Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A Comparative Study of
Kinga, Pangwa, & Nyakyusa Peoples
in Southwestern Tanzania
George Park
© 2002
Introduction 1
i
<5> Priests and their Princes
Histrionics of belief 168
Credos and credibility 177
Witchcraft, statecraft 180
Chiefly prince or princely chief? 187
Arena politics—’African despotism’ held in check? 200
ii
<10> Implications
About regional cultures 380
How are taboos learnt? 381
Fear, anger, blame 388
Blame, taboo, and the problem of order 394
What grounds social identity? 400
Least polities 403
Logics of the Least Polity Rule 408
The management of intimacy 414
References 451
Index [461]
iii
Introduction
A Politics of Amity
1
established in making the effort. The talk is for making friends. From
four or five, after weaning, a child of either gender will be domiciled
with age peers, apart from his mother’s house. The little cabins built
and managed by the boys or girls of the hamlet were spatially set
apart in whatever manner the self-builders chose. At herdboy age
and wanting no further company but their goats, youths were only
expected to build (for safety) within hailing distance. In old times
and often enough more recently a father would spend only short
periods in middle life sharing the house he built for his wife, since
conjugality was for reproduction first and (quite often) last. The
family system as a whole was not focused on close emotional ties,
although dyadic bonding was stressed. An elder should love and
shelter a (same sex) younger sibling into early adulthood, and in later
childhood a girl will be as close to her mother as to her older sister or
best friend—though certainly less open.
2
prince. The moral architecture of the court had to satisfy the human
equations entailed in a new pattern of careers for men, as well as all
the new requirements of subsistence and social reproduction which
the building of a protostate brought with it. Placed spatially
between the Pangwa, who remained stateless, and Nyakyusa
boasting a particularly vigorous and trickily balanced politics, the
Kinga are structural cousins of both. The circumstance invites a
regional study of social transformation. I know of no better case for
exploring the uses of kinship and amity in the elementary game of
building power from scratch.
3
village system. There is no matching settlement in Kinga country.
The mountain slopes are hard to tame, supporting rather a
centrifugal pattern of scattered hamlets, and indeed a centrifugal
daily life. Women gather in the dawn along the paths by appointment,
heading to faraway gardens as if to devotions. Men in pursuit of
their multifarious errands greet or join friends more casually—the
whereabouts of a man are never easy to predict. In short, space is
organized not by clustering so much as by networking.
4
license to escape authority by moving on to a new place and new
loyalties. For the Nyakyusa of Selya the initial situation of a
malcontent is similar, and the outcome much the same. But
contrary to Kinga practice, the process can take the form of
banishment, as if it were unthinkable for an individual voluntarily to
leave his fellow villagers. Officially, he goes only to escape the stigma
of witchcraft. Implicitly (and only implicitly) that applies also to a
Kinga malcontent, but that difference in sanctions is not superficial.
5
who conveyed powers proper to the throne from its last incumbent
to its new. In both cases though by quite different dramatic means
the political theatre of the priests reinformed their world of its one
source of stability.
6
As the coherent part of the Sowetan region I mean to explore
includes the three major ethnic groups hugging the north end of Lake
Malawi, and since for the project in hand this part-region wants a
name, I’ll call it the Malatan. Both these neological names properly
reflect place. But where these bearings are ‘modern and political’ the
rationale for this book is placing the Kinga where they belong in a
much older history. Kinga are linked politically westward with the
Nyakyusa-Ngonde communities, and historically eastward with
Pangwa-Bena-Hehe communities. This agrees as well with Kinga oral
testimony about migratory origins, which always posits a westward
movement and claims to have fostered chiefly rule down in the valley
and lakeshore by sending political emissaries that way to teach and
colonize—and aggrandize themselves beyond all expectation.
7
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER ONE
Malatan politics
8
The corresponding density for Nyakyusa-speakers was over
50 persons per square mile at the time referred to. It is my premise
that the linguistic connection dates to well before the storied
founding of royal lines in uNgonde and uNkyakyusa by migrants from
uKinga. Those traditions indicate an eastern rather than western
migration source and place the beginnings of state-building at about
a.d. 1600. But what is indicated prior to that was a long period of
eastward migratory movements into or through the Corridor. If only
a fraction of the evident Bemba-to-Nyakyusa rise in population
density had occurred by 1600, we have to suppose that quite new
forms of settlement and social organization would have been
prompted by the overall fertility of the Valley floor, and the
migratory traffic there. Monica Wilson properly paints the lands of
the Nyakyusa and their Valley neighbours as an important north-
south Corridor.‡
9
occasional remark about quarrels among local rulers in the Central
and Western realms confirms my suspicion that political life was
livelier than old men recalled—or than they were prepared to share. I
was not so fortunate as to have any of this documentary infor-
mation to work with in the field. Like most anthropologists of my
generation I entered and left with virtually no valid historical infor-
mation on the region beyond what I could get by ear. This volume
attempts, as my earlier volumes could not, to deal not just with oral
history but prehistory, reconstructing probable paths of change
from localist to translocal politics in three historically related
communities.
10
of the Later Iron Age, after about a.d. 1400. By that date banana
cultivars of appropriate type would have been well established in the
Valley zones, inviting a growing population density, and out-migration
from this Rift Valley community would have slowed in favour of more
intensive agricultural practices. In all this, smithing would have
played its part, first with iron tools for clearing and turning soil, and
eventually with the iron weapons a developing chiefly system of
authority could put in the field.
This wild belt of country, stretching from high and healthy uplands
to the stifling lake-shore plains, therefore lies in the very heart of
Africa. It has been a meeting point of invasions from East and West,
and North and South. [1958: 1]
11
marry if the relationship is known. Beyond that point, kinship is no
hindrance and bears no onus of mutual obligation. Only special patro-
nymics indicate a putative common descent, stemming presumably
from a small group of inmigrants uncounted generations back. The
exchange of wealth in cattle for brides is not associated here with
any definite pattern of exchange-alliance between local and kin
groups. The stabilization of lineage groupings promoted by social
contracts of such kind would have worked against the radically volun-
taristic trend of the Nyakyusa social system, which convenes the
scattered men of a lineage only for the funeral of a member and
disposition of the estate.
12
Where a special value is put on amity, individual moral careers
are pursued within looser institutional limits and the limits which do
apply may not be grandfathered on the young to the extent one
might expect in a traditional African lifestyle. At the same time
there is a gender dimension. Freedom of association may be far more
tangible for males than females, particularly in uNyakyusa. The
political life and active concern with the definition of rights through
court procedure is, as so often elsewhere, mainly for men. Women
can usually rescue a good measure of personal freedom by developing
moral strategies which maximize the rewards of a ‘woman’s world’.
Monica Wilson has shown how difficult this can be for a Nyakyusa
matron, who must follow strict rules of submissiveness. I have found
the Kinga woman’s world an effective refuge. It is made possible by
an extended bachelorhood in the high style of youth, and after
marriage a triadic devotion to food production, sisterly amity, and
the extended nursing of infants (limiting pregnancies to four)
followed after midlife by domestic privacy. But again as so often the
world over, a discussion of political process can be tied up without
more than a whisper about a woman’s role in it. In this respect, I
admit Malatan politics is like any other. A man’s world joins a
woman’s at evening meal, in the conjugal act, and in the ungovi. This
last is the festive breaking of ground for new planting, in which a
women’s team vies with a men’s, and all join in a lively beer party in the
evening. These are the main episodes in which men and women
interact on a common footing. For the rest, their spheres intersect
without joining, and each man or woman must pursue the good in life
independently.
13
standing one could not otherwise have reached. If this seems a mere
form of words now, I trust it will take on substance as I proceed.
14
obvious examples, such as can be identified without resort to
splitting hairs.
Protostates
15
prime domains, is politically self-conceived as an island to itself. In
uKinga it has been convenient for me as an observer to use the word
‘realm’ to mean the inclusive alliance of domains centred on a princely
ruler, as if it were thought of as a political unity. My reasoning is that
it was such in practice, if not in the language of discourse, since it is
unthinkable a satellite would fail to answer the call of a prince to
fight real external threat. But in ordinary speech there is no such
lumping. Each domain is known by its name, and terms like ‘satellite’
or even ‘central/ peripheral’ are not terms of native discourse.
The ties which create a Sanga realm are radially drawn between
one or more local rulers who agree to claim only the title and privi-
leges accorded an untwa (my ‘local ruler’ or ‘lord’) and a pivotal domain
whose ruler is accorded the title and privileges of the higher office,
unkuludeva (my ‘prince’ or ‘high prince’). In the retrospect of the
1960s there were ‘always’ four avakuludeva and hence in my terms
four realms, albeit one of them lately in a state of civil war. But Kinga
elders had no need for separate terms other than the untwa/
unkuludeva distinction of rank. This was a difference that made a
difference, and was jealously guarded by a ruling prince. Ambiguity
never arose because the political universe was small and familiar to
everyone. Every domain was called by a proper place name and every
ruler called by the personal name he had chosen for himself. This
applied even to Mwemutsi, though that name was hallowed by long
tradition for the ruler at Ukwama. But I would note that Kipole, the
woman ruling at Ukwama when the Germans came, was never to my
knowledge called ‘Mwemutsi’. As for the other princes, the name
most hallowed was Kyelelo. The eponymous figure was the regicide
surnamed ‘the Cruel’ who reigned in the West only a generation
before the pax. The name in that case was deliberately tied on
account of its strength to the office rather than the man.
16
of his warrior-following lest he lose too many to a rival, so must each
realm keep jealous watch on a satellite which might harbour inten-
tions either of challenge or secession. In uNyakyusa the same sort
of contingent autonomy, with the rivalry and indirection implied, was
openly sanctioned by constitutional principles.
Sanctions
17
neither ‘diffuse and mechanical’ nor top-down. The main agent is the
party which has been victimized, and the sanctions a man and his
family or friends may impose can look like revenge. It works for
restoring the peace if and only if people generally regard it as
justified action. That is, the new peace rests again on mechanical
sanctioning. But this is the peace of a broadened circle of friends, a
pedestrian community where everyone is known, if only at second
hand, to everyone else and knows how to put in a claim for redress of
a wrong. When outsiders to such a circle are involved in private
conflict with members, and a resort to force spoils the peace
between two communities, the eventual solution may be a resort to
some sort of oracular or otherwise ritually sanctioned referee of
claims. Anthropologists will think of the ‘leopardskin chiefs’ of the
Nuer of the southern Sudan, who were certainly not quite ‘chiefs’,
but also not quite priests. But there the variations are many, and as
trouble cases accumulate there will be a strain toward reorgani-
zation. A new beginning then might lead to the constitution of
political authorities and the pre-legitimation of unilateral sanctions.
Animism
18
hallowed rule), for the animist the failure is personal because the
spirit addressed is apprehended particularistically, in a social
relationship patterned on the dyadic relationships of family and
closed community life. A step toward the exaltation of a spirit is a
step over the ideal categorical boundary of animism, but it is likely to
be a small step. Animists will always know how to accept new spirits
without pushing out the old.
19
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER TWO
A Politics of Fear
Concessions to fear
20
is wrong. The pragmatic or practical strain—the famous social
contract—is bound to be there but, if it’s not quite hidden, it will at
least be well camouflaged. A main causal string in the rise of
statelike political systems is that the original concession to allow
one person a command rank creates a system of power, and any
enduring power must know the best way to watch its back is to grow.
But a prime requirement for that outcome is disguising its arbitrary
character as a negation of individual freedoms. So power, if it will be
entrenched, will by direction and indirection present itself as
necessary. Modern nation states have war machines and a stunning
cult of monumentalism to make the point. Protostates, being pre-
bureaucratic, are apt to depend for cover on a more oblique and
colorful kind of ritual camouflage or inventive political theatre than
fully developed states require.
21
sanctioning authority. The Sanga court’s imongo ‘marriage tax’ is an
apt example of life-cycle intervention in a society patterning
unusually late marriage; and the strict regulation of seasonal
planting, though heavily cloaked in ritual, was sanctioned by force,
banking on the everpresent fear of losing a crop. The court’s annual
war-games employed the still more radically political tactic of mobili-
zation.
22
inroads either from the south or north. Had penetration been easier
the region’s history could have been as tumultuous as it was for its
northern and southern neighbours. I think it important for our under-
standing of the early stages of state formation that this western
end of the political archipelago did hold together through the
nineteenth century. Had it not there would have been little left to
show what intricately off-beat political systems had once been
fashioned there. Militarily, though, the region’s experience in the
later nineteenth century was clearly hardening. What we have to ask
is what fate the Kinga and Konde escaped—What are the lessons for
state-building of the Sangu and Hehe cases? Both of them exhibit
the politics of fear in its immoderate posture.
First the Sangu, then the Hehe were in the thick of the fighting
for wealth and majesty, and a stake in the region’s perhaps
overvalued future. An earlier understanding was that the critical
stimulus to militarism had come from the south with the
expatriated Ngoni bands, who were living by rape and pillage as they
moved northward. They had reached the Lakes region, it was
estimated, about 1840. But the Sangu insurgency was up and
running, it now seems, at least five years before the Ngoni actually
appeared in the Corridor, and Zwangendaba’s Ngoni band settled for
a time in Ufipa, a fair distance northwest of lands the Sangu then
occupied. The critical stimulus to war was temptation not alarm.
Sangu were leading a scramble for custody of the Great Ruaha
trading route into Tanzania’s interior. Coastal Arab merchants were
taking out ivory in exchange for exotic goods like cloth, glass beads,
and guns. The Sangu until 1830 would have been a relatively small but
independent pastoral community in the lowland plains. But they were
nicely suited to the task of squeezing the traders, and it’s likely they
expanded very largely by recruitment from the several neighbour
communities they overran in their scramble. Shorter (1972) calcu-
lates that they were the great power to be reckoned with in the
Ruaha area by 1837. Ngoni weren’t there to challenge them until
1842. When they did arrive, having no use for trade or for guns and
the hard-to-get powder needed to work them, and still disinclined at
the time to provoke a powerful enemy, the Ngoni seem to have held
off from seriously engaging the Sangu. ‡
23
But it is not to be thought that lurid accounts of this bloody
business and the powers behind it failed to spread in all directions
between the Zanzibar coast and Lake Tanganyika. Permanent
enslavement of captives is reported, though hard to date, in tradi-
tions recorded by the British at Tukuyu, Iringa, Njombe, and of course
Songea, with its generations-old Ngoni settlements.
24
and led against the Germans was taken over intact and remained so.
That we can’t know much more reflects the tenuous, even
evanescent personal-political nature of the structural links which
make a tyranny work. Supported by frail roots in tradition, an
overnight empire to exist at all can require a tangible future. Ironi-
cally, it is perhaps because the German conqueror, Colonel Nigmann,
was such a fitting, in fact admiring, successor to Mkwawa that the
Hehe moral identity survived the infliction of peace. ‡
Malatan specialties
25
British administrators, to whom we owe many important records,
distinctly preferred an upland climate to the hotter plains, and
accordingly took their local orientation from that subregion. With
that in mind I have gone back to the broader (and now largely
discarded) label ‘Konde’ for an inclusive reference to speakers of the
Ngonde-Nyakyusa language in both Tanzania and Malawi. This allows
me to say, for instance, that there were several, interlaced
protostate processes going on among Konde chiefdoms in preco-
lonial times. There wasn’t the strain toward a centre of the political
field which, for all the belligerence of Prince toward Prince, the Sanga
system cultivated. To the extent that Monica Wilson’s enchantment
with the ‘divine king’ figure may have implied the living Lwembe at
Lubaga provided a central political figure for the Konde world, I think
we have been misled.
26
conflicting matters of record with which a Kinga-Konde comparison
must deal I shall also have resort to paragraph-length citations as
the best way to make clear my construction of the facts as it is
drawn from a particular documentary source. My intention from the
beginning of this ethnographic project has been to work through a
comparative analysis of the several statelike polities in the Sowetan
region, always with the aim of learning how their institutions must
have worked in late-historic times, and what the region has to teach
us about the origins of large-scale political life.
27
case a like remoteness is achieved for these Princes in two steps:
within the high court domain, only the trustee families live in the
immediate vicinity of (and have limited entrée to) the seclusive royal
court; while the affiliated ruling court which centres a client domain
typically rules less sanctimoniously and does not hide its own ruler
from regular eye contact with his people.
28
system had meanwhile created a ‘Kinga’ people united rather by the
spreading acceptance of a ‘court culture’ which colonized (not
uprooting or resettling) the ‘bush’ communities of their mountain
slopes and hidden valleys, and maintained the pyramidal organization
of ruling offices typical of a segmentary protostate through the
fiction of fraternal amity among leaders and the regular passage of
token tribute. Recall that Southall redefined his ideal type of the
segmentary state as a blending of political authority and ritual
theatre. ‡
29
play itself out, as it were, after dark. How far this preference for
witchcraft might apply to Ngonde I don’t know.
30
Can I describe the paths? Can you reduce a history to
narrative? There is no need in any event to go so far as to drown the
tale in dogma. Inside all three communities, important intergroup
linkages were effected politically and ritually. This entailed the
invention of an aristocracy with (fictional) bloodline relationships
linking the major rulers of the whole region as an hereditary class set
apart, and the development of a priestly presence with strong
professional ties across political boundaries. The sources of this
structural change, like the sources of a river, were many and
concurrent—none need be given temporal priority. The ancestral
figure for prince and priest was the three-in-one ‘most respected
elder’ of earliest-remembered times, who was vested with the
oversight of political, ritual, and jural services within an autonomous
face-to-face pedestrian community. As the settlement pattern
within a given ecological niche matured, trans-local trouble cases
became more frequent, and resort to arms called for a programme of
policing the peace. With the gradual appearance of secular authority,
the scope of ritual action came to include the explicit sanctioning of
entrenched political power. Moots gave way to authoritative law
courts for civil dispute settlement. In the mystical trade,
independent ritual practitioners largely gave way to politically
responsive priesthoods. But local factors affected the degree to
which a pre-existing ethnic mosaic resisted assimilation. The social
situation and character of prince and priest want separate consid-
eration in each community.
31
ubusooka or Coming Out, which culminates a chiefdom’s growth and
instantly decentralizes it.
32
theatre entailed reifies the perceived cause for fear, dramatizing it
as incorporeal animus, but giving it the fanciful intensity and
definition which allay skepticism, enlisting public concern. The Sanga
court presumed to deal equally with pragmatic-legal and ritual-
metaphysical determinations, and seems to have succeeded fairly
well in controlling both spheres—although bush-Kinga patterns of
self-help in civil cases were certainly not everywhere eradicated; and
diviners, curers, and unattached claimants to mystical power were
not always brought under the court’s umbrella. Witchcraft beliefs
remained a bastion of ‘mystical democracy’, as did spirit possession
among Nyakyusa. This is because anyone, of either gender, might
have secret powers of the very kind claimed by the court. I discuss
these matters, and assess the politics of belief, in Chapter Three, “A
Religion of Blame”. But to find the place of beliefs in the two political
cultures, I want finer-grained modeling of structural differences.
There are four basic questions to ask.
33
anthropologists of other-than-humanistic persuasion, to the impor-
tance of noticing ideas even when they are not floating on the
surface of life.
In Kinga context
Kinga oral histories I got for several domains record the exile of
a local wizard during early days of setting up the Sanga court, only
to call him (which is to say his official descendent) back some gener-
ations later. These oral records refer to and clarify the transition
from a pre-political system of governance to the Sanga court
system. The business of a wizard is reading signs not commanding
action, but wizards do deal in consensus, and that can be good
enough when the problems of governance are of quite limited scale.
When things were going wrong for a man in pre-political Kinga culture
the ultimate move was quitting his community for another. That is
the way things still worked for Ndendeuli when Gulliver was with
them in the early 1950s: movement there was free of risk and imper-
sonal constraint. It is a proverbial characteristic of the wizard that
his stature and influence is magnified by social distance from his
client, and that means in effect that close local groups don’t have
their own wizards. Clients come to seers at need and scarce need
heed them otherwise. Still, the kind of wizard we are dealing with is
not a loner or an entrepreneurial professional of the sort we find at a
later or more turbulent stage of social complexity.
34
association with authority, and look to him as master of ritual—not,
as before, the inspired stranger.
The most relevant Kinga terms for office at the court are
unkuludeva (prince), avanyivaha (the court’s trustees or strongmen),
unteketsi (officiant at sacrifice), and umotsi (rainmaker). Where the
first three roles are anchored in a royal court, the rainmaker is not.
He is a self-employed wizard to whom a Sanga ruler would be seen to
apply as client. The rainmaker’s trade and his kitbag antedate the
court and can survive without it as long as the belief persists that
his ministrations are needed to bring on the rains after a dry season.
As for sacrifice, any elder is competent to propitiate an ancestor;
the unteketsi deserves the name of priest because he is keeper of
the medicines of the court, host of the sacred grove, and necessary
as officiant at communal rituals. This puts him in the category of
unyivaha, companion (trustee) of the court. The priests lived hard by
the ruler’s enclosure in daily contact with him and other companions
of the court (avanyivaha). They were engaged as a group in managing
the ordinary business of government.
35
village to colonize a mere bush area of settlement, was being invoked
at once by the client and the higher court, affirming the nature of
their political ties.
36
His further task (but for German intervention) would have been to
build there a new branch of the priesthood, so assisting eventually in
the establishment of a new autonomous local domain under the
Sanga umbrella. In this latter-day example we can perhaps see an
historical analogue to the mythical practice of bringing back the
banished wizard whose local credibility was a precious asset. With
the firm establishment of the Sanga protostate, it may be the
prestige of a Sanga celebrant had become the only asset required.
Alternatively, we may speculate that an aggressive witchfinder-
priest had more than once been in the vanguard of a Sanga coloni-
zation programme.
In Nyakyusa context
37
German records (so far as known to me) shows that the basic Kinga
system of bounded domains, aligned as contiguous territories in
four bounded realms, had no parallel in Nyakyusa political thinking.
This means that client-rulers could not be ‘sent out’ quite as (in the
model realm of Kinga social memory) they were by a Sanga prince,
with the mandate to rule a named territory and all who lived there.
The initial task of the cadet Nyakyusa ‘chief’ on being sent out was
rather to recruit than rule. That is, he must gather men, cattle, and
women, pretty much in that order of priority.
(ii) About thirty years after the chief’s Coming Out he will be
ready to retire from active leadership. He and his whole generation of
village leaders are feeling a ‘push’ from a frustrated younger gener-
ation of males aged 30-35. So the commoner villages, each in the
person of its head, go together with the chiefly villages to stage a
grand Coming Out. Two young chiefs and as many young heads from
each senior commoner village are designated rulers of some (say,
twenty-four) newly franchised cadet villages which the ceremonial
organizers map out. The older generation bows out gracefully and
passes power onward. In a grand ceremonial drama, a whole new
political arena is opened up with fanfare and much excitement.
38
so political a structure as a Nyakyusa chiefdom would just blow a
whistle and say, ‘new game—start over’. The ‘graceful withdrawal’
(especially one to be accomplished through strangulation) reads like
one of Malinowski’s ‘just so’ stories. ‡‡
39
A good handful of spares, cadets ready to take over leadership at
need, are put through the rite as well. Perhaps in the 1930s when the
Wilsons’ fieldwork was being done, or in 1953 when Monica Wilson was
on revisit, this affair could pass for an orderly ‘communal ritual’, a
sort of biggish, long-delayed bar mitzva followed by youthful exploits.
But before the colonial pax the sequelae would have been a fair mix of
braggadocio and real violence. The competition among cadet leaders
can’t have been quite unbloody, but should be imagined higher on
death-defying than death as such.
We could all wish some scribe had been around only the one long
generation earlier to observe an actual case and record how all this
worked on the ground before the pax made the ubusooka a mere rite
of passage. We have one picture of an older generation ceremonially
sowing turmoil, and another of accomplished tropical paradise. But
between the anthropology and early missionary accounts we do have
an interesting body of evidence for reconstructing a credible model
of the social system our ‘scribe in time’ would have found. I find the
cadet generation a set of rivalrous client-rulers. I think the five key
elements of the model would be these:
40
size and majesty to make their Coming Out a map-changing event.
Splitting a weak chiefdom could only produce two weaker ones, and
this must have been a common result. These assumptions allow for a
realistic fit of the model to probable rates of demographic and
political expansion. But by the same token, the sense of expan-
siveness would have been in the air. It was indeed a world renewal, as
new villages and cattle byres were springing up and a fresh gener-
ation of men settling in to marriage and rivalrous begetting.
(d) Warlike manners were put on for the occasion. Ever ready to
psych themselves up for war, Nyakyusa men other than the chiefs
were not deeply macho, not inner- but peer-directed. Peer relations
being artificially dense and omnilateral, losing a comrade was not
structurally traumatic. The obverse of the Nyakyusa emphasis on
‘good company’ within an age-village was the ease with which a
deserter would be taken in by another such group. The model takes
account of the antipolitan ethic so evident in Nyakyusa testimony:
peer loyalty may even be negatively associated with loyalty to a
chief. Having friends and most of one’s kinsmen in other villages
leaves a man his own boss in the politics of commitment.
41
(e) What especially energized and maintained the prestige of
the ‘Coming Out’ institution was the high-spirited style of youth and
young adulthood, stemming particularly from the high morale
generated in the age-village system for boys. Observers might be
expected to assume that delayed marriage would produce
frustration and dissension; the sexual equation in the Nyakyusa
case appears to have been more like that of the Kinga, where
homophilia is not thought in any way unnatural, than Monica Wilson’s
informants intimated. Less like the Kinga experience was the oppor-
tunity every Nyakyusa youth seems to have had to form brief
liaisons in bachelor years with (married) women of their own age. This
risk enterprise was by all accounts a feature of their young lifestyle.
It was ritually infused into the careers of boy-men and maiden-
women by their special days and nights of intimate seclusion before
a girl’s nubility, friends with friends, learning about love-making by
show and tell. This idyllic interlude—what Monica Wilson describes as
their ‘initiation-marriage’ rite—was arranged for a self-selected
group whenever one of the maidens in a circle was preparing to wed.
Taken for granted: the groom (who was not invited) would ordinarily
be a stranger. While Wilson’s informants stressed an educational
rationale, it is hard to doubt two further implications: that the
possible trauma of a wedding night was finessed, and that the
radical exclusivity of marriage rights was mooted. Quite obvious is a
third implication: a bridge was fashioned, whatever else the young
people did in their private interlude, from homophilic to heterophilic
sexual orientation. By the time of Wilson’s fieldwork the original
African morality play was outdated: homophilia was being played
down, the interlude itself finessed, and a maiden’s transition to
adult sexuality was being eased by a few night visits with the
husband-to-be, who was expected to have ‘external’ sex relations
with her. That is, if the missionary mind has not unduly influenced our
information on sexual matters. ‡
42
(2) A tempered aristocracy.
