared their solidarity
with the Germans and, in consequence, participation in the ferocious
campaign of ‘pacification’ which the panicked Germans unleashed in
1905. From the lucid eye-witness accounts I had in 1960, there can
be no doubt the Mahanzi took to butchering Kinga of the East with a
vengeance. But many of the women carried away preferred, when
recovery came, to stay with their captors; and that must also be a
measure of Mahanzi character at the time. During the final third of
the nineteenth century they had been subject to intermittent
warfare under Sanga leadership, fighting off Kyelelo, the celebrated
tyrant-prince of the Western realm. They seem to have consolidated
as a polity under this régime, adopting important elements of Kinga
court culture. Nonetheless the Mahanzi form of speech remains
distinctive, and the difference of style as one moves into their
settlements from the Kinga is unmistakable. This is in face of the
prevailing amity, with intermarriage, which has prevailed now for
several generations between the two peoples, and their interpene-
tration as agriculturists.
79
avoid political contact with the Europeans until the British got
around to them in 1926.
Magoma
80
Nsulwa of Bulongwa was a respected Kinga elder who had grown up
there under the earliest German mission influence. I asked what had
been the main divisions of the Kinga people in precolonial times. He
named the waMahanzi, waWanji, waKwama, and waSokile. I recall that
what struck me most at the time was his designation of the Kinga
people proper (to use my labels) as waKwama, people of Ukwama. I
recognized the sobriquet of the Kisi (waSokile) from preparatory
reading as based on their habitual kiNyakyusa greeting. I was hazy
enough then about history to miss seeing how inappropriate it would
have been in 1900 to have designated the Wanji people as a division
of the Kinga, but I was interested to hear the Mahanzi called such.
German references had not made clear how independent the
“Mahasi” would turn out to be. I failed entirely to register the
omission from Lusayano’s list of the Magoma. I had encountered no
reference to them as a people—“Magoma” appeared in documents
only as a place name. Nyakyusa simply call them Kinga, and are apt to
attribute their qualities to all Kinga, in a manner which tended to
confuse early ethnographic records. At the time I was talking with
Lusayano the scene I had to gaze upon from his well-kept dooryard
was, if I had known it, the country of Magoma, lying at an easy half-
day’s distance across the Rumakali river. I was looking across
country constantly traversed both by Kinga and Magoma in 1960.
81
would have had in mind was that they never had had a court of their
own; that is, there never had been a body of Magoma law. It is a
question, of course, of the respect due to a court as against the
denizens of the bush.
82
developed community was a secular court prepared to supplant self-
help in the settlement of civil disputes. Without it, power could only
remain dispersed, authority situational and impermanent. By
pressing for such a court under the British, the Magoma were
aspiring to parity with neighbour peoples.
Rival Princes
It is positive that the first chief who came here had four sons, the first
Unkwama or Muibuka, the second Umhugilo, the third Unlupila, the fourth
Ulubumbu. After the first the region about his capital is called Ubukwama,
that of the second Ubuhugilo, of the third Lupila, that of the fourth
Ulubumbu. For a long time these names were carried on, until the most
recent Ulubumbu, who had two sons (Kielela and Bululile), let the region be
divided. So now there are five great, genuine chiefs Muibuka, Umhugilo,
Unlupila, Kielela, Bululile. In quite recent times Untandala and Maliba have
been added, both sons of Muibuka in secondary or tertiary line, that is of a
lesser wife. Both got chiefly capitals and people in Muibuka’s region with
orders to stand behind Muibuka with their people in time of war. Over the
years both took themselves free, as the Muibuka concerned was a weakling.
Both are now their own bosses, especially Untandala, who calls his region
Tandala, in less degree Maliba (BMB 1897:200).
83
concerned the lack of fit between Kinga cognitive schematics and
actual political practice.
The grandfather of the present Chilero (2) was one of the big Ukinga
chiefs, and he had three sons Ndungiri (3), Burubili (4), and another.
Ndungiri (3), the father of the present Chilero (2), killed his father and
took the chieftainship; Burubili (4) the father of Mwakarukwa (1) had lived
for a long time in the village of Mbemba, and was friendly with the Amahanzi
Tribe, and, on hearing that his father had been killed by his elder brother,
immediately declared war on him.
Burubili (4) is looked on with great respect by all the Wakinga and appar-
ently was beloved by a large number of the people of his father, as, on his
84
declaration of war against his brother, a number of people came over into
the Amahanzi country and joined him.
The country that was taken was handed over to Burubili (4) who became
the chief; peace was made, and the two brothers became friendly again and
had the usual feast. After several years Chilero (3) again became restive
and made more trouble by killing the eldest son of Burubili (4); and again
there was war between the two chiefs; Burubili was again assisted by the
Amahanzi, and again defeated Ndungiri (3).
Dynastic Claims
85
The fiction is rather like the ‘gold standard’ for inspiring confidence in
international finance, in that the trick works not because it really
takes people in but because the conventional wisdom shows a
terrible void where suitable alternatives would have to be. I try to
give an acceptably Kinga version of the ruling lines in the Western
realm, leaving some questions about hard historical fact to later
annotation. The result of adopting the perspective of oral history
will be to move from a distant past of remarkably uneventful succes-
sions to a recent period of dynastic turmoil. Presumably, more light
on the darker past would match it better to the times we know.
Details 1-3 (ending this chapter) present kinglists for the main
ruling houses. I went into the field with armchair skepticism about
such lists and emerged confirmed in it. Informants with a little
encouragement may stretch a short list of ancestors to match the
(stretched) lists of neighbour houses, but all the same the field-
worker has to pull out as many names as will come. A still more indus-
trious anthropologist could presumably have made all the lists come
out with an equal number of generations. In some cases there were
historians present to correct or otherwise steer an incumbent, but
generally I got the genealogy he in the presence of his elders saw fit
to volunteer. These are, as it were, practical genealogies and by that
token they are genuine.
86
and Kyelelo (Untowanilo the Cruel) exhibiting prodigious energy in the
building of a following. However infrequently he may have received
imongo [marriage tax] from a Mahanzi (or Vululile’s Kinga)—and it is
unlikely he ever did—Kyelelo continued throughout to claim it as his
right. Vululile struck the German missionaries as the “superior chief”
owning the most fertile and densely populated part of Ukinga, having
five “subordinate chiefs” (three Mahanzi houses, Mwenentela [7] from
Magoma, and Mwakagile the Sanga). To the Germans and British, suc-
cessive representatives of the Kyelelo line claimed to have conquered
all the Mahanzi and Magoma long before Contact, and hence to be the
rightful rulers of a united Western realm. But I suppose an even more
preposterous claim was accepted somewhere else in East Africa by
the Europeans of that day.
87
claim for his own he would have been outnumbered about six to one if
he’d ever found all his enemies aligned against him in the field. It is
owing to the atomistic quality of political life prior to the Sanga pro-
tostate mobilization that such massive confrontations could not
have happened. Whatever population catastrophe is attributed to
colonial disruptions in the generation before 1928 (whooping cough,
measles, and a European war were brought to Ukinga) we are dealing
with small, face-to-face polities. The typical local ruler would have had
to deal with perhaps 200 arms-bearing men of all ages. I believe the
numbers before Contact, though they probably were somewhat
higher, were of the same order of magnitude.
88
Detail 1: Sanga ruling lines of the Western realm to about 1960
* At Kilolelo’s death, his ‘younger brother’ Salile was made regent until
the heir, Mesiye, reached his majority. The choice of Salile was made after
much discussion and his subscription to a ‘contract’ to withdraw at the
appointed time. Mwakagile (II) was a regent not even closely enough related
to his predecessor to be called his ‘younger brother’—but nonetheless able
to assume and retain the succession. Kyelelo the Cruel is by some infor-
mants placed one generation earlier than in this ‘official’ version of the line.
The informant in each case is the last ruler on the list. These offices were
notretained bytheindependentgovernmentofTanganyika,later Tanzania.
89
Detail 2: Mahanzi ruling lines (Western realm) to 1960
Ungatisanyi (b.
Ihanga)
Kapola Umwenekivu
Mwenefikilo
Gutsungwa Umbatsi
Ndakulima
...........Pax begins.......... ..........Pax begins..........
...........Pax begins..........
(8) Malambila Selemba
(5) Mbemba (I)(d.
Mwapongela (6) Mwandilawa 1904)
Legezamwendo (d. Mwimbilile Mbemba (II)
1956)
Luka Jila
Aroni
90
Detail 3: Magoma ruling line to 1960
“Fungo” **
“Mwenentela” “Mwakalila”
Njalayivava **
Ukyeve Kiwolile
Mwasonya Mwakipesile
Mukoli Mwalawil
Mwezi **
Isaac* Isaac*
91
THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER FOUR
Kinga-Nyakyusa Expansion
It is within the Western realm we can best investigate the prob-
abilistic history of the Kinga state: the processes, including war, by
which Sanga rule and its extension were established. We are looking
for the rules of the board on which the game had to be played, not
particular outcomes. That other (the “outcomes”) strategy will be
familiar to some readers from Monica Wilson’s impressive collation of
certain Nyakyusa chiefly lineages. Her chart of “chiefs of Lwembe’s
line” places 181 names on an integral generational grid which charters
29 chiefdoms. It is as though Nyakyusa polities were generated in
real time and space in the way a genealogical tree grows downward by
ruled lines, from the single mythical ancestor at the top to the full
proliferation of the twentieth generation, packed like piano keys
across the bottom. That is certainly not the way proto-state poli-
tics worked. Nyakyusa traditions hold that their aristocratic polit-
ical system was an extension of the Kinga; it is likely the two systems
did develop in parallel, and it is certain they bear strong family resem-
blances. But the mechanisms of expansion were distinct. ‡‡
92
missionaries, administrators, and sociologists bolstered a spontaneous
liking for systematization among certain Nyakyusa elders, who co-
operated in the final editions of these charters of ancient unity. ‡
“It is clear,” writes Gulliver, “that, immediately before the colonial era,
the Nyakyusa were not arranged in a number of determinate petty chief-
doms, as later evidence has had it. The indigenous political system was
more fluid than that.” One of the major puzzles about the local organiza-
tion of plains-dwelling Nyakyusa at contact was the clustering of villages
rather tightly together, though in scattered places, leaving wide
stretches of fertile but uninhabited or minimally exploited land between.
This is a puzzle if you assume the radical thrust of each princedom was
toward independence—unqualified autonomy. On that assumption you
would expect each prince to distance himself as well as might be from each
of his neighbours, so that the good land would be evenly (if, at the time, still
thinly) settled. But the assumption is wrong, and the principles of
cohesion, responsiveness, and flexibility inhering among princedoms only
begin to emerge when the extraneous hypothesis is abandoned. To say it
briefly, it seems to me that the principle of “good company” adumbrated by
Monica Wilson is matched for Nyakyusa by a strongly countervailing
principle. It should be called something like “passionate rivalry” not, as
Wilson dubs it, passive “admiration of truculence.” Such a passion requires
the proximity of stranger-familiars, that is, persons outside the scope of
93
the neighbour-love ethic, yet within the scope of acquaintanceship and
network connection which makes personal rivalry possible. ‡
94
ically advanced community expands by incorporating acephalous neigh-
bours. It is a process of colonization by impressing the rustics with your
superior management skills. But both Kinga and Nyakyusa depended more
on political theatre than on either the pragmatic appeal the Alur had
working for them or the land-grabbing and cattle predation Sahlins was
concerned with. ‡‡
95
Kiponzuvutwa the advantage of organizing against one’s enemies.” On his
arrival practically the whole of what he was to make his domain was
woodland, not yet cleared. Maize, beans, and finger millet were the crops, all
planted according to tradition in imigunda swidden gardens cleared on a
steep slope. The new Sanga rulers from Ihanga took over control of the
wooded land, “letting it be known that all others should get permission to
build and clear the land.” The Sangas organized the clearing of larger areas,
grouping many imigunda gardens together so that they could efficiently be
fenced and defended from wild pigs. “Before Kiponzuvutwa settled here the
folk of Ihanga feared the witches and spirits of this country; but after he
led the way they followed in great numbers.”
96
place of their ‘chief’. But when a chief actually dies in office in his prime, he
should be succeeded by a brother or son, because the chiefdom itself is not
ready for a Coming Out. The ‘divine king’ rituals would then be available for
passing on the name and chiefly identity to a lineal successor. The choice
would be made and implemented by a local congress of priests—acknowl-
edged elders of the chiefdom which originally sponsored the now-deceased
chief at his Coming Out.
The sole Kinga case for which the specific motivation of the choice to
continue a name was made clear to me was that of Kyelelo—the name
belonged to an alien hero, was originally awarded to the incumbent at
Ihanga as an honour, and was claimed by successors in the same spirit.
That is to say, successors are claiming to wear the mantle of the founder;
or, put otherwise, they identify their office with a princely tradition having
a specific charter in heroic legends about past holders of the name. In
Kinga law as in English common law a person has the right to be known by
whatever name he or she may choose, and new names are often taken to
mark a personal transition.
97
From their earliest contacts the Berlin missionaries, carrying a Nyakyusa
orientation over to the Kinga, vacillated between “Mwenentela” and “the
Mwenentela,” “Muibuka” and “the Muibuka”—it is hard to know how far they
may have helped to foster a liking for titles, or how far they and the
“Langenburgers” [= the German military presence], with whom they were
often if never willingly identified, constituted a meaningful audience at the
successions of, for instance, Mwakagile II or Mbemba II. (“The old Mbemba
died 1904. Into his place stepped a kinsman, the now-living chief
Mbemba”—Stationschronik: selected dates.)
98
that no genealogy, however carefully corrected, can serve to document the
real political history of a single domain.
Political Vitality
Political technique may have been less important than political
vitality in the Kinga-Nyakyusa expansion. Though the dynamic was lodged in
a system of rule, the princes were recruiting people to it rather than
imposing it forcibly as the modern administrator has done under systems
of direct rule, or as the Romans and so many others largely did. Even in
1960 I found, as I moved from one domain or realm to another, variety in
the nomenclature of offices and public buildings. This was a reflection of
the local roots of Kinga political culture, just as a rigidly consistent
system of titles would have reflected an opposite bias toward central
direction. The genealogical frame by which Kinga princes modeled the ideal
ties of the peripheral realms to the centre was a charter not for power but
for loose alliance. By contrast, the intense hostility between the Kinga
followers of Vululile and those of Kyelelo was a source of personal power for
both of those princes, generating new structures in the Western realm.
When we later on get into some details of that civil struggle, as preserved
in popular imagination, we shall see how far hero myths could legitimate a
new kind of authority contrary to (yet hardly diminishing) a prevailing egali-
tarian ethic.
99
by priests) of two court villages. The opposing forces were then drawn
from two princely domains, they were not armies drawn from all the
domains within each realm. What the princely court could do, though, was
draw its youthful recruits directly from any of those satellite domains. Its
power to draw them was in good part a function of heightened political
theatre at the great capitals. Young men were always prepared to trade
on a new friendship to visit across any political boundary. That was the
nature of the boundaries—for men bent on trade or visiting they were
open—and the footloose nature of youths, with few commitments binding
them to place, and always prepared to charm a charming stranger. ‡‡
The priority given to autonomy for the domain even within the
alliance I have called a ‘realm’ contributes to an understanding also of the
chronic rivalry in the Northern realm between Ilevelo and Uhugilo. When
regarded as a kind of segmentary opposition, the rivalry does illuminate
the internal mobilization of each domain; but this ought not to be
dismissed as an intermediate level of segmentation which would automat-
ically be submerged in any cross-border conflict between a Northern party
and (say) a Western. The Kinga constitution is not a simple permutation
either of the stateless Nuer (who are said to escalate their warfare in
that fashion) or of the Alur, whom Southall put forward as a type case for
his model of the segmentary state. The Kinga/Alur contrast is particularly
instructive as to the place of political technique in the process of
expansion or, as befits the Alur, domination. ‡‡
100
from the other domain, they were his own to feed and command. If common
political cause were to be made between one domain and another it would
be within the boundaries of a realm (so much being assured by the regular
observance of rite and ceremony) but it would also represent the free
decisions of the two rulers to combine toward some particular end.
101
up under the Sanga name? At least one seems already to have taken on
something of the Sanga style by building up a priestly establishment; but
other ruling houses would perhaps have had to settle in the end for priestly
status for themselves, ceding secular power to a Sanga claiming royal
descent, coming to them from Lingundya. The Sanga strategy of expansion
was first to push into a new territory, then take it over. It is hard to reject
any of the possibilities I have raised—any of them might play some part in a
Sanga take-over.