43
than others. At any given time, only a very few men at a Sanga court
have an expectation of joining the dominant group there. Most men
will return with marriage to the peasant life at middle age. Most
Nyakyusa live in commoner villages and have no expectation of joining
a chiefly court. Yet these are not ‘bush’ villages. Even in a ruling village
only a few men have more than a nominal connection to dominance,
and since each commoner village has its own dominant group there is
no instantly obvious difference in rank among the several villages of a
chiefly domain. What is important to notice is that access by birth
or merit to political ascendancy in either society would be seen by
ordinary men to have the same conditional sort of permanence or
preordination we associate with ‘aristocracies’. I qualify the local
example as ‘tempered’ to reflect its subtle blend of the realized
aristocracy constituted in a set of loosely hereditary offices and a
nominal one constituted in a set of hereditary ranks. In either case, if
many are called few are chosen to enjoy real personal influence, and in
the competitive atmosphere of Nyakyusa politics the devil can
expect to take the hindmost.
In Kinga context
44
warranted a man’s acceptance by and loyalty to the court and its
élites, and little more. Consider the scene. When bush youths are
recruited to the royal courts, they replace senior warriors recruited
in the same way a generation ago. These seniors, according to the
Kinga model, are each awarded a mature princess of the court, and
with her the Sanga name to assure them status in the new off-
centre settlement the group is to make its own. The best of the
senior warriors, in particular, is so awarded and made group leader,
charged with carrying the Sanga banner into frontier country. This
man has now become untsagila (‘lieutenant’ perhaps) to the royal
court. But internally—within the new frontier community—the role is
better translated as ‘client-ruler’. In matters local, he is going to be a
ruler responsible to his own people not the high court. As client to a
princely patron he owes and is owed nothing until a specific, situa-
tional compact be made.
It is also the case that any such pushy new political estab-
lishment needs in turn to develop its own staff, the avanyivaha,
priests and magistrates and their chosen assistants. So a client
has a long path to climb before he (his part now played by a lineal heir)
could hope to see himself established as part of the Sanga ruling
élite. But that is the way Kinga of the final precolonial generation
thought it had been done—not how realms had been made, as they
were somehow all there ‘from the beginning’, but how local domains
would have been formed within the realms. It started with a small
party, a handful of men with their new wives. Most of these parties,
with average luck, would settle a new hamlet and survive there, or
perhaps go to replace a less competent local establishment in
already settled country. A very few leaders, cultivating old ties with
others settled near, would eventually set up as petty magistrates,
45
settling small disputes, sending hard cases further to the court of
the realm.
The territorial size of the domain one local ruler could manage
would depend on qualities of the land and landscape. The
demographic size would be a function of that and the natural limits
affecting a pedestrian community disposed to affiliate. Most of
this, in any event, was already stuff of the misty past in the extant
domains the Germans were coming upon in 1900. We are left to
extrapolate farther backward toward Sanga ‘beginnings’ and the
emerging idea of (four) realms in perpetual ‘fraternal’ league. System
change was ordinarily slow, and social memory kept alive not the
past but a code-like reconstruction of it.
46
In Nyakyusa context
To put this into the form of a practical rule you have to take
office into account. Anyone in high office is an aristocrat in the
telling sense that he is thereby presumed to be the heir of a solid line
of men holding that office. Blood lines and primogeniture play a less
cogent part in the continuity of this aristocratic thread than the
ceremony of investiture itself, which is enacted in the fullest
religious sense by the old prince-priest-chief. So predictable is it
that the Wilsons would have been told succession to this highest
office was by primogeniture, pure and simple, that I feel obliged to
take it as a Just So story. The Kinga said the same about their
succession but then made it clear on enquiry the heir unkinga must be
deemed by the gathered avanyivaha to have met their every test of
aptitude for the office. As in the Kinga case, in the Nyakyusa it is
only in the very act of seizing the man and ritually investing him that
the court elders announce a succession. Two chosen sons, each
putatively by one of the old prince’s two chief wives, represent the
47
two ‘sides’ of the old chiefdom sectioned out before their births, and
are fully proven adults at the time of the investiture.
Since the whole chiefdom (both the elder community and the
several new) must have faith in them, it is unrealistic to suppose
unhealthy or uncharismatic individuals would make the cut. Younger
brothers, in any event, inherit an office before sons if a chief dies in
the decades between these political ceremonies of renewal; and a
first-born who died young or otherwise failed to make his mark would
never be remembered in a royal genealogy. When the whole idea of
aristocracy is to strengthen the charismatic aura of high office,
when the crucial time for this is the occasion of a coronation, and
when the time and circumstances of the devolution of power on a
chief’s heirs are most carefully controlled by a gathered host of
elders, commoner rulers and priests, then politics can hardly fail to
temper its rules with pragmatism. In short, primogeniture is the
model rule: just so. Everyone knows if an ill-suited man is made chief
the story has a dead end.
The Wilsons were told that at the Coming Out each new chief
was told just where to settle his two wives and build his two stem
villages. Doubtless this worked out in the 1930s under the pax. But
before 1893 the Coming Out was the start of a new power game and
a turbulent reorganization of space. The best plans of the elders
could hardly amount to more than a starting drumroll. Mwaipopo’s
chiefdom, which the Wilsons knew well, began as four, with the
Coming Out of four chosen ‘brothers’. Mwaipopo conquered the
other three and reduced them to dead-end subordinates of his own.
48
Had they not been seen as brothers it seems they would not have
been treated so well.
49
that stage each its own group of younger age villages gathered
around. In a chiefdom matching the model of the Wilsons’ infor-
mants, all the established villages would date back to the last
Coming Out, and all would be on the same ‘careers’ track as the prince
and his commoner village counterparts. Their strategy was to
collect women and prosper, holding the next generation of males in
thrall—extending as long as possible the social dependency of
bachelorhood. With the next Coming Out ceremony, after thirty
years and more of ascendancy, a now-reduced generation of male
elders will grudgingly contract to ‘retire’ in favour of a more
numerous and energetic generation, the greater proportion of these
new men still unmarried. This is a deep generation, ranging in age from
about ten to forty. They have to be re-sorted and their villages
relocated, to make up two or more fledgling chiefdoms. This means
stripping all the old villages, chiefly and commoner, of their satellite
age villages. This pools all the men (say) between fifteen and forty
into one ascending generation. What remains then of the old princely
realm is an odd set of ‘retirement villages’ peopled by mainly old men,
each with a spate of wives, young and old, and a host of children
under the age of puberty. We are left to imagine how these old polyg-
ynous clusters, left now without the steady support of a young
bachelor set, will break up. Odds-on, this part of the process will be
erosive, not explosive.
Most of the women with young children will be needing new and
younger husbands prepared to do their heavy gardening and house
building. The model seems to say the old husbands ought now to
oblige by dying off quickly, but the model can’t be trusted on such a
call. What can be trusted is the informants’ constant refrain: every-
thing begins over again. Men of the right age and character, this
suggests, will be ready for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They
won’t just stand around waiting. I should be quite surprised to learn
either that the rate of adulterous elopements did not take off with
a Coming Out of young men, or that an eloping couple in the new
circumstance did not find safe haven in a chosen young man’s new
village. Turbulence of this kind stands in strongest contrast to Kinga
social life, where domesticity, though structurally minimal, is
paradoxically stable.
50
interest’ type. It seems a born aristocrat cannot beget the future
headman of a commoner village. That is, any young man with demon-
strable aristocratic claim is ineligible to lead any but one of the two
royal villages of his realm. Nyakyusa women like the Kinga spaced
their births generously, and would have done so in monogamous
unions quite as easily. The many male offspring of a wealthy and
successful prince were in fact ruled ineligible for leadership office, as
were their offspring in turn. But the prince’s polygyny did set a
pattern for his peers. Where the magnified heterosexuality of a
Kinga prince had no resonance in the moral strategies of ordinary
men, the climax of the good life for ordinary Nyakyusa men was
always polygyny, though it always started late and might continue
so long as to become an obvious burden.
51
the court’s men cooperated in clearing or working fields and in the
various tasks of maintaining court properties. In both cultural
locales the rationale for late marriage was political: military and
more. Whether the men were living (seasonally) in barracks or in
segregated age-villages, there was a clear political advantage in
having a compact, mobile workforce close to the court. The typical
peasant division of labour gives structure to the household; among
households the structure (even in the classic ‘kinship society’) is
uneven and for political purposes may prove unmanageable. Kinga and
Nyakyusa societies with their systems of delayed marriage added
within the ‘peasant’ system a political division of labour centred on
the village rather than the household. This allowed for de-politici-
zation of kinship, and prolonged political socialization of the men to
the advantage of central direction. Formally, the two societies used
rather different institutions to achieve this result, and the sexual
side of bachelorhood in the two social schemes differed accordingly.
52
I hesitate, of course, to borrow from the Kinga to fill the
lacunae in their neighbours’ account. What is especially clear on the
hearsay evidence when coupled with observable gender relations is
that Nyakyusa men turn on to women more vigorously in young
adulthood than Kinga men do. It seems likely this was especially so in
precolonial times, when a young man’s strength and vigor gave him a
stronger hand in wrenching cattle and women away from his father’s
to his own byre and bed. But I see a special implication in the ‘initi-
ation-marriage’ custom of secluding a friendly group of boys and
girls in an isaka (“girls’ house”) all to themselves for a few days and
nights of self-education. Both genders, it seems, want that infusion
of heterosexual eroticism.
In Kinga context
53
individuals move smoothly into rewarding sexual relations within
these same-sex peer groups. Sexual frustration as such is not a
factor in these lives, though libidinal dynamics of course pervade the
period of youth. When I deny that peer relationships were possessive
I don’t mean they weren’t warm, only that the obvious shine of a new
relationship was soon normalized as friendship—a personal
involvement wanting good will, not demanding fidelity.
54
a household for his wife. Domesticity itself was less complete for
Kinga men than women, but marriage for both was a break—and for
women a pretty clean one—from bachelor ties and bachelor ways,
beginning a new phase of the life cycle. At the same time, delaying
marriage was (at least, away from the court itself) a voluntary
pattern not a prescription, and there is probably no knowing what
the statistics would have been. The main thing to have in mind is that
premarital pregnancies were systematically avoided, the first
conjugal embrace legally enacting the marriage. Her maidenhood lost,
a woman dared not—for she and her girl friends had always lived in
the shadow of this taboo—return to sleep that night with her peers.
Her commitment to a heterosexual life had a measure of the
seriousness of trauma.
55
health with a further pregnancy, but that her conjugal duty to her
husband is finished. Heterosexual relations in marriage are for both
partners mainly about reproduction. Erotic satisfaction is an
important by-product. There are no reliable statistics to clarify
questions about life-expectancy for men or women, or survival rates
for children in traditional times, but I think it unlikely a woman would
have passed child-bearing age before her mid-forties. Menarche in
the nineteen sixties still came rather late (17 or 18 was a typical
expectation, 15 was thought early) and women in their thirties
commonly showed impressive youthful vitality. In the Sanga court
culture I doubt that many women quit the bachelor life before their
mid-twenties, though in the full bush culture (or in the Kinga-Pangwa
overlap region) marriage would normally follow a few years after
menarche. I think the point to take here is that the Sanga proto-
state created a healthy moral and social environment by extending
the life situation of youth as it did, and limiting births. The general
good humour and good heart for life of Kinga men and women,
regularly attested by observers, reflects this.
56
dramatic heightening of or conversion to heterosexual values in early
adulthood, which anthropologists so often find elsewhere. Much
world and time is wanted for conjugal arousal. The comfortable
domicile a non-Christian man built for his marriage in 1960 was still
regarded as hers, not theirs.
In Nyakyusa context
57
maiden’s marriage in more nearly Kinga fashion at the time of the
Wilsons’ fieldwork. But there is no evidence from Selya that a girl’s
bachelor phase was ever expected to last more than a few years into
her full adulthood. In fact, the ample evidence of male dominance
there in adulthood indicates a pattern distinct from the Kinga, as
does the Nyakyusa man’s strategic career interest in plural
marriage. But the arithmetic of the calculations about marriage age
has to be challenged.
58
Kinga women lived more fully within their own world than Nyakyusa
women could in theirs, and Kinga women went about within their
world with a far more autonomous air as individuals. Kinga men fully
accepted their moral exclusion from that world on any terms short
of marriage. Since attention to good manners is, but docility is not,
characteristic of Nyakyusa masculinity, the point to take is that as
long as bachelor men in their age-villages were seen to be compliant
the system would work.
59
That means the classic problem of achieving a transition from the
particularism of kinship to the pragmatism of political authority is
finessed.
60
If Eastern Bantu peoples in less than 500 years spread three
thousand miles southward through sparsely settled lands from the
equatorial interlacustrine region to the Transvaal, it was not in
surges, waves, or mass movements. We aren’t dealing with conquest,
invasion, population displacement. In one form or another, the original
Bantu pattern of settlement in the Sowetan region would have been
migratory drift: discontinuous, purposive movements by small
groups toward proximate goals. The dominant motive for this kind of
migration is scouting good living conditions, and this kind of
pragmatic trial and error cumulates over many generations, given a
thin population of indigenes spread over a vast area. This is the
pattern of another well-known migratory settlement of continental
scale, the peopling of the Americas: after a first, thin peopling of the
continents by foragers, a gradual repopulation occurs through
migratory drift by carriers of more effective technics. The extent
and speed of movement is explained in the Bantu case not by finding
empty country but more likely by colonizing already lightly-settled
areas with the right tools and techniques to exploit them more
productively.
61
local political cultures was not replaced by ‘tribal’ boundaries, until
the pax.
62
methodological problem is ‘archaeological’: reconstructing from
fragmentary texts we chance to find still strewn like shards about
the field of play. The idea is to reconstruct what is still knowable of
their context, the once-living world from which they survive as
scattered relics. Reconstruction is interpretive not demonstrative,
and may be seen to rest on fuzzy logic, but without context none of
the evidence can be assigned clear meaning.
In Kinga context
63
career advantage over the talented ‘orphan boy’, dilutes the kinship
value of the Sanga name in favour of a political meaning. The spatial
dispersion of the settlement pattern for men still belonging to non-
Sanga surname categories, when combined with a de-emphasis of
kinship ceremonies, further dilutes kinship to the point that chiefly
politics has little to fear from kin sodalities which might oppose it.
This is a point of radical difference between the Kinga and Nyakyusa
protostates.
In Nyakyusa context
64
experience, where a funeral is closer to a moot than a rite, and
generates no festivities. Only a kin group with ‘central direction’ (e.g.,
an authoritarian family or minimal lineage) would possess the
sanction of ostracism. For the most part, kinship societies depend
on interlacing ‘loyalty networks’ not an authoritarian hierarchy, and
the rights which come with membership are inalienable. Nyakyusa kin
groups are of this sort: finite but unbounded. The age village, having
no kinship nexus at all, only augmented amity, exiles but does it in a
manner which tags it voluntary. A man begins to be seen as a witch.
The ‘breath of men’ leads to confrontation. The man moves off to a
far chiefdom. Years later he may return to his home village—he has
not lost his claims there. This favours the antipolitan ethic of the
region, which justifies a person moving on to escape from trouble. It
also bears analogy to the tight sort of family system we know from
the parable of the prodigal son.
65
Amity and kinship combine almost seamlessly in a society
which gives primacy to the former. Parties of young men from other
chiefdoms had access through kinship to important funerals, and
would be expected to pick fights there. Agonistic encounters like
this were probably as important as formal battle in strengthening
political identity within a fully established chiefdom, but would have
shown up the weakness of others. In times of turbulence, when the
inner moorings of social identity and loyalty are not strengthened by
stress they are weakened. As in kinship societies, where the puzzles
of social history so often lie in explaining why some lineages thrive
while others wane and disappear, so with Nyakyusa chiefdoms. The
politics of amity is as dense a subject as kinship itself. It is only too
easy to forget, in reading what Nyakyusa say about themselves,
that every chiefdom was destined to split before its generational
cycle ended, pitting brother against brother. This applies not just to
the chosen leaders of each new ‘side’ of the old community but all
the way down the line, for brothers generally grow up in separate age
villages. All this is in spite of the fact that at death a man’s next full
brother is the legal heir to his place in the world. Here as elsewhere
kinship apparently survives betrayal better than mere amity.
66
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER THREE
67
the archipelago would obviously have been of a more businesslike
sort, but specifically political contacts were probably few, or of no
great moment, before the nineteenth century.
68
of a remarkably homogeneous civilization. The Eastern and Western
Bantu-speakers, taken together, comprise a recent overlay on
diverse earlier African peoples, the product of a phenomenal
migratory spread beginning hardly two millennia ago. The overlay
process was one of assimilation and economic development not
displacement. Within the continental latitudes we are considering,
only a few islets of pre-Bantu settlement remained unassimilated
when the ‘colonial freeze’ began. I found, to give an example, a little
community of little people—somatically San (Khoisan), linguistically
Kinga—continuing under Sanga rule.
69
apprehended future needs for alliance, and only as strong as the
practical expressions of such use, in the symbolism of tribute or
inclusive tributary rites addressed to higher than mortal authority.
‘Divine kings’ if we have them at all among Kinga and Nyakyusa are not
addressed as living gods.
70
loyalties, or stress a pyramidal structure of ‘unilineal descent
groups’. The emphasis would rather be on a type of network ties
making use of both kinship and amity, and creating clusters rather
than bounded localities on the ground. Network ties of this kind are
not cut off by common boundaries, since no two individuals (unless
we think of newborn twins) are structurally placed quite alike. It is as
local populations increase and shifting movements become less free
that political units begin to form and stabilize as ‘local domains’ of
pedestrian size with a recognized centre.
71
estates (far away in warmer parts of the extended region) bachelor
men of the court centres took to migrant labour as a substitute for
the old barracks life, whose rationale had disappeared. By 1960 this
meant the great majority of adult men were fluent in Swahili and well
acquainted with town life. Ironically, this left the defense of native
conservatism to the fully disarmed old male power élite, uncon-
verted women, self-secluding smiths, and well dispersed bush
villagers.
72
better protected these two peoples from disruptive external
contacts through most of the period; and (turning to regionally
internal disruptions) only the Pangwa among these Kinga neighbours
escaped being drawn—always marginally, always to some limited
extent—into the transformative state-building processes of the
archipelago.
One can point to low population densities and the slow rate of
change prevailing in these highlands. It was the British boma
(bringing to bear a mandated government systematized only when
the colonial era was half done) that saw an arbitrary Kinga-Pangwa
boundary laid down, leaving at least one ‘Kinga’ community (per
earliest German maps) alienated to a Pangwa court of adminis-
tration. Boma documents say nothing of this. The Kinga-biased
history I got was that Sanga rule was in process of establishment
across the Mgiwi river before the Maji fighting erupted. If so, this
account would confirm the southward direction of Sanga expansion
from the Eastern Kinga realm, which a concerted oral history claims.
The Wanji (north from the Kinga but still at the high-plateau
level) during the same times of troubles were drawn inadvertently
into alliance with the Sangu (another full step northward and
downhill) in wars with Hehe, though it seems the fighting never quite
moved up the escarpment into Wanji country itself. The Wanji
economy may simply not have been fat enough to divert a loot-
seeking enemy. The Wanji communities farthest from the turmoil of
the 1870s, and removed from the missions and schools set up in
German times, came through the pax itself largely self-sheltered by
their native isolationism from acculturative contact.
73
colonized by a small party of refugee Sangu warriors shortly before
the pax. The Kisi on the lakeshore were potmakers and fishers who
traded primarily northward along the shore with Nyakyusa, but
traded also with Kinga. These three Kinga neighbours, Wanji,
Magoma, and Kisi, were small ethnic communities assigned for
administrative convenience to the Kinga Native Administration and
its courts when Indirect Rule was set up (1926) by the British.
74
of the Sowetan archipelago is discussed in Four Realms and
elsewhere. The Sanga political system is a close cousin to the Bena
and to the Hehe system described by Ernst Nigmann. The Sangu, as
nearly as one can tell, are not of the same tradition; and what the
Kinga have in common with the Nyakyusa is somewhat less on the
plane of political than social organization. This leaves the Hehe-
Bena-Kinga chain in the archipelago an historical entity linked by
overlap to another, the Kinga-Nyakyusa-Ngonde chain.
75
elsewhere discussed the way political theatre was able to sublimate
neighborly aggression between Kinga realms, and the Culwicks report
Bena sentiments to match: war “was the king of sports and the road
to wealth and honour.” Whereas eyewitness reports from the
Malatan region and from Kinga folk memory make this credible,
another chapter of the same folk memory concerns blood and gore
with no relief. This was from external wars where the ethical infra-
structure we call community or a common culture was set aside, and
the sporting metaphor quite lost. ‡
76
The official position on Pangwa in 1960 at the British colonial
Boma at Njombe was that the name applied to an extensive, under-
organized, and underpopulated area rather than to a distinctive
people. The missionized Pangwa studied by Fr. Stirnimann were
descendants of a half-century of turmoil beginning about 1850,
brought about by Ngoni scavenger bands who scattered settled
populations throughout the country, appropriating stores, livestock,
women, and boys. Ngoni here and there set themselves up as rulers,
exacting tribute in food and beer. Only in the early decades of
German contact does Ngoni dominance disappear from the carto-
graphic record on the northern (Pangwa) side of the Ruhuhu river. By
then the still-unassimilated Pangwa who had been carried off
southward as slaves and warriors had begun their return and were
reestablishing their communities. Two Ngoni groups had reached
uPangwa through uKinga, where Sanga forces had out-fought or out-
bluffed them. Pangwa had never been disposed to defend their terri-
tories; like ‘bush Kinga’ and Mawemba their strategy of defense was
flight.
77
Fr. Stirnimann’s study, just as that of Lupila ( just across the
northern ‘tribal’ border of uPangwa) was for me. For all the past
devastation on either side of the dividing river, the people who put
things back together were or became mainly Pangwa on the one side
and mainly Kinga on the other. The last time of crisis was already half
a century back when our fieldwork was done, and the British adminis-
tration had pretty well levelled the political scene for the region as a
whole. Only our eldest informants had known the pre-pax cultures
directly, and they mostly as children. Fr. Stirnimann’s Pangwa have
reduced the Kinga settlements and incursions (about which we know
from hard records) to a story in the very style Sanga tellers favour—
there is a Kinga figure, a sort of demi-prince, who came to teach and
lead, and whose line the British came to favour when they found the
great Pangwa District they had laid out contained no chief. The whole
‘founder-hero’ tale is there, only lacking the hero’s gift of seed he had
carried in his hair.
78
domestic lives categorically according to ‘Kinga’ and ‘Pangwa’
templates? I think not. When it comes to cultural distinctions of
this order—what one finds in a few days’ visit—the best predictor of
difference would be the distance by footpath between the one
community and the other. Crossing an arbitrary ‘tribal boundary’
counted for little even as late as 1960. The surnames, the greetings,
the temper of life wouldn’t change. In that respect, descending from
Kinga to Nyakyusa country is a far more drastic step.
I can say nothing more final for a bigger mystery, the grand
puzzle the Sowetan region presents to history. This is the matter of
79
learning what scholarship can educe about the human past from my
‘political archipelago’, the series of five Sowetan protostates,
running from the Hehe to Ngonde. Morphologically, each is a
transform of its neighbours in the series: a family resemblance runs
right through the archipelago, bridging the many important differ-
ences. The problem is to get a clearer sense as to how these social
systems are related and how and why they have diverged. My
intention in this, the final of my three volumes, is to build on the
descriptive and analytical base set out in the earlier monographs. As
usual, it is the Kinga I hover over most, and my own field experience
which supplies most of the regional verities. This is not because I
propose my findings needn’t be questioned, only that I’ll have done
what I can on that score. My main field intuitions on the Kinga stand
radically rethought. I do confess I have wanted to make a (to me)
coherent portrait of the people, the place, the past time. But to
place the Sanga political achievement in its context in time and
events I have to see it in its regional aspect—which just means
rethinking all the other fieldwork as well.
80
Pangwa studies of Fr. Hans Stirnimann constitute one of two
ethnographies which can serve as reference models for the world of
the pre-Sanga communities in what came to be ‘Kingaland’. My other
reference model is Gulliver’s searching work on the Ndendeuli, a
seemingly still less ‘political’ people colonized (and, like the Pangwa,
terrorized) by the Ngoni. Stirnimann’s Pangwa are presented under
the dependable rubric of old-style ethnography. The folkways and
mores, the organizational schemes and rituals of times past are
described to us just as they were described by competent infor-
mants to the investigator. Gulliver’s work is a sociological study of
the way Ndendeuli ran their daily lives and dealt with others. The
fieldwork was done only a few years earlier than mine and Stirn-
imann’s. ‡‡
81
was integrally overlaid. I can turn to the Pangwa to explicate that
and to confirm the degree of continuity between the culture the
Pangwa recall and my own reconstruction of the developed Sanga
court culture.
82
A premise of imparity
If a rich commoner dies and the heir buries him with only one cow,
the shades are angry and the people also...People are angry...But the
oracle says, ‘The shades are angry.’
I fear for the ritual, I fear hunger, the hunger of the people. For I am
the food of the country, I am the maker of food. ‡
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one pervading difference: appeals to the shades are impossible in the
village locale. The appeals the Konde make to ancestors are trans-
local; and chiefly ancestors respond to trouble among any and all
residents of the chiefdom. That is why when in the village it is said
‘the shades are angry’ (and not ‘your neighbours are angry’) the case
must go to the chief, whose decision relieves any villagers of respon-
sibility for the sanctions imposed. The buck is passed to the chief as
if to a scapegoat.
A reader will quickly see that the chief must not be tied (by
culpability, by blame) as neighbours are tied to one another in a
commoner village. That he has two villages, one on each more-or-less
self-contained ‘side’ of the chiefdom, allows him leeway. Each of
these villages is ruled, hands-on, by a ‘senior headman’ who with age
and a successful career will take on a priestly bearing once he and his
peers have become the arbiters of right. The political scope of a chief
is larger. He must be free to judge those neighbours without
prejudice. Specifically, when trouble arises among the households of
a chiefly village, he cannot be put in the position of referring an
appeal to his own court. Several of the special attributes and rules
which apply to a chief appear to be designed to meet such embar-
rassments. There is the majesty of his wrath, which needs no
argument to give it the force of truth. There is the supra-local
ambience a chief begins to carry with him as he judges appeals from
commoner hearings. Every chief had men in his own villages to handle
local cases, doing what they could to settle them without appeal.
There is the ordeal, which an angered chief will order when a man
thought guilty by his peers will not confess and make amends—since
the ordeal is most convincing when it only confirms the public’s
sympathy, a man who feels ‘outnumbered’ is likely to confess before
demanding it. And there are special hearings a powerful chief may
set, to settle issues which apply beyond the sphere of responsibility
of any single chiefdom.
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in the same chiefdom—the chief himself may feel safe in one village
of his country and not in another. ‡
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case, but stands clear of them as the sole source of judgement lying
beyond popular blame. A good chief kept his own counsel and wore
the mask of power in all his dealings. ‡‡
When Kasitile insists ‘they do not fear us’ he has in mind that
members of the chiefly confession, since they cannot be envious of
commoners, have no cause to use mystical powers against them.
Commoners would not suspect envy in a person of the chiefly kind, or
the witchcraft such envy spawns. A chief, in his night thoughts, is
not biased by personal involvement in the quarrels of his people. But
couple this with the consideration that strong-minded chiefs have
been known to confiscate a commoner’s cow or his wife quite
arbitrarily. So it is not that chiefs are blameless but that the blame
of a commoner cannot touch them. This I take to be Kasitile’s theory
of the two confessions. What is problematic in his world is that the
unchiefly multitude should be insensitive of the moral burden carried
by the few.
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sufficiently chiefly style. Mwambuputa was born 1880, is listed for
1938 as ‘the greatest in the country’, and later on in 1955 when he
was in his seventies he had become ‘the senior priest in the country’
with 30 wives. His is the first of two senior villages of Chief
Mwankuga. Though he is a commoner he knows how to act the chief.
He took charge of a recent Coming Out (1930s) and there exhorted
the young chief Mwanyilu, “Listen to the people: they are the real
chiefs! Be hospitable! Greet people politely! Don’t beat your men!” ‡
We look back at him now in his fifties, wealthy, able, and forceful.
He is having trouble with an assistant, Nsekela:
Mwambuputa himself had moved away from this same place all
the way to uNgonde some years back. One story is that he moved
into an inheritance there. More convincing is the story that he
moved because two of his children had died—he moved in fear:
Eating fine food alone is said to kill a man. ...It is said that
Mwambuputa grudged his fellows certain food, so they were very
angry and two of his children died at home. When he found that
sickness was spreading at his homestead he fled to the lakeshore
plain (MuNgonde), but there also he found that death pursued him,
and he returned home again. It is said that sickness pursued him to
the plain because he went off without performing the death ritual
87
for the children who died. So when he returned he found two bulls and
killed them, saying: “Friends, I have come. I did wrong because I did not
perform the ritual for your children with you.” ‡
88
ritually planted ulupando tree has grown tall at Bujenga,
Mwambuputa has retreated to uNgonde, and the matured new
generation (ii) of Mwankuga’s age-peers is taking centre stage.
Seeing that and seizing the occasion of the death of Mwankuga I,
Mwambuputa makes his move to return from abroad. ‡
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and his peer group. Mwansambe could not count on support from his
own chief Mwaipopo, who was keeping his distance. Mwakalembo-II
(having built himself up as a man of Bujenga) would have had the
popular support which neither Mwansambe (an absentee ruler) or
Mwambuputa (with no current following) could expect. On the other
hand, Mwambuputa by coming in at the funeral of Mwankuga-I could
expect the patronage of the successor (a younger brother), chief
Mankuga-II. The wrangling over claims and counterclaims was several
times renewed without a decision, as Mwaipopo (with a full life behind
him and now a salaried chief under the Rungwe Boma, and nothing if
not circumspect) saw the risk of open dissension. ‡‡
Who will sort out the impasse? While the decision hung,
Mwambuputa put up temporary houses in Mwaipopo’s along with the
older generation. But Mwansambe had properly made the first move,
and as a good patron like his father would have done, in time arranged
Mwaipopo’s sanction for a major ceremony of reinstatement,
attended by all the commoner priests and headmen—no chief, not
even Mwankuga-II. It was commoner business. They took over the
village (Igembe) where Mwankuga-I had come out, and with much
feasting at Mwambuputa’s expense they installed him as senior
headman of the new Mwankuga’s first village. All the commoner
‘politicians’ were there to witness an act of contrition. Mwambuputa
(it appeared) should have sacrificed two bulls in the long-ago, to
demonstrate atonement after the death of his two children. Now
this had been done, and the people’s concern about the meaning of
those long-ago events was cleared away. Here are some things that
were said at the ceremony:
[Of Mbuluko, who was being bumped:] “At first he refused, but
they pacified him. He cannot refuse, he will move. They just
considered where it would be best for the village headman to be.”
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old case reopens. Now it appears it was the shades who were angry
back then. Mwambuputa should have seen that, should not have
thought witchcraft, should not have grudged his fellows the meat of
sacrifice.
For ‘Now you have given them power’ let us read, ‘See how you
have turned our suspicions into certainty.’ The matter began with
the illness of a child, which became a matter for alarm and an
unfocused presumption of witchcraft. M. became the target when he
showed signs of defensiveness, a suggestion of guilt. This increased
to the point that no one would side with M. The child’s agonies flared
up, and M. was driven out. For ‘He is an evil man’ let us read, ‘He is
resentful and wishes harm to our child.’ His former friends are now
saying he ‘knew himself to be a witch’ or he would not have been
acting so defensively. From this I infer that it is possible for a man’s
resentment to cause harm (because he is a witch) without his
91
intending it (because he is unaware of his magical powers). The people
seem in their rough way pleased to have found the scapegoat they
needed if they were to restore the peace broken by fear of death and
a child’s mysterious seizures. If their culprit had chosen the route to
Mwambuputa and the ordeal, they are saying, they would have
believed its decision and thought better of him even if he failed the
trial. In the other event, this tale would have no ending.
And how then to read “We should have expelled you both”? It
clearly says “Don’t presume on our good will!” More than that it can
be taken to say “We don’t need leaders” or even “We have better men
for the job.” Mwambuputa has heard that before, when his own
children were dying. He heard in the way one hears what is not
spoken, and at that time he was unwilling to brush it aside. He has
since laid down an impressive record as a settler of cases and local
information manager. Interviewed about witchcraft he came back
with an indisputably sophisticated judgement, adopting the view
that openness about ill-feeling can always lead the way back to
amity. “It is when he lets nothing out and stays silent, though angry
in his heart, that he comes in dreams to throttle me.” As long as he
keeps to his therapeutic perch above the fray, it seems a man like
Mwambuputa can settle cases and grow rich. The key, I think, is
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Kasitile’s insight: don’t be reached by their blaming and they will let
you understand them. ‡
I would rather argue from the evidence that politics among the
Nyakyusa has become a profession surpassing the mere settlement
of cases. Men who find themselves charged with authority quickly
come to know they may as easily be discharged from it. It is an
entrepreneurial game, in which the players put up the stakes and
each defends his turf against rivals. May we suppose Mwambuputa
might have admitted to favouring M. against the general will, and
might have been expelled with him? The reason it didn’t happen was
that Mwambuputa has learned to cover his back and play the
political game, turning fear into blame and blame, perhaps, into
kudos. In this view, it is the commoner village ‘chiefs’ who make a
Konde community governable. The hereditary chiefs are involved in a
game of their own, at a translocal level, with much the same rules.
There is a balance kept. Show me a politics which doesn’t revolve
about off-loading blame. Show me the chief in an antipolitan world
who was never made scapegoat for local troubles in which he had
taken no part. The strongest among the hereditary Nyakyusa chiefs
stood high, as any reader of the literature will know. But they were
many, not few. They hoed their own land, boasted many wives, and
kept their own counsel. In a world where the deeper kinds of political
involvement are local, the prime requisite of an appellate authority is
keeping distance.
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FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER FOUR
A Religion of Blame
Honour’s underworld
94
In the literature, witchcraft transpires in three distinctly
conceived frames. In today’s account of the Salem witch-hunt we
have ‘the witch as victim’. In post-medieval Europe the witch was
presented as a human embodiment of evil. The frame I’ll be exploring
here may be called ‘the witch as creature of misfortune’. My
approach will be interpretive. I take it that the high seriousness of
the witch belief has to be understood dramaturgically, as it derives
from a critical reversal of fortunes in the moral career of the person
who will come to feature as a witch’s victim. There are three formal
considerations which help to show how the invention and the
persistent reinvention of witchcraft can be explained from the
ordinary experience of misfortune in the context of a worldview
common to Eastern Bantu peoples. The first point is the distinction
between divination and prayer as a response to misfortune. Prayer is
not available to the victim of accident, infection, or deep personal
loss in the prepolitical, precontact Sowetan regional culture. When
you go to a diviner with your trouble, you may discover you have
offended an ancestor or incurred the envy of a witch. In either case,
the matter of the enquiry is not to question your moral character or
state of grace but to discover what small neglect of duty or show of
pride has angered someone, living or dead, within your private circle.
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‘choice’ between equally likely alternatives; or from the accepted
disinterestedness of the seer, where the client’s anonymity is seen
to be protected, as in some of the Greek temple oracles or a
Sowetan witch ridder’s performance; or theatrically, when a god-
voice seems to speak through the diviner in trance, or is ‘cast’ by the
ventriloquist’s art. Systems of indirect action are virtually identical
with what we call ‘civilization’ just as direct action, the quick resort to
force and violence to gain one’s ends in a world devoid of polite proce-
dures, is our prime criterion for ‘barbarism’. But diviners don’t deal
easily with shades of doubt, and this leaves them best suited to
cases which won’t come to proof against hard evidence: if there were
no witches the diviners would have to invent some.
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seemed ill-defined in the minds of their informants, the sheer
existence and power of these beings had been massively established
in the common knowledge of the people. Their (unrecorded) folk
history surveyed a people’s timeless struggle to appease them. The
typical Christian convert was focused well on a new belief system,
but it was one framed within a well known cosmos.
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may belong to a household, an extended kin-group, or a locality.
Whatever the basis of their ties to the living, they are locally but few
in number. Yet these spirit-minds are nonetheless many, as their
spiritual clones are spread throughout the country in cellular
fashion. Wherever you pass from one social group to another, if it is
an easy passage, you find yourself in a parallel universe, familiar but
not convergent with the one you left. Animism is the ground for all
religions of blame, each being special to a regional culture. It is where
blame can be shifted from autonomous spirits to hidden shades of
the living that you have witchcraft. In its special fashion, it is an
empowering system of belief.
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passionate terms, found fickle with a favorite, ruthless tricksters
otherwise. Not quite a matter of intimacy, any approach to divinity
entails moral proximity and awareness of danger.
I never heard of a victim who, once sure he had found his witch,
attacked bodily. Every move in the game boasts of indirection. The
first reason for refraining from violence is the obvious one: witches
are dangerous. Witchcraft is a fine leveller, but only as a six-gun was
in the old American West. If only one man is secretly armed, the
playing field isn’t level. The problem is one of honour, squaring
accounts at once in a public and a mystical frame. Compare theft.
When a thief is caught in the act, public moral indignation takes hold.
A thief threatens everyone. Procedural intervention is not wanted,
justice should be quick. But witches can’t be ‘caught in the act’. An
accused witch and his victim could travel comfortably enough
together on their two-day journey to the favoured curer in uNgonde.
We need to look over the social maze witchcraft has to work in.
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but only in a dramaturgical frame. This takes following your moral
career as ‘situational theatre’. Social interaction is seen as it
appears in story: episodic and moved by circumstance, a rivalrous
game with protagonists and antagonists, confrontations and
dodges, stratagems and alliances. As you fare well your sense of
honour builds—it is nothing to flaunt, only your ego’s nestegg. Kinga
always hid their treasure, hating to be thought rich. But when
suddenly your luck is out the moral capital you hoarded seems to be
gone like so much stolen gold. The moral significance of honour and
its loss is coded into the central mystery of the ‘high cult’ of a
Sanga court.
The site of interest for now is the Malatan region. I deal here
with the way Kinga, especially, and Nyakyusa used elements of a
preexisting bush religion in building their systems of political
100
authority. Of uNgonde, the third Malatan protostate, and its sacer-
dotal ruler the Kyungu we have a constitutional outline and a rich
history but not enough of the all-important sociology one may glean
from an ethnography based in direct and participant observation. I
assume what I find most probable, that a traveler in the early 1600s
would have found a Sowetan culture area and within it hundreds of
autonomous local communities occupying dozens of distinguishable
dialect zones. Some borders, especially where they coincided with
natural barriers to easy movement, would have been marked by
stylistic differences in certain artifacts. But trade in essentials like
salt, unhafted iron tools, and pottery would have distributed
through the region whatever portables were not in short supply, and
significant functional differences in material culture would have
reflected local ecological adaptations—not ethnic or otherwise
political alignments. As with material culture, so in good measure
with practical activities—the division of labour, the kinship-amity
balance, marriage and domestic arrangements, and ‘bush religion’.
The one major divide within this culture area would have been
the Rift Valley escarpment between the lands now occupied by Kinga
and those of uNyakyusa. Evidence suggests the cultural heritage of
the Valley ecozone significantly differs from that of the mountain
slopes eastward. Two items are particularly striking. In gardening,
Nyakyusa men historically put in far more regular work than women—
the reverse of the traditional Kinga pattern. This may reflect a
different heritage from prepolitical times, but not one Nyakyusa
shared with their Corridor region neighbours. In religion, the Valley
peoples know spirit possession and inherent, heritable witchcraft.
But everywhere stories about witchcraft float free. They are
feather-light folklore of a sort which knows no boundaries but
language itself. What deserves the name of religion is belief grounded
in praxis, and the Kinga-Nyakyusa difference here is fundamental. It
firmly sets the cultural heritage of the Valley zone apart, and lends
special interest to high-level ritual cooperation between the two
protostates, which bridges the deepest moral divide within the
Sowetan regional culture.
101
sively taken over egalitarian bush communities in uKinga and
Nyakyusa-Ngonde country. The oral sources on which the premise is
based even seem to imply that the original bush communities would
have been overrun and absorbed in this movement. But a myth is
often easier to tell than play out in the time and circumstance
careful historical inference can allow. Are we to imagine a full-blown
political system (unexplained and unknown to tradition) somehow
lurking in that proto-Bena sacred grove at the outset? The party
would of course move quickly, with the pace of mythical beings,
sowing political seeds and moving on? Or do we posit an exotic alter-
native to this African magical account, featuring small parties of
alien movers (Arabs) settling in with the gift of civilization
(Sultanism)? You may find a dozen versions of this ‘aliens’ myth
explaining Bantu accomplishments in (say) Great Zimbabwe at any
bad library.
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A realistic view grounded in archaeology and ethnohistory
would presuppose roughly concurrent developments in each of the
five homelands under consideration, with stimulus diffusion
accounting for some parallels, and local idiosyncrasies—whether of
heritage or fresh invention—to explain deeper differences. Three
centuries are, by a common reckoning, no more than ten political
generations. I count ten full reigns no more than enough for the
more-than-minimal chiefly institutions of these three protostates
to have developed and, while showing so many subtle parallels and
deep local divergencies, stabilized within the region. A great deal of
what the protostates have in common with their neighbours can
also be found among the less chiefly folk of the broader region,
bearing all the marks of what is integral to tradition. I have elsewhere
shown this in detail and noted certain constitutional provisions the
several protostates share with less-political neighbours—provisions
of the countervailing sort which no authority would have imposed.
They are safeguards against the abuse of power, and would have been
maintained by entrenched local groups jealous of their autonomy.
You don’t impose a social contract. So far as it is real and so long as
it endures, a constitutional contract is a bargain about the balance
of power. ‡
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however, has had to find its own way to a working system of trans-
local authority, and it is by understanding their differences we are
likely to learn what we can of their separate political histories.
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troubled times cooperated with Kinga in ritual address to Lwembe.
His anger was thought by Kinga to be the cause of irregular,
widespread (‘territorially’ inclusive) troubles. But where Kinga made
a politically unifying thing of seasonal plantings, localism prevailed in
the Nyakyusa approach to hydrological mysteries. Rainfall in the
Valley does have visibly local patterns, and the regular seasonal
round of garden crops was a local concern of each chiefdom and its
rainmaker. Nyakyusa ‘rainmaking’ devices are the usual set for all of
the Eastern Bantu civilization and certainly antedate chiefly
politics. For the chiefdom we know best (Mwaipopo’s in British
colonial times) the rainmaker was the hereditary priest Kasitile, who
claimed collateral chiefly descent. A few samplings from the Wilsons’
fieldwork will elucidate some of the techniques and suggest the way
this particular bit of lore fitted into the pattern of Konde social life.
105
I suppose garden rituals since early Neolithic times have been
co-opted everywhere to some sort of political use. Just here, the
puzzle is what, in the historical situations of the Kinga and Konde,
should be held to account for one particular cultural difference: the
continuation of localist ‘bush religious’ praxis in respect to crops
among Nyakyusa, as compared to the fuller cooptation of traditional
rainmaking into a centralizing court culture among Kinga. It is useful
to have Godfrey Wilson’s information on Ngonde praxis: here are
rainmakers clearly subordinated to a centralizing monarchy with
traits of ‘divine kingship’ absent in the Sanga ‘high princely’ courts.
In the Kinga case, one may guess, priest and warrior were from
the start separate roles. But that surely would not have been the
case with the Konde, where we see the two callings everywhere
partly merged. Thus Kasitile calls himself chiefly and has hard things
to say about the ‘commoner priests’ who are only aging village
headmen. Konde chiefs also are felt to grow stronger spiritually as
they grow weaker physically, and there are points in her monographs
where Monica Wilson is clearly in favour of viewing secular chiefs as
‘divine kings’ in the manner of their death. I don’t find myself
convinced, but I find the ring of truth in the notion that ‘still growing’
body parts (hair and nails) would have been taken from a powerful
chief’s body in traditional times, to renew the chrism priests used in
the inauguration of a successor. Why would not Konde priests, like
Kinga, conceal the death of a powerful ruler until the stage was fully
set for a successor? But ordinarily this would be unnecessary, as
106
ordinarily a chief would have spent his charisma and seen the
identity of his successor assured long before death came.
107
does the risk of loss and the intensity of any future expectation of
wealth. Herds are wealth as few crops in a subsistence economy are,
and the presence of alienable (redistributable) wealth begets a new
politics, quite likely armed. Without cattle, can we offer a set of
equations which would account for the Konde age-village system?
108
Nyakyusa priest ‘of chiefly line’ was far from enjoying chiefly privilege
in his community, it is just as clear that he was socially aligned with
aristocratic interests to a point that justified a ‘chiefly’ or ‘princely’
demeanor. When must a lion tamer hide his pride?
109
Though gardening for Kinga remained an individual enterprise,
only cooperatively pursued through the customary ungovi work bee,
the seasonal timing of a few traditional crops was calendrically
regulated, as if to set apart these staples as the foods at risk of
mystical punishment. When particular plantations were affected by
pestilence the event would be treated as witchcraft or ancestor
neglect, and as such would not be a political concern. But the kind of
pestilence or drought which might strike the whole of a domain or the
larger realm was the kind which could merit political blame. So the
mechanisms of political-ritual theatre are called upon to exonerate
the high court in advance. Any court claiming to possess a counter-
vailing mystical power of defense against divine anger has exposed
itself to blame when its powers are deployed in vain. The dramatic
task of an elaborate Kinga planting ritual, buttressed by strict
taboos on early planting, is accordingly to tag the danger to the
advantage of priest and prince. If these taboos have not been
broken, the buck passes upward. But blame must fall not on neglect
by the Court. Some other, diabolical mischief must be discovered
which only the Court with its priestly diviners could hope to identify
and neutralize. Theodicy is the central contradiction in a religion of
guilt. If a perfect God made us as we are, why did he intend us to
know evil? A religion of blame derives from the great tradition of
animism and does not have to account for inscrutable or in any way
perfect gods, as all the evils of the mystical sphere are quite
naturally inherent in the imperfect beings which command its forces.
Kinga priests were the lawyers of a mystical arena in which these
forces must be dealt with. Or we may think of them as lion-tamers.
110
domain, a fiction was developed that each sacred garden belonged
not to the court of the local Lord [Untwa] where the garden lay but
to the Prince [Unkuludeva] who ruled the inclusive realm. Considered
as a stratagem, the effect was to pass the buck of blame along with
the mystical burden of (dare I say?) ‘crop insurance’ to the higher
court. It is not a trivial advantage of translocal authority as Sanga
organized it, that blame is removed from the personally accessible
to an inaccessible ruler. Ultimately, and it seems in traditional times
pretty frequently, the great Sanga procession to Lubaga off-loaded
the blame—accumulated at the courts of all the domains and
realms—on the master Kinga troublemaker, Lwembe.
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ethos of the courts evolved, the tendency of the priests was to
magnify the princely harem and press the incumbent prince to
consider it his real workplace. Once installed, a new prince was
abruptly removed from the homophilic world of ordinary manhood.
The dangers of that world were not mystical: the problem was
poison. As men grew older they learned to fear their friends. A ruler
took no food or drink without seeing his official taster survive it; and
a ruler slept only with women. In this way the heterosexual principle
was given its champion, and the court was eventually magnified by
the presence of his many comely daughters, the new set of
princesses to whom men must defer. Picture these maidens going
about always in groups, always light-heartedly tilling the family
gardens in sisterly teams. Picture them singing as they worked, but
don’t see Ophelia—perhaps rather Atalanta. When a princely court
was well enough established, even a youthful ruler would not lead in
warfare but let a local champion wear his kingly gear for the day. The
prince should be dedicated, as his priests would assure him, to the
work of the harem. It became the right of the throne to see that the
avapapwa, the non-inheriting sons or ‘younger brothers’ of the royal
line, and any of their barrack mates who would accompany them,
were suitably married when the time came to send them away from
life at court to settle and ‘rule’ disputes in some part of the
periphery. In this way the work of food production, storage, and
preparation at court was principally done by bachelors—maidens
full-time, barracks men part-time. It was only with a man’s and his
(royal) bride’s removal to the bush that their own delayed fertility
began.
112
sons, living in satellite villages of their own, did most of the work in
the parental fields. (2) While the orderly royal genealogies made up
for Monica Wilson belie it, every chiefdom really was painfully regen-
erated from a near-inchoate state every thirty-odd years with the
formal abdication of governing authority by all the village officers.
This was not a succession of new men to old offices but a managed
secession of young men, moving from the chiefdom of their birth to
one cloned from it, with a full structure of new offices. A Konde
chiefdom unambiguously consisted in people, not the ground they
happened at any particular time to occupy. It is important to see
that it was not only the chief and his two villages of peers who
passed over their powers and responsibilities relating to political
reproduction to a new chiefdom, for as part of the same operation
all the headmen of commoner villages comprising the body of his
chiefdom did the same, stripping themselves of their young male
workforce. This made for a combination of energy and social turbu-
lence unequaled in Kinga country even in the two ‘frontier’ realms,
East and West. Remarkably, as judged by the high morale and good
life found there by Germans on their arrival in the 1890s, the
Nyakyusa system of literally liberating youth at periodic intervals
appears to have worked. The puzzle of the Coming Out is the Wilson’s
great legacy to anthropology. Reconstructing it at closer range will
be a project of later chapters, building on a fuller understanding of
the Nyakyusa world.
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The Lwembe figure (Monica Wilson’s divine king) when seen from
uKinga does serve to raise popular expectations above the level of a
particular domain or realm. The great ‘pilgrimage’ of priests from all
the Sanga courts to Lubaga in the Rift Valley evidently lumped the
ethnically distinct Kinga and Mahanzi communities together,
probably from the time in the nineteenth century when they were
chronically fighting, and perhaps from before that. The same figure,
seen from the Wilsons’ uNyakyusa or as a feature of the larger
Konde community, being one amongst several rival divinities, can
perhaps be regarded as a politically ‘neutral’ resource but hardly a
unifying one. The formerly parallel figure in uNgonde, the Kyungu, did
so evolve politically in the nineteenth century as a supra-segmental
unifying force but had to do so, in good part, by shedding his tradi-
tional mystique—his implicit, not-visible powers.
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No one studied the Kinga in the 1930s, or we should perhaps
have had cases comparable to those the Wilsons offer, from which to
judge the relative importance—frequency and severity—of witch-
craft accusations in the two cultures. As it is I can only proceed,
having uttered this caveat, on a basis of what I know. I find a greater
prevalence of witches in Konde than in Kinga culture, and offer these
cursory explanations: (i) The stresses of domesticity are distinctly
less in Kingaland, for the reason that domesticity there is minimal. It
is mystical (and mystifying) personal hostility which explains witch-
craft, and this comes to the surface within close personal range. In
particular, kinship ties are maximal-claim ties. You carry them around
wherever you go, you can’t move away. Emotional involvements within
this sort of tie are deep, complex, and ambivalent. By minimizing
them, Kinga reduce the neurotic load they carry. (i) Where it comes
to peer relationships, there is an important difference between the
two cultural settings. Kinga amity is built very largely through a
network structure. The older a Kinga male becomes, the freer (and
usually wider) his pattern of association. The pervasive Konde amity
structure on the other hand is collective: it is based in ‘compulsory
voluntarism’—if you are not convincingly friendly you are asking to be
named as the witch whenever untoward events break the brittle
surface of village amity. (ii) Then there is the pervasive muttering of
old men in the Nyakyusa setting. Each has pursued his moral career
between kith and kin. Over time the volatility of ‘kith’ (village peers)
impresses itself on a person who cannot himself confront the
invisible masters of his destiny. He sees things falling apart. Perhaps
he has had to admit he’s had witches for friends. We see him
muttering where he sits facing the ground, not just to himself but to
some other. ‡
115
Nyakyusa couldn’t afford to let the mystique of agnatic inheritance
pale. In going so far as to divert inheritance of wealth and wives down
the full list of a deceased’s younger brothers, until finally reverting
to his eldest son, they balance the structural weight of descent
with that of sibling seniority. This offers a distinctive way of
mapping a man’s social identity in light of his longterm expectations.
The kinship map comprises an overlay on the collegial map of day-to-
day life in a world where men grow up in peer-groups, not families.
116
Kinga ‘ancestor religion’ as a variant of the Malatan pattern. It is not
accidental that Kinga share their ‘high god’ Lwembe with the
Nyakyusa, and can claim to share their line of ritually sanctioned
rulers with both Nyakyusa and Ngonde.
117
Nyakyusa princes ranged from rich to poor in land and cattle
holdings. The wealth of their local states varied radically because the
rivalry of their realms was multilateral and intensely antipolitan—
and all this despite the bias toward ascriptive agnatic alliances
celebrated in their kinship rituals. Kinga by contrast lack any such
histrionic occasions for the assembly of lineage members, except
for funerals; and at these (as in fact at Nyakyusa funerals as well)
the vast majority in attendance are not kinsmen but neighbours.