102
isn’t absolute but relative to some fixed structure of expectations. What
could be more spontaneous than jazz? But an indispensable basis of the
most inspired jazz performance is, beyond conventions of phrasing and
form, a tune simple enough to be held in one ear while the other is used to
think. In human relations spontaneous order is relative to a frame of law
and the ‘logic of actions’ it creates, the if-then nexus of reciprocity which
ties an act to its predictable consequences within an institutionally given
context. Order of this kind underlies most of what we deem to be everyday
interaction in human communities; it is order which results from the
predictable operation of the law and its logic upon the action of any
ordinary person intelligently aware of the rules. A familiar example of
spontaneous order is the marriage system of a society like the Nyakyusa
or Kinga. Innumerable spontaneous decisions by individuals, subject to the
rules of exogamy and contract, result in the orderly circulation of women
without violence, the formation of a systematic web of affinal ties among
communities, and the unambiguous allocation of responsibility for children.
103
ravages of an anti-power movement is the reassertion of spontaneous
order under refreshed anti-authoritarian norms. But in practical terms
this only means general acceptance of a ‘kinder, gentler’ system of
authority run by a new set of faces. We can assume that each time a
purging movement passes through, it will leave something more of the new
authority structures behind. That is, the progress of the political entre-
preneurs will be steady in the long run but fluctuating in the short. Thus
Monica Wilson on zig-zag change among the Nyakyusa: she asks us to see
“a pattern of waves advancing and retreating in a tide that is flowing in one
direction.” What this comes to is that Tiv struggle with the problems of
structural change through something we could call ‘anti-manipulation
movements’ which are in themselves hugely manipulative but mask their
authoritarian character by resort to the histrionics of mysticism. The
need for such movements arises when the times are out of joint owing to
unprogrammatic change. My point in introducing the example of the
chiefless Tiv is to afford a clue to the success of the Sanga leader in his
claim to charisma and his offer of a tangible programme. ‡
104
the many recurring afflictions which beset the community at large. It could
never do for the prince himself to fraternize with his men; he must be seen
to embody the transcendent powers of his court to maintain the fertility,
prosperity, and secure well-being of a people.
105
language better, from the first, than the one I had been straining for so
long to hear. In spite of some disparagement on the point from linguists I
believe the reason was not in my having had prior experience with Mahanzi-
like aural discriminations but an inherent difference between the two
languages, a difference which in some measure bespeaks the separate
characters of the two cultures. In relative terms kiKinga is esoteric while
kiMahanzi is exoteric: the Mahanzi do not require in their manner of speech
so long and fine a tuning of the stranger’s ear as do the Kinga. On the other
hand, the Kinga are content that a stranger hardly ever learns their
speech—Kinga will readily acquire the other’s. It would be hard to miss the
special fit of this formula to Kinga sexual self-awareness. They are the
adaptable ones where others can’t be expected easily to acquire Kinga
sensibilities. Another true picture the language paradigm affords is that
of a highland society ‘farthest in’ and ‘least accessible’ in the regional
context of Southwestern Tanganyika, whose people have always been more
likely to visit others than they to visit Kingaland.
The Mahanzi are on several counts less closed socially than the
Kinga. Mahanzi traditions freely recount a long-continued practice of
emigration westward, but without any implication of historic destiny. The
famous emigrants of the Kinga are gods like Lwembe and Kyala who have
not lost their Kinga identities but return by underground travel or
uncannily on the wind to trouble the land and its people. Kinga project upon
them the ambivalence of an intensified ethnic self-awareness, a Kinga
mystique. I think this contrast has a good deal to say about the transfor-
mation the Sanga had worked on the Kinga communities of the Central,
Northern, and (presumably) Eastern realms before the German contact.
From the Mahanzi I learned that Kyungu, the divine king of Ngonde,
emigrated from Mbemba’s village, now called Utengule. But unlike Lwembe
whose leaving Ukwama was under duress and eternally resented, Kyungu
though an equally powerful figure was not assumed to be resentful or,
indeed, otherwise mystically or emotionally tied to or mindful of Mahanzi-
land. The attitude is simply secular. “He is a great chief in Karonga. He is
well educated, he has askaris and cars.” His supernatural powers having
evidently never been the subject of belief, the exoteric qualities of fame
and fortune were enough to remark. The Mahanzi ruler at home was likewise
never made the object of cult, though his rank was recognized in special
burial customs. A Mahanzi untwa is honoured in death by the slaughter of a
black sheep whose skin is spread over the corpse (already wrapped in its
containing mat) at burial. Continuity of the ruling line is symbolized in the
refusal of elders to mention the death directly until there is a successor.
They say, “Tufumbilwe, untwa asikuli — We are in bad straits, the ruler is
nowhere to be found.” When the successor is installed he must sit along
106
with his priest on just such another black sheepskin spread over a rolled-up
mat. His throne is not the tyrant’s symbol, the leopardskin of the Kinga
prince, but a sober reminder that the greatest of men is mortal.
A Mahanzi untwa ruler was honoured with house burial, as were his
wife and son, but the interment itself was a rather simple procedure
carried out on the first night after the death. The emphasis of the funeral
was on festivities, that is, on renewal and not on the mystical dangers of
the passing of a cult figure, as at Kyelelo’s court. From the accounts on
which I must rely it appears that the most impressive feature of a ruling-
family member’s mortuary ceremonies, comparing them to those accorded
a commoner, was the conspicuous consumption entailed in closing up a
house to make it a memorial over the grave. Commoners were buried in their
courtyards. Since identical honours were accorded a ruler, his wife, or his
minor son, they must be read as betokening the rank not the sanctity of
the Mahanzi untwa. This contrasts directly with Sanga customs at the
ritual level of the princely office where even burial is effectively refused on
account of dangers lodging in the royal corpse. At lesser levels Sanga
rulers and their close kin are interred in a ground of their own—the
important statement is only that theirs is a race apart. But Sanga royal-
court rituals of burial say that the death and bodily corruption of a prince
puts all his land in jeopardy not because of his public attributes but by
reason of unseen qualities of the person, generating forces which only the
priest-adept can control.
Social Control
In another respect the Mahanzi had an open society as compared to
the Kinga, and that is in their system of social control. While it is hard to
prove on summonable evidence, the Mahanzi seem to have had a far less
developed jural system than the Kinga. This is consonant with the
relatively undeveloped character of the Mahanzi ruler’s authority. Mahanzi
were given to handling ordinary trouble cases by way of self-help vengeance
raids, placing responsibility at the level of local kith/kin groups not politi-
cally integral domains. For example, a Mahanzi man whose wife eloped with
a visitor from some distance away could lead a private raid on the herds of
an intervening group: they must compensate themselves by action against
the original culprit. All this would involve three avatwa rulers, three
separate domains, but without their authoritative intervention at any
point. The contrast to Kinga country, where the court intended to maintain
107
a monopoly of force, suggests the real political achievement of the
Sangas.
By Contact the Mahanzi had been affected for some time by the
Sanga presence. Their own close alliance with Mwangawa and his heir
Vululile led to intermittent attacks on their country and the need to
match the ferocity of Kyelelo (Untowanilo) with a show of solidarity and
perseverance. Hence Mahanzi memories of pre-German times may be
supposed to bear a bias toward picturing their rules on the Kinga (authori-
tarian) model. The difference nonetheless is tangible. A Kinga ruler dealing
with a witch and finding him to be dangerous would order the execution like
a good ‘African despot’. The imperious utterance, Kantagi kuluganda!, orders
a form of execution treating the offender as untouchable dirt—the witch
is strangled at the middle of a long rope and cast off a cliff to rot on the
rocks below. When a Mahanzi ruler, often by means of the same dog poison
oracle the Sanga used, discovered a dangerous witch there seems to have
been no need for the ruler to demonstrate supereminent personal powers.
Mbemba’s successor claimed only, “I’d give them leave to kill him.” Mbemba
108
was not a raider of the cattle of strangers but called his men together
only in the name and occasion of defense. This was “the Mahanzi way.”
Where the powerful Sanga lord held his war games in an aggressive
spirit, pitting squads of fifty men against one another in a massive demon-
stration announced by the sounding of war-trumpets, the games at
Mbemba’s in Mahanziland were done with ankle-bells on. They presented a
spectacle of mock ferocity. “Untwa adindilwe,” the elders would announce to
call the people: “The ruler is entertaining.” The time should be one for
youths to show their skills and study the fighting styles of older men,
always vying to please the ruler, obliging him to serve more food and beer.
The festivities should last until dawn, and the crowds then disperse. If the
Sanga encampment evolved from such an institution, the process entailed
the appearance of militarism as a distinct phenomenon contrasting in
mood and style to the evening’s dancing, as well as by enlargement in time
and scale.
109
The Ruling Establishments
Judged by degree of role-differentiation, the Mahanzi was no more
than an embryonic version of the Kinga superstructure as that was to be
found in the Northern or Central realms. It is true the contrast with either
Mwakagile’s at Bulongwa, with whom all Mahanzi seem to have been on easy
terms, or with such as Lupila’s in the East, would not have been fully so
clear. Mahanzi tradition has it that Mwakagile “begged” territory from
them and continued to be dependent on their medicines for smallpox. The
Mahanzi ruler Malambila had two priests, Tamapa who kept the rainshrine
and Mwadepela who prepared the medicines (a potion and a topical salve)
for pox. The term ruler/rulers for the Mahanzi was untwa/avatwa as for the
Kinga, but applied without differentiation to all the men of the ruling family,
that is, men removed from the incumbent ruler by four steps or less of
consanguineal kinship. In effect, this is to make a distinction between high-
born and commoner but to make it in a way which hardly could have yielded a
sharp line, and to distinguish no special secular positions at court. In fact,
usage here reflects the true absence of a court establishment. As the
priests were all likely to live spatially apart from the ruler, in the manner of
private consultants, and the exaggerated polygyny of the Sanga ruler was
absent, a Mahanzi capital was more hamlet than village.
110
the prince; and both Malambila’s heirs and Mbemba’s report they sent
imongo to Vululile directly, not to the Mahanzi Umbatsi. Such realm
structure as there was could not have been clearly delineated, I think,
whether before or after Contact. Tradition in such matters only too quickly
accommodates to any changes which are plainly accepted by the people;
and this would account for differential social memories in the separate
domains, since tradition also can go underground.
111
conflicts. Men fought for the ruler who could feed them, and in the Kinga
system that meant the military unit was the domain.
112
there are not structures of power, only structures for power, which is an
attribute of persons and personal groups. Firth defines social organization
in contradistinction to structure in order to draw attention to individual
and social planning, to the prevalence of case-by-case resolution of
conflicts of interest in human society, and to the everyday possibility of
loosening constraints, felt to be excessive, inherent in the law. A well-
structured game, despite the clarity of its rules, requires intense concen-
tration by the dedicated player, never reducing to repetitive routine; yet
that routine to which only a truly dull game can deteriorate is the model
for many accounts of custom. It is true of all departments of life, but
particularly of politics, that a routine style of play has never allowed
anyone to dominate a game. ‡‡
113
nities. Yet we know from German maps and records of the British adminis-
tration’s efforts to establish proper “tribal” boundaries that Kinga had
crossed the river Mgiwe to the southeast and settled 36 kilometres from
Ukwama in an enclave in what has since been called uPangwa; and we know
from Kinga oral history, though the facts are submerged in German official
documentation, that Lupila (as the real centre of vitality in the Eastern
realm) was an aggressively expanding domain at Contact.
114
THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER FIVE
War as Structure
It is conceivable the Sanga polity in Kinga country was formed
under essentially peaceful conditions, the war pattern having been
added at a later stage. More likely, war and politics evolved together
interactively, and that will be the assumption I lean toward here.
Owing to the ravages of the Ngoni and the depredations of foreign
traders in ivory and slaves, activities which intensified about 1840,
the nineteenth century saw a revolution in the scale of warfare in
Southwestern Tanzania. If we thought the Ngoni from the south or
slavers from the coast had brought war to an erstwhile peaceful
people, we might want to assume the Sanga system of rule was full-
blown by 1840, having been set up in an administrative spirit with
taxation, redistribution, and dispute settlement as its work, with
little concern for organized aggression apart from sporadic feuding.
We could then suppose a war pattern had been added without greatly
altering the system in a structural sense. But that would be taking
an unrealistic view of the region’s history on at least three counts:
115
disputes; the strength and legitimacy of the ruler is the guarantee of
his court’s jurisdiction, and his endorsement is required for the use of
force in applying the court’s decision; but the ruler does not embody
the law as reported for some other Bantu regions. Priestly ordeals
settle the guilt or innocence of an alleged worker in evil; but the
standing of the priest, and the power of the court to enforce findings
of the ordeal, depend on the legitimacy of princely power. In short, the
general pattern is not that of a militaristic regime. The exceptions
(Sangu, Hehe) date from after 1840—they were military dictator-
ships but fell back toward the regional pattern once their wars of
expansion were ended.
Likewise the Sanga introduced war and the rule of law in place of
a pattern of self-help. Since this older pattern survived (quite unoffi-
cially) in some bush-culture areas to the time of my fieldwork, I was
116
actually able to observe the process of change and form an idea of
how slowly it must have been working over the generations and
centuries which Sanga oral history pretends to cover. The paradox I
observed was a bush culture basing solidarity at least as much on
amity as kinship, yet given to a system of justice based on the idea of
those infrangible group ties which only a rigid kinship society can
boast. When you burn a man’s hut because his brother stole your wife
you may have sanctioned him effectively; but when the culprit was
only his tentative friend ? For Kinga, at least, the great social trans-
formation which we usually see as the move from kinship to political
community was a move toward voluntarism and the liberation of indi-
viduality which that implies. As said, the change was gradual and
never complete.
117
evolution of an elaborate political/ritual superstructure? Probably
that which finds everyone in agreement that disagreement is the
problem. A general escalation of violence and personal insecurity may
eventually breed such agreement among the most egalitarian of
peoples. As for the association of war and politics in an Eastern
Bantu context, I suppose the only real questions are how early? and
how much?
118
with stock in compensation. So the ethic and practice of self-help
were still in place to the end. But my informants went on to say that
within a domain there was a strong sense that warring was only killing
one’s own folk, a resort of fools. Therefore quarrels, even murderous
fights, were quickly referred to the ruler’s court for judgement.
Someone in the aggrieved party would tether a goat and bring the
matter to authority for settlement. The goat secured the interven-
tion of the ruler, since he could not make a feast of it until he had
found a satisfactory resolution of the trouble case. No one could
produce a recital of cases from so long ago, but once the ruler had
accepted jurisdiction his prestige was staked on making peace, and I
was assured he “could not fail” to do so.
Yet of course the untwa could fail. As lord of a local domain his
authority was not deniable in the settlements close to his court. But
since for power he must rely on his own persona and the style and
energy of his court, his hold on the imagination of the many more
remote hamlets and isolated homesteads could waver and break
under the impact of events. The politics of passion is a theatre of its
own. Under the stress of mortal danger or fired up in anger, a man
defines his own turf and needs no distant politician to tell him who
are his friends and who his enemies. So trouble which begins at home
within the untwa ’s domain can quickly involve strangers to his jurisdic-
tion. What happens then is what we call self-help, a category of
events which lie only just below the surface of Kinga social history.
Anecdote (which is the native equivalent of the foreign observer’s
‘extended case history’) is social memory in a different mode, ignoring
the norms and revealing the normal.
The untwa could afford to leave passion to run its course. Self-
help across a jurisdictional border could only strengthen the vigorous
rivalry among neighbouring domains in a realm and so strengthen the
untwa ’s legitimacy. He need assume no responsibility—except as it
suited his purpose—for aggression at this level. As with us, the scope
of Kinga politics was the scope of the pragmatic mind. Lacking
priestly sanction, the dynamics of a self-help affray were not licit,
not a part of the court life and history but in that view a lingering
phenomenon of the old bush culture, peculiar to the ill-defined border-
lands which characterized the Kinga and many comparable segmen-
tary polities.
119
outward act of surrender is clear enough but often leaves a residue of
inner doubt. Men who held themselves apart from the political
theatre of the court, whatever their private reasons, would know
themselves as the clients of warlords not the subjects of a great
princely house—the social contract of the Sanga revolution had not
been sold to all the natives. The Sanga dispensation was defined in
inter-personal not intra-territorial terms. Territorial standing can be
made an unambiguous criterion for political identity. Personal follow-
ings, being only as constant as the human heart, are contingent and
generate a different kind of politics.