Each society in its own way demonstrates the clash between
politics and kinship. Neither culture can be said to have integrated
the two. But it is the appropriation of the worldview and religious
beliefs of the bush, turning its rhetoric and structural norms to
political use, which allows the developing courts to give fresh form to
the societies which cradled them.
118
Attributing misfortune to neighbours means witchcraft. In
Nyakyusa culture, which is heavy with kinship ritual and ancestral
lore, it is easy to see this as displacement. In fact, Nyakyusa shades
are always thought to bring trouble on a younger person for disre-
spect of an elder. This man “mutters over the fire”—the shades hear,
and are moved to punish with a disease or an accident. If there is a
propitiatory sacrifice, it is not the shade but the living elder who
must be reconciled. Such dense facework within a family is
unthinkable for Kinga. Their bush culture, alive but often
overshadowed in the neighborhood of the courts, seems to have
struck the rough (if logically opaque) balance, typical for Eastern
Bantu peoples, as between the ‘neighbours’ and ‘shades’ schools of
thought in the placing of blame for misfortune. The initial appeal to a
diviner calls for a choice between grievance and repentance. If the
shades are angry the client should repent a neglect of duty and
make amends. But if a neighbour has sent the trouble the injustice
fixes automatically on the other. That is, a victim always earns the
ill-treatment he gets from a ghost, but never deserves the mystical
cut he may get from a wife, a brother, or a friend. The diviner’s call as
between ‘neighbour’ and ‘shade’ decides the path a client will take in
his quest—accepting or deflecting blame. If the client is inclined to
accept the diagnosis, he will act on it, but need accept no responsi-
bility for so doing. He has paid someone else to do that, and this was
a disinterested person who acted as catalyst for an oracle.
Under Sanga court culture the diviner was one of the prince’s
men, avanyivaha, and made a similar choice, but in a new political and
administrative context. Let a threatening illness befall the royal
house itself, and the diviner must find either for hunting out a witch
within the fold (which entails using the ordeal and can wrench the
ties which bind a small élite together) or for propitiatory work in the
sacred grove, which has broader implications than the ancestor cult
of bush religion. It is just here that, for Kinga and perhaps for their
Malatan neighbours, the exact character of the mythical shade
Nguluve can be defined. He is the bridge between bush and court
religions. When an ordinary Kinga man ties a goat at home in the
morning and prepares a trip to the place where he can sacrifice it to
an ancestor, that is usually where his own father was buried. At
least for the second-generation ‘Westernized’ men I knew, there
might have been little need for divining a specific ancestral
complaint.
119
among friends, old and new. In his supplication he will simply offer
food, drink, and greeting to the shade(s) he addresses and ask that
his gesture be shared with a few (named) ancestors of his mother’s
agnatic line as well as his own, then to certain (named) friends he
lost in boyhood “and all the other children,” and finally to Nguluve, who
is understood as the apical ancestor of all the living persons present
at the feast. They may be his own real or fictional kinsmen, or simply
folk now living at this place. What the address to Nguluve implies is
that all the shades a Kinga man knows comprise one face-to-face
community, and this community includes as well all the shades these
named persons would have known, and so on to the beginning, which is
Nguluve.
120
Kinga and Nyakyusa rulers are supposed to have witchcraft in their
bellies. Witches and shades share with the invisible agents of other
animistic religions a reluctance to settle for what they have, an
implacable sense of grievance. The grass, as it must seem to the
uninitiated looking across to the world of the shades, is only browner
on the other side. The shades are, in today’s parlance, ‘under stress’,
and it makes them ‘demanding’. In their own terms, if not in ours,
Kinga and Nyakyusa commoners recognize the syndrome also in their
rulers.
121
place to witches is biased, after all, against monopolies in the
mystical trade. The Sanga courts adjusted to this feature of bush
culture with the logic of a redistributional chiefdom. The court, in
this scheme, trades on its magnetism as much as its discipline. But
the give-away programme is balanced by another kind of theatre in
the ordeal and the public execution of convicted witches. Nyakyusa,
in their age-village programme, found a way to use discipline in the
control of antipolitan tendencies, and retained kinship solidarity to
the same end, though the two principles of solidarity were impos-
sible to merge. As for witchcraft, the Nyakyusa chiefs took the lion’s
share to themselves. The prototypical antipolitan is a sort of
cowboy figure apt to pull up stakes when things don’t go his way. In
the Nyakyusa peer village, banishment is always conceived as ridding
witches, and we may suppose the cowboy scenario was more likely to
fit the actual cases of (self-)exile than a heavy procedure like the
ostracism of ancient Greece. Decamping in an antipolitan world will
be more than one part voluntary.
Kinga lads in the hills had an easier way with peer pressure.
They were not assigned to a given village (as Nyakyusa were) but
chose their own friends and built their own places with them. As a
boy gained confidence and formed a wider amity network, it was likely
he could untie himself from the family goats and take off to live with
new friends. Amity all the while was being reinforced by intimacies.
What this meant for many a young man was a gradual accommo-
dation, a sort of ‘cowboy syndrome’, which might long prevent
settling down to a life of routine. But easy friendships too easily fail,
and older men might fall to suspecting an erstwhile friend of
mischief when things began to go wrong.
122
Compared to the condition of Nyakyusa youth, the kind of
discipline—authoritative rather than, in Durkheim’s sense, mechani-
cally or peer-enforced—which the Sanga had brought in had led Kinga
youth, of both genders, another way. What Durkheim meant by
‘mechanical’ sanctioning is best seen as a feature of the everyday
role network itself. The diffuse sanctioning of behaviour which
constitutes such networks can produce a dense moral atmosphere
which distributes self-realization unequally to men or women, young
or old. Majesty had been a key to political power in uKinga, as it had
not been in uNyakyusa. We are left with the interesting puzzle, how it
may come about in human affairs that strong politics will coexist
with high morale, grounded in felt autonomy, among ordinary people.
The clue I see in this comparison is the sense that ‘strength’ in the
case of a Nyakyusa prince/chief is not laid on but has to be achieved
at the cost of stressful, aggressive action in a chronically turbulent
social environment. Arena politics rules. The more monumental
political theatre of the Sanga court as it existed before the pax was
structurally firmer and allowed an easier transition to top-down
colonial administration. The zigzag dialectic of change can be sharp
or almost smooth.
123
chiefly realm, with its periodic ‘world renewal’, the Coming Out. For
Kinga too much history has languished unrecovered, particularly for
Eastern and Northern realms; and there is too much myth in the mix
of history we have for Ukwama, to know as well where the balance lay.
124
I resist any temptation to see this priestly intervention as oriented
to the laying down of arms as between principalities. These priests
are not doves of peace. At least in uKinga their role in the regulation
of warfare entails the sublimation not elimination of violent under-
taking. Their counsel to the prince is ever to mind the murmuring of
his people lest he lose his braves to a rival. Yet for all that, we should
understand that they always work by indirection. Kinga priests like
the Nyakyusa are in their own way menders of the peace. What else
could be the point of their insistence on doing the intricate work of a
‘ritualist’ and their obvious pride in it?
125
competing with his truculent neighbours for the security of life and
property, and for honour. In the better-contained and stabler realms
of the Kinga—not including, for certain, Kyelelo’s before the pax—the
prince was more symbol than leader. But in all cases, as with every
Nyakyusa prince, the mystical persona of a sanctified leader could
be deeply hurt by an admission of weakness or fear.
In ‘majesty’ we have the off loading—to the throne itself and all
the other props and effects of political theatre—of all the charisma
of founding heroes, whether taken from life or legend. Majesty also
comes in an implicit form: Sangilino of Lupila (Kinga Eastern Realm)
needed no regalia, but his was a quality rarely found and not trans-
ferable. Malatan charisma lived on well enough in its institutional
form into the 1930s, embodied in the surviving old-time chiefs, that
we can know its qualities from the Wilsons’ fieldwork. It was to
disappear, of course, with the new generation of educated public
126
servants. The good political entrepreneur of tradition was big,
decisive, and full of himself. The public was his claque, everything he
would do must be made a quantum larger than life. The driving force
for all this is explained as ubulosi (K: uvuhavi) witchcraft in one of its
several manifestations. The poetics of embodied danger lends
drama to the ‘constitutional’ stand-off between ‘evil witch’ and
‘charismatic chief’. Monica Wilson wanted to see it as a mystical
‘balance of power’:
127
marry late, at least a decade after they are fully fledged as warriors.
The Nyakyusa prince/chief is no exception to the rule of the place, as
he only takes his rank with the Coming Out of his agemates and only
gives it over to the next generation when the younger men have
proved themselves ready to ‘come out’. This means a prince stands
to reign some 25 to 30 years as a hands-on ruler. His preparation
will have been an extended decade of leadership in defending and
augmenting the family herds. At the climax of a successful reign
there will be a surfeit of wealth and wives to keep him busy. I think I
am right in doubting Monica Wilson on the brevity of his future after
the Coming Out of a new political generation. To me, the decisive
evidence is the known career of his village headmen—his age peers
and colleagues in government throughout his reign—at the same
point. All of these ‘retiring’ headmen take up now the final stage of
their careers, as ‘commoner priests’. If the chief has to settle down
at last as a diminished ruler, I don’t think his realm is diminished, only
the active, hands-on role he has hitherto had to play in governing it.
Do his pythons desert him? We hear of no such belief.
128
suppose there was logic in the way the Prince’s body was handled by
his priests; and that logic would almost have to begin with the need
to prevent a meeting of Lwembe with his perpetual bane, Mwemutsi,
who had banished him in heroic times.
129
depended on the sacralization of authority, and the vessel for this
could be either more charisma (python-deity in the belly) or a more
developed political theatre (ranging from ‘majesty’ ritual to heavy
heroics in well-staged warfare) or any combination.
130
a prestation as to confer a secure sense of permanence on the
pyramidal arrangement. A ruler’s real guarantee of security in tenure
lay in the strength and loyalty of his avapapwa, the inner circle of
Sanga ‘younger brother’ bachelor warriors living at his court, and the
effectiveness of his management corps among the avanyivaha. The
rest was up to priestly theatricals, and I suppose we should be
looking for the ‘spin doctors’ minding that side.
131
balanced political structures of each of these three societies. But
there is also a darker side in the religious expression of mortal fear
and discontent. High office embodies in Ngonde, Nyakyusa, or Kinga
cultures a popular ambivalence toward power. Ngonde nobles used to
kill all but two sons of the Kyungu in their infancy. At every level of
rule the key office was guarded by a council of nobles or Great
Commoners whose combined powers of witchcraft could check-mate
their ruler’s. The same show of countervailing power, here embodied in
python-familiars, held the Nyakyusa prince to responsible rule.
As for the Kinga prince who must choose seclusion, the motive
was unabashed fear for the resentment of others toward his power.
Everything he ate or drank must be tasted beforehand for poison.
The schoolboys who scoffed at Mwemutsi Suruali in the sixties for
spending his truly enviable salary as Paramount Chief on bottled beer
could hardly have understood his reasons. Before the decay of his
royal court, everything the ruling prince ate or drank had been tasted
beforehand for poison. His daily existence had been sacralized—
though he had not the same ground of fear as the early, reclusive
Kyungus in the Ngonde court. It was said they must be throttled if
they lost only a drop of blood by accident or fell into light fever. The
institutionalized paranoia of a reclusive king is not found among
Nyakyusa, as the ‘divine king’ Lwembe was not expected to play
defender of the realm, but the burden of danger in that office was
still enough to keep the kingship at Lubaga empty from early in this
century.
132
medium. As unteketsi he made offerings and executed sanctifying
procedures on behalf of court and country. But as a courtier unyivaha
he might be found leading a roving party of avasangutsi revenue
collectors out after imongo from a bush hamlet. This was of course
low, not high political theatre, and the scene was blurred in the social
memory of the nineteen sixties. Whereas the Mahanzi rainmaker
before Mwangawa was a private person with a religious calling, and he
may be taken as stand-in for the Kinga priest before Sanga times,
later court culture created an independent, mystically sanctioned
authority largely immune to interference by secular rulers and even
in position at times to patronize them. The children of the courtly
priest slept with those of the Prince. On his breast the priest wore
the regional symbol of authority, the imatsi conus-shell emblem, a
perfect spiral disk traded inland from the coast through many
hands, and elsewhere restricted to chiefs. Religion and politics were
largely emancipated from ‘tribal’ institutions, having come to be, in
an emergent polity of its own sort, instruments of state. ‡‡
133
dominance between the two principal agencies. Each would have
sought to extend the scope of his own kind and sphere of influence.
Confrontation on certain issues would have forced at least the kind
of innovation which comes of sidestepping—the ‘workaround’. The
impression I had in 1960, when the whole native cosmology was in
limbo, was that no one conceived of it as a distinctively Kinga way of
seeing the world. It was not a human achievement to have pride in or
claim the right to preserve as history—any special feature I might
mention was taken as detail. The whole fabric was classed as general
knowledge about which only some few details might be debatable. I
came to see that in all probability the same would have been said to a
traveler who had come to them in 1860. In short, as there can be no
historical consciousness where there are no alternatives to ponder,
all of this came down to the present in a package, fait accompli, from
very early times, as explained by the mythical arrival of the first
Sanga, his reconstruction of bush culture, his confrontation with a
younger brother, and Lwembe’s escape to Lubaga. Any talk about the
gradual politicization of the priesthood and its consolidation as a
governing institution is thus my talk, not theirs. Was it witch-ridding
which would have given the priests their first specifically political
role in an expanding court culture? There was no one to confirm or
deny. If I now suppose that the peculiar powers of the priesthood
had to have been won at the expense, in final analysis, of the princes?
I’ll have to make that my own text, as it isn’t theirs.
Parallel texts one might take from the priests of the Kyungu,
divine king of Ngonde, are not quite the same. His seclusion is ratio-
nalized not in terms of plots but another sort of paranoia. His bane
is his extreme fragility, an uncanny vulnerability to accident. It is a
personal fragility which apparently comes with the office. Pondering
it we may want to turn with more understanding to Kyelelo the Cruel.
134
Is he not perhaps some sort of Achilles figure, a hero unscathable
and unafraid to boast of the fire, the python power, in his belly?
135
monolithic theocracy. The four realms of the Kinga comprise a
radically segmentary protostate whose major segments are weakly
linked by the perpetual kinship of the four rulers but rather more
securely by priestly cooperation. Nyakyusa chiefdoms are auton-
omous, locked in a turbulent competition for political-economic
space, for wealth in cattle and women, and for manpower; they are
linked by multiplex ties of kinship which intermittently effect the
realignment of local alliances; and they maintain the semblance of
constitutional stability in the irregular propitiation of hero-gods
most prominently at the Lubaga shrine of Lwembe. In the three
Malatan constitutions one constant factor stands out, the
mandate and professional character of the priesthood.
136
to a privileged standing premised, in effect, on sexual inversion. For
Nyakyusa youth homophilia is a temporary, imperfect alternative to
sexual abstention during a frustratingly prolonged bachelorhood.
The formula for the successful life is plainly visible in the age-village
of his elders: the heterosexual life brings wealth in cattle and wives,
and the authority of senior standing. Nyakyusa say homophilia is a
resort of youth, thankfully forgotten with maturity. In Sanga court
culture the elevation of heterosexuality—in the big but reclusive
persona of the Prince/King—to a transcendent plane can be seen to
have provided a symbolic bulwark for marriage in a masculine
community whose commitment to that institution might otherwise
flounder.
Was there genuine fear that the High Prince might fail in his
fertility and all Kinga in consequence fail in theirs? If so, it would
certainly be fear of the sort we call ‘religious’—congruent with a
state of general confidence in Sanga institutions, and reflecting the
competence of Kinga priests to manage such a situation handily,
should it arise.
Imaginary theatre
137
witch need only be chased beyond the narrow horizon of his chiefdom,
to lose all occult power. When after some years he is allowed to
return it is expected he will offer an act of atonement. This is not
the witch of folklore, unfixed in time or place, but the witch in local
experience.
Lukasi: Witchcraft has grown beyond all bounds in the years since,
in Old Kingaland, the witch was killed off before he could spread his
evil far and wide. Now you approach a witch very slyly, making friends
with him over the beerpot. “How can you like Fulani, he is up to no good
and needs to be done away with, eh? If I had the power I’d have got
him before this trouble began.” The other fellow hears and agrees he
might help. “I’d even give a cow,” you say. “A cow in calf?” says he. “A
cow in calf.” The contract has been made. “There are many witches
about from whom the medicine can be had,” says your fellow. He
would never admit to being the witch himself.
138
thing a done deed and witchcraft real. People say of such a man, “Ali
n’inumbula ja ‘gukanu, He has a wild beast’s heart.” But this refers to
nothing secret, as the words only describe in metaphor human
conduct everyone has seen. The technics of witchcraft are hardly
more mysterious to Kinga than flight and pharmacology to most of
us. The fascination is with the mind of the witch, its presocial ethic—
its wildness. These are the mass murderers of common discourse in
a technically simpler world.
139
maintained. To say this I have to bracket some of Monica Wilson’s
findings about her ‘divine king’. Since an important chief’s body could
be sacked (prescriptively before the last breath) for its mystical
parings, it compared in death with the Lwembe’s body. But in life the
difference was stark. A princely kingdom was won by the spear; only
after death was a great prince apt to appear in the frame of divinity.
Lwembe’s kingdom was ‘not of this world’. The shared rites of final
passage have their meaning in the special need to solemnize the
particular kind of succession which is not given by nature but must
be conferred by rite. The after-living hair and nails of a charismatic
man are known ingredients of the chrism by which this conferring of
identity can be achieved.
When you catch sight of a python near its watering hole you will
behold a being with uncanny powers, but you are not seeing a shetani
(daimon) on the way to possessing a mortal. Nyakyusa do, far more
than Kinga, credit ‘subjective’ divination even to the point of
accepting a ventriloquist—that is, not a consultant diviner but a
self-proclaiming and self-serving divinity. Even the early missionaries
found this level of credulity surprising, but in context and retrospect
it fits well into the picture we have gained of allegations and
counter-allegations among priests there. This was a society in which
the gods particularly helped those who helped themselves.
The witch who is killing you may be your friend. Kasitile freely
suspected his wives as well as his fellow village elders. So far as we
140
are told his story, though he kept on trying he never really confirmed
who or what sort of being was wishing him harm. He lived on for many
years, possibly always in partially bad health, looking for his antago-
nists. Just as the wrong which Kasitile might have done to provoke
such anger would have been inadvertent, and just as guilt and self-
blaming remorse would have been beside the point, so their fault
would have been in an isolated act not an unnatural state of the soul.
Moral indignation often and justly arises, but usually is not
magnified by infecting bystanders. As with any tort, if the affair
entails no public hurt it stays private.
141
checked either by guilt or unmasking but by quelling. I give now in full
detail Tunginiye’s experience, more briefly mentioned elsewhere. ‡
142
threat of witchcraft.]” Everyone was stunned to hear these sharp
words.
We went home. Atangile was the first to tell the Master that his
field was finished, and he was given a shilling to purchase beer for us
all. Atangile led the way to some beer he knew about, and after a time
I followed. Atangile greeted me facetiously, “Vasite avavaha, Hail to
thee, Great one!” He went on in but I stayed outside. He brought me
out a small bowl of beer, which I refused. He put it on the ground. It
was finger-millet beer and only the hulls, the dregs of the bowl. “I
suppose you think we should have set aside the clear beer for you,
the prince!” That was his comment.
Now when I heard all this I knew that the witch was Atangile, for
he had been the favorite minstrel-dancer of Bulongwa before the
Teacher came, and always at the dances he had worn two miniature
horns at his neck, resting on his Adam’s apple.
The doctor had brought along with him fresh healing leaves and
roots which he had dug along the way. He had brought his own
medicine horn and a little medicine bundle the size of your thumb,
ihilisi it is called. It is tightly bound and the medicines it contains are
kept secret. The doctor crushed the leaves in a little mortar, adding
143
water. He asked for a wooden spoon and fed me this milky juice. Then
he called for the smallest kind of pot ikisaji. He spat into it words I
couldn’t hear. Somehow he was twisting his bored earlobe with the
one hand all the while. Then he added the roots with water, and still
spitting in these words I was not to catch. Then he took up the pot,
covered it with a shard, and ordered a fire to cook it.
While this soup was cooking the doctor took his own medicine
horn isiva, and fed me bits of the paste he had there, made with
castor oil, while using a special little paddle. He called for a razor
uluketo, and I had to show him where I hurt. He made incisions all
around under the left arm and over the right shoulder, a line following
the pain and circling to meet itself. Then he took more paste on the
little paddle, smearing it on his finger and rubbing it into the
incisions. I can still feel the sting! He took the razor again and made
three incisions at each joint of every limb, but on my hands only the
thumbs, and on my feet only the little toes. Then he made three
incisions at the navel, the spleen, the meeting of the clavicles, the
centre forehead, temples, and the base of the skull. Each time he
made the cuts he would rub in the medicine.
The doctor took up the ihilisi bundle. Fixed at the middle was a
pretty little horn, a tiny thing no bigger than a carnivore’s tooth and
quite empty. Ungita went into a sort of angry mood, spitting unintel-
ligible words into the little horn on the bundle around my left upper
arm and warned me that only he should untie it. Finally he fed me the
soup he had boiled up from the roots he brought, and I finished it.
The doctor said I was very ill and near death, but he had some hope
just the same, as his own best medicine was the little horn tied
around my arm. He had got it at Karonga in Malawi. “If my medicine is
stronger than the witch’s, when you dream tonight he will come to
you naked. You will find a spear in your hand. You will cast it. It will
pass right through his body and then return to your hand. Until dawn
you will go on doing this, and tomorrow you will feel better. But if your
dream is different, if the witch comes to you naked but it is he who
has the spear, or if he has a knife, he will pierce you. You will feel the
sudden pain and you will die.”
My people cooked him porridge, for we had no beer, and he took his
leave. First he scooped out some more of his medicine from the horn
isiva. He put it in a cornshuck and gave it to my people so they could
renew the medication through the incisions from time to time.
144
That night I had the right dream. Atangile came to me naked. He
was covering his private parts with both his hands. The throwing of
the spear went fast, very fast. I would wake up. When I went back to
sleep again, there was Atangile. He would just appear, staring at me. I
would throw the spear. That is the way it was the whole night long. It
was the same night after night.
My illness continued for a week, with the blood giving way to foam.
The Teacher asked after me. My ‘father’s brother’ who was attending
school told him that I was probably dying. The Master called Atangile,
“Let us go see your good friend who is ill.” They came in the early
afternoon. My wife and I were inside, and our mothers nearby. When
my parents saw the Teacher come they joined the assembly.
After some days the doctor Ungita bin Kibidi returned. When he
learned that I was still fighting off the witch every night, he told
everyone that his medicine had proved triumphant. I was to recover,
he said, and it happened. ‡
145
a dream self, a sort of twin, whom Tunginiye could not repudiate.
That is why it was Tunginiye who felt he must move out of the circle.
His experience of the affair seems to have been infinitely clearer and
more truly religious than Atangile’s—and unforgettable. The two old
friends survived most of their peers but never spoke, though there
was no civil enmity between them. Only a few survivors in 1960 knew
why, or thought they did. It was an old tale but I think it told me
where Tunginiye had confirmed his conspicuous faith in virtue.
146
sexual adjustment was programmed to set in late, the deeper
psychological consequences must have been manifold.
147
valorous would validate the autonomy of a new local domain within
the realm by accepting tribute. Treaties of this kind were not done in
stone. The paths to glory were doubtless winding, and a prince who
did nothing when an annual tribute was late would find himself on a
slippery slope. Orders of precedence were written in sand. History
might well be recast after the next clash at arms. As the former
outpost could become an autonomous domain with its own barracks
and games, the domain at a distance could take on a satellite of its
own and begin to style itself the centre of a new realm. The details of
such developments are forever lost, though the ongoing politics of
the unsettled Eastern and Western realms in the decades before
the pax can be sketchily reconstructed, and suggest such a zig zag,
ad hoc pattern.
148
in the solemn sense of the word. One is that witchcraft is conducted
by spirits, not persons. That makes it irrelevant that people who
think they are witches are aberrant and few. There is drama in the
idea of the ‘whole witch’, the person imbued with evil. But when you
look for them you are likely to find few or no empirical cases—granted
you can’t count heads when dealing with spirits. The other reason for
taking witchcraft seriously is that the witch belief is a system of
thought which, once established, will always be easy to act on, and
for that reason requires no expensive maintenance. The social
anarchy on which it thrives is never quite lacking in any human
society, though the self-proclaiming witch of today’s media world,
unless he or she is out to sow fear, has little in common with the
Malatan self-proclaimer we see in the person of a strong Nyakyusa
chief. Today’s urbane ‘witch’ resembles more the Malatan priest who
professes to use his powers only to tame the antisocial impulse in
others.
Still, for ordinary Kinga beset by private woe the ancestor cult
was in some ways less ‘positive’ (being less therapeutic) than its
alternatives. Solidarity with one’s lineage past can have little
intense meaning in a society generally so neglectful of lineage and so
careless of the distinction between kith and kin as Kinga were. Where
you can’t assemble your kin for the sacrificial meal, what return can
you really expect from propitiating your proprietary dead, even if you
do recall some of the names? Against that, a well aimed accusation
of witchcraft can create a new sense of solidarity with all who will
149
shudder in sympathy. It hardly needs pointing out that the
wondrous flying baton of the witch finder when it singles out one
certain man in a crowded circle will have pleased all the others there
by vindicating them.
150
mass-entertainment through the televising of actual murder trials,
which is not yet fully approved as a model of legal justice, the
settlement of accounts for a broken marriage in our courts mostly
depends on confronting one fictional biography with another. The
manifest aim of each adversarial voice is establishing unilateral
blame. The credibility of a settlement flows from a balance reached in
the courtroom drama. If the result can satisfy anyone, it must have
used theatrical means to do so. We get a morality play, a piece of
judicial theatre instead of the judicious exploration we want of a
failed dyadic involvement. Can we not talk of the ‘politics’ of this
adversarial system as well as its stunning ‘psychology’? The political
value of the adversarial courtroom in a democratic society is the
semblance of a ‘justice’ freely achieved without state interference.
The same must be said of the Kinga ordeal. The divining procedure is
as open and manifestly fair as the drawing of lots, only somewhat
more dramatically staged. The decision’s authority is made imper-
sonal. Blame has been laid and the decision legitimated: revealed, in
fact.
151
the innocent capacity of baffles or safety valves, and but rarely as
catalysts to passion. What is a royal court, what is a royal theatre,
without heroic themes?
152
cally segmented, pyramidal protostate. This has the consequence
that rank and file have spent their best adult years fighting as
solidary teams against outsiders—and will subsequently be redis-
persed.
153
Ancestor Witch
Physical corruption Moral corruption
Righteous indignation Amoral envy
Propitiation Suppression
Sacrificial feasting Ordeal
Solidarity Repudiation
154
The storied ordeal Kinga elders would most often retail made
use of the foreign poison unkali, on which the priests of the court held
patent. In this (post-pax, retrospective) telling the poison was not
administered directly. Accuser and accused must attend, each with
his dog. Either dog, when dosed with the poison, might vomit and
survive or might die. Accuser or accused, if your dog dies you are
found a witch, while vomit means exoneration. In the event both dogs
survive, neither man is more than he seems, and the case is
disarmed. No informant could think both dogs would die. I supposed
that would have implied something unlikely: a witch resorting to the
court in his quarrel with a colleague. The found witch had a chance to
repent but was otherwise banished by the ruler’s decree, or might be
executed. To judge from reported uses of the given poison in mass
ordeals applied directly to the whole adult community, the proba-
bility of vomiting was high, and a reasonably happy ending likely. But
theatre has its own dynamic, and if the perils it plays on are only
ersatz the theatre will cease to move minds. How many actual
executions would it take to keep a public in thrall? Only Naïve says
none. But Clever says in good times the frequency could be quite low.
There would be an inverse relationship also to the dramatic
resonance of the show the court could put on when it chose to.
155
I reasoned there were two motives for adopting the dog ordeal
instead of a direct procedure, which Kinga agreed they knew but
which they under-reported. The first motive is the consideration by
a ruler that he could show his strength as well by banishment
(should there be a loser) as by execution, while incurring less disaf-
fection among kin and friends of the accused. There are not many
‘loners’ in a Kinga community, and those there are will more likely be
pitied than censured. The theatrical effect of the dog ordeal was
strengthened by its miming the bolder form in which a fatal decision
would entail its automatic execution. And the easy valorization of
the labeling act (“Witch!”) would in any event rule out popular demon-
strations in defense of the accused. A second advantage to be seen
in electing the dog ordeal is the greater ‘objectivity’ of this
procedure. That is, it becomes less a defiant confrontation of
powers, more surely a cool demonstration of the witches’ impotence
before the soothsaying medicines of the court. Cruelty is not always
the most effective drama, and at least at the court of Ukwama the
reclusive prince may have resorted to the ordeal less often than the
priests as a group, to promote their prerogatives. The priests were
known as managers among the court’s men, the avanyivaha. As such
they were the tax collectors and knew they required an extra helping
of credibility.
156
to the ceremonial style in a few generations. Vululile, Kyelelo, and
Uliluvilo on the Western and Eastern frontiers were princes-on-the-
make and have in Kinga lore the character of heroes. Mwemutsi and
Mwalukisa, in the established Central and Northern realms, were
puppets of their priesthoods not the stuff of hero tales. Proof is
hard to find, but I collected a good deal more underworld drama in the
sacerdotal (or ‘unheroic’) than in the ‘heroic’ realms and came to
conclude that there could be a systematic reason for that. A hands-
on, charismatic ruler like Kyelelo or a high-riding Nyakyusa chief can
afford to leave no power vacuum at the grass roots within which men
may imagine the free-booting witch will thrive. The principle at work
here is that the strong-bellied, hands-on ruler, to underwrite his
power, has to assure himself no sign of witches and their counter-
vailing power can appear in his realm; but the reclusive prince relies on
an almost opposite strategy, seeing his majesty magnified by just
the stagy kind of theatre that witch hunts and witch ridding
provide. Am I overimpressed here by the bathos I met at Ukwama at
the close of colonial times? In a lesser degree it was to be felt then
also at the Western capital, Kyelelo’s domain, another which the
independent government of the (then) state of Tanganyika chose to
put in new hands. Where it was least to be felt, and charisma most,
was in Sangilino’s part of the Eastern realm. Here was the strong
man who’d stood up to the British and earned their respect, tradi-
tional but not in the sacerdotal frame. In face of this unfazable
political entrepreneur it is hard to imagine a witch who would not fly
the other way. That seemed to be the general feeling about him
amongst a people ever ready to notice the weakness behind a mere
show of power.
157
litical way of resolving a problem—what you would expect in
boundary-sitting Magoma—and wouldn’t have been suggested at a
Sanga court.
158
(2) A witch, discredited in public trial, as in the dog ordeal, will
be more than ready to accept banishment as the only practical
means to restore his honour.
159
tutions would be stable. The priests stay hors de combat or they are
nothing. This means scrupulously playing an impersonal game, attrib-
uting decisions to infallible procedure. The greatest embarrassment
was the incident in the Kinga wars between Kyelelo and Mwemutsi’s
court, when a priest was overrun in battle and taken prisoner in full
possession of his chemical kit. Of course he was treated well enough
by his professional colleagues in the other camp. But in their game,
exposing personal powerlessness is a bad show.
160
the edge of the wood where others of their children already lie. Word
goes out. A few women gather with the mother in her hut to keen
through the night. By mid-morning there are a hundred men and
women gathered. A number of fires have been made and beer
brought. Food is prepared, and the keening grows lusty. One late
comer is a remote agnatic kinsman. He has with him a squirrel-skin
bag with tobacco and some whittling work to finish. He has hardly
settled himself when an accusation rings out above the keening.
Little by little it becomes clear this is the man being accused. He was
seen passing by yesterday but failed to stop. A spokesman for the
bereaved at length emerges, stationing himself across the
courtyard from the accused. We hear denials and charges repeated.
A few others join in. There are intervals of silence and quiet general
conversation. The accused man attends to his whittling. A stilted
interview continues for several hours. At last the man will have no
more of it. He gathers his things into the squirrelskin bag, the first
adult to leave. He knows they expect compensation and he has in
effect bargained the amount down to ten shillings, all the while
steadfastly denying guilt. People say he will send the money but only
after a cooling time. Far from binding back together a (loosely
defined) lineage group which has been drifting apart, the whole
transaction puts a seal on schism—who would continue to attend
funerals where he will only be accused of bad faith? The significant
social consequence of the accusation has less to do with the choice
of a witch than the dramatic assertion that a boy’s death is
unnatural. A child has the natural right to expect a full life. So the
premature death is malicious and avoidable, an affair of the elders
who have access to powers over life and death, and which they
sometimes use amorally to hurt one another. This is the way the
world is.
161
A further consequence of the funeral accusation is the social-
ization of the dead boy’s peers, as they move about unnoticed
among the guests, into witch believing. They gain a sense for schism,
an acquaintance with alienation within a kinship group, an awareness
of the boundaries of trust. If a young wife dies in her first
accouchement, an experienced young man will know it is her agnatic
kinsmen who must bury her not his own. Still he may be shocked when
the accusation rings out as he makes his early appearance at the
funeral. With a penis he has speared her! He has no rights, the loss is
not his but her kinsmen’s. They will claim in compensation the whole
part of the bridewealth already paid, and in Kinga law it will be theirs.
He can’t claim it back. In effect, the law proclaims him a witch on the
evidence of circumstance. Only when a new wife has produced and
nursed a child of his agnatic group has he the right to bury her and
suffer the loss. It is through her attachment to a child not a
husband that she acquires a new identity linked to his. The kinds of
change which most closely govern our being happen in huts, conver-
sations, intimate lives spread out in time and space. A religion of
blame has a theatre of its own, in the courtyard of an ordinary hut,
where truths may be told and debts added up which are otherwise
not accounted.
162
Kyelelo, no recluse, and this history makes plain the balance of
powers then prevailing there. The son Madamwa understandably
failed to find high favour as a grown man either with the colonial or
native Sanga powers, but had held local office at Igumbilo as the
devastated region recovered. He had been a child when the Germans
came and still too young to stay and fight when the country was laid
waste in 1905/6. He had seen little of the old culture of the court
after early childhood. He had certainly seen no mass ordeals with his
own eyes, but could convincingly show me exactly where one had
taken place. “Just there under the branches of that tree on the ridge
the witch was left lying. The place is avoided still.” A witch must be
judged, he said, by the prince unkuludeva (in this case Uliluvilo) but was
brought in to trial and executed by the avanyivaha, acting as the
executive and police arm of the court.
163
destroyed, appears in any event to have receded along with the
Sanga system during the colonial decades, falling into the frame of
idle folklore. The facts suggest that amity prevailed over distrust
for most people most of the time in both Malatan cultures; that
this would not have been the case where ordeals did no more than
lynch the defenseless and aggrandize the court; and that it is not
the sentiments of fantasy lore but of practical daylight discourse
which offer the best clues to social history.
164
set. He was widely admired—no witch, because his talents were put
to constructive use and never concealed. Compare the priest: he has
no special talent, rather professional training and knowledge.
Compare the reigning prince or local ruler: his special qualities have
been passed over to him in adulthood by the priestly ritual acts of
inauguration. No one, in fact, is thought to be a witch until someone
is seized by misfortune and, to escape, must know who to blame.
Should all three plantations in the Kinga paradigm fail to prosper, the
evidence hardly implies witchcraft. General misfortune, having no
beneficiaries, is to be explained in other terms than the particular-
istic, grass-roots theatre of blame. But the paradigm does nicely
define the crucial role of envy in giving life to witchcraft.
True that the wealth of a prince exhibits the same kind of self-
serving power as a witch’s prospering field. But royal wealth is legiti-
mated by magnanimous redistribution—the socially corrosive
atmosphere of envy is absent. A magnanimous witch is a nonsense,
as is a local ruler who is stingy. But so far as office among Kinga
depended on network connections—the Sanga connection for the
untwa or prince, the priestly fraternity for the budding ritual
specialist—the ultimate definition of witch was a person armed with
uncanny powers and without legitimate title. This is a person whom
you cannot afford to trust. But Kinga in 1960 felt such a person
could be effectively disarmed. We have to ask why they would not
have so thought under the Sanga regime, and the answer seems to
be politics.
165
similarly conceived in Kinga discourse, but without reference either
to embodied ‘powers’ such as witches and sacralized rulers are
thought to possess. We have instead avanyivaha, ‘big men’ or perhaps
more literally ‘men of greatness’—a plural term indicating a social
position not a particular social type. Within this crowd are found the
priest (unteketsi = celebrant) with his assistants and apprentices,
magistrate, chosen assistants to the ruler, and armed servants of
the court, some with particular competencies—in short, the whole
agency of the Sanga court.
In none of the Malatan schemes was the secular ruler any sort
of wizard fit to exercise overweening mystical power over others or
demolish witches by personal zap. German accounts make it plain
that witchcraft was no more than an auxiliary weapon for the
Nyakyusa prince/chief. His persona was more deeply colored by his
boldness in war, his authority as magistrate, and the magnetism and
bounty of his court. He had to have the right stuff or his chiefdom
would not thrive or rise to the implacable competition of other
chiefs. Chiefs and princes throughout the Malatan region depended
on ritual specialists at any turn in the pursuit of religious ends, and
not least in combatting all those entropic manifestations of the
human condition locally blamed on witchcraft. The secular ruler’s
transcendent status was owing not to his mastery of the mystical
art but to power of another sort. The figure of a living Lwembe
provides a clue. He displays in his fits of anger and petulant refusal
of gifts the prototypical character of the Ancestor: peevish and
demanding, a creature whose power to harm derives not from his lore
or earned merit but solely from his pitiful ontological condition.
166
imagined anger which lies at the root of human suffering and
ultimately accounts for it. But rendering respect, whether to a
prince by groveling or to an ancestor by prestation, though it be a
performance laden with meaning is hardly a transparent cosmo-
logical statement. When Kinga priests come to Lubaga to placate
the Lwembe they do not bargain or reason with him. The play is more
nearly comparable to that ‘reasoning’ which goes on between guards
and madmen, trainers and lions.
167
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER FIVE
Histrionics of belief
168
than the natural one. Nyakyusa priests comprise no sort of college.
This is what most clearly distinguishes them from Kinga priests: it is
not that the Kinga priest is less of an auto-didact but that he
recognizes collegiality; and it is not that the Kinga is not
quarrelsome but that he expects, like a good academic, to reach an
eventual meeting of minds. In religion as in politics the Kinga world
had taken a further step toward central direction.
169
was himself the ‘high priest’ but was paired with a ritual specialist
(Mzagira wa Tambiko) without whom major public sacrificial
ceremonies could not be reproduced. The system is thus ‘monistic’
with respect to the secular/sacred dimension. Chiefly ancestors
were the recipients of public ceremonial address, and these
ceremonies were strictly parallel (only writ large) to the private
propitiation rites which accounted for the popular/traditional
religion of ancestor propitiation. Each chief relied on lesser local
(client) rulers in marginal ‘provinces’. The tendency of the system
was to grow localist roots but without generating frozen hostilities
between the autonomous polities.
170
The picture I’ll be painting of precolonial conditions in Selya will
emphasize a politics of uncertainty and managed turbulence in which
secular political authority is vested not in the office but the person
of a ‘chief’ or ‘prince’. It is a picture of arena politics characterized by
a good measure of theatricality and entrepreneurial ambition. Seen
through Kinga eyes, the absence of a firmly established territorial
map only invited political mischief. The ‘priest’ in this picture is a
more stable but no less uncertain figure than the ‘chief’. But if my
picture of Nyakyusa doesn’t duplicate or epitomize Monica Wilson’s,
the evidence for the priestly role lies in her case records. Her
portrayal of the role, so largely based on close relations with one
such (Kasitile of Selya), is the product of direct observation, still
feasible in some cases in the thirties.
171
kingship’. At the same time, the quasi-kingly aspect of the Lwembe,
as recipient of abundant tribute yearly from a full roster of Sanga
and Mahanzi courts, gave him a plainly secular stamp.
172
staged to seem none of his own. The very essence of priesthood,
which is shared with the peripatetic ‘doctor’ but never with a prince,
is this disavowal of egotism.
173
given, only one case involved the targeting of women, while six women
were accused of witchcraft. One of these was accused by a husband
of ‘bewitching the loins’ of her co-wives and divorced. No woman is
mentioned as an accuser. In one case an accused wife was forced to
undergo the poison ordeal. By successfully vomiting the poison she
exonerated herself from the charge of bewitching her husband’s
cattle; he then paid compensation to her male guardians. ‡
However that may have been, and whatever the subtler differ-
ences between Sanga courts and those of the Selya princes, the
broad Malatan scene was characterized by a division of spheres on
gender lines which will be familiar to readers of ethnographic
monographs from many parts of the world. It is men who are
expected to claim the loss when a child sickens or dies; men who
suffer when their women die or misbehave; men who sacrifice to their
ancestors on either side; and men, on the whole, who dare bring
charges to the authority. All this means that a woman seldom or
never enters the lists to confront a man in the name of justice
among equals. And this in turn at least whispers that a man is more
than likely to have met a woman’s resentment and want, should
trouble arise, to displace or reflect any blame. In the 1950s Monica
Wilson found Selya women’s resentment very near the surface. In For
Men and Elders she paints Selya as a repressive society in which
young men and married women are the spiritual victims of a world
174
made safe for children and their aging fathers. Separate was much
more nearly equal for Kinga women then and, most probably, in tradi-
tional times.
175
uttering veiled threats. The witch word comes back to him in gossip.
He begins to take more care. This may be a feature of peer relations
everywhere but it is sharp and double edged where witchcraft is
socially real.
Take care or you’ll lose your friends! That is the advice Kinga
priests liked to tell me they had for an uppity prince or the lord of a
domain. Sanga rulers had the inherent powers which go with majesty
but weren’t armed with the ‘pythons in their bellies’ which Nyakyusa
chiefs could boast. The reason is to be found in the difference
between the two worldviews: since the Sanga ruler had to fear not
night-witches but the medicines of witchcraft, his safety was in the
hands of his priests and the other court trustees. Nyakyusa put
their faith in the mystically armed ‘Defenders’ of their village. This
calling was the distinctive property of those men Godfrey Wilson
called ‘Great Commoners’—not just the ‘village headmen’ but the
handful of peers comprising their trusted entourage. The
counterpart in a Sanga court was the group of avanyivaha. Among
them were the specialists I have called ‘priests’ but also the secular
men of power associated with the court of law, peacekeeping, and
tax collection. The bond of personal loyalty was the key to a ruler’s
security in Selya. In Sanga courts the nexus was structural.
176
grievance procedure based on the presumption that deep trouble
always comes from beings on the other side of a mystical divide.
There are two points I find the three Malatan cases can help to
clarify. The first point bears on the roots of credibility in ethno-
graphic modeling. The Malatan is a region of state-building in a
formative phase we seldom get to see so nearly in vivo. Archaeology
knows these transitions have to happen in the formative stages of
any civilization, but the sociology of such a transformation is hard to
reconstruct from stones and bones. As we’ll see, wonderful as it is
to have on record a few pertinent observations by early missionaries
on the lifestyle they had found in a pagan ‘paradise’, there were few
sociologists among them. More than that, however apt the
missionary’s training might have been for the time, we now have the
last-best century of professional ethnographic study behind us and
still it is a struggle to understand how the Nyakyusa-Ngonde social
systems must have worked. I’ll reconsider some excellent efforts in
177
that direction published by anthropologists and historians in the
post-pax decades. My own revisionist view will have to be judged on
its merits. But for each ethnographic region most of the social
facts not forever lost are already on record somewhere. We can’t
count on much fresh evidence. The business of Malatan studies then
becomes a forensic exercise, pitting one probability against another,
and theoretical models are essential. The point is to keep asking how
the model has to change to account for the viability of a particular
world we are trying to know. It wants touring a maze of evidence
always doubting but never quite denying.
What all sides agree is that with the colonial deep-freeze gone
the old political order in Malatan life is broadly misremembered. The
fragmentary memoirs which we have need careful screening. If some
few happen to be vivid, and early missionary notes occasionally are,
common pyrite can have the luster of gold when it is gold you are
after. Monica Wilson’s last fieldwork in the region was done in the
1950s, and her interest then was largely in systematizing her infor-
mation on chiefly genealogies, a task some of her informants took up
with enthusiasm. Her final monograph on the Nyakyusa offers a
profound reflection on the structure of experience—the moral
career of the individual—in the society she studied in the 1930s. But
that task doesn’t engage her in reconstructing the political
sociology of the turbulent ‘paradise’ her kinglists so clearly fail to
evoke. Should we blame the pretensions of positivism for this? The
rules of method seemed to the midcentury social anthropologist to
say, Trust only your data not your private sense of the probable. But
when the data themselves contain only your informants’ own private
sense of the probable, what then? How much detached under-
standing do most of us have of our own social lives? If the normal
dose of such understanding were truly comprehensive, the ethnog-
rapher’s job would be simple—round up a few articulate informants
and take dictation. The biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world could be
easy to compose if all the pieces were numbered.
178
monograph, whatever the conditions of its production, reveals the
degree to which there was a meeting of minds in the fieldwork. But if
it isn’t often you would choose to criticize your oral informant face
to face, it is seldom you should be content not to pursue the
contextual questions any statement must raise. As it is with
thrown bones, any batch of social facts from which you hope to
reconstruct a past may be moved about on the board of the mind
and reconstrued. What is special about reconstructive ethnography,
when virtually all the facts you’ll have are in, is that no single account
of their meaning can be empirically tested against another.
Goodness of fit, like elegance, is a matter of judgement. With the
vantage point of a student of the regional culture, my recon-
struction of traditional Nyakyusa politics begins with the social
situation of the chief or ruling prince in his court, which I see in
contrast to the more established Sanga realms as well as to the
more nearly sacerdotal Kyungu court in traditional uNgonde.
179
their proper audience, can subside. Kinga communities tend to be
stable. Even when very small they are not self-isolating. The ethic of
amity promotes here—as not in Selya—a wide-branching network
structure without the all-pervading mosaic of in-group identities
the kinship ethic always (but the amity ethic less certainly) favours.
When quarrels erupt in a Kinga hamlet there is—again, not as in
Selya—no joining in. Kinga bystanders to a quarrel tend rather to
hold their ground and intervene only to cool parties down when dire
deeds threaten. If fear plays a role, it is common-sense fear. The kind
of fear the witch belief can introduce is of another sort. Instead of
raising hackles it wants to subdue egoism, anger, and indignation. It
is the kind of fear a priest or prince can use. It works on multitudes.
The actual prevalence of witches is imponderable no matter who you
ask, but the importance of belief in their magical powers can be seen
to rise with protostate politics. This is quite certainly the business
of priests not princes, however obviously both of them stand to
profit. The Malatan region, where the European pax found three
linked protostates differently placed in circumstance and stage of
development, offers special evidence.
Witchcraft, statecraft
180
views, also based on evidence, have to be reconciled. It is the same
with reconstructive ethnography: until we have an integral grasp of a
case we can’t even tentatively close it.
The sociological reasons for this success are really not hard to
find in the record, once a few ethnographic muddles have been got by.
The problem is to reconstruct the institutions prevalent in Selya
before the 1890s and ask what sort of social and cultural activity
they would have generated in the region. By good fortune, some good
armchair anthropology was done in the 1960s which made a fair
start on the task of reconstructing the relevant past by sorting
out documentary sources. The writers’ focus was on the changes
which must have occurred in Nyakyusa institutions and worldview
prior to the Wilsons’ thorough field study in the mid-thirties. The
main work to consider is S. R. Charsley’s The Princes of Nyakyusa
(1969). A critical reappraisal of some aspects of that work will be
wanted when I come to evaluating the special character of Nyakyusa
(and the related character of Kinga) religion. But on political organi-
zation the writer puts the right foot forward.
181
considered as fixed locations, hardly can be said to exist, as the
‘village’ consists not of its buildings or fields but its people. These
‘villages’, no less so if they are princely courts, are prone to translo-
cation. When a chief loses a group of his villagers he loses a tie to the
land they occupy. Solidarity is through peer-bonding while leadership
is through personal influence (and in that limited sense, propinquity)
but ‘territorial’ identity is weak. ‡
182
a young chief’s claim to greatness would have to be established by
mustering a force fit to match and impress an already established
neighbour. Comparing this situation to the Kinga and most others
we know, the Nyakyusa chiefdom only comes about through radical
change in the local political map.
183
ruled by a polygynous older generation. Then there are the adoles-
cents and young men liberated by the Coming Out decrees. Most of
these potential recruits would be bachelors still. Their prime
concerns now would be getting their own food. Their staple grains
and bananas should come from their own gardens, and for this they
would need to start accumulating cattle and wives. That is to say,
each new village, chiefly or commoner, would have to build its
fortunes on an accumulating mix of inherited and self-made wealth in
cattle and women. A Nyakyusa man of a new generation only stands
to inherit when the last of his patrilateral uncles dies. Any of the
young princes would need time running into decades, better than
average luck, and (it is hard to doubt) patronage from powerful
neighbours to succeed in drawing enough men of the new generation
together to muster a force of chiefly proportion. Along the way he
would of course have to win the charismatic reputation which is the
reward of growing a spiritual python in your belly.
The basis for this interpretation of the Coming Out lies in the
size ratio between the ‘chiefs’ who were strong enough in 1890 to
claim recognition by the colonial government and the scores of
invisible ‘chiefs’ still claiming that status in the mid-1930s. In the
Coming Out, considered as a charade, the specific ‘loyalty’ of each
man in the new generation is assigned, giving each aspirant to high
office a fair number of his own, and a fair handful of ‘commoner village
heads’ each with his own putative following. It is an arrangement for
Cloud Cuckoo land. In the real world a full-blown chief could put some
6000 men in the field. The explanation has to be a scramble not so
much for individual recruits but for whole commoner villages. The
time frame is set, in the first place, by external relations, since
desirable cattle and women are on the move and ill-protected. Men
who are engaged in converting a property-less bachelor existence
into a semblance of wealth and security will want to make quick
decisions about future alignments, and it is just here the impor-
tance of the celebrated ethic of ‘good company’ can be appreciated.
In effect, what this means is that a fumbling chiefly candidate may
have his own small ‘village’ crowd with him, while by the same token
each commoner headman will either lose his crowd or be carried with
them into new alignments in a rapidly shifting field. Arena politics
selects for opportunistic values.
184
and coherent work of Colonel Nigmann on the Hehe. To reconstruct
from the 1930s ethnography I think the first requirement is freeing
yourself from what is sometimes disparagingly called ‘the social
anthropological method’, that is, picturing for your readers just the
society your informants pictured for you.
The ceremony itself seems ... not to have involved the two young
princes succeeding to an existing position of authority ... but to have
185
concerned the creation of new positions and the attachment to
them of followings. The hierarchy of princely titles produced, each
with its own following, was manned by incumbents whose varying
authority, power, and wealth were ... determined in the course of a
continuing competitive process, on which ultimately depended the
survival of the titles themselves. ‡
186
inclined to give priests more credit. There are two reasons for
thinking, as Charsley himself suggests in the letter quoted earlier,
we can hope to draw closer to the pre-pax Nyakyusa experience.
First, the institutions in question are older, stabler, and more recog-
nizable when they are taken to represent the broad regional culture
of the Corridor region than when they are grasped only on ‘insider’
evidence and so must lie ‘outside’ probative history. Second, I take it
as fair game to interpret them in light cast by my own fieldwork in
another part of the same culture area. This is not so much because I
can pretend to see the Nyakyusa version of the regional culture
through Kinga eyes as it is because I can claim to have read the
relevant professional ethnography with such borrowed eyes.
187
Now we have evidence enough to make sense of the moral
career of a Nyakyusa ‘chief’ or ‘successful prince’ under precolonial
conditions. Start with the figure of the young prince at the Coming
Out. His project is unusual for a traditional society: he is expected
to make himself a leader of men. ‘Leadership’ is a buzzword in
capitalist kindergartens and schools of business. It is a word whose
etic meaning applies to peoples like the Tiv or the Nuer, where anthro-
pologists speak of ‘predatory expansion’; but its emic meaning
among the psychologically tainted teachers of kindergarten children
is foreign to Tiv or Nuer discourse. It would be wrong also in respect
of the ‘great commoner’ or village headman of Selya, though his
career is in good part made on the battlefield. What counted in
Konde warfare as it has been described by Western observers was
individual daring and skill with spear and shield. But the moral career
of the chief as I find it is a quantum jump away from that of his village
headmen, because it involves and crucially depends on actively
recruiting a following of village outsiders. My evidence for this is
inferential. If you try to model a world in which ten ‘mother
chiefdoms’ produce twenty or thirty ‘successor chiefdoms’ by going
through periodic mitoses once each generation you can only make
the model work by supposing that the mainstream political process
entails a massive project of amalgamation and re-sorting of
personnel, capable of reducing the twenty or thirty to a figure (say,
twelve) appropriate to a rate of population increase (natural plus
predatory) you can expect your expert colleagues to believe. Beyond
that, if you want your model to suggest a less-than-chaotic political
system, compatible with the African ‘paradise’ the early mission-
aries found, you have to assume that the process of re-sorting and
amalgamation, seen as realignments of individual men of fighting
age, would be massively de-randomized. That means villages remain
solidary wholes throughout, and that is a condition all the ethnog-
raphy firmly supports.