120
hardly be explained as a simple reflex of such independently-driven
structural change. The new moral strategies which loosened the
kinship bonds on youth were driving forces in themselves, making
available a bachelor labour force to sustain and protect the central
court as a thriving public institution. To be sure, the court was best
able to protect big animals and had a ready use for them. It can also
be seen as a ‘greedy institution’ in the sense of Lewis Coser, requiring
the undivided commitment of its labour force. Or it can be seen in
broader, ideal-typical terms as a Bantu version of the ceremonial
centre which has been a feature of pre-urban civilizations in many
parts of the world. But the Sanga mix had a formula of its own with
ingredients ranging from ritual formalism to entrenched autocracy,
peer solidarity, and youthful spontaneity. ‡‡
The model Kinga war pattern evoked when you stirred the social
memory in the early 1960s was not the raid (unscheduled or official)
but the steady war of rivalry between princely realms. This was
supposed to have originated not in any private encounters or griev-
ances but in deliberately provocative cattle raids by one court upon
another. The very fact that a choice for war could be reserved in this
way as a court prerogative says in itself that kinship loyalties at the
high-court level of the Sanga dispensation were weak. Under the
norms of bush culture the unit of retaliation was only the neighbour-
hood, ikikolo —the literal meaning of the word is local lineage. Self help
(or private enterprise) was the normal form for raiding in bush-
culture relations with stranger peoples like the Wanji, north of the
Elton Plateau, with whom intermarriage was rare and peace treaties
were never attempted. Kinga-Wanji relations were not political (prior
to colonial times) but ethnic; and that meant that as the Sanga
progressively asserted control the intent of a raid still could not be
provocation as such, only the loot and glory to be won from an
anonymous other. But within what was becoming the Kinga proto-
state, though it remained a loose political entity, that anonymity was
dispelled by the metaphor of fraternity among Sanga princes. It was
a metaphor which had become a mechanism for recruiting men to war
as well as for establishing the historical depth and grandeur of the
high courts. A man has a privileged relationship to his brother,
whether or not the peace is being kept between them.
121
Spies would be sent out to locate the cattle in Kyelelo’s
country—or it might be in the Central realm, in one of the three
domains with direct approach from Uhugilo: Kila or Tandala, Maliwa,
Igolwa. But when neighbour domains were raided in that spirit, once
the peace was broken a cycle of warfare was knowingly begun, which
only the oblique diplomacy of priests (with their professional talent
for manipulating the meanings in events) could eventually bring to an
end. This kind of guerrilla activity was by no means the spontaneous
thing a group of youths would spring.
Logistically, raiding was the more difficult the more distant the
target, especially as darkness was required to cover the whole opera-
tion. If cattle could not be rustled well away by stealth, the owners
might quickly form a superior party to run down the burdened thieves.
The style of a Kinga cattle raid would hardly have satisfied a Turkana
tribesman or, indeed, the very Nyakyusa or Sangu herdsmen whom
Kinga youths considered their most eligible victims. As lowlanders,
these peoples had larger herds and faced greater difficulty in retali-
ating. Ironically, though such a target might be thought formidable,
the unheroic style of a Kinga raid may sometimes have accounted for
its success. It is harder to raise a posse to chase down a sneakthief
than to hammer a brazen enemy. No doubt, raiders everywhere are
drawn by dreams of glory, and a raiding pattern does not persist
where these values can’t be realized when needed in actual combat.
The intrepid persona of youth was much made of in Kinga warfare but
didn’t preside. Heroics were something the Kinga put on well enough,
but the dominant theme in night-raider accounts I had was not
bravado but ritual precaution. The outcome of a raid could seem to
depend on the performance of medicines not men. Kinga heroics will
deserve their chapter but in another context.
122
ments, with the coming of darkness the spies must actually approach
the byre and take footprints of the lead cow, secreting them in a
special calabash. A pole from the byre gate must also be carried away.
At home the bark of the pole would be stripped and mixed with
contents of the calabash. Then the raiding party, thought strong
enough to succeed, would start out by daylight, lying quietly on the
way the first night while scouts went ahead again.
The actual raid was mounted the following night. The lead cow
whose footprint had been ritually bound would be enchanted by the
calabash, and the other animals should readily follow. Behind the herd,
specialists would busy themselves with medicine horns of the type
that spread protective vapours. When pursuers reached a place
treated in this way their feet must grow heavy. They might well give
up the chase. But on their side as well there could be powerful
medicines used. The raiders’ own footprints might have been found
and bound up in the calabash of a Wanji specialist—Kinga would know
this when their own legs grew unaccountably weary. Generally the
raiders would not hope to escape without giving battle, but would try
only to harass and delay the pursuers, allowing the lure-calabash to
lead the herd into safe country.
In this way, though a ruler would not farm out the royal animals
123
chiefly to decentralize his herd—they were few enough that they were
best protected at the heart of the realm—he could still combine
feeding the court with building his own and the smaller herds of his
most stalwart cohorts. As cattle failed to breed well in most parts,
capital stock had to be maintained by persistent and reasonably
successful raiding. Next to this, if the Northern realm may be taken
as a model for the Sanga political system more generally, border wars
over territory were less important. Even where elders did discuss
wars of that kind with me (the wars with Kyelelo) they emphasized
the business of raiding for cattle and women.
Territories
What was the value of territory in a circulatory political system
which depended on the magnetism of its courts and failed to ascribe
corporateness to its kin and local groups? That wars might be fought
over territory at all—and the saga of Kyelelo the Cruel in the Western
realm is evidence enough that they might—suggests an element of
territoriality affecting if not determining the character of the war
pattern. But this case at its core is that of a prince understandably
bent on extending his realm over independent domains on its margin.
That is, the central issue is the extension of the Sanga hegemony and
with it the Kinga political identity over a small neighbouring ethnic
group, the Mahanzi. This ought not to be confused with a war between
two parties over the rights to settlement and exploitation of some
given territory. It is the entanglement of Kyelelo with rivals for a
stolen throne which gives his saga its special twist. Setting that
case aside, I believe all the evidence is consistent with the idea of a
segmentary protostate comprised essentially of groups not lands.
But this is not to say territory never featured among the spoils of
war.
124
un-Kinga culture; but in fact the territory Kinga (in their own way) did
fight over had little or no economic value to them.
More than one Kinga ‘pioneer’ must have felt the irony of a
political system (not in this respect a ‘modern’ invention) which
depends on individualism for the forces of growth, then follows it up
with the burdens of taxation and control. The ordinary advantage of a
marginal location, compensating the relative poverty that may go
with it, is a measure of immunity from the demands of a central
government. The Sanga lord can’t exact imongo where there is no
visible wealth, or expect military service from a man who dare not
desert his family to attend court. All considered, some men raised in
the bush culture would have found it congenial to accept the court’s
patronage at the greatest practical distance. And since that in itself
could only help to keep the system growing, a prince would have found
this arrangement congenial as well. Some principles apply the world
around.
125
country settled by a lord’s known followers which marked his putative
borders, not any lines conceived to be inscribed (map-fashion) on the
land itself, whether by medicine horns or otherwise. The uncertainty
attaching to the boundary man did not usually pertain to the
question which side he would fight on if obliged but whether and in
what circumstances he might be made to feel obliged at all. A man
with little invested in his situation can only be pressed so far before
he vacates it for another. Short of that, hill people can (as the
Mawemba were still doing in 1960) keep a weather eye out for the
revenuer and rarely be found at home. In the norms of bush culture
men, women, and children are together in the fields during the day,
leaving their settlements empty. In barren country the predators are
few and herdboys always in position to give the alarm. Staying free of
political entanglements is rule one.
126
pattern there was no effort made to take other human captives
unless the specific (and official but top-secret) purpose of the raid
was acquiring not booty but a single human ritual victim. But under
the war pattern as such, in the rivalry between realms, women were
often taken. Custom had it that a captive woman should conceive and
bear a child, rearing it through infancy and leaving it then as ransom
when, eventually, arrangements were made for her to return home.
Mwanadyo said:
Captive women were divided out among their captors, but the
Prince kept one or two to be his concubines and the servants of his
chief wife. By such a captive woman the Prince might beget two chil-
dren before peace was made at last with Kyelelo. The Prince then would
either return the woman or marry her by paying the husband
bridewealth. This man would come after her once the peace was made.
If the Prince wanted to keep her he must pay five hoes and three or
four goats—perhaps two goats with another owing if animals were
scarce. This was a full bridewealth then [1890]. But if the woman pre-
ferred her original husband he should have her back, only the children
born here must stay. Some captive women might please no one. They
would be given out to commoners to work for their wives as servants.
When the husband came seeking such a woman he would be told where
to find her: “No one would have her, she has only eaten our food.” And
the man would pay a spent hoe and get her back.
Though the Kinga did not marry the people they fought as a
matter of preference, the war pattern did create ties across lines of
enmity, stabilizing them. I know of only one case of decimating war
within Kingaland, the scarcely-documented Mahanzi rape of the
127
Eastern realm under German instigation during their Maji Maji
reprisals. The two native communities in that case had no common
border and no seam of kinship.
128
Kinga say they acquired the sweet potato [Sw: viazi vitamu ; K:
ama javo ]. The hero untenzi of this exploit was enthusiastically
rewarded with a princess in marriage for his daughty deed; but it is
given as a private undertaking not a ritually sanctioned act of war
properly creditable to the court of Ukwama’s High Prince. In social
memory this hero was popularly renowned as much for his potato as
for prowess. ‡]
Profits of War
All considered (I propose) the Kinga for all their relative poverty
were not the natural victims but, in their hilly-flank setting, the
natural raiders of the Sowetan region. This looks to be the frame we
should adopt for thinking out their history until about the middle of
the nineteenth century, when the region as a whole was being milita-
rized. The opportunity for Kinga to raid their neighbours with impunity
in the earlier period would have been a function of their own elusive-
ness but afterward of their defensive strength and warlike reputa-
tion. The strategy which evolved was a form of armed theft, the
maximum use of stealth backed by a readiness to mount a daunting
rear-guard action. This was the pattern still living (not merely lodged
in the social memories of old men) in 1960. How much should we
presume to read from it?
129
calling for direct court sponsorship, tactical planning, and the intro-
duction of elaborate ritual precautions to discipline the actual opera-
tion. It follows that in a general way the raiding pattern can account
for the rise of Sanga power and its militaristic ethos. But right along
with this rise the importance of the war pattern would have grown;
for it was a segmentary political order, organized by war, which had
evolved by the time we begin to have genuine historical knowledge.
130
retain the core of a strong man’s able-bodied following? It would
always depend on subtle matters of character and social alignment,
subject to the press of chance events and, as often as not, the
mischief of political rivals either at home or in a neighbouring camp,
who might draw men away.
131
by any such serious falling-out. We know of a few battles within the
Central and Eastern realms; we know that even when a prince was
clearly defeated within his own realm there was no simple reversal of
rank order. The challenger could aspire to full independence and might
even eventually achieve some measure of priestly confirmation of his
claim to princely rank; he might take on the trappings of royalty and
set up client domains to pass on imongo . But this is the work of a
strenuous lifetime not a single victory in battle. Inside the limits of
population, space, and time which comprised Kinga ethnicity in 1900,
the actual formation of new realms by fission of this kind could not
have been achieved more than three times.
132
Though the land itself is not favoured by reason of its altitude, the
expansion of Kinga population and settlement appears to have kept
pace with that of the Nyakyusa-Ngonde peoples and the Hehe, though
on a proportionally smaller scale. Regional conditions fairly inde-
pendent of zonal ecological variations seem to have favoured the rise
of politically complex communities; but regional conditions did not
oblige the Kinga to surpass the Mahanzi, the Wanji, or the Pangwa; nor
were Kinga mere recipients by diffusion of political institutions
evolved elsewhere.
Faces of War
Kinga doubtless did their raiding in their own way, and the
degree to which the court-sponsored raids were encumbered with
ritual may set them apart, but it is the war pattern I find distinctive.
Is “Apollonian war” an oxymoron? At any rate, it points to the Sanga
emphasis on social forms meant to contain the passions. That is, in
its ideal form the Kinga war pattern did not make violence a licensed
end in itself. War games focused on martial arts, and the rules of the
game even laid a ban on public recognition of accidental wounds or
death. Yet in practice war within a realm must have been bloody
enough; it was often socially disruptive. Since political ambition
seems always to have been the open motive of such wars, they would
have strained the system’s legitimacy. According to what Malinowski
would call ‘native theory’ an internal war was never actually initiated
from below but always provoked from there. War then took the form
of a disciplinary or pre-emptive strike by the prince, putting down a
presumptuous lord for arrogating to himself some special trappings
of rank. Gauntlets were thrown down and taken up. Upset victories
are of course not countenanced as such in native theory. They do crop
up anecdotally. Every domain was a would-be realm.
On any of its levels the war pattern would have shown alternate
faces from time to time, according as the perspective shifts from
winners to losers, or from the offensive to the defensive side. War
could energize segmentary expansion, though ‘predatory expansion’ in
the sense of Sahlins’s ideal type does not apply. The other face of war
was defensive. For the lord there was the problem of being seen to be
the protector of his people: keeping the boundaries in an unbureau-
cratic world. For subjects there was a bigger and stronger alternative
to neighbourhood self-help. I find no reason to suppose the two faces
of war, offense and defense, were philosophically more distinct in the
Kinga mind than they have generally been for modern military élites.
133
The reasoning which led to elaborate ritual precautions on a cattle
raid was followed also in full-scale war, encumbering it with a wealth of
medicinal procedures and caveats. The fact that a small raiding
company could easily have dispensed with its priestly component,
while the much greater forces drawn up for war itself could not do so
without undermining the Sanga system, is worth pondering. It
accords with the interpretation that raids, like war-games, were
schools. I have found it characteristic of the Sanga mind to put the
art of war ahead of sheer warmaking power. By this I don’t mean to
suggest that armies like that of Shaka Zulu were not skilled; but
what distinguished them was their commitment to a fierce kind of
total war then quite new in all of Bantu history. Sanga rulers met this
new spirit of war a generation later with the Ngoni intrusions but (like
the Nyakyusa) weren’t affected by it in the way the Sangu and Hehe
were. It is first with the German suppression of the Maji Maji uprising
that war of this kind came to Kingaland. The Sanga courts were tuned
to an older, medieval Bantu model.
134
Kinga child-rearing pattern, owe unflinching loyalty to their adoptive
communities; but all this does not mean that border warfare could
have been a materially profitable enterprise. Rates of reproduction
were not enhanced, nor one lord’s population in the long run swollen at
the expense of another’s. War was an integral facet of Kinga court
culture and not in some simple way reducible to un-peculiar human
motives.
Heroics
The Kinga war pattern would appear less peculiar among East
African examples were it not for the elaborate war games held at a
Sanga court. These were most developed at the four princely centres
but would be held by ambitious local rulers on an appropriate scale. A
lesser training game found everywhere in Ukinga was the stick fight
for youths, often staged by their elders. Two sides would be drawn up,
each fighter getting himself a handful of cudgels, which he would let
fly close to ground level. Legs might be broken and boys possibly killed,
but the game was generally deemed salutary—it was certainly salta-
tory. The stick fight was good training for dodging spears but hardly
could have been for hurling them, since the cudgel was much lighter
and was flung gyring. No shields were used, and each boy fended for
himself, finding his own style for fighting. Training with spears and
shields began with own-made weaponry among the herding bands. A
lad could expect his first experience with combat defending his little
herd from the ambitions of neighbour bands. Skills and armament
would naturally escalate, if he survived, with bodily growth until as an
aspiring young man he put in his appearance at court. But the transi-
tion was probably gradual for most recruits, since the smallest local
settlements would have had some political presence: chicken, goat,
and cattle politics graded into one another in practice if not in the
ideal model of the social memory.
After taking office Mwalukisa (I) never took part personally in war or in
the war games held at his capital. Makolovolelo was his unyakivaga general
officer, a man of Mahenge (a commoner) lineage. Umumikilo, his lieutenant,
was a Sanga but not of royal birth. They were appointed by Mwalukisa on
the strength of their recognized standing among their fellows, having
proved themselves in the games and in war itself. The avanyigoha royal
135
guards appointed by the prince were about twenty; among all the men
barracked at the court it was they who enjoyed special rank and trust.
Some were avapapwa men of royal lineage, but the proportion of royals to
commoners was not ascribed but determined strictly by individual
prowess. These guards could expect to be continuously feasted, always
having more than enough meat, beer, and other foods. Some were married
men who during periods of peace lived with their wives near their fields at a
distance from court; but they were always quickly summoned by the
sounding of the war-horn ingalape. [This was a ten-foot pipe of reedy wood
whose tones traveled out to the borders of a domain.]
Far more numerous than the guards, and generally less well entrenched
at court, were the ordinary barracksmen avanyakivag. The rule was that all
male offspring of the royal lineage were members of the prince’s ikivaga, but
commoners to gain tenure there must prove themselves of value. Lacking
special talents, a youth must prove himself valiant by a challenge at arms.
He would be matched against an experienced fighter and must acquit
himself well. The opportunity for such a challenge was afforded by the
schools or games of war which the court held from time to time as public
means and the public mood dictated. Even in times of peace this would
mean once a year, either during the rains of in the dry season, when men
could be spared from the fields. A school lasted four or five days, with
continuous feasting. An experienced barracksman might challenge a
guardsman to a duel with amagoha spears, ihula sword, and ingwembe shield.
The first wound ended the trial; even if it were mortal there could be no jural
consequence. A challenger who triumphed was much loved by the prince,
becoming himself a guardsman for life, but if he failed he was disgraced.
136
cally: he too could become an aging hanger-on. It was the hero untenzi who
married first and moved on to the pioneer’s life, while the coward undwatsi
held back in courting as in war. The two men lived and ate together in the
ikivaga as equals, but no one had secrets there.
Ilelo twibiha kugelana iligoha! “Today we are going to try each other in war!”
By that announcement all men of fighting quality in the domain were
summoned to court. There were no prohibitions of sexual congress, no food
taboos or restraints on drinking—men were expected to act in high spirits
the whole time. Along all the paths to the capital, parties of maidens and
women from the farms would be bringing in supplies. They would stay until
their pots were empty. It was a time of general festivity for which beer and
food must not fail, and in which the broad community participated.
The first war of Ntowanilo the Cruel was undertaken against Mwemutsi
of Ukwama. Ntowanilo wanted to conquer the capital, displace the prince,
and rule there himself. Though he failed he continued to make trouble for
Mwemutsi, who called upon the Avahumbi (Sangu) for support. They
responded in good number under a hero named Kyelelo. Then Mwemutsi sent
a challenge umpavo to Ntowanilo, who presented himself with a full fighting
force at Ukwama. When the two armies were drawn up, Mwemutsi
challenged, “If you are man enough, attack!” But Ntowanilo held out for a
duel of the heroes, pitting himself against the Sangu Kyelelo. The two
fought fiercely, hurling each a fistful of spears at close range, but neither
had been able to wound the other. Each parried one spear with his shield and
evaded the rest. Then Mwemutsi stopped the fight, declaring the decision
was to be made by measuring the rents in the two shields. They found that
the Sangu was hit fairly in the centre of the shield, Ntowanilo only glanced
high and right, by the shoulder. The Sangu embraced Ntowanilo and
presented him with his own name Kyelelo, which he did in respect for
prowess, taking the name Ntowanilo in return. But the Kinga prince Kyelelo,
as he now was to call himself, returned to his home at Ihanga. Though he had
won a personal victory he had failed in his political aim. His failure to fight a
war when challenged signified his submission to Mwemutsi, and henceforth
Kyelelo turned his attention to expanding westward.
137
otherwise would have been lost. They are details which offer insight
into the precolonial world of southwestern Tanganyika, but for
assessing their significance the general historical context wants to
be furnished, and I therefore propose to give it in as tidy a fashion as
information permits. I shall also take note of uncertainties, though I
do suppose the general proportions of the model I have developed are
correct and deserve to be given as history not hypothesis. Some of
the uncertainties derive from the two Kyelelos having been conflated
in the popular mind by 1960, and the several famous exploits of
“Kyelelo” attributed variously to father and to son. This kind of mix-up
yields to detailed comparisons of information from different inform-
ants, and in this I have had to rely on my own judgement. I doubt we
shall ever be clear how the two predatory princes (Kyelelos I & II)
differed in character and military qualities, or know under what condi-
tions the succession took place. It is clear, though, that they share
the credit for putting together an integral Western realm under the
Sanga name, as eventually sanctioned by the German administration
at century’s end. As for the gap between Sanga theory and the telling
of this history at the level of local events, I think we should accept
the view of elders I consulted that these events constituted a resto-
ration of Sanga unity—that is, a reintegration of the kiKinga-speaking
settlements in the West—which had broken down in the original
furore around the Napoleonic aspirations of Kyelelo I Ntowanilo. At
the same time I find it unlikely that the pre-existing unity had ever
amounted to anything as systematic as the Sanga model calls for.
There was a loose and fluid alignment of independent Sanga settle-
ments conceptually polarized by the Sanga myth of a settling-and-
ruling élite. From time to time the domain-and-realm structure was
confirmed by public acts of rank-concession within a realm—the
rendering of nominal imongo tribute by lord to prince, as at Ihanga or
Ukwama. But between the realms the only vessel of structure was
the verbal formula maintained (and updated at need) by a ubiquitous
priesthood: the supposed order of seniority among the four siblings
imagined to have founded four separate realms at the beginning of
Sanga time.
138
from world events. At least three Sowetan peoples responded by
moving, each in its own way, to central direction. Godfrey Wilson
(1939) concluded that Ngonde centralized around a single ceremonial
court in response to the ivory trade on Lake Malawi. Redmayne (1964;
1968) shows that both the Sangu and Hehe military states were
formed Zulu-fashion: a single local chief rises to an external challenge
and wages a successful war of amalgamation on his neighbours,
creating a novel and formidable offensive force. Kyelelo would have
been such a conquering hero if the Sanga polity had been open to
amalgamation. A closer look at this, the only Kinga hero-figure of
genuinely historic times will illuminate both the way the Sanga
system expanded and the stubborn strength of its segmentary form.
139
collect imongo at the grass roots in an expanded domain. But on this
point the evidence wants a close review.
140
should picture the Ntowanilo of the duel not as a prince or even a lord
but (at best) an unkinga heir-apparent of Ihanga. He would have been
the war-leader for a secluded ruler:
When he turned away from Ukwama, Kyelelo I seized the power of Ihanga
through the murder of his own father Umwikusi [otherwise Ndutukutuku],
the fifth lineal ruler of that place, fourth since its founding by Ukiganga, a
Sanga sent from Ukwama to rule there. The full brother (one mother) of
Umwikusi, whose name was Mwangawa, regarded himself as the rightful
claimant to power but fled westward before Ntowanilo’s determined insur-
rection. Later Mwangawa was murdered in the same (treacherous) manner
as his brother. But followers of Mwangawa rallied to his son Vululile rather
than accept Kyelelo. Vululile was beaten back in subsequent wars by Kyelelo,
who was able to extend his realm to include Luwumbu domain. It was there
he established a new capital and continued to fight Vululile and his Mahanzi
allies. [Field summary of responses to group interview, 6/93]
141
spite of the six or seven kilometers between, and despite the
anomalous duality of their leadership during the early period of
contact, remained in their own view a single if twin-centred commu-
nity. Ndunginye must therefore be regarded as [ unkinga ] heir-
apparent to the domain of Ihanga-Luwumbu, as he first appears in
missionary records. This in turn positively implies that no conquered
community formed the core of Ndunginye’s following at the place
Luwumbu. In short, further investigations do not confirm Kyelelo IV
Padili’s foreshortened tradition of a “move to the west” by the
original prince of his name.
142
had done so when he first came to power, but Vululile had not. In
Kyelelo’s case, having seized a crown by foul play, there would have
been a stigma to outlive before he could lead men with confidence into
a major conflict. But the priestly powers of his avanyivaha viziers were
there to be used, and informants all supposed that his ritual installa-
tion would have been properly executed at Ihanga. Since no one had
defeated him he retained the sacred things of princely rank—
supposing, that is, that they had indeed belonged to the throne of
the “father” he first murdered. It is not really unlikely that his
challenge of Mwemutsi and the honour he won in the duel from which
he took his name first opened the way for a ruler at Ihanga to claim
brotherhood with the high prince at Ukwama and call himself unku-
ludeva .
But whatever the historicity of their claims, Kyelelo’s priestly
viziers would have remained more powerful by public reckoning than
Mwangawa’s until their medicines had been mutually tested in battle.
The elders of Ihanga [May 1963] stated that whereas rulers at
Ihanga had propitiated ancestors at Ukingilo nearby, Mwangawa had
made sacrifice at Pivutsavanu, west across the Lukameli river and, in
fact, beyond Vululile’s eventual capital at Lingundya. The significance
of this, given the symbolic importance to Sangas of a westward
movement in history, is that Mwangawa could not himself have been
born at Ihanga. He could claim no more than lineage brotherhood with
its ruler. But at the same time Mwangawa was by common consent
“older brother” not “father” to the Bulongwa ruler. The last was
Usakalang’i of the Mwakagile line. The mandate of that line was traced
to Ihanga directly, not to Pivutsavanu or Lingundya. That is, though
imongo, in following the fortunes of war and military repute, did (in
passing from “younger” to “elder”) centre the Western realm for some
time in Mwangawa’s court, there were latent structures in the realm
which still favoured re-establishing Ihanga’s ruling house. This would
account for the bitterness of the contest, after Mwangawa’s murder,
between the two camps, Lingundya and Luwumbu, facing each other
across the Lukameli valley. The prize, as we shall see, was the assign-
ment of imongo from Mahanzi rulers, who had now been firmly drawn
into the Sanga sphere.
143
show himself ready for leadership but evidently found he’d need more
of the Midas touch to rally his predecessor’s following. Sanga leader-
ship depended on a bountiful reputation.
When Mwangawa heard his “older brother” had been killed by his son at
Ukwama (sic), he sent word that Kyelelo was not to cross the river Lukameli
into Mwangawa’s domain on pain of death. But Kyelelo had ambition to rule
that whole country. He sent two cows and pombe native beer by his
avanyivaha priestly elders to Mwangawa. The prestation was “to make
peace and calm his sorrow, for Kyelelo knows he has done a wrong.”
Mwangawa at length accepted the gifts and granted permission for Kyelelo
to come to him, for the priests from Ihanga made representations that
their lord “wanted to meet face to face and contract peace.” As it turned
out, Kyelelo was only plotting with his avanyivaha to feign sorrow ukulila ikililo
in order to accept the embrace of his “father’s younger brother” after the
Kinga fashion. “I shall lock him in my arms. You are to charge in, sweeping his
feet from under him. As soon as my arm is free I shall bring down my battle-
axe upon him.” It happened just so. Everyone who saw the deed took flight.
Kyelelo himself seized the moment to flee, returning to Ihanga to prepare
for war.
144
Mwangawa as a man “much loved throughout his country,” and so well
established as to provoke Kyelelo’s envy. In Mesiya’s retrospect,
Vululile had fought Kyelelo to a standstill, the Mahanzi joining in as
natural allies because Malambila of Kavale, a Mahanzi, had long been
Mwangawa’s untsagila. That is, a good portion of the Mahanzi folk
already fell within Mwangawa’s domain. Mwangawa’s personal
charisma, Mesiya assured me, commanded tribute from countries
Ihanga had never claimed: “He received imongo from all the Mahanzi,
from Mwakagile (Bulongwa) and from Ukyeve (“Mwenentela” in German
times) in Magoma.
These were not wholly vain boasts. After all, the German
missionaries had found his successor in office the “superior chief” of
all the western domains but Kyelelo’s. But Mesiya exaggerates Mwan-
gawa’s position, underrating the personal achievements of Vululile
and the unifying mechanisms of war where men can be aroused by
outrage and inspired by a common fear. At the village Pivutsavanu/
Witsavanu in Mesiya’s domain, the site of Mwangawa’s old capital, I
consulted the ranking priest, a Mahanzi by lineage, and the local
elders. Mwangawa, they said, had cordial but co-equal relations with
the other avatwa local lords: the three Mahanzi, the other Sanga at
Bulongwa, and the Magoma. “He did not rule over them.” Later, Vululile
came to do so in the final period of Kinga history before the pax
germanica . “Because they feared to be killed at the hands of Ntow-
anilo, they freely joined together to support Vululile as protector of
the country.” No unification of these people on such a scale had been
known before.
145
Mahanzi univocally deny that either Kyelelo (Ihanga) or Mwangawa
(Pivutsavanu) had authority beyond their own domains until the unifi-
cation under Vululile; and there is no convincing evidence that this
unification was solid before Kyelelo (Ihanga-Luwumbu) succeeded in
turning seniority claims (as “elder brother” to Vululile) into a
command rank under the Germans and a jurisdictional fact under the
British. A truer picture of the colonizing of the domain the historic
Mwangawa would rule seems to linger in the tradition within his own
domain that the whole Kyando line of rainmakers fled before the
original “Mwangawa” into uSafwa in the Poroto mountains. Their flight
was followed by drought in the country, particularly in Ng’ondong’i
where the immigrants had settled. At length a Mwangawa sent his
priest-elders to Usafwa, where travelers had reported flourishing
crops, to persuade the Mahanzi rainmakers to relent and return.
Mwangawa allowed them henceforth to carry on their sacrifice as of
old, respecting their religion and granting them a section (Unkumbulu/
Unyampeke) which has since been an integral but clearly Mahanzi part
of this Sanga domain. The story constitutes a charter for the contin-
uation of a Mahanzi culture and identity within and effectually
subject to the Kinga.
146
and Kyelelo managed to break off the spear in his side at its shank. He
then hid in a millet bin. There he was found in the morning by a woman
who proved willing to assist him. She gathered men who would bear
him to Ihanga. Safely arrived, Kyelelo toasted them with beer, sending
them home as his “brothers” with two cows. It was Vululile rather who
had a claim to fraternity there: this was the community which had
sheltered him for three years while he established his leadership, and
his chief wife was from there. But social memory carried no hint of
moral indignation at what an observer might take for treachery. The
tyrant’s rescuers are assumed to have acted as free persons should
according to their own best information on the man and the matter.
As for Kyelelo’s wound, he soon had a strong sapling tied like a great
bow to the ground, put a taut rope to the barbed spearhead, and
ordered six men to hold him down while a seventh cut the tie of the
sapling. So he lived up to the reputation for personal heroism which
had moved Kilanzi’s men to bear him home.
147
Why was Kyelelo, found wounded and disarmed in an enemy’s
millet bin, allowed to survive? Tunginiye denied that there had been
laws or rules of warfare which could have protected him. Instead the
reason must be that a commoner would not have dared kill a prince
sultani , enemy or not, unless in the heat of battle. Other well-
informed elders thought Kyelelo must after all have taken grain from
the bin and stolen away under his own power. “If they had seen him
they would have killed him.” I can’t reject either view out of hand. What
we do know is that the social memory after 65 years of colonial peace
and war liked the tale as told here.
Where war takes its style from the surprise raid mounted by a
small band of adventurers, and where armies may be drawn up in full
regalia to witness the duel of just two heroes, the deep rationale of
the martial exercise revolves in good medieval fashion around notions
of manly valour. We must try to judge how far the great fear of
Kyelelo’s threatened conquest was an artifact of political theatre
and, at a deeper level, a sign of the kind of public unease which, in his
generation, had been inspired by confrontations with truly unknow-
able enemies from outside. Kinga knew a great deal about the world
beyond their mountains. Their contacts with Rift Valley Nyakyusa,
Safwa, and Sangu were particularly intense, being always balanced
between raiding and trading in iron wares, both activities requiring a
keen awareness of the others’ customs, their leaders, and their
seasonal movements.
148
Sham, Bluff, and Sacrament
The hierarchic order which Vululile introduced, particularly in his
relations with Mahanzi rulers, seems to have had no profound effect
at the grass roots, if the matter can be judged from later events and
folk memory. By this I mean that, though Vululile recognized the
standard three ranks of the Sanga system and published them
among the Mahanzi on a note of fear and necessity, lordly rank-
concession had no more power in the West than in the North, Centre,
or East to quell popular claims to independence. Among the Mahanzi
the ruler of lowest rank was untwa unya’nekelo master of the sacrifice.
The rank corresponds to the (quite differently conceived) Sanga
untsagila who, being of the line “sent out to rule” from the capital, was
thought to owe his old host the duties of a junior. Since the Mahanzi
local ruler was patently not “sent out” from an alien immigrant’s
capital, Vululile’s term for him associates him with local non-military
court responsibilities. But one Mahanzi ruler, Selemba of the Mwandi-
lawa line at Ulumba (the central domain), was elevated above the
others. His insignia, presented by Vululile, proclaim the military
competence of his court. He received ilikule and ingalape , master drum
and trumpet; ulwanzisi otterskin crown, and ikinya’lwangula royal stool.