188
nents of a decisive situation, risk management, ploys and tactics,
misunderstandings and revelations—not a proper scheme of
pathways but a tangle: hard knocks, prods and pitfalls. Consider how
individuals feel out the moral strategies which keep them in phase
with the institutions they will confront and manage to work-through
in the formative stages of life. The walls of this maze are met as
events not rules—immediate menace, fleeting gratification, not the
memorized turns-right and turns-left of a rat’s cardboard maze.
Think of friendships, marital ties, rivalries. Think of envy, pride, and
responsibilities met or shirked. The experience which is the signal
feature of this kind of social learning structure is the experience I
have called the individual moral career. For the typical biography of a
man or woman we may for convenience make do with a generalized
account of a life-cycle as expressing and giving context to an ethos/
eidos we have found characteristic of some cultural group. But that
is to suggest that role-differentiation is hardly important except
as it relates to such categories as gender and age.
The young prince from the day of his Coming Out is working
within a social maze requiring the would-be ruler to build a viable
polity of his own, starting with a small team of age-mates with
whom he has shared the life of a bachelor boys’ village for as long as a
couple of decades. If this is not ‘starting from scratch’ it is starting
with about the same handicap as any of the rival aspirants for
chiefhood matched with him by a committee of sponsoring elders. A
special Rift Valley condition for making this kind of political game
feasible is an environment which can be converted from grazing
commons to farming land by the application of just the kind of
industry such a team of young men excels in. An informing feature of
the Old Nyakyusa world is that the importance of cattle was more
social and political than subsistence-economic. Emphasis could be
shifted at will. Their land-use pattern was a combination of banana
culture, hoe culture, and cattle ranching which left open space
between one major political centre and another, so putting no special
premium on longterm settlement at a given site. The open space left
was still in the 1930s enough to sound paradoxical in the Wilsons’
description.
189
comprises a mix of non-kin male peers. They are boys or young men,
for the most part without women. Autonomy is out of the question,
as the food they produce goes to the stem village, where it will be
cooked and served out by their fathers’ wives. Dependence on the
stem village of polygynous elders is total. In effect, the peripheral
age-village is equivalent as an organizational feature to the central
barracks of a Sanga court; while the married senior men (those
huddled together in a stem village around the Nyakyusa chief or
commoner headman) are counterparts to the senior Kinga barracks
men who have been given a wife and ‘sent out to rule’ peripheral
settlements. The two systems have a logic in common but use
opposite signs.
190
close into the Livingstone escarpment and the lakeshore—the
ethnic area through which Kinga normally make contact with the
coastal markets. ‡
191
social structure as you might have met it ‘on the ground’ is more
robust by far than the social geometry ‘in the heads’ of estab-
lishment informants. ‡ ‡
192
The main political lesson is that there is solidarity inherent in
the (compound) village but not in the chiefdom, which must be
considered a loose league of a dozen or more such villages. What
unity is to develop in the new league will have to be worked out by a
new political set. It is the mandate of more than one young prince
‘sent out to rule’ to form an effective power group from within that
set. Carried to its logical end, an aspiring chief’s life task will be to fill
the whole space, political and demographic, of the old chiefdom as it
was at its height. As demographic increase is slow, this would mean
sidelining a few villages and assuming leadership of the rest. It is a
moral career which seems to have entailed outshining and outdoing,
but only rarely killing off, one’s princely competition.
193
general model of the chiefdom as it was ‘ever since the heroes
brought fire’. It will continue to orbit about the same sacred places,
and recreate the same institutions. But it will probably not accom-
modate more people, and the system as designed doesn’t offer
answers to the question, where the putative surplus must go.
Typically the number (n) of men forming the core of a new stem
village will be no larger than before, though the male offspring of any
single senior village would possibly amount to something rather
more like n² after thirty years of protected polygyny. Assume
normal rates of natural attrition and some deaths in fighting. You
would still expect a surplus of males in relation to available places
within a manageable new chiefdom. These are not the conditions of
self containment and political stability. But the Corridor region is
not an island, and the great civilization of which it is a small part had
taken over the better part of an enormous continent in the two
millennia before. All the cultural groups comprising the Eastern and
Western Bantu civilizations operate on structural plans which,
realistically evaluated, entail expansion; and all require chronic effort
to achieve it. The special turn of the Nyakyusa is to put boys and
youths to the main work of the fields, doing the gardens coopera-
tively and leaving the women (once their husbands are aged) to a
secure productive and reproductive life of their own in the closely-
built polygynous compounds of the stem village. It is a perfect
change on the Kinga pattern. In the royal Sanga village the main work
of the fields is done by a close group of protected women—royal
wives and daughters—whose bachelor male age-mates are mostly
herds and barracks men. An apparent consequence should be a
slower rate of expansion and a decidedly laid-back approach to the
great masculine scramble for women.
194
1890 would have discovered little to suggest what stage of this
thirty-year cycle any particular village represented. Neatness,
industry, and good humour were specialties of the Nyakyusa, and
that would have been the case right through what I have called their
scramble.
195
appearance of a father-in-law. The rule had already become deeply
dysfunctional, at least for young wives. Doubtless, it pleased old
men and helped to slow down the pace of structural change. Though
under the colonial pax (since 1926 under British Indirect Rule) the old
political system had been kept alive, it was effectively castrated.
Ironically, what this meant was loss of the countervailing power a
young warrior generation had enjoyed vis-à-vis their elders, whose
wealth and women had no other protection. Now under the pax the
seniors might keep all the cattle and women with very little of the
trouble. ‡‡
196
section of the priesthood from the remainder of a ruling oligarchy. It
is these priests who will (in the ‘divine king’ scenario) finally smother
an old chief and bequeath his charismatic powers and identity to a
single successor—presumably, the by-then foremost of the ‘royal’
princes. The powers of these priests would not be diminished but
magnified during the interregnum in the political cycle, and it is hard
to suppose they didn’t play their few cards close to their chests.
What else are sanctuaries for than lending an air of destiny to hard
decisions?
197
normal strength in numbers of warrior-ready young men in the
typical Nyakyusa village, there would not regularly have been
expansion (by intrusive colonization of bush communities) when one
young leader saw that as his best opening. That Nyakyusa were
better organized politically than their neighbours is hardly to be
doubted on the evidence of Saku, Kukwe, Nyiha, or Ndali communities.
The Nyakyusa is a variant on the distributional pattern typical for
East African protostates: an extensive, active political arena
harbouring a network of developed and autonomous polities, and fully
separated from other such centres of chiefly politics by buffer belts
of smaller peoples enjoying the rather different rewards of localism.
198
quite predictably grew in his belly, giving him dignity, authority, and
personal power. This is the ‘princely chief’. A born leader to whom the
manners of an aristocrat are natural. I have presented a different
argument, for a man born a little prince, who achieves through enter-
prise in adulthood the status and attributes of a chief and
commander of men—the ‘chiefly prince’. There were, as Charsley
noticed, scores of princes living here or there who couldn’t claim
much of a following. Monica Wilson talks of perhaps a hundred
‘chiefdoms’, the great majority of no consequence. Semantics aside,
I think Charsley’s mistake was assuming that aristocratic heredity
had a lot of significance for status among ordinary villagers, where
the evidence suggests that ‘bloodlines’ without the proven ability to
take and hold political office bestowed a rather modest social
advantage. Both Charsley and the Wilsons underestimated the
importance of achieved standing among men, the political career.
Greatness, which is a corollary of influence, could have been but
rarely thrust upon a Nyakyusa prince. For Kinga that is not the case.
200
contain ancestral shrines meant for a domestic market. Translocal
concerns such as we attribute to accidents of nature are more
firmly and strategically planted at known portals to the nether-
world. The chiefly shrines are like those of Bena chiefs. They allow
making a public benefit of the personal ancestral hearing of a
particular public’s current chief. Each marks the burial place of an
important ancestor of recent vintage, and consists at core of only a
few trees planted at his death. The custom says something about
the political use of lineal kinship rhetoric in an amity-based
community, but not about territorial boundaries. A group of inter-
ested priests may perform a sacrifice there, addressing the full
circle of chiefly ancestors through the ghost who guards the grave.
A bullock may be begged from a reigning descendent, and the object
of the rite will be release from whatever particular trouble royal
ancestors are blamed for visiting on their living descendants. One
thing this says concerns kin groups among aristocracy: if they don’t
constitute real lineages, the priests will have to construct mythical
lineal links back from today’s hero-chief to predecessors. Something
else is said as well: if it weren’t for the third-party role and the
earned credibility of the priests in this transaction, how would the
people know that their secular rulers are so fraught with mystical
danger? It is not a thesis one can usefully propound concerning one’s
self unless one is indeed a tyrant prepared to daily demonstrate the
size and power of his ego in the rankly unjust but unapologetic ways
of politically constituted fear gone mad.
201
speaking area (estimated in the thirties at about a hundred) must
have expanded at a snail’s pace in relation to the potentially
geometric expansion of the number of young aspirants to high office.
That means an aspirant stands no more than a fifty percent chance
of success; and if the scale of success would approximate a bell
curve when graphed, notable success would be rare. Since notable
princes were quickly drawn into whatever turbulence erupted within
their purview, and seldom on the same side as near rivals, a
princeship however successful was no sinecure. Still, a young prince
willing to accept patronage rather than fight for fiefs of his own
might well have had an easy time. We just can’t know how many
played cool and how many hot. What is clear follows from knowing
that a Coming Out called for a shake-up of the chiefdom as a whole.
The burden of political action was conclusively divided among many:
the new commoner village leaders would have been nearly as
important as the prince challenged to gain their loyalties. At
starting, the prince could be no more than first among equals. A
Coming Out was a big dose of deregulation. If my modeling is right,
peer-group ties were left intact while interpolitical ties—the web of
loyalties aligning each commoner village head with a prince—required
intensive practical affirmation.
202
knit ‘Nyakyusa’ protostate template couldn’t stand up when the
surrounding buffer belt of localist bush communities was broken.
203
villager a pragmatic option. But we have to assume this was not the
case late in a man’s life, when the Nyakyusa elder would be settled
down with a crowd of wives and children in a closed circle of many
another such crowd, all surrounded by byres, trees, and gardens.
Mobility in youth, roots in old age. It was the same in essence with
Kinga men, as all through their middle years as bachelor barracks
men they enjoyed great personal mobility, being at home with their
friends both everywhere and nowhere. The great difference to
Nyakyusa arrangements was a relatively cool version of arena
politics. Treachery, assassination, and back-room dealing were there,
but on-stage every succession to office was clean, final, and
designed to minimize the need of structural change. Armed clashes
were always possible especially where a given domain bordered
another linked to a different princely capital. but multilateral hostil-
ities seem to have been rare.
In the Konde context the age village pattern with its thirty-
year scramble was special to the Rift Valley where nature afforded
any village great freedom of movement. While the Sanga ruler staged
spectacular war games in the spirit of sport, the declining Nyakyusa
chief prepared a clean-swept arena for his best young princes, there
to reinvent war in a small way and play at the great game of states-
manship.
204
mutually dependent subgroups celebrating ‘solidarity’ and, by doing
that, advancing their commitment to the politics of incorporation
which binds them. Nyakyusa funerals are such gatherings. Back
stage we can look for the ritual acts by which individuals affirm their
own social and political identities and watch for tactical moves by
their ritual stage managers. Every interior, every informal meeting-
place in a village is a ‘back stage’ place of its own, and the scenes
played out there can range from contacts leading to adulterous
elopements or shifts in personal allegiance to the weighting and
working out of new individual moral strategies or commitment to
special group projects. Ethnographers unfortunately get to observe
and describe little of this off-stage activity.
205
to Nyakyusa ways. In particular there is the complex figure of the
Nyakyusa chief, armed with wizardry, habitual bellicosity, and born-
to-rule self-importance—something of a self-made man, something
of a titan. The Kinga example, Kyelelo the Cruel, comes to mind: a
patricide and more, a tyrant for certain—and the most popular hero
of Kinga folklore.
206
the man who took it. The crown’s share was to be modest. ‘Market
forces’, in short, were abetting this revolution. How directly the
scheme was based on the Ngoni example can’t be known, but this kind
of ‘horde’ behaviour doesn’t match the way neighbour peoples had
governed their relations.
207
external war pattern seems to have been affected by their Ngoni
contacts. But as a device calling for close combat to death, this
sword must have been found useless in the internal war theatre
where the prize was only collective glory. A single serious wound was
enough in their ceremonial battles to take the prize away. For Nyaky-
usaland as well, the prior development of translocal politics allowed
for the massing of formidable forces of defense—in short, for
effective preparedness—against external threat. Looking then at
the history of the whole political archipelago in the Sowetan region,
it appears that Sangu, Hehe, and Bena were rushed into growth by
external impact. This was due to their immature structural devel-
opment at the crucial time of first contact with the Ngoni (and
Arab) versions of a new and massively destructive form of warfare.
From a stage of developed localism but still without a routinized
system of internal war-preparedness, they were drawn directly into
(or in the Bena case, toward) a despotic military state organization
which enabled them to match the Ngoni raiders already so well
organized. In this way of modeling the Sowetan scene, only the
Malatan segment of the region had developed (by about the 1840s)
a sophisticated system of translocal political authority. And while
this authority was necessarily based in war, its destructive
potential within its own cultural sphere was minimized for as long as
the preferred system could be kept in balance. ‡
208
reparation or apology. These are simply not expectations in the
context. The broad idea of ‘arena politics’ seems to apply, and the
prevalence of priests is, I think, established, though Kinga can’t
match in this their Valley neighbours. As with ‘red tape’ in a modern
bureaucracy, ritually correct procedures, seen to by the avanyivaha in
a call to arms, will effect a shedding off of moral responsibility for
outcomes. Is the hand that throws the dice to blame for a bad fall?
Even conspicuous success in this political arena is attributed to
invisible pythons more often than to nobility of character.
209
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER SIX
A Malatan Cosmos
God is the everlasting terror for Konde. That is why they pray so
often, “Go far away from us, oh God, go to the Sangu, for your home
is so broad and great!” This fact offers a shattering insight into the
pagan condition: Angst. [Ludwig Weichert] ‡
210
It is no fault of the ethnographers in the 1930s that they
focused on what they could discover by direct observation, or that
interpretation was based on this well-grounded evidence. The noise
of random events mustn’t distract from an account of common
practice. Still, what is aberrant is often significant too. The recon-
struction I’ll offer of the fragmentary ‘case’ as it can be extracted
from missionary records is indebted to the original ethnography, the
critics thereof, and in particular to Dr. Peter Weber, who has recently
checked out Mbasi-survivals in the field. ‡
211
taken as oracular by his elders. The young men I have in mind were
would-be prophets in search of a calling. Since some individuals in the
mid-century decades had been able to develop forms of divination
good enough to earn a measure of fame and fortune, the calling was
there. But Tunginiye was sure no practitioners of the occult
unacceptable to the jury of court priests would ever have been
tolerated. That the case was quite different in uNyakyusa became
clear only from bits of documentary evidence I encountered in
expanding my study from uKinga to the broader region. What was
special about uNyakyusa was the disunited character of the
‘priesthood’—that choice of a name could itself be misleading, as the
priests comprised no social entity. Still I was astonished to find
Mbasi’s ventriloquist called in the revisionist literature a ‘priest’. I
was also surprised, though not astonished, to find no recognition in
the Wright narrative of the evident and persistent preference of the
young chief’s young wife for staying home. If nothing else does, this
should dissuade us from seeing this ‘Mbasi’ encampment as an
established shrine or ‘cult centre’. Her side of the story, if we would
dramatize it in the interesting manner missionaries and scholars
have done for the masculine side of the case, I don’t doubt much
would be disclosed.
I don’t now think my initial take on ‘Mbasi’ was wrong. But it’s
clear that historically for Nyakyusa, in absence of high courts and
their centralizing dispensation, it would have been just such self-
employed diviners who might rise to the occasion as popular
saviours in times of widespread trouble. The irony in this is telling:
Mbasi the divinity is busy withering crops and magically killing
healthy cattle; yet his herdsman, the only mortal he seems to love,
is presented in the documents we have as some sort of hero. As it
happened, troubles from abroad and from nature had been mounting
up in the decades just before German contact, and epidemics,
droughts, and pestilence were just hitting the region when the
Germans were setting up their missions. It was natural for the
missionaries to put themselves forward as ‘doctors’ in the root
sense of the word, and so they were taken to be, by those who came
to patronize them. Within weeks this led to some meddling in local
affairs and ambivalence in their social situation. Enter Mbasi. Though
he put the missionaries only briefly at risk, the ‘Mbasi affair’ made
something plain which an observer ought to take seriously. The chiefs
were in open competition with the ‘doctors’ in a great game of
influence. The major tool was blame. If the missionaries would make
themselves felt, they would join this game.
212
themselves must turn to ‘free divinities’. A plague is no respecter of
human boundaries. These spirit beings might be deemed ancestral,
but only in a mythic and universalizing sense. As such they might
logically be blamed for wholesale tribulation—disease, drought,
pestilence. The German missionaries were not slow to put in their
claims for a new and powerful free divinity. They had translators
brought with them from Karonga (uNgonde). They picked ‘Kyala’ as
the nearest word to Gott, and went right to the task of preaching
the powers of Kyala. If this didn’t clarify their presence, it made
them interesting, and important chiefs came to claim their
patronage. ‡
213
To achieve conviction most Kinga consultant diviners depended
on a display of objectivity. Only Hikadiseku (alive in the flesh in the
1930s) lived on in folklore as a proper spirit medium, and no one knew
the learning source of her art. She said she carried ancestral
voices—the whole ruling line of princes at Ukwama. Mediumship puts
a turn on the subjective type of divination by acting out a dramati-
cally effective dichotomy between the speaker’s ordinary presen-
tation of self and the supposed divinity’s manner of speaking. It is
not often independently invented and is not a regularly reported
feature of the Malatan cultural region. In the Mbasi case, the
spokesman for the divinity was a medium manqué. He didn’t present
trance or other outward signs of inward (spiritual) transformation.
This may seem to betray amateurism, but the routine was made
effective by night-time rants in the numinous voice of Mbasi himself,
and this may have been the routine of choice in those days for
presenting this divinity. Mbasi was not new to the Corridor scene in
1892, nor was his ‘medium’ the first or last to speak for the divinity.
We know nothing to guide conjecture about the herdsman’s
recruitment. Self-recruitment would not surprise.
214
trouble for his own ends. Neither was the setup like prophecy, looking
to what Fate has in store. This was an oracle offering to stay the
hand of a vengeful Fate on a quid quo pro basis. Mbasi’s herdsman
(a.k.a. Mwamafungubo) might have been a young man running a confi-
dence game. When his warnings missed their mark he would not be
around to take responsibility for failure. He had the advantage of the
itinerant in escaping claims. I was not immediately impressed. For
me, what eventually made the case significant was its mischievous
career in scholarship. The revisionist story in its most inflated form
seemed to demand we give up the whole sense of Nyakyusa culture
as we had it from the particularly thorough fieldwork of Godfrey and
Monica Wilson in the 1930s/1950s. Anyone familiar with that
fieldwork could hardly be blamed for demurring. The evidence contra
Wilson may possibly be taken as hard but certainly not hefty. Monica
Wilson herself soon laid the matter to rest or to stalemate. But
what hadn’t happened was a real expansion of our understanding of
the way things must have worked for Nyakyusa in 1890. The ‘Mbasi
case’ and the literature it provoked should have moved us toward a
better sense for the developing protostate process among
Nyakyusa, and the featuring in it of the (unfinished) cooptation of
‘bush religion’ to the advantage of the courts. Here was a clue to a
continuing ‘process’ where we had had only a seemingly finished
‘structure’. The revisionist critique started out well but lost its
way.‡
215
counter-critique should I mount? I can begin by looking over the case
she makes. Then comparing it with mine will lead into the matter of
premises.
(a) Shrines. Wright would have this both ways. Mbasi has a
shrine “only an hour away” from the new Mission station. But Mbasi
is loose-footed:
The Mbasi priest, who was not attached to any fixed ritual
centre, then decamped to Lubaga. ‡
(c) Cults. In one sentence we have ‘the cult’ and in the next ‘the
oracle’ referring, in each case, to the same object of popular
skepticism or allegiance. If the latter term had been consistently
adhered to we would escape being told of “the Berliners, who became
engaged in a spiritual conflict with a cult of Mbasi in the neigh-
bourhood.” Rejecting an oracle is a world away from fighting a cult.
The time presence is other. An oracle is not a corporate group. What
these passages and countless others in Wright’s two reports
obtain to is a three-sided imbroglio over influence. The Mission has
tried to quash an oracular herdsman whose veracity some chiefs
have underwritten with loans of cattle and wives, while other chiefs
prefer to magnify the claims of the missionaries. There is no
evidence of a cult brought forward, if ‘cult’ means a group adhering to
a cosmic persuasion identified with a dedicated divinity. In Georg
Simmel’s terms, there is a rising potential for group conflict, but only
amongst the chiefly polities, and in any case it is of the kind that
‘they need discord in order to preserve the relationship’. When the
focal confrontation does occur between a mission and an oracle it is
better described as a collision than a duel. Neither side could have
216
won on its own terms, both were lucky (or smart) to walk away from
the scene. They didn’t after all speak each other’s language. So far
as we know, the ‘cult’ disappeared with its spokesman later on, after
getting into more trouble elsewhere in the valley. The persistence in
lore of an Mbasi even a century later as a free divinity in the Konde
cosmos was not compromised by the failure of an oracle using his
name. But this is not saying an ‘Mbasi cult’ so persisted.‡‡
I set aside the careless use of the ‘god’ idea. What we know is
that in the general confusion about the blame for a rinderpest
epidemic ‘Mbasi’ was quick to claim responsibility, and a plains party
was sent (armed as always) to investigate. We certainly don’t know
that anyone was holding Mwaihojo or any other chief responsible for
the epidemic. Mwanjabara’s lieutenant seems to have been passed
over to the missionaries. There was a stand-off and withdrawal.
What had happened? Clientage is a system by which direct conflicts
between chiefs or headmen are turned to indirection—the play is to
gain influence and clientele by discrediting a rival. Each player is thus
bound to get into the game where the prize would magnify his
political persona. Almost every narrative of chiefly alliance and
conflict in Wright’s gloss assumes we can know how their system
worked by reference to the way we like to play chess or war. But in
this case we can’t even see the chess board. ‡
217
politics in the later nineteenth century’ from missionary notes and
letters concerning their dealings with chiefs and oracles about
whom half of what we know is their names. Here is a quick sample of
Wright’s narrative voice:
For their part the resistant princes now turned to the heroic
tradition to legitimate and consecrate their resistance. For a prince
like Mwanjabala, who had once supported the Mbasi priests, there
was now no alternative but to support the Lwembe...It is unknown
what role Lwembe himself played in the ceremony, or whether anyone
represented the German enemy as a pestilence, seizing cattle and
disturbing the people...The princes were under great pressure of
public opinion, and the whole style of religion and politics was in crisis.
‡
218
The story of ‘the mischievous medium’ with very careful
retelling and editorial spin might let us emerge with an acceptable
sense for Nyakyusa history, building from tactical deconstruction of
old and new models. I promise only a little more of that. My point of
departure is the premise I take away from ‘Mbasi’ that Nyakyusa
chiefs faced some loss of their legitimacy whenever they were faced
with ‘territorial’ portents. Their only means for keeping face was the
military one. The same would not have been the case in remote pre-
chiefly times for the localist regimes headed by hereditary pop-up
leaders whose ritual prowess, allowing access to parental shades,
was home-grown and not translocal. Arena politics had not been
invented. Territorial shrines, like Lwembe’s at Lubaga, grew up or
moved into the Corridor with newcomers in a pluralistic fashion,
matching the needs of people spread wide in an extended pedestrian
area. To survive, the self-employed doctors must be many not few,
because it takes time and chance as much as talent to see the end
to a disease or a natural disaster. Mwamafungubo is an example of a
doctor who overplays his hand. He is very smart but not cagey
enough in the playing. It was the genius of Eastern Bantu cosmol-
ogies to recruit the victims of any standing ecological threat to the
game of finding its cause and propitiating the free divinity who might
confess to being at mischief. This is a common-sense reading of the
pragmatics of a religion of blame. It is not the religious reality
Kasitile (in Selya) or Tunginiye (in Ukwama) would teach us. But I think
it reveals something that has always been veiled even from the
foremost Malatan intellectuals, yet always was there.
219
and since, in turning to reconstructive interpretation, I need a
broader reach: Selya has to be seen in the fuller context of a regional
history. So I include the whole population of which Monica Wilson’s
Selya chiefdoms comprise only one especially well studied part. It is
important we have in mind the pluralistic identity of ‘Nyakyusa’
males as they are still portrayed by the Wilsons well after the pax.
Bearing arms ‘for the Nyakyusa’ happened rarely. A man’s primary
political identity was with his peer village and (most often through
its commoner headman) with a chief able to keep his respect.
Fighting was ordinarily against some (if perhaps beside other)
Nyakyusa chiefs. The pax made a system look stable, which earlier
had certainly been guaranteed turbulence. The deployment of force
had become the organizing framework of Konde society long before
the Ngoni and then the Sangu and the Germans came. But unlike the
Kinga, the Konde protostate process outside uNgonde itself didn’t
integrate religion with politics above the level of the chiefly segment.
220
ecological zone. All Konde speak one language with dialect variants,
indicating a high rate of internal circulation. But it is essential to
have in mind that, despite notable statelike developments, the
Konde of the Corridor know very little of hard internal or external
boundaries, both of which are salient, hard-won waypoints in political
development. Konde boundaries are not lines between parcels of land
but implicit lines between groups supposing themselves dependent
on different chiefly ancestor shrines for their welfare. The Nyakyusa/
Ngonde difference is understandable as a function of political
ecology: once Ungonde has become a fortress state, its politics
changes accordingly. But formerly this was the part of the Malatan
region least well isolated from external connection (Swahili/Arab
ivory and slave traders) or telling collision (Bemba, Ngoni). As for the
other (Corridor) Konde communities, since they were many
chiefdoms they had the Hydra’s advantage with respect to defense:
cut one down and two pop up. But what should be understood is that
this kind of chiefly organization is inherently instable. It must be
such that large forces can be massed at need, yet be a system in
which massive force readily breaks down into politically autonomous,
self-supporting, but potentially warring parts.
221
Is oral history not the way to resolve questions of this kind?