He bore a large imatsi spiral shell ornament at his breast and donned
the iduma leopardskin on occasion. “ Vatetsage untwa : The people
always called him lord.” Nonetheless when I inquired about war games I
found they had acquired little of the Sanga style. The drum ilikule was
used to assemble the warriors yearly “to prepare for possible war. The
Lord wants to know who has died and who remains—how many are his
avanyigoha warriors.” The gathering served as a display of martial
conformation without martial energy. As to actual armed contests
there were none, for “they feared some would be killed, and they could
not afford the loss.” The Mahanzi were, in short, sham Sanga; and the
symbolism of rank was lost on anyone outside the circle of the ruling
élite. Kyelelo with his incessant threats and intermittent raids,
stealing cattle and even goats, taking women and children captive,
and his reputation of having vowed to kill every hero the Mahanzi
might put up against him had made it possible for Vululile to organize
Mahanzi and Magoma alike on a military model. But the structure of
the polity remained segmentary not hierarchic.
149
Selemba’s unyivaha witch-finder, can be seen from his own admission
to German authorities, to have exercised the full powers of a witch-
ridder. He was of Ngulwa lineage, which was still in my time repre-
sented in strength only in Vululile’s domain Lingundya. But the
process of imposing a Sanga political system here in the West had
not had the time to ‘take’ as it had done in the other realms, before
the German period. Vululile himself was certainly styled unkuludeva
prince, and there is general agreement except among informants from
what was Kyelelo’s camp that Vululile in the precontact period had
established ritual links directly with Ukwama—links from which
Kyelelo was cut out. That is, Vululile might in a pinch have made good a
claim at that time to being the only prince unkuludeva and the legiti-
mate ruler in the Western realm. It was not in fact until preparations
were under way for the 1926 constitution that Kyelelo’s claim to
seniority was examined and validated at a general conclave of local
rulers. The strength of this claim at that time lay in the admission
that all Sanga rulers in the West had their origins at Ihanga: it must
follow that the ruling house there was the senior one. Old enmities
and the alliance of Mahanzi with dissident Kinga, which had been
based on those enmities, had come to have little meaning on either
side. Mahanzi elders even at Mwangawa’s old capital told me [June
1963] that there would have been no disputes over jurisdictions in
the West during British times, had colonial officials been prepared to
grant two courts (and the nominal salaries of two rulers): one court
should have been for the Mahanzi-Magoma peoples (“We are like one
kin”) and one for Kyelelo and his Sangas. They seemed to have no
doubt that in those days the supplementary court would have been
awarded to Mwandilawa in the Mahanzi domain which Vululile had
raised above the others. “Even the Paramount Mwemutsi knew
Mwandilawa, though he would not have recognized a Magoma ruler.”
And that is to say that the Sanga-Mahanzi alliance, having fallen
apart at the top, had ceased to have meaning by 1960 if not by 1925.
An older ethnic cleavage had asserted itself instead.
Lugendile was tight-fisted and that is why he failed to get the rule. He
was elder brother to Kyelelo and due the office but was cheated of it, being
outsmarted by Kyelelo. All this happened when the time was drawing near
for certain solemnities. There came a stranger from the bush country while
150
Lugendile was withdrawn with the avanyivaha councilors of the place and
certain emissaries from the neighbour realms. These emissaries were the
chief priests of Mwemutsi at Ukwama, of Mwalukisa at Uhugilo, and of
Ndwanga at Ilevelo. [At the time Ndwanga called himself unkuludeva and
rejected the claims of Mwalukisa to imongo—they were at war.] The
stranger, a fellow from Mwalukisa’s country, was denied hospitality. Three
times he cried his greeting at the doorway, Mapembero!, and three times he
was sent away. But he had heard the talk of the avanyivaha within: at the
first cock’s crow before dawn they would beat the sacred drum ilikule and
blow the sacred trumpet ingalape pronouncing Lugendile untwa ruler of an
autonomous domain. The stranger left and, walking on about a mile, found a
gathering of men eating and drinking at a private house. This was the place
of Kyelelo, who straight away welcomed the stranger to take food and
drink. Now Kyelelo, hearing the stranger’s tale, was full of resentment that
he had not been informed of his brother’s impending elevation—he, Kyelelo,
had been barred from being a member of the inner circle and was left to
entertain himself and his friends apart. So he gathered together these
friends and together they raided the ritual centre at midnight, well before
cock-crow. They beat the drum and blew great blasts upon the horns.
Lugendile heard the sound and cried, “Vanyengile, ndilinyengwa! They have
cheated, I am deceived!” This is the tale of how his lineage became Sanga
Nyengwa, the Cheated, while Kyelelo’s line is Sanga Mbetsiwa, the Denied,
referring to the tight-fistedness of Lugendile. [May 1963]
151
To illustrate the way the Sanga successions worked, let us
imagine that Ngasika/Petele had not chosen the mission and,
surviving to 1926, had then laid claim through his lineage to seniority
among the rulers in the West. Succeeding in this, he would have
become known in accordance with Kinga usage as Kyelelo III, bumping
the man of junior lineage, a son of Kyelelo II, who actually did take that
title. In each of the princely realms we seem to have an unbroken
hereditary line of rulers bearing always only the one name, identified
with the office itself. The impression of continuity is, of course,
intended.
152
open to easy approach from two directions. The old site of the village
evidently had been chosen without any compulsion to think first and
foremost of defense.
For the most part the people live in scattered and isolated huts. A
larger settlement was reached, however, whose farmsteads lay in the
midst of green fields planted in peas. [BMB 1896:222]
153
THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER SIX
154
sit about an open fire, which is described as flaring up in the manner of
fireworks, but managed so that the fire itself seems to single out a
culprit. Persons of his stature would have been more common in the
precontact culture, if only because men of all types then had to find
their careers at home.‡‡
23 June [1899]. Today I learned that the Kinga also have a kind of ordeal
by fire. For example, should the victim of a theft report the robbery to a
witchdoctor, of which there are plenty to be found, the victim must bring to
the spot those persons he suspects. The sorcerer takes a calabash cut off
at the neck, anoints it with sorcery-medicines, puts some fire in it, and
then rubs the vessel back and forth on the subject’s body, the opening
turned against it. If the vessel sucks itself fast, searing the subject’s hide,
he is convicted of the theft. The sorcerer says isoe [iswe] or yesoe [jiswe]
“He has died” (that is, the dog). This kind of judgement comes from the
custom by which very poisonous medicines, which also in other ways are
employed as vouchers for guilt or innocence, in recent times have been
administered to dogs—as earlier happened with human beings. If such a
substituted dog should die, the thief or the like is unmasked. If he throws up
the medicine that is called ivexile [ivekile] or jidexile [jidekile]—[the man] has
withstood or (the dog) has vomited—and the subject is free of guilt.
It is first of all the victim of the theft who must stand this ordeal by
fire, for the thief may be in his own kin group—if so he is burnt himself, and
the case is settled. But once he is proved innocent the suspects are taken
in turn. He who is burnt is the thief: the calabash can only by force be
removed from the subject’s body. The thief must pay. The procedure is
called ukupokola [ukupukula= to divine].
Some sorcerers operate with a kind of die. Three iron nails with heads
graduated in mass are put into a narrow bamboo cup. Should the one for
whom the dice are consulted be guilty, the nails unite; should he be guiltless,
each nail stands alone. Should a thief caught in this way still protest his
innocence, they will pierce one of his ears and put, or if necessary force, one
of the nails through it. When it goes easily through the subject is innocent,
but failing that the nail may remain with its head stuck in the ear so that
nothing will dislodge it.
155
Oftentimes one and the same person will try all four types [of divination
by going round to] various sorcerers and will, though innocent, be declared
guilty by all four, especially if the complainant has paid the sorcerer a nanny
goat or the like a short while in advance. Then the doctor may be reviled as
the kind who will seize the wealth of people for nothing and worse than
nothing; but the next time they will none the less be sought out. Only a few
persons desiccate themselves fully from the chicanery, which is only too
conspicuous. ‡
The facts must stand as Wolff has given them, as I was not able
to observe divination in the field. I find it reasonable to assume there
would have been a manifestly random mechanism employed in each
case. The nail would be chosen by a random throw, and the autonomy
of the rubbing oracle would be dramatically shown. This allows partici-
pant and observer to impute something like divine intervention or
communication; and it is this invisible backdrop to the visibly
arbitrary action which Wolff has not seen fit to credit. But I am
inclined to take seriously the implication of this account that
thievery tended to be handled in a local and voluntaristic fashion, at
least in the neighbourhood of Wolff’s Tandala station, which occupied
a borderland position with respect to the Northern and Central
capitals. As one moved closer to the centres of political power the
bush culture with its anarchic ethos would have given way before the
Sanga court’s interest in all transactions of a jural nature, and the
fees which might be attached thereto.
156
witchcraft.” She called on Lwembe and the entire Mwemutsi line by
name, calling them gods who lived in her body. She said they gave
orders for everything she did. “Their shadows [ imyitsitsi gyavene ] have
built in me.” She divined by possession: first going into trembling, then
falling down in trance, kicking the fire about as she thrashed
(upsetting the onlookers) while speaking in tongues. Then she would
achieve calm, sit up with gravity, and receive—now as embodying the
whole princely line—honorific greetings from the assembly. The client
would have explained his grievance earlier; now she communicated the
gods’ answer. They were always of one mind. Hikadiseku divined by
night or day and took clients from beyond uKinga’s borders, in
constant procession. Should an accused witch deny guilt, the whole
household was threatened with death. But Tunginiye found she had
the Paramount’s support. “Hikadiseku would name her fee: your basin,
your sheep, your cow—bring it! and she became very rich.” But when
she had meat she would slaughter by night and in secret send a
portion to the Paramount. “He received this as tribute. He had found
by independent investigation that her claims were sound. His
ancestors had chosen to build in her body.”
157
Mwakanema was younger brother to Mlambikyuma, the Paramount
chief originally confirmed by the British. Mlambikyuma had been the
boy called Dembademba for whom a regent was ruling in early contact
times. Divination concerning deaths in the royal household gradually
revealed that Mlambikyuma was under powerful attack by
Mwakanema, who was out to destroy his house and take over the
Paramountcy. The sorcerers employed in the attack were the most
renowned in neighbouring uPangwa; defenders were the avanyivaha of
the Ukwama court. The battle is said to have been drawn out over a
long part of Mlambikyuma’s reign, with death after death in either
house blamed upon the other. At last Mwakanema was defeated,
being left altogether alone. None of his wives or their children
survived. His medicines were seen to have met a superior power, which
turned their withering potency back upon him. Though he himself
survived both Mlambikyuma and that chief’s successor-son Suluvali,
Mwakanema in later life had no expectation of power. In late mid-
century Kinga culture I found him a withdrawn and bitter old man,
representing defeated principles of conservatism and, as he came to
be seen by the independent Tanzanian government, superstition. The
long internecine struggle had seen the debilitation of orthodoxy at
Ukwama, not its confirmation in the nominal victory of an incumbent
Paramount. Unlike a factional schism in which the people must partic-
ipate and political loyalties at least are sharpened, this was a falling
out without popular drama, an acting-out, even as the people mainly
saw it, of decadent values.
158
times prophecy is decentralized, and established power decides
either to crush it or co-opt. On the whole, the strategy of the Sanga
courts seems to have been co-optation. In this way, all the conferr-
able arts, however occult, known anywhere in the realm would eventu-
ally find their way to court to strengthen its establishment, while
the non-conferrable arts as well would be subject to the court’s
review and its expectations of tribute.
159
power centres emerge, tending to claim authority in all spheres of life,
private power is forced underground.
160
Autochthonous Lore—Immigrant Authority
The non-Sanga origins and identities of priestly lines all over
Kingaland gave them a charter as watchdogs for what I have called
the bush culture with its distinctly egalitarian values. This is to say
that dualism at the level of culture was mirrored in a role-opposition
at the level of power. In general, the result was that consensual
decisions of the court represented a synthesis, the product of a
frozen dialectic. Sanga principles called for an unmitigated pursuit of
gain through cattle piracy; but the scruples of the priests produced a
considerably mitigated final pattern. Sanga principles would have
taken the young men out of farming; but priestly coordination of
planting for each of the main traditional crops meant that all the men
could be returned to the fields for the predictable season of intensive
labour without jeopardizing the defense of the realm. Sanga values
would have maximized tribute and feasting; but priestly concern with
scarcity and the popular disaffection it could produce demanded
moderation. Sanga values tended to legitimate arbitrary rule, but the
same priestly concerns acted again for moderation.
While I don’t mean to suggest daily life at the court nicely artic-
ulated itself as a clear-cut structural opposition, I think such
ordering of thought and event had categorical importance warranting
consideration. In the ordinary affairs of a community a Kinga priest
had to look to his own rights and immunities on the same basis as a
warrior of the royal line or a man from the bush. The main line of segre-
gation at the capital was that which set aside the prince, his harem,
and his marriageable daughters. This was a line all commoners must
recognize; and though a similar boundary was not to be found between
commoner and umpapwa [warrior of the royal lineage], the privileged
familiarity of a man who called a queen ‘mother’ and a princess ‘sister’
set him apart. In this sense the underlying structure of court life was
class—dominance and counterdominance. The role of the priest was
to represent people to prince, not vice versa . Thus:
161
Such an alignment of cultural features helps to make clear why
Kinga mythology attributes the civilizing mission, the introduction of
fire, to autochthonous commoners not to the immigrant rulers.
Kilimba, the founding prince at Ukwama, ate raw meat until he was
taught by a traveller from Mavindi (southeastward, now in uPangwa)
the art of making fire with log and drill [ ikivanyina n’ululindi ] and again
the art of burying brands in their ashes to keep overnight. In the
myth, the symbol of Kilimba’s special power is the bow and arrow, said
to have amazed natives of these hills. For hunting the small game
which then abounded there, arrows were far better suited than the
spear. The bow is also a formidable weapon of war, when used with
great skill. In the Kinga division of labour, fire is used by men for
clearing forest land or reclearing fields which, under the prevailing
swidden system, have reverted to bush. But the cooking fire is (by
half-strict custom) in the domain of married women. There is an oppo-
sition here between ‘manly’ and domestic arts which illuminates one
of the creative tensions at the heart of Kinga culture in the nine-
teenth century. The prince or lord alone among men was bound wholly
to the heterosexual life; the priest with other officers of the court
mediated between the prince, withdrawn in his harem compound, and
ordinary men.
The court with its manly arts was undoubtedly the centre of a
Kinga realm. High deeds were those of war, of dispute settlement, of
ritual action. The hinterland was given to agriculture and domesticity.
In the myth, Kilimba’s wives are away, as he is, when the traveller with
the art of firemaking chances by, so it is a daughter of the prince who
is taught the art and in turn teaches the Sanga men. In gratitude to
the traveller who has so sweetened his meat, and in altogether
fitting return, Kilimba gives him the girl in marriage. This may stand as
162
the primordial act from which the Kinga polity has been derived. We
have a social contract by which the manly arts of the immigrant
warrior-hunter and the domestic values of the autochthonous farmer
are joined to form an expansive new society.
163
difference than shallow public acceptance. As 'doctor' a practitioner
of magical rites is inevitably embroiled in interpersonal relations
which will tend to generate private claims upon him, and require him to
provide himself with private immunities. But rain or the want of it
affects all farmers equally, and a 'doctor' who has once been credited
with the power to control the rain—to endanger or to benefit the
whole community as one—has by that fact been elevated to a status
above the private. As broker for mankind vis-à-vis the source of all
mortal danger, this is a doctor cast as the sublime prevaricator: if he
won't send rain he can't pretend he can't. He deserves to be called a
priest.
The chief wife of the ruler [unkuludeva] will stir up a small amount of
eleusine (finger millet) beer, mixing in with it some well-pressed-out castor
beans in her own calabash. At length she will tell the unkuludeva that the
beer is ready, and the ruler will call together the same officiants, saying,
‘The time is come for ye to make the rain sacrifice.’ Then the officiants will
take the special beer from the royal wife, putting a tiny bit in each of the
four calabashes inside the uluvya. Next they will sift out about the amount
of one cooking bowl from the ruler's sacred finger millet, putting it on a
special shard. Then they will remove the four calabashes and pour from
them over the millet grains which are lying on the shard, taking them out to
164
the place of the eleusine garden known as ilyagano lya’nkuludeva to be planted
in the special mound prepared there. The season is November, and that very
day the rains will pour down. Upon this the ruler will tell the officiants, ‘Now
ye must see to it the people all begin to plant their own finger millet.’ ‡‡
The rain shrine is only found when you have come to the innermost part
of the sacred wood, a place dangerous to everyone, even to me. Every week
without fail an officiant must enter to inspect the shrine, seeing that all
goes well. On these occasions he performs no sacrifice, but each month
when the moon has waned away there will be a celebration with beer, a
gathering for sacrifice.