Interviewers encounter the same spectator paradox a reporter
meets in reconstructing a street accident. It is not simply that
some observers misremember, but that each of them has seen only
what he or she was prepared to by nature, situation, and experience.
Human wisdom is a function of the number and kind of private intel-
lectual matrices a person has for assimilating novelty. When it
comes to hearsay history, the differential preparation of individuals
is hard to exaggerate. Rule One in the interpretation of turbulent
cultures might be looking for laminations. That is, digging for more in
any individual’s testimony on the chance of finding what is not just
new but is revealingly incongruent with more superficial information.
If you are prepared to think of ‘thick description’ as the essence of
good history, you will know that even the best informant can’t supply
what scholarship needs. Even a Kasitile (Konde) or a Tunginiye (Kinga)
is no scholar from Mars. The ‘case of Mbasi’ well illustrates the diffi-
culty of trusting information as if it were knowledge.
222
reconstruction on the view that we can’t comprehend the meaning
of Konde village relations within a chiefly realm without relating it
first to the ‘loneliness at the top’ which is created in the ubusooka or
Coming Out ceremony, and perceiving the same effect only inten-
sified in the division of any one chief’s realm into ‘his own two villages’
and a greater number of ‘commoner’ villages each with an
independent head.
223
I have no doubt that in precontact conditions, when the elders
of a chiefdom decided on a Coming Out of fledgling chiefs, their hands
had often been forced. If there were peaceful years there would be
turbulent times as well. Political mobilization was the key to success
at arms, and in times of drought, epidemic, and pestilence
dissension could prove an aging lion impotent. Political theatre
empowers its star actors when it succeeds, and opens them to
scorn or ridicule when it fails.
(2) What was the place of the free divinity Mbasi in Konde
cosmology? I use ‘free’ here always in loose parallel to Godfrey
Lienhardt’s classic monograph on Dinka cosmology: some Dinka divin-
ities are assigned to a clientele by birth, as ancestors are in the
Sowetan region; others are unassigned (free) and broadly available,
as are all the so-called ‘heroes’ of Malatan literature. The canonical
ethnography portrays ‘Mbasi’ rather ambiguously as a legendary
Hero name but without a distinctive legend of its own. The one ‘hero’
easily conflates with others unless you notice that this ‘Mbasi’
floats also in political space, correlating with no fixed abode either in
geography or lore. Monica Wilson found that ‘Mbasi’ was a spare
divinity name often used interchangeably with some others better
localized in the Nyakyusa pantheon. A revisionist historian added
only a touch: Mbasi was a Hero on a par with others (notably Lwembe
and Kyala) who were only mistakenly thought to be more securely
lodged in legend and myth. This then took on the corollary that the
scruffy (un-chiefly) spokesman/herdsman for Mbasi was a proper
priest and a challenger to the priests of Mbasi’s fellow free divinities.
The ‘Mbasi’ episodes in the collective Nachlass of the German
missions have thus been held to afford us a unique, neglected insight
into the political as well as the religious life of the region in tradi-
tional times. If the argument doesn’t ring quite true, it does point to
the importance of ephemeral events and movements in affecting the
Konde eidos. The lesson of this is of course that turbulence was not
restricted to secular matters in Konde life.
224
I find that a proper understanding of the Mbasi episodes
requires us to credit the Konde community with greater dissensus,
intellectual subtlety, and imaginative genius than the relevant liter-
ature has done. Also required is a sharpened sense for the
processual dimension in the Konde political system as we have been
able to observe it. This is a lesson I would apply broadly to our under-
standing of the civilization of the Malatan peoples and of the
Sowetan region. If I picture the Sanga protostates as better stabi-
lized than the Konde, the distinction I’m urging is not one of black and
white. I suggest that in our reconstruction of this civilization as a
free-standing historic achievement we should reconsider the
balance of eidos and ethos, beliefs and values, in the emergence of
translocal political structures as they may be seen in regional
context. Cosmological ideas tend to reflect and reflect upon the
political. In particular it is obvious that Konde and Kinga shades have
their afterlives in an underworld of no great splendor—up on earth
bad luck is to be blamed on their jealous resentment as often as on
that of a living witch. Giving their offspring trouble is the shades’
way of demanding help from their former dependents. Certainly, no
shade individually has anything like the awesome mystical power of a
well-entrenched chief. Mystical and political beliefs are symbolically
joined in the high office, whether for the Konde ruler or the Sanga.
They are also joined privately at the base, where an insistent
antipolitan ethic keeps alive that disillusioning doubt which a high
court’s political theatre is supposed to allay.
What I have found arresting in the Mbasi case is the ‘lion tamer’
heroism of the itinerant oracle. In face of the wanton devastation of
rinderpest, it seems the popular wisdom was prepared to accept
that cataclysmic vengeance was justified by the niggardly behaviour
of one young chief in refusing to lend his wife to a certain doctor
nominated (he said) to speak for the divinity. Two features are
strange. The more usual form of an oracle is theatrically effective
mediumship. But here the ‘theatre’ is hidden in the dark, and the
‘oracle’ disclaims having been there. Then there is the public scale of
the trouble matched with the private and personal scale of the
grievance. Must we, after all is said, leave our inquiry into the Konde
and their cosmos with the impression of a preposterous credulity? I
prefer to see the scenario as ‘extra-processual’. What is clear
enough is that the translocal rumour mill was running at speed.
Translocal awareness would have been active since the arrival of the
Ngoni, the Sangu, and the slave and ivory hunters from mid-century
onward. The coming of Germans in an astonishing ship has given rise
to new rumours. In this case general apprehension is stirred anew by
reports of cattle dying and, ‘They say Mbasi is angry’. This automati-
cally suggests trouble on a big scale, because it goes back to the
225
mythlore everyone picks up in childhood. The person everyone turns
to when trouble comes on a grand scale is their recognized chief. The
young Mwakatungila, for his part, is personally involved in a confron-
tation with the Mbasi oracle, and finding his position backed by an
obviously powerful patron in the Mission leader, decides to stand
pat. All the other chiefs are committed to chiefly action, but only
the oracle has a plan, and this is the one they cautiously begin to
follow. Marcia Wright thought just here ‘the whole system of religion
and politics was in crisis’. An askari might have thought so, but the
Nyakyusa thought Mbasi or some other divinity was angry again. My
own opinion is the security of the system depended entirely on its
ability to absorb Angst on a scale matching that of the troubles in
hand. Nothing the chiefs could have done would stop the epidemic.
This was not their view but it was their situation, and they managed
to muddle through without, for the most part, losing what matters
in politics, their personal followings. The chief least likely to lose a
follower in this system is, paradoxically, the chief who has them all
with him ready to fight whatever comes—provided, I suppose, there
are windmills and lion-tamers enough to keep them busy. ‡‡
Sifting premises
226
about whom there is a definitive myth as a ‘founding father’. A
source of confusion lies in her treatment of ‘Mbasi’ as a hero name—
for Mbasi in her texts lacks a myth (and so an identity?) unambigu-
ously his own. Certainly she nowhere intends to assert any of her
‘hero’ figures are knowable from legendary days as actual leaders of
men or founders of ruling dynasties. They belong not to history but
cosmology. Would the fearfulness of a chiefly ancestor enhance a
chief’s worldly power? Only in this sense: even a chief can pass the
buck upward.
227
Mbasi as a Trickster figure featured in casual folklore and
sometimes in legend. Associated with no fixed address, Mbasi had
no specific portal shrine, no rooting establishment able to continue
over the generations. The divinity was presented in the 1890s as an
unearthly voice (was there a gourd-shell megaphone?) hovering
about in the depth of night, shouting out in the high style of moral
indignation, claiming vast powers of public mischief and offering to
relent only if certain rather trivial material demands were met. The
source of the bellowing was seemingly uncanny and (meant to be)
invisible—i.e. the ghostly divinity himself, unmediated. How far does
this account oblige us to challenge Monica Wilson’s premises?
228
crisis driven by inflamed public opinion? Is the Mbasi oracle treading
on the toes of the Living Lwembe?
The answers I find justified at this point are these: The Mbasi
oracle has a special appeal to the un-chiefly but is driven by self
interest. Public opinion is intermittently aroused by chiefs, priests,
and independent diviners in pursuit of their respective trades. Each
of these trades depends on the manipulation of public opinion. It is a
one-dimensional view of this sophisticated society which would deny
such pragmatic qualities to its leaders and professional practi-
tioners. The Living Lwembe accepts clients at their call and deals
with them by traditional tricks of his trade—he will doubtless be
glad to hear the last of the Mbasi oracle. But Mbasi and Lwembe are
often thought to be the same divinity. An entrepreneurial model fits
the facts better than an ideological one. There are no ‘saviours’ in the
picture.
229
...The numinous quality of the heroes is conceived as contami-
nation, not holiness. Like the shades, the heroes must be ‘driven off’
lest men go mad, and it is when they have driven them away that men
are belu—white, innocent, free of anger. Men should be belu but this is
never cited as an attribute of the pagan Kyala. It is the terribleness,
not the goodness or purity of God of which the Nyakyusa are aware.
This is underlined by the fact that a madman who, ‘when he comes
home rushes off’, and ‘does not see his fellows are human beings,’ and
who ‘has a loose heart’ (i.e., is passionate and quarrelsome), or
‘whose heart curls up like a leaf in the sun, or turns upside down’, is
called ‘Mbasi’ or is said to have been ‘caught hold of by Kyala’. ‡
Now that the wizard was gone, famine came to Kingaland, such as
never before was known there; it was perceived as direct punishment
for the expulsion of such an important man. Emissaries from the
Kinga went after Lwembe with gifts and urgently bade him return to
his homeland, which however he refused. As a return gift he gave the
emissaries seedgrain from local bounty, wherewith uKinga was
blessed with a rich harvest. This wonder produced a great sensation,
and the famed (wizard) Lwembe accordingly became a most
honoured priest. Henceforth at the start of each new growing
season, emissaries were sent him with gifts of cattle and hoes, to
ensure his support for the coming harvest. As with the father so
with the sons, and in the old priest Lwembe’s place his successor
was shown the same honour and credit by the people. After some
time this man devised a new name for himself, saying: ‘God has newly
appeared to me, now my name is Mbasi.’ This new name brought the
wizard great riches. Yet he was no miser but slaughtered for the
emissaries something of what they had brought, and thus these
festivities continued without end. The gods as well were particularly
230
well disposed to him under this new name. There followed a richly
blessed year producing such fruits that in Kondeland bananas
decayed on the stock, and Kingaland as well was unable to consume
all that was grown. Likewise, the wizard understood just how far
ahead to set the time when an Enemy attack should be expected. Lo,
all that Mbasi prophesied was fulfilled. Then came the report as well
to uKinga, that Whites (our missionaries) had come to Kondeland
and settled in to cultivate. The priest-prophet was asked advice, and
he promised they would soon leave. But the prophecy was never
fulfilled, any more than the assurance that all the cattle felled by
pestilence would come back to life. These and other remaining unful-
filled prophecies gradually undermined the popular reputation of the
once so respected priest, who lost his credibility. ‡
231
1960s, though it seems folk were prepared in the 1990s to conceive
of Mbasi rather vaguely as a territorial (translocal and free) divinity
whom they should contact when visiting in the Valley. Unfortunately
he was unavailable. Hübner’s special difficulty may have been in
expecting one cosmos, whereas the myth maker thinks rather in
terms of possible worlds. Here is one of Monica Wilson’s summary
judgements on the case, which bears the signs of information from
interview rather than mission documents alone:
During the years before 1914 a man, with two boys in attendance,
posed as Mbasi and went round Selya by night, growling in a gruff
voice that he was Mbasi, and seizing cattle and fowls and food. He
was eventually taken by night, by some Christians, and died after
seven months’ imprisonment in Tukuyu. ‡
Only one premise can be helpful here in sorting the facts, and
that is easily summarized: popular theological discourse in a socially
and politically turbulent society is unlikely to be self-consistent
from time to time or place to place. Social memory sifts the ‘facts’
of history differently in different affected communities. There is no
canonical form of a myth, unless long after its death it be found in
(to scholarship) a convincing documentary form.
The main support for the premise that ‘tradition’ blows on the
wind is that this seems to be the case quite commonly throughout
the world. The pertinent corollary is that in an animistic cosmos
divinities of varied sorts come and go, flourish in popular fancy and
fade, far more easily than in orthodox worlds. A broad application in
the present instance is simply that a protostate process moves
quite gradually toward the stabilization of a cosmological dispen-
sation which will be a bulwark to political orthodoxy. I have been at
pains to demonstrate that the Kinga had moved farther in this
direction than the Nyakyusa had. The (presumptive) primary reason
for this is setting: the Sanga régimes in the Livingstone Mountains
had far less varied and troublesome social contacts to deal with
than Konde chiefs had. Or perhaps I should simply say that the Kinga
bush culture was relatively homogeneous.
232
Whereas the people who are living near the cult-center on the top
of the hill assured me that until recently they were always waiting
for the “big priest” from uKinga, on the other hand the chief-priest
who is embodying the Hero nowadays told me that quite often he is
ordered by the Kinga to visit them in order to make the rain in the
Livingstone Mountains. ‡
233
the politicians for the vagaries of nature. Pestilence was the work of
spirit beings like Mbasi or Lwembe, two figures often confused in
popular lore. The boycott (in which Weber finds proof of the populist
character of an ‘Mbasi’ movement) in the early months of pax was
imposed by the chiefs and after an appropriate tarrying time
aborted by them. The reason for Angst at the time was a growing
ambiguity in the German presence—growing ambivalence. We may
doubt the boycott would have been aborted if, as happened later on,
the medium’s threat had been backed just then not by the annual
return of vague doubts about the coming of rain but by the drama of
pestilence: rinderpest or a plague of locusts. If it is insecurity that
turns us to our divinities, the certainty we may find there is itself a
turn of mind.
234
Konde cosmology could embrace innumerable spirit beings, any
one of whom might through divination claim responsibility for
punishing acts of some kind, visited on some unlucky individual or
community. As a rule of thumb, I suggest a self-employed diviner
would expect the range of free divinities available in a typical trouble
case would be quite like the range of dead kinsmen close enough to a
client to qualify for blame, or like the range of living kinsmen or
affines who might credibly be accused as witches. There is always a
handful of suspects, never less or more. We have to deal with a
religion of blame not fear, though the distinction may be hard for a
deeply Christian mind to accommodate. In religions of fear, a believer
is responsible, in the manner of a child to an all-seeing parent, for
‘being good’. In classic (ideal-typical) animism divinities are not inter-
ested in your welfare but their own. If a divinity seems to have
punished you, it is not for crossing your neighbour but miffing the
divinity. You will not find a spirit ready to be your moral guardian.
When spirits decide they want something you can give, they will bully
you for it in their own, well recognized ways.
But what I see in the case of Lwembe and the Sanga chiefs is a
neater compound of politics and religion, fear and blame. Where there
is an original sin there is an Original Blame, shared by the multitude.
Only the principals to the original acts against Lwembe can still his
anger. The greater and more general the Angst, the firmer the
court’s hold on its public.
How far the Konde mind had shifted from classic animism
toward a tenuous (poly)theism we can’t know precisely. Peter Weber
finds support in the symbolism literature for taking Lwembe as the
first Konde sky-god. For Kinga, in any event, Lwembe is certainly and
radically chthonic. But from what the Wilsons found in the 1930s I
believe any Konde shift from shades to gods, when Christian and
some Muslim overlays are set aside, was more apparent than real.
235
The main free divinity then who seemed to be making a transition to
a post-animist cosmos was Kyala, but that is only as one might have
expected. He had been adopted by the Missions, and the rhetoric of
deism is catching.
236
become too spongy for use without special gloss. I have tried to
show that the ‘rival cult hypothesis’ implicit in the revisionists’
argument doesn’t fit the facts as known.
237
but the advantage of the native Konde speaker was in experience
and tactics. Mwamafungubo had apparently been living by his wits
for some years as a roving presence (nuisance) in the Konde
community: the evidence is that he had already collected for himself
a small herd of cattle and a modest company of wives. When his
original effort to present as a client to the Germans failed, he
claimed them as his clients—he had brought them in. When next they
cried ‘Shetani’ he cried it back. They were straight and he was slick.
So I read the case. But just as we don’t style this Mbasi as a rival of
the Mission, we don’t style him as a ‘rival’ of the established priest-
hoods. He is a thorn in their side. He doesn’t threaten to replace
them. The ethnography shows the Lwembe, with his arduous taboos,
as a priest among priests, not a free-spirited ‘doctor among
doctors’.‡
238
better farming technics, moving into more sparsely settled parts of
the larger Sowetan region. We may picture loosely connected pedes-
trian communities embedded in a gradual flow of individual culture
bearers looking, in the main, for a marginally better living but encoun-
tering resistance of the sort which intensifies a need for adaptive
change. One result is the emergence of new political institutions.
Another is the elaboration of new ways of dealing with the kind of
private woe which stresses social ties. We have two novelties which
are made for each other.
239
Divinities’ names can operate as concepts in legendary
narrative. This hero of folk fiction is indeed a hero of legend to those
who find themselves wrestling against tyranny—let us grant that is
what, for some, his story could be about. But when Lwembe is
approached in time of trouble it is not as a potentially friendly inter-
cessor but as a fierce divinity whose anger has been roused. If ‘Mbasi’
seems to share all his magic but little of his majesty with ‘Lwembe’,
there may be ground to grant Mbasi less weight. I fear we know too
little about this, but we do know that the Konde Lwembe and the
Kinga are not deeply one and the same.
The attitude of the living toward the dead was one of respect and
honour, but not predominantly one of avoidance and fear as among
some of the neighboring tribes. ‡
240
Mizimu (spirits) of ancestors were occasionally identified by
vyanusi (izanusi: i.e. diviners, doctors, prophets) as causing personal
misfortune or illness, but oral accounts indicate that such
instances were infrequent. Rather than assigning personal problems
to ungratified mizimu, the Ngoni felt that most cases of misfortune
and unexplainable problems could be traced to witchcraft. ‡
241
Prophecy: Ngoni kingdoms as we know them in pre- and post-
contact times from Malawi and Zambia had incorporated so many
diverse practitioners of diagnosis and prophecy as to stir up a true
efflorescence in these occult arts. Considering prophecy as no office
but a calling, recruitment to the role is not by routine but animus.
Cults of affliction of every sort are reported not just for Ngoni but
Cewa and many other unconquered peoples in the Central Africa
region south of the Malawi-Tanzania Corridor. Most occult arts are
everpresent in one form or another in East Africa as well, going
through periods of dormancy and arousal in response to
troublesome events. Where a protostate process is underway good
statecraft means controlling (co-opting) as much of this action as
possible. Famously, one Ngoni tyrant set a trial assignment—a trap,
indeed—to all the diviners under his court, and executed most of
them for toadying. Still the calling lived on. A prophet’s fame is
proverbially far from home. Boys pass on magic tales from one end of
the continent to another. When the times are out of joint, new
prophets will pop up. Malatan culture, in the canonical version,
tended to institutionalize prophecy through the portal cults, rulers’
ancestral shrines, and the carefully staged ordeal. Ngoni influence by
example would have been, on the one hand, to light up ambitious
young prophets everywhere; and on the other to point the benefits
of cooptation for the local ruler. But Ngoni influence by intrusion
would have been to heat up an already turbulent society, creating a
bull-market in certainties.
242
inner life not even as plausibly called ‘observable’ as the scene
already presented. Consider how important it has been, and how
difficult, to be aware of the difference between informant-models of
the Nyakyusa polity and actual (deemed most probable) practice.
Now apply the same consideration to ideas held about religious
matters. It is hard enough to be sure what those ideas were in the
1930s, and harder still to have anything certain to say about the
generative ideas which would have prevailed in the 1890s. Then
comes the task of reconstructing praxis: everyday life and response
to crisis. Still, having once recognized that the record can afford us
few certainties, we need to ask how we should deal with what
remains. When all is said, that means consulting the empirical
evidence, and it is not insubstantial.
243
at least have known through their Kinga colleagues. I have pointed
out that the Mbasi figure refers to a traveler with magical powers,
an animal maker in exile on account of those powers from his native
community. Usweve, who was sought to for relief from locust
plagues, was described by Kinga as an exiled rainmaker. He would have
been an autochthonous practitioner, first banished by a new Sanga
lord as a rival for authenticity, then by a successor on office urgently
but vainly wanted back. Other rainmakers, invaluable for the very
localness of their wisdom, in other domains did return, but Usweve
was unyielding. What we have then is a paradigmatic expression of an
animistic religion of blame, in which the narrative hero is first object,
then subject of righteous indignation. As with Lwembe, Usweve
proved himself a free divinity by plaguing his people. A witchlike figure,
envied and exiled, he escapes with supernaturally magnified powers
of terror-and-forgiveness over former friends and kin. It is a formula
which must have been applied to many more divinities than we can
reliably name. Joseph Campbell might welcome Usweve or Lwembe
into the company of his omnificent Hero, if only they would desert
their underworld abodes and claim the miracle of rebirth. I suppose
what is really at the heart of the Malatan hero myth is the logic of
social leverage. Our Mbasi impersonator was playing the very
trickster character of the legendary narrative, using special powers
to escape the trammels and injustices of the normal human
condition. We are dealing still with jealous not generous divinities.
The diameters of fear and blame, deprivation and feasting, anger and
forgiveness are dramatized wherever misfortune offers leverage—a
people informs its understanding of the cosmos, always hoping the
better to sense the part which human will must play in it. ‡ ‡
To this little homily I would add that ritual intercourse with the
spirit world in the Malatan region is esoteric. Since most people
won’t have had close and direct contact with even one major cult
centre but depend on priests for interlocution, common speech in
any part of this orally grounded culture may have its own plan as to
the importance, location, or proper name of address for any resident
spirits. About certain things priests themselves are bound to
disagree: chunks of narrative are borrowed and turned about, history
is improvised and the teller is always ready to recognize his protag-
onist by some other name. If the name ‘Mbasi’ in the episodes we
know was used to identify a spirit without a shrine and quite
possibly without free-willing clients, there were certainly many appli-
cations of that same name and many not kept for posterity. If there
is a single point to have in mind it is that Kinga/Konde culture is a
manifold system, all of which will never be seen in the frame an
outsider may regard as properly ‘evidential’.
244
Swahili’s two common terms for occult power, uchawi and ulozi,
have Malatan counterparts. Kinga favour a cognate to the one
(uvuhavi) and Nyakyusa a cognate to the other (ubulosi). Both words
translate as ‘witchcraft’ in english, though our ‘witch-hunt’ connota-
tions are usually misleading. Any account of the context of Malatan
witch belief should start by inquiring into the cast of mind which
equates legitimate moral authority with access to arcane power. Is
this a simple form of rank concession, or is it a yet subtler way out of
responsibility? Can the apprehension of your friend or your wife as a
witch be seen as a begrudging concession of rank in the presocial
order—the actual-cum-unofficial power scale—of your social world?
That is the order in which egos swim or sink. Tunginiye perceived a
threat from his friend which he could not withstand. By conceding
deadly powers to the other, and turning to a doctor able to match
them, Tunginiye experienced an estranging victory in his presocial
world and a heartening cure in the fully socialized world he could
return to. Had Tunginiye failed to survive, the idea of witchcraft
would have had shadowy confirmation and would have attached
itself to his suspected aggressor. Had his self-diagnosis led the
‘victim’ to a priest of the court instead of a doctor-friend, there
would have been no victory for anyone in the (ensuing) ordeal, and the
tale would have had no hero but the court itself. That is the kind of
drama I think reveals an essential political value in owning narrative
truth.
245
More I can’t say, but the measure of agreement by elders inter-
viewed in several domains was confirming. It is clear that Usweve was
considered in some circles to be just as tough as Lwembe, and I
suppose he was retrospectively married into the Lwembe line to
assign him a clear status as ally rather than rival. This may have been
needed, as Usweve (in the 1960s) was not as well known as Lwembe
in all parts of Kinga country. There are no documentary records for
an Usweve pilgrimage such as there are for the Lwembe cult centre,
and I know of no confirming notes from a supposed Usweve site in
Rungwe district. ‡‡
246
Weber in the 1990s that it probably was annual) but in response to
general ‘unrest’ of one kind or another, and as the main concerns of
the pilgrim-priests were to make firm connections with professional
colleagues all along the way, particularly within uKinga, the show
seems never to have happened quite the same way twice. It is easy
enough to accommodate all the conflicting stories recorded about
details, if you bear in mind each has reference to particular under-
takings and events of different date.
247
diverse priests, wherein to play the kind of solemn waiting-game
required. The sociology of the Lwembe shrine makes clear that in
response to plague or fear of drought the only politick solution for
the court’s priests was to be seen still hard at work on the problem
until the turmoil of fear had begun to fade of itself. Still, I do not put
it past Mbasi’s oracle to have accosted the Kinga priests, and they
would have been out of their own bailiwick. Failing intercession by a
career priest familiar with the oracle, how would the career priests
of uKinga respond?
248
description (since called PaliKyala, Kyala’s place) between Ikombe and
the market centre at Matema. Though in the longer run the eviction
of the Kyala oracle, with its move much closer to population centres
in the Plains area, may have been good for business, it’s hard to
believe the status of Kyala in the regional pantheon was not
affected during the early German period, in the 1890s. Then once
‘Kyala’ was taken up as the Christian name for God, the operation of
the shrine would have reflected new ambiguities. But I think we
should suppose the Konde, like the Kinga, rather enjoyed than
deplored the license ambiguity could lend their cosmic speculum.
(1) All the Kinga chiefs when praying in the sacred groves say the
names of their fathers who have died, and also the names of
Nkekete, Kyala, and Lwembe, in that order.
(2) Nkekete and Kyala only made crops—millet and beans. We ask
for fertility of the soil, and sunshine, and rain from them, but not
animals. From Lwembe we ask for milk, and fertility of men and cattle,
and snakes, and goats, and sheep, and all crops. Lwembe has every-
thing. We ask for sunshine and rain from Lwembe as well.
(3) When Lwembe went down into Selya he found the hill people
and the people of the plain already there. They feared him because he
had all things, and they still fear him. He was greater than Nkekete.
They cut Nkekete’s throat, but they couldn’t kill Lwembe. ‡
249
figures result from the conjunction of ethnically separate traditions
with mutually-borrowed narrative plots. Or the matter might better
be settled more simply: in a regional culture like the Malatan all tradi-
tions will be heard in many dialects and versions. One man in a fairly
representative case might well in his lifetime subscribe to several of
them without sensing a difficulty. Kikungubeja, as arbiter of differ-
ences, must feel compelled to give a syncretic account: so all these
free divinities become ‘brothers’ within the Sanga ruling line. Other
expert tellers splice in other names and events. The myth remains
readable.