If we failed to sacrifice the weather would go awry. When the rain has
been too abundant this is what we do: There are two pots, one of great size
and one smaller. In them are kept the ing'ala—round, black pebbles which
generate their own moisture. One is male, the other female. In the dry
season they are gestating, in the rainy season lo! there are four. The two
have reproduced their kind. To control excessive rain the officiant removes
(say) two of the four stones from the greater of the pots, putting them in
the smaller. They must be carefully covered, for they want to run away,
having wills of their own.
165
When the rainstones run away, as soon as this is discovered, all the
officiants will be called to search and recover them. For this you need a black
sheepskin bag. As you find the stones you stow them safely away. Only the
children run away, the parents have not got the same wilfulness. When
there is thunder and lightning over the country you know the parents are
beating the children, and you may expect the children soon to run away
again.
These pebbles are simply called isula [meaning rain or rain-thing]. The
officiants may fail to find the children and must consult a diviner to learn
how they are to be recovered. If the children were truly lost the rain would
inundate the land, and it would split apart. This is the reason for the
upheaval only this year in the Western realm [a landslide which took a
number of lives], and for many such an event which is remembered in this
domain.
The true reason for keeping the shrine under such close watch is that we
must know, when the rains have begun, how many children have been born to
the parents in the greater of the pots. Perhaps there are five—too many,
the number must be cut down. You place the surplus children in another pot,
which you must keep covered with a black sheepskin. In fact, there may be
many such smaller pots to accommodate all the surplus children. The
parents came from uKisi many generations ago and they are the self-same
stones. You cannot go and get more if they should be lost. But the children
are trying to return to uKisi. That is why they are forever running away.
Now when that happens, when the children really disappear from the
sacred wood, all the officiants must take a beer basket filled with millet (or
bamboo or eleusine) drink to uKisi. The great rainmakers of that country are
called the avasusi (singular unsusi = stirrer of water). They must concele-
brate with the party from this domain of Lupila in doing sacrifice down by
the lakeshore. In ancient times it is true the avasusi journeyed up to our
country as well, but since the British years this has not happened.
166
Lupila.) But the yearly sacrifice to which they refer is one which
required Sanavule's attendance. He brought prestations, including a
special hoe, to the Igolwa shrine. Following Sanavule on that journey
would, I believe, take us onto the second level of priestly activity
associated with the sacred groves, which are found in each domain
but are tied like the ruling houses by a network of filial obligation.
167
aspects, I have identified this shift with the institution of the Sanga
court. The less-secular aspect of the same historical transformation
stands out when the Kinga is contrasted with its neighbouring
cultures to the south and north. Setting aside late-precontact
incursions of (respectively) warlike Ngoni and lowland Sangu detach-
ments, the Pangwa and Wanji represent the least-politicized cultures
of the region which ethnography records. (The culture of the
Mawemba is still and seems likely to remain undescribed.)
168
with it the promise that a ruler would always provide fields for his
followers, reduced individual land disputes to an innocuous level and
made territoriality among the quasi-descent groups [ isikolo ] a politi-
cally manageable problem. But a condition of this secular transforma-
tion was a corresponding shift of responsibility in religion from ikikolo
[lineage] to ikilunga [domain and realm]. The improbability of achieving
clean separation between the political and religious levels of collective
concern, which is to be felt even in the least-sacerdotal industrial
societies, is overwhelming in such microcultures as the Kinga or
Pangwa. ‘Ultimate concern’ as a theological concept is sometimes
taken to mean ‘concern for matters transcending the present and
practical’; but if a religion is not concerned with health, religious
concern with life and death is by so much diminished. A religion not
concerned with material security is by so much the less relevant to
the handling of human anxiety. A religion without Angst is one without
its antidote. Obversely, a political system which in the Pangwa or
Kinga contexts commanded only loyalties independent of the
religious would not enjoy much sway. ‡‡
169
powers. The boma , in short, never supposed that local headmen or
chiefs would have any effective way of coping with such a cult. Yet the
traditional religious practice of the Sanga courts entailed human
sacrifice in behalf of garden medicines, for which the victims were
taken by stealth and violence. The Germans had easily suppressed
this practice through the established (and quickly co-opted) system
of political authority they had found in being. It was a system to
which the doctor-priests were explicitly accountable. It is this nexus
which Wanji and Pangwa specifically lacked.
Both the Wanji belief in the efficacy of living human victims and
the Pangwa belief in maleficence behind bad weather are significant
elements of traditional Kinga religion. There is an as-yet obscured
regional culture pattern of which these are only two particular
facets. But in Kinga society the regional pattern is transformed
through its incorporation into something like a ‘state religion’—having
in mind that the state in question is radically segmentary in form,
and that the phrase should not be made to borrow inappropriate
meaning from the grander contexts in which it has more often been
used. Certain peculiarities of the established religion of the Kinga
emerge from a consideration of the way priests adapted the
medicines of the bush culture for implementing purposes of the
court. I shall discuss this under three headings: gardens, boundaries,
and antidotes.
170
the lord’s wishes to the people. The unyivaha was also directly in
command of the avanyakivaga barracksmen. Thus in his compact
domain there was no division of function between secular and religious
commoner-officers. On one level, the priests were the sole mediators
between prince and people. On another level, the priesthood consti-
tuted the executive. If this overstates the case for the importance
of the avanyivaha , it would be in respect to the administration of the
law. The untwa in such a domain was in person court-convener for
hearing civil disputes or sanctioning misdemeanours. But his task
was to preside not decide. Procedure was governed by the assembled
elders, among whom certain priests would be prominent spokesmen.
In the trial of a witch, priests would manage the ordeal and, in the
event, execute the lord’s sentence. A ruler might (but need not) be
strong-willed and directive. The part of the priest must be to comple-
ment the ruler’s personality. But the responsibilities of the
avanyivaha remained very general. the title of unteketsi [officiant at
sacrifice] was thus an understatement of the priest’s role— unyivaha
[big man] was just.
171
spontaneous growth of uvupemba must be discovered in the sacred
field—a sign. The secret participants were first the avanyivaha them-
selves, to clear; then a few of the oldest women of the court, to sow
and cultivate. When the first sprouts were confirmed the ingalape
[trumpet] of the court was sounded from the hills, calling all the
avapapwa [agnates of the ruling house]—in Maliwa they were settled
at a distance—to bring in a work force to clear and plant the
remaining mounds of the royal garden. All this took place in the
season for starting uvupemba , which is January, in the thick of the
rains.
172
We say we shall try it to see if all is well. This is the reason for
planting secretly by night. It is later the permission will be given every-
one to start. Anyone who plants before the ritual sowing has suc-
ceeded will get no crop at all. Of course there can be no feasting, as
only we priests [ avateketsi ] are in the know. Between the secret plant-
ing and the appearance of the grain we make only secret sacrifices in
the sacred wood. Each year we have had to prepare new medicine for
the rainshrine, the seed is mixed in and poured out for planting, but
until we see it sprout we dare give no sign to the others. These others
will be saying, ‘Why does the priest not burn the ilyagano ? Why does he
delay so? The rain will come and spoil the fields before they are burnt!’
On his business a priest at this time talks to no one. It is taboo to
greet him on the path. We must complete our reading of the signs and
know that all is well.
173
tionally the new year, the start of the rains in November, before which
the fields have been cleared, the organic material piled up for drying,
and the fields finally fired. Ritual concern for uvuletsi stands for a
diffuse anxiety about the renewal in nature on which the human
community absolutely depends. Any dramatically convincing proce-
dures for dealing with such public anxiety, provided they filled in the
needed length of time, would have served a clear purpose.
As root crops are not harvested all at once but kept in their
mounds until needed, there is no celebration or discipline at harvest.
Only in the case of millet is the ruler’s party required to lead each
operation in the cycle—clearing, firing, planting, weeding, harvesting.
At harvest a small calabash of the consecrated grain must first be
174
taken, brewed, and offered to the forbears of the untwa . But the
general harvest does not wait upon this sacrifice, which is private and
represents the first direct participation of the untwa in the agricul-
tural cycle. The ‘release’ of eleusine for harvesting is accomplished by
the unyivaha . He takes a little pumpkin grown according to traditional
practice, in the same mound with the millet. He cooks this together
with a few ing’ing’i , chews the food and spits it ceremonially in all direc-
tions. The whole community should be assembled for this ceremony,
after which they disperse to their fields for the harvest.
175
medicine. The prince himself cannot thus beget food and has for
himself no access to medicines. There is no need to invoke economic
determinism to make the point that rain and garden ritual were the
foundation of priestly power. The people’s own livelihood was under-
stood to hinge on the success of a priest in bringing seed to life each
year, and he was not begrudged the powers and immunities which
enabled him to do it. On the other hand, the priest’s own dependence
on medicines for power was well understood; and it was known that
the medicines were too dangerous for a priest to keep on his person
or hide in his hut. Apart from his office and access to the sacred ark,
he was not fearsome.
176
and herd, country and polity. In all of uKinga I only once saw a field
fenced (against goats), and I think it is generally regarded as imprac-
ticable. A field’s boundaries are ruled, hardly ever naturally given.
There is no bounding substance as there normally is (a stream, a cliff,
a ridge) for a country [ ikilunga ], and the contents of a field, the
objects of value there to be protected, are removable and soon
enough in the normal course of events taken away. ‡
177
Their political struggle is to maintain amity in the village and
chiefdom. Quarreling is distinguished from warring by just those
boundaries. The use of medicines in quarreling leaves the parties
stripped of the protective clothing the priests’ medicines weave. The
Kinga case is in some measure parallel: a condition of grace is achieved
for everyone or for no one. But the differences among these three
neighbouring societies are also deep. ‡‡
178
from uPangwa, it is not unlikely. No human community is actually as
inflexible as its own tradition paints it—Kinga could still see them-
selves as a kinship society in 1960. A seminal feature of the Sanga
court culture was the achievement of balance between prince and
priest, such that each might embody a separate principle. The Pangwa
mkoyo is lineage headman, active as a work leader and (presumably) in
the past as warrior, while at the same time he is the highest
authority on religious matters:
179
finding that this rod with its medicines was kept in a proper storage
vessel in the sacred grove, under the keeping of a specially-recruited
warrior-priest. This man must have proven himself first in war as
untenzi [hero] and only then might be selected by the avanyivaha to be
apprenticed in the new calling. The major rule was avoiding contact
with the ingimo while in a sexually soiled condition. For the Kinga this
meant the prince, whose destiny was never to escape that condition,
must have nothing to do with the very medicine horn by which, as all
were convinced, his hold on power was maintained. It is thus the power
balance was struck.
180
clear definition of jurisdictional boundaries. Ritual sanctions here
extend beyond the scope of the jural. The case of Iboma illustrates
the operative principle. If the claims of the two sides are found to
overlap, only the outcome of battle can be decisive. So war has
become a superlative act of divination. Ordinarily the strategy of
each side was to advance its claims only with great caution. The
result of this was that warfare could be pursued within a sparsely
settled noman’s land, rarely spilling over the inner lines of defense
drawn by the priests. These lines, if long established, would be marked
by tall stones placed at each turning point to commemorate an
occasion on which the priests of both sides had assembled to settle
a boundary under dispute. Each realm and domain remained, in keeping
with the general pattern of the segmentary state, open or ill-defined
as to boundary in any direction in which a chronic war policy was not
maintained. This provided avenues of peaceful expansion through
gradually more intensive settlement, backed by demonstrable power.
Another source of flexibility was the expectation that when a reigning
prince died his successor might choose to repudiate old agreements.
It was the calling of the priest to make boundaries and perhaps by
protecting the new prince tame him. But the priest’s calling was not
to make the peace. He was only the broker, though not without influ-
ence.
181
wares from Johannesburg which are powerful enough to cause a man
to conceive a passion for his own mother or sister, or which may be
used to hang-up an adulterer like a dog so that the husband must be
called to release him. It was a particular untuguva which enabled
certain avahavi [wizards] in the past to appear in two distant places
on the same day. Untuguva translates the Swahili dawa .
Isingila
one small, jet black pebble [ ikisi ]
one matching pure white pebble [ulutondwe “star”]
a bit of crocodile skin, dried
one leopard testicle, dried
a quantity of leopard brain, dried
a quantity of python faeces, dried
other ingredients unspecified
182
The category isingila is extended to the medicines of a different
sort kept in a horn or tusk [ ulusuga ] beside the calabash. These are
medicines of power not protective antidotes, and are meant to
energize the prince. The power they generate is that of fearsomeness
not fertility, yet I was assured the medicines of the ingimo ija’ligoha
[iron horn of war] were quite distinct. The isingila sya’vutwa are
brought to the prince first at his inauguration. The priest says,
“ Let’untuguva ugulimungata ndusuga lwa’tsungwa n’ugulimungata munkidili.
Munywese . [(My helper,) fetch the medicine kept in the antelope horn
from the special crock, and the medicine kept in the calabash. (My
prince,) you are to drink.]” Thereafter whenever the prince feels indis-
posed, or when he dreams of being bewitched, he will call for the same
medicines. Even in the best of times the priests will bring them twice
a month to maintain, especially, the prince’s immunity from the witch-
craft of his brothers, who are known to covet his power. Alye isingila
syoloso— they repeat the formula: He has taken all the medicines. He
is secure. Actually keeping the prince fearsome seems (from this) to
have been a secondary concern.
183
of leopard medicines. I translate Tunginiye’s Swahili original:
184
inherent in human nature itself? I think it more likely this rite was
conceived as a cleansing and protecting act, perhaps even a sort of
absolution. But I was not skilful enough with either Swahili or ikiKinga
to engage Mwanadyo and his elders on the point, and Tunginiye (who
was so quick to draw the right Swahili expressions from me) was not
at hand.
185
authority with which a priest can address disease, do not themselves
attack it. They are used to repair a circle of defense behind which the
subject community is to find shelter. As Sunguluma’s officiants bade
the troubling disease go to uPangwa, their Mapanga cousins bid
theirs go to uKinga. That is, the disease like a visible cloud of locusts
could be fought off by sealing one’s boundaries against it. This makes
it clear how a single ritual, albeit employing many and compound medi-
cines, can protect a community against pestilence, plague (or disease
of any sort), and human enemies as well. In the rite of ‘sealing the
country’ [Pangwa: xudinda umlima ] there is indeed use of the medicine
ukwavusiki which casts a veil of darkness before an enemy’s eyes “so
that he must turn back.” But this need not imply an anthropomorphic
(over, say, an acridomorp h ic) notion of the enemy. In the rite, ukwa-
vusiki is used untactically, without the pretense of an active threat.
This medicine like the others repairs and strengthens a boundary. The
aim is intactness, defense not counter-attack.
186
this belief is its effect on the supposed distribution of power among
men, and the moves by which a balance may be changed. Medicines are
manipulable. Power achieved by their means is never more secure than
conspiracies through which the secret lore of making it was acquired.
Bought medicines, disingenuously used, are known to turn back on the
buyer. In a radical sense power of this sort is political. ‡
187
medicines and their meaning the anthropologist was able to conclude
that, apart from certain quite practical pharmaceutical items, “the
imagination of doctors works within the general symbolic system.” If
we allow Pangwa and Nyakyusa to represent the ends of a scale, Kinga
culture falls fairly between. ‡
188
THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER SEVEN
189
The power of a prince, taking that word in its sociological sense,
was in good part a function of his personality and stage of life. The
ministrations of the avanyivaha [the professional group at a court,
which I usually tag as ‘priests’] created a path of least resistance, a
sanctioned role, which in the long run incumbents must have seen fit
to follow. A prince was continuously plied with beer by day and women
by night. He was not encouraged to hold public court in person but to
deal with the realm’s affairs remotely, from within his stockade,
through functionaries. Unless he was personally attracted to the
public life he would come to be seldom seen by the people, a mythical
as much as an actual presence, becoming in his later years a true
recluse. Custom has it that on the occasion of his actual death the
people would be called to the capital for an extraordinary month of
feasting and dance. No one, they say, need call attention to the
prince’s absence—let the myth live on. Even Kyelelo (I) Ntowanilo
seems to have become something of a figurehead in his later years.
But though the institution patterned and invited a certain
demeanour no one was in position to command it. The man who was
expected to succeed to a princely throne [ ikinya’lwangula ] was known
as unkinga ; but the title was bestowed on a nominal heir only as it was
earned. He must prove himself untenzi a leader in war, a man favoured
(to use an un-Kinga phrasing) by the gods. An eldest son unable to
shine above his brothers knew his risk, and the actual inauguration
was therefore a personal triumph, as the case of Lugendile “the
cheated” and Kyelelo (II) Ndunginiye makes plain. The transformation
of such a man into royal recluse could never have been immediate. The
history of any reign would have depended much upon persons at court
but also upon the relative importance of human and natural threats
to well-being, and on the security of the court’s leadership position
as pre-eminent among the domains of the realm. Thus Ukwama, in the
history we have, appears more secure in the Central realm than
Uhugilo in the Northern; the power struggle in the Western realm was
cut short by the Germans’ arrival, and the history of the Eastern
realm was all but obliterated by their askaris during the Maji Maji
suppression in 1905.
190
population than ecology would have allotted them. They were fear-
somely attractive both to their people and to the German adminis-
tration. Kyelelo (IV) Padili, whom I knew, had been deemed
exceptionally able in his youth and in the early years of office, but had
(as both British and Independent régimes perceived him) tended
gradually to withdraw, spending more time with a few close
supporters, travelling less, preoccupied with beer and the other
furnishings of high office. But he was still young when the office was
revoked by the Independent government, and the personal change
proved reversible. He came back very much on personal merits,
showing himself to be bright, communicative, and a rather less
devious politician than his erstwhile advisers.
191
ugwa’nyengela [medicine of the rebrewing], a metaphorical reference to
the custom of rebrewing beer by adding new hot water to release
fresh strength from the solids at the bottom of a crock. The prince
must send to a private herbalist for such a cure, of which the ingredi-
ents remain trade secrets unknown to the priests. A prince whose
fertility failed in fact would face the probability that the avanyivaha
would conspire to send a younger brother in secret into the royal
harem. In view of that, I think the loss of fertility must have seemed
more than ordinarily threatening to a prince, as his brother would be
the man before all others with whom he had avoided intimate contact
since taking office. A prince dare never share a meal with a brother for
fear of predictable malice.
The prince’s plight stands out sharply when seen in its cultural
context. Unguvu, a commoner, acquired a young wife. He was rich, and
the girl’s father had initiated the match with an eye to a fair
bridewealth. A few weeks after moving to her new community the girl
composed a song which she began to sing in the fields with her new
women friends, “You look upon a married woman, but she might as well
still be living with her father!” Unguvu was moved to approach his son
Kivuke to take the girl in secret to prevent her running off. Otherwise
he would have had to send her to a stranger, admitting his failure, so
as to recoup the bridewealth. Kivuke sired three children for Unguvu,
then inherited the woman and sired three of his own. It is said Unguvu
would not have chosen a son, had he only a younger brother (by his own
mother), for brothers are close. People even expect they may quietly
share a wife. It is only a prince who must fear his own. Like his
unalloyed heterosexuality, gnawing distrust of his own brother marks
the powerful throne with paradox.
The heir, unkinga , long since turned out of the royal enclosure as
192
a potential rival, on his accession becomes its owner and takes over
the royal herds. He will invite the royal women (excepting any who
trace descent cognatically, as his mother’s sister would, from one of
his own great grandfathers) to style themselves as wife to him
instead of mother. As with a commoner’s widows, a wife who finds no
one suitable ‘within the house’ is free to go outside, a suitable
bridewealth being payable to the young heir. He will shortly be taking
more wives of his own, among them the chief wife [ umwehe umbaha ]
who is to bear him his own eventual successor. But until his accession
to rule, probably in what we call middle age, the unkinga lives with many
companions in the royal ikivaga . His fall from bachelorhood is precipi-
tous.
193
has elected to enter his body is/was a Kinga royal whose powers were
greater than those of the court priests [ avanyivaha ] at Ukwama
where he was born, and who proved to be unmanageable—indeed,
immortal. The main spectacle of the Sanga court’s religion commemo-
rates his banishment and is required to placate his anger; it entails
obeisance done him by the heir of the first ruling Sanga prince, his
elder brother, who banished him. There is a clear message implied,
that the mortal prince acknowledges an eternal debt of guilt, that
the plagues and pestilence Lwembe annually visits upon his people are
justified, and that the powers of a Sanga prince are less than
daimonic.
194
kind. Compared to the Ngonde, Nyakyusa communities in the Tangan-
yika Corridor region are better seen as a shifting congeries of
chiefdoms each with bilateral relations of alliance or opposition with
some neighbours, but lacking overall constitutional structure. ‡‡
It would be hard to make the case at all for calling Lwembe a ‘king
of the Nyakyusa’. In the usage of Jacques Maquet a ‘chief’ is a
monarch who rules directly, a ‘king’ governs a more complex polity
requiring the delegation to officials (G. P. Murdock’s ‘ministers’) of a
power which nevertheless derives from and can revert to the
monarch. It is not certain that even the Kyungu’s condition ever met
these criteria. Mwemutsi’s satellite domains clearly would have
reverted always to local autonomy. We can’t even talk about Lwembe
as secular ruler even of a local community at Lubaga. Still I think that
the ideal type of the ‘divine king’ can be helpfully applied. ‡‡
195
‘chiefs’ (M. Wilson) or ‘princes’ (Charsley), so that powers remaining
to the ‘king’ are only the mystical. But the work of a religious agency
is to ward off, rid out, or bear and contain social danger, mystically
conceived. This is the part of the Kinga and Nyakyusa priests who
periodically attend the shrine of Lwembe at Lubaga. But the
deathless Lwembe himself is not, like the taboo-ridden priest who is
his medium, religion’s man. The scene at the Lubaga shrine which Kinga
priests describe is one of fury. The mortal Lwembe has a daimon on his
back. He becomes an embodiment of the mystical danger against
which the community’s religion is pitted. The esoteric drama played
out at Lubaga, has the combined priests of two peoples struggling to
control the daimon. Exoterically the danger is known when plagues
and pestilence, drought and disease affect the region on an epidemic
scale. It is also known when rumour spreads that the mortal Lwembe
is showing new signs of his mortality.
196
It may seem paradoxical that the men of religion show so little
fear and awe in dealing with godhead. But the first principle in under-
standing animistic religions is the premise of egoism: the gods
(spirits, daimons, nats) are neither noble nor otherwise ethically
superior beings. They are seen as ex-humans always armed with a
robust, egoistic self-concern. They are troublesome because (being
invisible and voiceless, yet needing the care and attention of the living
folk they remain among) they are only too easily neglected in favour of
the visible and vocal neighbour whose needs are immediate. Like living
folk, the spirits use black magic to get their way or get revenge. Their
‘other world’ is not a radical transformation of the one mortals know.
The job of a doctor or priest of religion is to protect a set of mortal
clients from the great variety of perils these non-mortal and invisible
beings are able to visit upon them. The living Lwembe remains the
priests’ man in the same degree that a Kinga prince ought to be. But
the living heir to Lwembe’s godhead is unable to contain it without
great effort and skill, exercising his fullest human powers. He must
‘contain’ in the specific sense of localizing divine anger, so that the
priests can cope with it. The priest Lwembe must sleep every night
alone at Lubaga. But without the help of an elaborate and systematic
ritual drama the living, mortal Lwembe cannot ‘contain’ (in the other
sense, of ‘controlling’) the daimonic anger of a banished and cheated
god.
When the Kinga prince dies, far from sealing the body up to
secure the inner identity, priests see to it that the flesh has swollen
and burst before they publicly discover the death and simultaneously
inaugurate a successor to office. The body cannot be buried but
remains deep in the sacred grove lifted above ground on a closed
platform protected from scavengers. It is the stench of this rotting
body which, filling the grove and reaching the capital village, signals
the passing on of the princely powers to an heir. The capital meanwhile
will have been transformed into a fairgrounds, for the folk will have
been called together without explanation for a month of feasting and
games. While in the case of Lwembe at Lubaga everyone who might be
called to succeed to the office is known to fear it and loathe the day
of the incumbent’s death, with the Kinga throne it is quite
otherwise—the incumbent goes daily in fear of rivals who would take
his place. The Lwembe, in his fearsomeness, is left to a remote
existence in life. He needs no stockade to keep improper visitors
away, as reputation is enough. The Kinga prince, though he shares
that fearsomeness, is yet the central figure of magnanimity in a
redistributive system dealing in food and drink, manly honour, recogni-
tion, and women. He must close himself away in life for fear of the
197
brotherly envy his privilege inspires, though his death will mean
rotting away in the open air, far away from the living men and women
gathered to drink and feast from his store in their ceremonially
perverse way of doing him honour.
An Exiled God
Tunginiye recorded the Lwembe myth in Swahili on the basis of
recitations (in ikiKinga) at Ukwama in the 1930s. Though his original
was lost, I found a Swahili typescript secreted (?) behind a radiator
at the ex-British Boma and confirmed it with the author. I present my
translation:
In the ruling house Mwikolongu sired a child by his second wife, and the
child’s name was Lwembe. As a boy he tended his father’s herds along with
comrades. Now here is what he could do: He took two twigs and two pots,
putting the twigs on the ground and covering each with a pot. Then he called
his companions to gather round and behold a wonder. As soon as his friends
came up they saw the pots were beginning slowly to rise, the twigs going
through a transformation until one turned into a lion and the other a
leopard. Then the lads set up a clamour, saying we are your friends but we
are afraid of these monsters we see. Then Lwembe slapped the creatures
down, and they turned back into pots and twigs as before. When his
companions got home they told the father our dear Lwembe has been doing
things out there which have got us frightened. He takes little twigs and
turns them into a lion and a leopard and then back again to what they were.
Thereupon the father said it is time I settled two wives on him, then I
shall have him move off to a far country lest he take the throne away from
my eldest. So he bestowed two maidens upon the lad and showed him to a
place called Upinga, but Lwembe kept right on working his wonders,
surpassing all his comrades among the children of the ruler. Wanting to find
out the truth of these matters, the father ordered two of his children,
Lwembe and a companion, to fetch two goats from the high grasslands
198
where they were being herded, bringing them right to the father. But the
comrade left by himself while Lwembe only stayed behind where he was. The
companion returned with one of the goats and brought it to his father, who
challenged Lwembe, “How is it you stayed behind here without fetching the
goat I asked for?” There and then Lwembe produced the goat before his
father’s eyes and the elders, saying, “Isn’t this the goat I was sent after?”
Then the father and the elders were dumbfounded, seeing, “In truth this
child has surpassed us all! How could it happen that, though he stayed just
here without any chance to go out to the grasslands, yet this goat—how
has it appeared right here before our eyes?” Therefore the father and the
elders were agreed they must hold council on the matter of sending
Lwembe into exile.
Fearing, “He is a great god who will destroy us all,” they could not find
agreement on a way to kill him by themselves. But they used another
stratagem, sending word to their ally Prince Mwalukisa, whom they bade
waylay the lad as he came passing through—kill him along with his wives and
children. So the father and the elders approached Lwembe, saying, “You are
to move out of here and go to the far country of uNyakyusa to rule there.
Later on we shall follow after, bringing what equipment we can get together.
Lwembe agreed to move out through the country of Uhugilo/Lupalilo
[Mwalukisa’s]. So when Prince Mwalukisa saw Lwembe passing by, he set out
to kill him. Lwembe, when he saw Prince Mwalukisa laying an ambush for him
on the path, took out the same little twigs and threw them down. One
turned into a leopard and led the way in front. The wives and children were in
between, while Lwembe himself rode behind astride a lion, and a swarm of
bees hovered in the air above their heads. Lwembe was holding a lyre, which
he played as they went along. Then Prince Mwalukisa and his party were
beaten. They couldn’t kill the man but returned home trembling with fear.
Prince Mwalukisa sent the news to his father [sic] that Lwembe had
defeated him and was a great god.
199
beans or millet grain. In this and another version also collected in the
1930s Lwembe has herds and two companions as well as his wives and
wild animals. He enjoyed the protection of isingila immunity medicines
and could turn into a stone when attacked. In dry weather he would
simply strike the earth to produce a spring. At Lubaga, Nyakyusa
priests added an account which provides a charter for the regular
propitiation of Lwembe by Kinga priests bearing gifts. When Lwembe
was first driven from the mountains, the crops immediately began to
wither. When the priests at length found him at Lubaga, he promised
to restore their gardens but called for a quid pro quo . They were to
bring him his promised ‘equipment’ which had been left behind, with
beer and twenty iron hoes to boot. The Wilsons’ most consistent
informant on ritual, Kasitile, cites Lwembe’s message to Mwemutsi: “I
want my hoes, especially my great, eyed hoe ilikumbulu ilya maso. ” ‡
200
four like stops in uNyakyusa, and in the West I was told of divinations
which might require backtracking and other delays. This would have
been enough to put a crimp in the ‘military season’ in some cases. I
concluded the procession itself would often have taken place in July,
but that divination (with changes in the weather and the political
situation) would often enough have prescribed procrastination for as
much as another year.
201
qualities wanted of a god who made the world go around. At least for
Kinga, any talk by whatever name of an ‘otiose god’ who fashioned this
world can only refer to creation lore, not to the object of religious
practice. Lwembe’s creative powers made live animals from clay which
was certainly there before he was born. ‡‡
202
cally recreating the spectacle of the god’s going into exile. The
priests blew the kudu horn trumpet [ ingalape ] and beat the war-drum
[ ilikule ] as they left, but neither seems to have been conceptualized
as the voice of lion, leopard, or Lwembe. The focus of attention was on
performing appropriate ceremonial acts at each place along the route
where, as it was agreed, Lwembe himself had stopped, leaving a
noumenal influence—some fraction of his mystical identity.
203
with gods. Gods in this region travel through the air or the earth from
one sacred grove to another. The bored or ‘eyed’ hoe was special to
the Lwembe cult but reflects the more general regional cosmology in
that the sacred groves served to localize ritual danger and enable the
doctor-priests to control it. The cognoscenti would know from a
special stirring of leaves in the grove that a supernatural visitor had
arrived, and would know how to divine its nature. Lwembe, the original,
had descended into an underground aquifer at the end of his mortal
life, and tended to travel as pythons are thought to do through the
earth. The ‘gates’ presumably contained him when he visited local
sacred groves, so that his demands could be dealt with, and eventu-
ally all of these powerful emblems took their place around the Lwembe
site at Lubaga, where some were photographed in German times. ‡‡
The fact that the Usweve cult is grafted so easily onto the
Lwembe narrative can hardly surprise us, given the political impor-
tance of Ukwama and its development as a ceremonial centre. Here is
a ‘younger brother’ who gets on as he ought with his elder, comple-
menting the main cult without competing with it. Usweve, in fact,
would offer a quick safety valve should locusts descend just when the
rather more predictable anger of Lwembe has been publicly assuaged.
The shrine of Kyala in uKisi (on the near lake shore south of
uNyakyusa) is similarly assimilated to the Lwembe myth in the
testimony Monica Wilson took from Kinga priests in the 1930s, and
204
there are scattered if vague indications in my notes suggesting
Lwembe might have had quite a series of ‘brothers’ with fabulous
powers, all of whom were better known in the past. If the Sanga
dispensation had collapsed before the pax it is likely enough the
pluralistic particularism of a surviving bush culture would have
resurged. Something a few shades closer to monotheism was more
useful to the priests in their management business.
205
colour. No one supposed these remnant somatic features, special to
their mountain slopes, had been brought in by migrants. Many well-
established Kinga surnames trace back explicitly to place-names on
the map, several days’ journey eastward. The immigrant ancestry of
the Sanga and a number of other Kinga groupings is not denied.
On its first day the procession from the smithy at Ihela made
about twelve kilometers, stopping at Masasatu, west of Maliwa
court, until the following day. All tilling of the soil in Maliwa domain
was halted for the whole period of about a month set aside for the
making and transportation of the consecrated hoe; tilling was
resumed only when it had been got safely away. Maliwa had no sacred
wood capable of containing the dangers which the priests attributed
to their artefact. Its name [ ilinya’vumongolo ], meaning hoe of the
(royal) gateway, made no reference to the visible gate of the prince’s
stockade. A nearer analogue would be a Christian’s ‘gates of hell’. In
its black sheepskin the mysterious object was borne into the grove by
206
priests who would reveal little to others about it or about other
sacra in their care. Later the hoe (or the older one which had been
doing guard duty at Ukwama’s grove?) would be moved on westward,
following the trail of Lwembe. As said, I found no evidence the great
procession otherwise mimed his myth. The burden was not spectacle
but mystery.
207
sexual preference, symbolized in the love between brothers. That
Mwikolongu becomes the first Mwemutsi defines his station as
‘brotherless’.
208
have to move our minds into a community whose whole existence is
made possible by the ten-pound blade of an iron hoe.
209
hero’s career. But the prince’s fear of poison incorporates a deeper
fear of the potential poisoners, the brothers who are his erstwhile
comrades, and so models the universal plight which a male must face
as he leaves the bachelor life of the court. The exile of Lwembe is
relived in the career of the ordinary man ‘sent out’ from the life of the
court to marriage and homesteading. Particularly is this the case for
the royals, avapapwa [‘those whom one has borne on one’s back’]. As
younger brothers of the heir [ unkinga ] they have never known any life
but that of the court. The transition from that existence to the more
self-reliant life of the bush and marriage ideally can be bridged by a
fostering elder brother who has gone before, and with whom one
makes one’s peace—in whom one may place one’s trust, in the manner
of a gift. It takes only a small stretch of the scientific imagination to
regard wonder-working as the quintessential fantasy of the sexually
autonomous young male. Lwembe’s magical offspring, begotten on
dust in a womb of clay, would have permitted an everlasting world of
men without women. This is the magic of omnipotent egoism. The
unusual prolongation of this stage of life among the barrackroom
bachelors avanyakivaga of the Sanga courts was a distinctive feature
of their culture and was not without its peculiar strains. We can’t be
surprised to find them figured in its myths.
The Would-be-gods
The informing theme Monica Wilson found in the rites at Lubaga,
which she got to know almost at first hand though always from the
viewpoint of the Nyakyusa officiant, was moral unity. Dissension
would spoil the rites. Only when they commanded the fullest partici-
pation of religious and secular powers across the land could offic-
iants count on the effectiveness of their efforts. The same theme is
not as clear in my Kinga materials. Though dissension is clearly an
issue for Kinga priests, unatoned conflicts at home will not disqualify
an offering properly made. The issue of dissension is ritualistically
conceived in both cultures, but there is an added moralistic tone
taken by Nyakyusa. They say the people have insulted Lwembe by
failing to propitiate him, so provoking his anger. Kasitile felt his ill
health could be owing to quarrels with other priests, not by way of
their resentment but Lwembe’s. The Kinga priest recorded by Godfrey
Wilson, who was a direct observer, interpreted the matter otherwise.
Interrupting an argument about a Nyakyusa priest who had refused
to participate on account of a fancied slight, the Kinga officiant said,
210
“Ignore him if he refuses to come. If it were us we should leave him
and celebrate without him, but you Nyakyusa are all witches, and you
fear to ignore a man who refuses to come to a ritual, saying that he
will bewitch you. You are cowards, you are!”. ‡
211
group of peers. A father hardly features in a boy’s socialization. A
Kinga youth would often find himself free to shift about from one
boys’ house to another, for he lived within a voluntaristic network
formed by kinship, acquaintance, and attraction until he was ready
for the adult life of the ikivaga (barracks) at court. The Nyakyusa lad,
though sometimes recruited to his village on a less-than-prescriptive
basis, was always obliged to develop his lifelong loyalties there. This
was a permanent political community. The greater voluntarism of
Kinga life reflects an impermanence of associations and absence of
the village as such, in both early and later decades of a man’s life,
away from the ceremonial centres. The central rite of Kinga religion is
organized not as a sanctioning of unity by authority but as a transac-
tional response to the several and possibly conflicting demands of
many constituent groups.
212
Mwambokela did say, now using Swahili, that the three Sanga
rulers of the West and his own Mahanzi untwa were of mlango mmoja—
one door, one path, one kin. This could not have been meant in a
strictly genealogical sense but clearly was meant to explain how one
hoe in this rite could serve all those four domains. The same would
apply to contending rulers within each of the other realms. Because
each community was thought to enter into this ritual drama in
response to needs of its own, not simply on call from the priests of
Ukwama, the nominal solidarity of each realm came predictably to
expression. But how much real political unity would be claimed, how
convincingly, on any particular occasion of the rite would have been a
function of the pattern of amity actually prevailing then. The typical
cycles of inter-realm warfare were such that a few years of peace
would alternate with a few of chronic hostility. In a year of natural
crisis sufficient to displace thoughts of military sport, there would
have been peacemaking, but whatever the scheme for matching ‘gate-
posts’ with ‘gates’ at Lubaga, I expect the cause of all-Kinga unity
would usually have been served in piecemeal fashion. Peace within a
‘village’ is one thing. Within a domain, realm, or proto-state it is quite
another. Collective rites always do express an ideal unity of purpose.
Ukwama religion made use of the leverage fickle nature supplies, the
threat of wholesale misfortune, to launch concerted action. However
much bickering was required along the way, a quantum of lasting moral
solidarity would presumably emerge, as it often does from bargaining.
213
balanced labour force in a culture especially reliant on the steady
work of women in the growing, reaping, and preparation of foodstuffs.
By keeping his mature daughters unmarried at court, the prince could
afford to keep their prospective husbands there as well, while by
reserving to himself the privilege of bestowing these young women (or
some of their friends) upon his warriors in reward for service, the
prince had direct population control. This was sufficient to obviate
the need for fissive mechanisms like those (the Coming Out) for which
the Nyakyusa age village is justly famed among anthropologists. The
equation of procreational and agricultural fertility was more tightly
represented in the Kinga case, as Nyakyusa youths did herding,
fighting, and gardening in their bachelor stage of life.
214
avanyivaha . They comprised in their ranks the whole intellectual élite
of the court: doctor, ritualist, magistrate, manager. The same man
might bear the tokens of secular, ceremonial, and divinatory powers.
Individuals were respected for their authority and knowledge, not as
specialists but as avanyivaha , great men of the court. They seem
always to have worked as a group not as contending individuals. Their
thinking is definitively masculine—extra-domestic, as Lwembe’s was
not. If by ‘playing god’ we mean holding the high ground against all
comers, even up to Caesar himself, that does seem to have been the
notion they had formed of their calling. We may trace it back to the
reclusive rainmaker but should add-in the equally reclusive smith who
deals as deftly with magical fire, and the husbandman of the bush
culture, concerned as much about justice as substance in the fabric
of community life.
215
FOUR REALMS, SOURCE NOTES
Source notes ‡
These annotations have two purposes. One is to clue documentary
sources to the text of the book. This will serve an occasional student
wanting to explore petty points. The other purpose of the notes is to
enlarge on my analytical strategies where they build on an older literature
and on work Africanists may not be familiar with—or where I think my
African cases have special significance for general knowledge. During the
several decades after mid-century last, the mood of discovery was still
peaking in anthropology. Most of us were, to cite one disapproving
colleague, “still struggling with ideas.” His thing, of course, was science.
Mine is, too, but with a difference. My social anthropology is scientific prin-
cipally in its insistence on developing its theoretical frames to fit a reality
directly observed. In its peak time, that meant direct observation of
extraordinary cultural communities. This is no longer happening. Cultural
differences are on the one hand melting away and on the other reinventing
themselves so quickly that the culture observed yesterday will not be
there tomorrow. These notes annotate my sources and draw attention to
areas of a vibrant and relevant literature which, though belonging now to a
past time, can’t safely be left on the shelf. The process of distilling the
ideas of twentieth-century social anthropology has barely begun. I have
meant my work on the Kinga and their neighbours to contribute to a scien-
tific syncretism within social anthropology. I have been steadily “struggling
with ideas” since leaving the field, and have left a paper trail through the
decades to which I make occasional reference. It is a fugitive literature, yet
all of a piece. My theoretical course has been guided consistently by the
need to interpret observations made in uKinga while 1900 was still alive in
memory. If I knew one thing quite clearly when the fieldwork was done, it was
that the Kinga puzzle was deeper than my ken. The writing would not be a
task to have quickly done. My appreciation for ethnographic realities has
matured with wide reading, largely of titles since published, and of relevant
archival sources. This is the second of three volumes now completed, all of
them comparative, dealing with the Kinga in their regional culture. The first
is Twin Shadows, dealing with Kinga moral strategies. The third and final is A
Politics of Fear, a Religion of Blame.
Chapter One
216
with here is Bantu civilization, the smallest a hamlet or domestic group. The
quite grand and the very small are perhaps the hardest of all to describe.
Anthropologists tend to find their ‘cultures’ at mid-range.
p 4 For Bena, see Marc Swartz (1964). For Hehe there is a magisterial
source in Nigmann (1908).
Chapter Two
217
among males serves to stabilize a hamlet. But when amity fails, a man may
decide to build elsewhere. It is in fact the women, agnatically unrelated, who
always sleep at home, and it is when they develop a sense of solidarity that
a hamlet comes to thrive.
p 28 For the classic idea of charisma see Max Weber (1947: Part III
Sections ii, iv, v). Weber’s explanatory genius regularly drew on his three
‘grounds for action’: rational motivation is matched to legal authority,
tradition sponsors a sort of prudential deference to established authority,
while affect arising as devotion to individual leaders allows them charis-
matic authority. For my part, I see tradition as role-motivation, rationality
as a quality of role systems, and charisma as an occasional feature of
political theatre. The Kinga hero, Kyelelo the Cruel, was certainly ‘charis-
matic’ in the sense of drawing young men to his ranks while he was a fighter,
and stands comparison to Mkwawa of the Hehe, on a reduced scale. But
with age he passed leadership in war to his son and ruled, now as unkuludeva
or Prince, through his avanyivaha, elders of the court at Ihanga.
Monica Wilson argued (1959b) the case for ‘divine kingship’ among the
Nyakyusa. The term is a relic of past times in anthropology. It was intro-
duced a century ago to account for the ritual killing of a ‘king’ on his losing
bodily strength. It was supposed he must keep his health or the kingdom
would go sick with him. Nyakyusa have such notions. They are discussed in
later chapters. A quick source for Shaka is an encyclopedia, and major
studies will be found in scholarly libraries. Mkwawa is less famous. An
available source by a field anthropologist is Alison Redmayne, ‘Mkwawa and
the Hehe wars’ (1968).
218
wives and offspring, plus a dozen and more boys’ and bachelor men’s age-
villages off-sprung from the eight. Two of the eight senior villages, one on
each ‘side’ of the community, are alternate residences of the ‘chief’. A new
cycle begins when seniority is passed on to the new generation of men, with
a mandate addressed to certain picked leaders, each with other peer
villages in train, to amass cattle and wives. This gives rise to an entrepre-
neurial period of political realignment and redistribution of wealth, partly by
inheritance, partly by competitive raiding, and partly by the politics of
clientship, resulting in a settling down after thirty years into a mature
chiefdom rather like the original. There is again one chief sitting on two
‘sides’. Demographic expansion, if any, is not expressed in a change in the
structural plan of the new union, though small independent ‘chiefly’ groups
may have formed wherever they have found space—perhaps eventually to
grow. There is no need to regard the successor union as ‘the same chiefly
union’ since after thirty years neither the people nor the places will be the
same. But the politics of chiefly titles is another study.
p 36-7 I have discussed Kinga acquaintance with war, and the indirec-
tion lent to it by ritual interventions, in ‘Peace and power’ (1994a).
p 38 For the Lwembe myth and ceremonial see Monica Wilson 1959b
and Park 1966; also ‘An exiled god’ in chapter seven below. For an historian’s
reconstruction of Nyakyusa beliefs about and political uses of their
Lwembe cult (envisioned as one of several within the ‘heroic tradition’ of the
region) see Marcia Wright 1972.
p 38-9 The sources for Southall’s ideal type are found in his monograph
on the Alur (1954) and in a later explanatory revision placing the type in
broader historical context (1988). For the Nyakyusa form of ‘hiving off’
(the Coming Out) see Monica Wilson (1951: 22-30).
p 48 I wrote a book (1974) on the theme that the rules of the game
called ‘social structure’ hardly hint at the excruciations and high drama of
play which draw us in.
p 56 ‘Cult’ is probably the right word for the relationship the Sanga
system cultivated with the external Lwembe shrine. The procession of
Kinga priests to the shrine (as done in traditional times) clearly drama-
219
tized the natural clientage of their people to an exiled divinity. But
Lwembe’s status among Nyakyusa is not one of a patron saint and his
congregation. The shrine there is one resource among many to which people
may turn when they find themselves made powerless by events. Such terri-
torial shrines appeal most strongly to publics at a remove beyond the
horizon of familiarity. But when parties are seen to ‘shop about for a cure’ I
think ‘cult’ is always the wrong word, even if it is the readiest to hand.
For the Yao: Clyde Mitchell (1951 & 1956) provides a thorough study and
bibliography.
p 51-2 For the Kinga version of the Lwembe myth see Park (1966) and
the indexed passages in the current volume, in particular Tunginiye’s
account in Chapter Seven, pp. 234-6.
Chapter Three
220
jealous of privileges a ruler might claim. They mocked self-important men
taking others to court on small matters.
p 86 In theory, every Kinga youth should be able to name all eight great-
grand-parents and all their descendants, in order to avoid an illicit
marriage; but I never found anyone who could. Lore shows a preference for
the patriline, though exogamy is bilaterally defined in law.
221
Chapter Four
222
tive sanctioning is restricted to the established ‘true’ or ‘free’ Nuer home-
steader, who may have a not-quite-true-Nuer homesteader allied and
subject to him. The wobble factor here is obviously cattle, as a man who, in
the warlike rivalry of Nuer with Dinka, loses his cattle can only survive by
conceding rank in order to join forces with a cattle-rich compound. Refer to:
(Park 1974a) (Southall 1976).
Chapter Five
p 115 For my scheme for naming and dating prehistoric periods in this
region—since I am not convinced one label fits all Eastern-Southern Bantu
areas—see Park (1988).
p 120-121 Coser’s model was meant to fit industrial society but applies
only better to a small scale community with, as here, overpowering political
223
institutions. It would apply also to cattle-centred communities whose
social institutions are severely skewed by the effort to maximize the
herds. In the Nyakyusa case, as also in the Kinga case in late British times,
the greedy institution is the bridewealth. But the obverse of the same coin
is ‘cultural emphasis’, a value-positive term.
p 128-9 For the date 1845 I follow Oliver & Mathew (1963).
p 142 For the chief’s position in colonial times see Lloyd Fallers (1955).
For the idea of a ‘dual society’ and its application to colonialism see Boeke
(1953, 1955).
Chapter Six
224
p 169 If this discussion seems to finesse the problem of theodicy in
animisms, it is because the problem does not exist where the only gods are
known to be, as in ancestor cults they once were in life, ultimately governed
by existential concerns of their own.
p 175 For envy and the doctrine of limited good see Foster (1965,
1972).
In his Origin of the State (1927: 51-73) Lowie argued that the shift from
‘blood ties’ to ‘territorial ties’ would always have been gradual.
p 178 Stirnimann is cited from (1979: 149). His ‘local descent group’ is
an emic not an etic phenomenon.
p 179 The two citations on this page are from Stirnimann (1976: 115 &
181). On the place of medicines in Pangwa defensive magic (1976: 180-81).
p 221-2 For the full cycle of kinship rituals among Nyakyusa see Monica
Wilson’s volume on it: (1957).
225
Chapter Seven
p 195 For Maquet’s political model: (1971: 90). Here is another ‘ideal’
pairing of opposites which, as touchstone, can help lend definition to a
range of African ethnographies.
p 196 Many details were recorded by Godfrey and Monica Wilson in the
1930s. See M. Wilson (1959a: 22, 25 & 1959b).
p 199-200 Monica Wilson describes the Lubaga scene and the myth of
Lwembe’ sacred hoes through Nyakyusa eyes (1959a: 8-10).
p 205 Citations are from Monica Wilson (1959a: 7ff. & 1957: 16).
226
p 208 Another symbol, associated with the accession of a new
Lwembe, is the ‘headpad’ (a small wreath) brought by the Kinga, on which the
selected priest must sit. Instantly on so sitting, he is invested with the
spirit and godhead of Lwembe. He is born anew. Here a single ‘eye’ communi-
cates the genius of a god to man. Just such head rings serve as symbols of
taboo-protection of a plantation. The ring may suggest the walk-around of
a priest with leafy medicines, which traditionally secures a field (Monica
Wilson 1959a: 22, 146; Stirnimann 1976: 140ff.).
p 211 Citation from Monica Wilson (1959a: 390). For the priesthood of
Lwembe and for Unsanyilwa (a.k.a. Unsanyigwa) see Monica Wilson (1959:
24-5 & 33). For Nyakyusa anti-witchcraft instruments and for the separa-
tion of brothers see her Good Company (1951: 91 & 21).
227
Figures 1 and 2 here.
1 = Digital version of Weichert’s photo 1928
2 = Digital enhancement of the compounded hoe
228
FOUR REALMS, REFERENCES
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233