What the myth says (one of its readings) is that free divinities
are created when a superior kind of human being can’t be tolerated by
the political establishment, and is inadvertently ‘kicked upstairs’ (or
more correctly, down). Such divinities can best be understood as
antipolitan heroes. It is thus that all the free divinities we have to
consider for the Malatan region are tagged with the same narrative
schema: magical feats—exile—apotheosis as a chthonic divinity.
250
the critical difference between Kinga and Konde settings it may be
well to revisit the ‘case of Mbasi’ one more time.
This time we ask why the local Nyakyusa chiefs were willing to
lend credibility to Mbasi’s ‘herdsman’, almost to the point of
dropping their own ‘great game’ of internecine contest and turning
as one against the apparently benevolent missions. I take it as given
that the herdsman’s claims, counterclaims, and reverses of field
were not simply so adroitly done and so compelling as to explain the
hostile boycott of the missionaries in which most of the courts
joined. It appears the deciding factor was simply that the powers of
the chiefs were not equal to meeting natural (territory-wide)
challenges. These they would normally pass over to their priestly
colleagues; but these colleagues were even less well prepared to act
as a body than the chiefs. The Mbasi claimant was the man on the
spot on whom to off-load popular concerns about rain, dread signs of
change, and (eventually) rinderpest and locusts. Whereas the Sanga
prince had a fully established priestly entourage to turn to when
trouble arose which, of its nature, transgressed local boundaries,
the Konde prince had to deal with only transitory boundaries and a
plurality of distinctly individualistic priests, some of aristocratic
and some of commoner hue, scattered among residential enclaves of
chiefdoms of varying size and maturity. Crucially, the time-and-
spatial scheme of breakup and consolidation given by the ubusooka
institution would often if not always have left the personal links
between secular and sacred leadership tenuous. This stands in
contrast to the self-integrated Sanga system, in which continuity
of power was guarded by a co-opted priesthood whose every
interest lay in keeping close to the secular powers it served.
251
witch, brought to the high court at Ukwama, had all the drama of high
treason, as if to prove that if the ordinary ordeal had failed to find
the witch, Destiny itself would take over. I find it hard to picture the
equivalent in the Selya I can reconstruct from testimony taken well
under a lifetime after traditional times. The standing of a ruling chief
was not, as the Lwembe oracle was, set apart and high enough.
252
medium’ has told us much about the state of both religion and
politics in Kondeland. I have called it turbulent and stressed the
contrast, if always in shades of grey, to Kingaland. Client-rulers in
the Sanga system are given a piece of the political periphery of their
domain to develop as they will. Their competition is in the business of
recruiting strong followers, not besting internal rivals in power ploys.
Client rulers (fledgling chiefs) in a Nyakyusa setting are launched
into a harder game, either to win conspicuously or inconspicuously
lose.
253
Political management strategies in ‘amity societies’ are quite
different to those in kin-based polities. Because the Nyakyusa
people as a whole were never left without firmly constituted central
authorities (having many chiefdoms, never in sync), and since they
were politically advanced enough to abhor a vacancy in high office,
they seem to have achieved stability over a long run through
switching loyalties, even though local pockets of low-level turbulence
were a chronic feature of the landscape. The genius of the Konde
system shows best in their age-village institution. By maximizing
kith-based male solidarity, and doing so in an especially effective
fashion, these rules gave light but durable weight to locked-in
loyalties, greater weight to moral suasion. The peculiarity of this
constitution can be called ‘bottom heavy politics’. That is, closed
pedestrian communities ultimately made the choice who to follow
into battle. Translocal power—power at a high level of protostate
structure—was only to be achieved by competing with one’s princely
colleagues for the loyalty of a number of autonomous commoner
villages. For Kinga on the one hand, the antipolitan option of
disloyalty was open only to unaided individuals. For Nyakyusa it was
also open to whole villages of able-bodied men. Again, the ‘case of
Mbasi’ provides the evidence that an aspiring chief could be
deserted by his commoner villages as well as his mentors.
254
the scenes we see played out there are a hundred political huddles—
steering committees, watching each turn and planning moves. Or call
it a school.
255
empowerment but for setting their persons at arm’s length from
the problems their clients might bring them, and for dazzling
doubters. Would a deity share his wife with a herdsman? It is easier
with a Kinga prophet to accept that the wizardry, though mercenary
and made explicit, comes from the spirit world.
256
is rife with social types of any stripe, people who play their roles for
all they are worth, each at his or her own pleasure. The problem a
star performer has is to establish the charismatic frame a good act
needs if it is to work every time. In a protostate context that means
pulling strings. In the Kinga case there was a clear path to legiti-
mation. Hikadiseku needn’t play off one secular authority against
another. She pays off the High Prince in the same tender he chooses
to entertain and bind his own clients. But the ventriloquist cowherd
Mwamafugubo (a.k.a. Mbasi) has no such simple option: political
demesnes are fuzzily defined, the mazeways to legitimacy all dead-
ended. He is not destined like Hikadiseku to die beloved of his
countrymen. The difference is structural.
257
Only a forcefully assertive entrant could hope to prove himself in the
open political arena born of the ubusooka process. In uKinga there are
several famous cases of warrior-princes of the best Nyakyusa type,
whereas in the canonical version of the four Sanga high courts,
charisma and fierceness were for the youth of a prince-in-waiting, to
be put behind him on his ceremonial accession to rule. The (extrapro-
cessual) charismatic war-leaders best-remembered in 1960 were of
the final precontact decades. Ngotwilwe (father of or at least
predecessor in office to Sihudika in the East) had thrown the
gauntlet to the high prince of that realm. This Eastern realm was the
one soon to be shown on the German maps as Manduba’s, but the
seat of the realm was in a small, hilly domain (Igolwa, only a half day’s
walk from Ukwama), which was being dwarfed by the expanding
domain to the east. Whether Ngotwilwe was set firmly on the path
of secession, or (as I think more likely) envisaged claiming his own
domain as the ‘true’ seat of the Eastern realm, we can’t know. This is
the realm whose oral history vanished in the Maji Maji slaughter of
1905-6. In the Western realm the two Kyelelos, father and son, were
embroiled in civil war for dominance over an expanded realm pressing
into Mahanzi country. At contact, the elder (Kyelelo I the Cruel) had
finally retired in favour of his son (Kylelelo II the Cruel), and was
withdrawn to the older seat at Ihanga, just where he had in his youth
assassinated and usurped the throne of his father’s brother to
begin his career. Such seemingly errant cases are presumably echoes
of the way the original Sanga system grew—here are the vital
mechanisms of the protostate process, while the canonical consti-
tution I had from my best informants is the normative ‘structure’
toward which each of the four realms may be thought to have been
growing.
258
Sanga courts didn’t internally segment their recruits or allow the
formation of entrenched power cliques. Freedom of association was
built into the bachelor lifestyles of both gender groups but always
with this special ballast: dyadic withdrawal was not countenanced.
Bonding within the peer tie was not to be exclusive.
259
We see the contrast in their main institutions. Kinga and
Nyakyusa youths both must prove themselves in cattle raids not for
their private herds but their elders’. But when it comes to war itself,
Kinga men practice in war games, organized like a professional sport,
not the flare-ups and skirmishes so frequently cited for Nyakyusa.
Kinga and Nyakyusa both organize much of their lives primarily
around amity. But Kinga never switch from the amity-base of youth
to a domestic wealth-building phase of rampant polygyny and patria
potestas. Nyakyusa do so with a vengeance, and create dual struc-
tures of generationally stratified kinship on the one hand and
narrowly focused peer amity on the other.
The two protostates fared quite differently under the pax. For
Kinga there was a continual accumulation of decreed constitutions,
the new one always jacketing the old, all of them subtly fused in a
single ideal model to be used pragmatically ‘on the ground’ in sorting
out one’s options according to practical opportunity. In this way
time seemed not to erase the past but to continue and build on it.
There was less talk than I expected of ‘good old days’ among Kinga,
much more about great days to come. Past times in recollection
conformed to the same template as these or future times. It was a
challenge for the anthropologist to jog an informant back to the
specific conditions which must have prevailed in an earlier decade. A
little example would be the many informants who would assert that
late marriage among men must always have been due to difficulty
finding the bridewealth, all in the context of conversation stressing
the opposite—the ease with which a young man in the old days might
fetch himself the two hoes and goats he would need, once the need
was felt. The anomaly reflected no simple lack-logic but the persis-
tence of the feel of life today in the imagined life for an earlier gener-
ation. The prevailing premise was cultural continuity, and that is a
self-fulfilling premise on the deeper levels of being. The opposite was
the case young men made for Monica Wilson in the 1950s, when
generational awareness had taken on the colour of class
consciousness, and the young were restless for the autonomy a
traditional Coming Out had once thrust upon them.
260
Bantu societies are dependent, perdure the kind of fracture which
ends friendship. The bright side of this shines in the wisdom of the
West and may be taken for granted. Of the darker side it may be too
simple to say most of the cramping done to human psyches occurs
when an ego is ‘trapped’ in a relationship, but the remark agrees with
general experience. Konde and Kinga share a way of life which keeps a
male child from being ‘trapped’ in a too-close parental tie; Kinga
provide this privilege also to female children. A community which
allows scope to amity in its social architecture produces individuals
who have established freely chosen intimacy with a series of other
individuals on the basis of social compatibility. I know this gives rise
to lively mind-games (songs, stories, skits, riddles, innuendo) among
Kinga lads and among Kinga maidens in their private houses, and
can’t doubt the same applies to Konde youth. ‡
261
If what was new was the phenomenon of ‘worship’, what
Lutheran worship built on was the Apollonian style of Kinga celebra-
tions generally, their quick switch to gaiety, the lightness of their
expressive style on jubilant occasions. The difference to Konde style
is not abrupt but is deep. Social forms may look alike, but the
dramatic side of a dance is less conflicted, more predictably amiable
in outcome. Nyakyusa funerals are frenetic, Kinga come together
quietly, keen mainly in low voice, and depart quietly as well. Ruth
Benedict would surely find little of the Dionysian about them, though
this is not to say drinking parties can’t lead to fighting of an
unscheduled kind—fights “always forgotten by tomorrow.” ‡
262
thought a great spectacle and high fun for the participants if not
too much of the blood were their own. But as with a boys’ cudgel-
throwing fight or mock warfare, no enmity arose even from an
accidental death. Anger was simply not on the menu. In the feast
and dancing which followed, the Dionysian element was gone.
263
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER SEVEN
The kind of moral claims a child can lodge upon a parent or peer
are the child’s to discover through incident as often as instruction,
though modern life has seemed to alter the balance with formal
schooling. A lifetime narrative under classic human conditions moves
through what Meyer Fortes called the internal domain of social
relations and proceeds with growing sophistication into the external
domain of public institutions. In each successive stage, the ordinary
person of either gender confronts new problems in conceiving a
successful strategy for conceiving and securing a good life. Included
in the Everyman narrative are such choices as conceding or claiming
advantage, honing or neglecting skills, keeping up with tasks or
letting things go, hounding or begrudging or letting-be in close
relations, and in-public policies of flagrancy or modesty, narcissism
or comity. A thousand and one shades of moral value may be applied
to anything you say or do in any community, from a sandbox to a city,
and each choice colors your life. The idea that life in some far corner
264
of the world can be unmeditated, a sightseeing drift down river never
lifting the paddle, is airy and not for Everyman. ‡‡
265
cultural settings doesn’t disqualify as an Everyman narrative. We
can still read it for the social structures encountered and the strat-
egies evoked, not just for keys to individual character. But as
disparate contexts multiply, useful comparison diminishes. I propose
to compare the structure of experience in three cultures within a
single region. The peoples are related through a long history of
contact. Culturally the Kinga are most closely related to the
Pangwa, who traditionally lived very much in the style of traditional
bush-culture Kinga. Politically, Kinga are very much closer to the
Nyakyusa (Konde). I make an initial declaration here that incongru-
ities in the Pangwa-Konde-Kinga series are manageable. I find their
differences instructive, not random, not baffling. There is no impli-
cation that I see the series as rectilinear. A better figure would be
three paintings by the same hand, but on distinct themes—or the
other way around. I deal with the same range of problems (‘core
problems’?) in each case.
266
given social maze at the speed of time, person and world momen-
tarily merge, emerging a moment later marginally altered. The point
of taking the three cases together is to present the structure and
experience of three historic versions of the regional culture, so
aligned as to represent—as touchstone models—three successive
stages in the phase movement from ‘acephalous’ to ‘pyramidal’
political systems. In this four-dimensional modeling the principal
sanction of social order self-transforms through its motion along an
ideal continuum from ‘taboo’ to ‘law’. But ‘taboo’, as the term is used
here, does need special explanation. There is a lot of wisdom to
dispel.
267
looking for symbolic expressions of solidarity, there are a number of
well-studied societies where the clanship (highest segmentary) level
would be an obvious answer. If you were looking for military adequacy,
you might be led by the scale of fighting forces people say were most
often mobilized in ‘the old days’. But if you looked for minimal social
and economic reliance on (and responsibility for the welfare of)
members of other ‘segments’ at the same structural level I think you
would find yourself looking at domestic groups. In a school
playground, who is going to watch your back for you, if you don’t? In a
kinship society, however strong the ritual rhetoric of cooperation
with kin, who is going to feed and manage your children if you don’t?
These were not merely abstract concerns in Malanduku « [Twin
Shadows], though the answers you would get there to those
questions would scarcely point to any easily recognized, solidary
‘domestic group’. Still, the existence of domestic groups considered
as solidary units can be asserted even for traditional Kinga settle-
ments, though the family members are spatially dispersed. It is
something we discover when we inquire into taboos on intimacy of
the sorts commonly recognized as incestuous. Does dispersal in
space, by reducing everyday intimacies, concomitantly reduce the
call for strict incest taboos? It seems not. Better consider the
possibility that the dispersal itself is an expression of such taboos.
268
persons in either gender group will show that ‘fear of incest’ is only
one aspect of the problem of intimate rights which haunts the
Everyman narrative everywhere. Since I conceive the nature of taboo
as both more interesting and more elementary than most do, I’ll try
to make my notions clear in the pages which follow in this section,
before turning to Fr. Stirnimann’s Pangwa. They were, in the image his
informants elaborated of their past, a swimmingly taboo-ridden
people.
269
But a viable political system which doesn’t have roots in ‘family
ties’ remains to be described in the world’s ethnography. A good
handful of societies are well known, which seem to keep family
solidarity minimal by locating primary autonomy at the level of a local
band comprising several small family groups in close intimacy. This
may be thought of as ‘treating the band as a family’. The Kinga
system is by contrast a micro-diaspora—tight family bonds which
however are not allowed to compete with the members’ intimacy
with unrelated peers. Now ‘tight family bonds’ arise from the web of
taboo (ritual) not law, and constitute the primary frame for estab-
lishing the web of personal identity without which law can’t function.
270
experience. If parents can’t depend on a child to do most of the work
in the development of successful moral strategies in the early home
years, it will take a mighty struggle to produce a half-way socialized
adult. ‘Taboo’ connotes not only avoidance but safekeeping. Every
episode of intimate interaction has a two-way sanctioning
dimension. Is it not taboo to wound your friend’s pride? By its
nature, the phenomenon calls not for mutuality but reciprocity—
asymmetric but not one-sided. The kind of role behaviour which
makes intimate coexistence possible entails kinesthetic, linguistic,
and moral fitting of the self to the invisible forms of others. This has
to be ‘learned by doing’ and like correct speech has to be intuitively
understood, abhorring ‘explanations’.
271
child’s sexual awareness matures would regularly carry a new burden
of meaning with it.
272
Taboo has sometimes been assumed to have merged with and
disappeared into law in the course of recent human history: taboo
being taken as touchstone for a ‘primitive’ and law for a ‘civilized’
world. But quite apart from the burden of hubris implied in the
assumption, it is not the case that taboo disappears into law. The
microcultures described by anthropologists in the century past
have ranged from lightly to strictly ritualistic. And where is our own
to be placed? When we consider sociological studies of ‘modern
society’ it is not only the military and ecclesiastical orders which
look heavily ritualistic. Linguistic, political, and gender rules can be
laden with penalties no mere, self-supporting jural system could
maintain. Their sustenance is rather from the unquestioned accep-
tance of the subject population—Durkheim’s ‘diffuse sanctioning’. If
there have been times in your own career when ‘crime in the streets’
was no public problem the reason was not better laws but greater
‘spontaneous respect for the rules’ (taboos) guiding civility—rules
the most enlightened law cannot implant. If there have been times
when unenlightened mob rule has taken over a community, the reason
was the weakness of jural interventions meant to sponsor program-
matic change in the ‘spontaneous’ (taboo-based) values of that
community. The range of felt threats to social order anywhere,
whether in the synoptic comparison of different peoples or in
surveying longrun oscillations within a single culture flow, is only from
light to grave, never non-existent. But if Hell and Shangri-la sound
like storybook stuff, still the non-fictive differences within the range
between can be monumental.
Taboo and law are not alternative means to one end but
separate formulae for social control which work together in organic
fashion. One source of our problems has been the use of ‘ritual’ (as in
distinguishing ‘the political order’ from ‘the ritual order’) as referring
to the master class containing ‘religion’ plus ‘magic-and-super-
stition’. ‘Ritual’ was chosen (reluctantly, I believe, in the case of
Meyer Fortes and his circle) in an effort to escape the knotty
question where the line between two religion-like phenomena shall be
drawn. The usage unluckily seemed to imply there was no ritual in
political life, in marriage and adolescence, in the framing of moral
careers—and no politics in the ordeal. For ‘ritual’ in just such context
we may have to substitute ‘taboo’ to suggest how wrong the usage
was which seemed to deny deep mystique to a Hitler rally or a very
high tea.
273
social danger. For ‘sacralization’ when applying the word to an insti-
tution one may sometimes read ‘casting in bronze’. Institutional
wisdoms pre-empt individual liberty. As a sailor’s channel buoys are
meant to narrow down his freedom of secure manoeuvre, an ‘incest
taboo’ narrows the freedom of action between any self and certain
others, and does so in a way we had as well call mundane as mystical.
A taboo is a marker in social space which fends you off, just as
perfume or a siren song may be a marker drawing you (perhaps with
just the right degree of fear and trembling) into a zone of danger.
Thinking of taboo as a bugaboo stirring instant trepidation is
dramatic but more fanciful than scholarly standards require. Social
markers may be the more effective the subtler their form. When the
institution in question is as close to your roots as your natal
domestic group, taboo merges enigmatically with identity. To see
that social identities couldn’t begin to exist and serve their political
purpose without the taboos that ordinarily protect and stabilize
them, we only need consider the appalling breakdown of social order
in a spate of ‘new states’ in Africa, starting in the middle and
restarting toward the end of the twentieth century. I think particu-
larly of arming preadolescent boys with the high-tech weapons of
mass murder.
274
My brief here is not that taboo is or isn’t a feature of human
nature. I think the only taboo which scholars have quite often
attributed to human nature is the ban on incestuous sex, and that
scholarly position is controverted by clear evidence. The Zande ruling
clan is one of those ‘swollen kin groups’ the incest taboo elsewhere
militates against. We simply have there a politically deliberate
exception to the rule, which tests and refines our understanding of
it. Here is a clan which as a political expedient can afford to
encourage brother-sister incest. The main gain in the king’s eye is
perhaps to forestall the court’s young princes fraternizing with
commoners, magnifying the risk of royals developing independent
loyalties and ultimately obscuring in a new generation the divide
between ruler and ruled. ‡‡
275
of the spontaneous rightness of the rule in isaka thought, for no
other institution was normally involved. For maidens, the bachelor
years were the peak period of private pleasure of a lifetime, and
those gregarious maidenly years extended over the best two
decades of a woman’s life. Does it seem paradoxical that the taboo
of coitus, so negative in itself, should underpin an existence of high
spirits, self confident friendships, and (often enough) confidently
generous conduct? Readers who are agreeably acquainted with one
of the Lesbian sisterhoods on scene today will not find it so. We have
again the case of a taboo with ‘spontaneous’ staying power, even
while the oblique appeal of Christian young women’s sodalities was
making inroads in the 1960s. I think it behoves us to accept taboo as
an effective mechanism of social control, ontologically prior to
coercive law, and universally present as the rule-stuff of which all
human institutions, beginning with the family, are made.
276
existence? Isn’t it from private experience repeatedly coming to
expression in a contagious form? and isn’t that most likely to
happen when private intention moves a person toward the intuition
of value? The ultimate result when there is continuity enough and
generations of time is the emergence of a quite particular
community’s quite particular culture. You hardly need read much
news of the world to realize how little the private arts of living in
amity with colleagues in a culture have improved in a century of
stunning technological advances. The explanation we most hear is
dissonance: dissonance in the cultures which have taken form in the
century past, answering dissonance in private experience. It is a time
when we are prone to seeing every conceivable taboo being broken. It
is a time when cultural dissonance may seem to have filled the
prisons of the richest countries in a trend beyond the scope of law
to control. Does it make sense to ask if taboo, considered as the
matrix of law, might have a regenerative power in such a world? (How
many world leaders today are wearing the signal clerical garb?)
277
ideas about the kind of ill fortune at risk may be fuzzy enough. Stay
out of danger and the problem does not appear. Break with your
taboos and—only wait—it must. Each member of the cast has got
to consider the moral options for action in redress. For each, the
existential triangle remains a private space, but for the errant one
the sense of privacy is shaken or may shatter. We see this obliquely
in the way a court can protect the privacy of mind of an accused,
holding that, whatever the crime, a suspect may not be forced to
testify. Such rights of privacy, meant to spare the court the onus of
forcing an obvious breach of taboo, at once guard the fiction that
courts discover truth, and honour the perishable value of the human
conscience. In it resides a person’s responsiveness to the rules of
decency whose force is only born of Taboo—fear not of measured
authority’s intervention but of wrong itself. Without the socially
fostered attribute of persons which we call conscience, Law has lost
that legitimacy of good faith which makes it viable. Who watches the
watchman if it be not the people themselves? But they must do so,
if they will, spontaneously.
278
Nyakyusa taboos relate to a very different lifestyle to the Kinga, but
the difference is not an ‘apples and oranges’ case—more like Court-
lands and Gravensteins. There is a hand-in-glove, systemic relation
between Kinga taboos and Kinga behaviour, the same for Nyakyusa.
Of course we won’t insist this hand made this glove or vice versa. But
glove is shaped to hand in either community, and vice versa, because
in the case of culture and habit there can be no priority. Of course
taboos are man made just as laws are, though the one may be lightly
attributed to a god, the other to a Solomon. It is only misleading to
link taboos any more than laws to a mindless ‘Tradition’. That would
be to say people were able to make cultures in illo tempore but aren’t
up to it today. The idea of a modulated culture flow at the speed of
time is better than the cultural creationism implicit in earlier
teaching.
279
For the most part, labeling popular tendencies in patterns of
individual preference in this way (calling them ‘values’) does little
mischief. It is a convenient shorthand which, however, reflects an
observer bias toward dogmatism, as though values could not exist
unpreached. The processual aspect of a culture is masked, leaving us
with a puzzle: How are values formed? How do they change? How well
can we expect them to stabilize community life? These questions
are particularly relevant to anthropological studies, which usually
deal with relatively non-dogmatic human communities. I have taken
the position that one’s way in life is, and is bound by our human
nature to be, found crucially by intuitive thought and interpersonal
discovery not instruction. This is especially clear in Kinga and
Nyakyusa cases, where children run their own homes. When proper
conduct is ‘taught’ only in rule-of-thumb prohibitions, a way has to
be found around these roadblocks, but there is no equivalent to our
dogmatic moral principles—meeting bourgeois (godly) standards of
acceptability and the like. Where values become explicit they are
coded into daily discourse and doubtless have a conservative
function. Where they remain implicit they pervade Everyman’s
experience in his social world at the level of that stream of infinit-
essimal events which cumulatively give direction to a community’s
persistence and change over generations.
280
word had found its way into polite discourse. Even today the open
discussion of taboo in self-reference remains awkward. If your moral
strategies are based on acquiring and relying on the taboos appro-
priate to being who and where you are, exhuming them can mean
losing hard-won self-confidence—the kind of being-in-the-world
which goes under the rubric of ‘human dignity’. When psychotherapy
‘goes deep’ in search of the particular roadblocks a person has
encountered in the pursuit of a successful life-strategy, a terrible
dilemma arises: you are not asked to discard your ‘self’ because you
cannot, but you are asked to shrug off some long-buried encounters
with dread which have ‘always’ guided you—and with slim rational
assurance of finding your own way forward again. Taboo marks
danger, and danger marks us all. The experience need not be
traumatic to go deep. There is no fixed time- lapse.
281
recent writers, as opposed to the ‘magicality’ focus of much popular
and anthropological thinking on the matter. The deeper aspects of
taboo require us to be aware of the privacy of mind from which,
through the centrality of moral strategy in the human career, a
‘system of public values’ is rendered possible. Taboo is maintained
primarily by usage, secondarily by tradition. Crucial to this, taboo is
reinforced by the privately harboured presentiment of ineluctable
danger, without which external sanctions on behaviour are relatively
impotent. ‡‡
282
increased migration of culturally assimilated Kinga and Wemba into
the depopulated areas of uPangwa. [II: 14]
283
courts were persuaders against resistance from the bush
community as it moved from a first-contact situation to a fully
fledged minor court. Sanga were, indeed, in the process of spreading
by settlement across the Mgiwe/Kilondo river (variously named on
various maps) which was the natural feature the British later used
om setting up their ‘tribal areas’. That boundary settlement in 1926
‘orphaned’ substantial ethnic-Kinga populations in the north of
Pangwa tribal area and again in the trans-Mgiwe parts of Wemba
territory, which were eventually allotted to uBena. Sanga rule, be it
noted, lost nothing in the British boundary manoeuvres, as the new
‘tribal area’ gained more on other fronts than it lost in the east.
What the new regime meant was that many men paid taxes and took
their trouble cases to a new baraza. The new order did not officially or
practically close any boundaries, but did put an end to the game of
expanding Sanga rule by sending out client rulers to reorganize
acephalous bush communities.
284
porated. A drum dance, or the like, may follow. The only sensible way
to sort out three cultural communities on such a continuum is by
scaling them—which depends more on dramatics, which more on
performative symbolism. Modest as our information is in each case, I
think it is enough to scale the ritual systems of our three Malatan
communities. Kinga, for one instance, do make some use of puberty
rites. The male rite, which is supposed to treat a group of boys from
a given locality, seems always to have been honoured in folklore more
than deed. There is no memory of a feastful dance afterward, and no
circumcision even in token form, and no explicit ritual change of
status. For girls there is token circumcision, a joyous ‘naked parade’,
and spontaneous drum-dancing after. But if a change is effected in
the girl’s status it is achieved through drama (teaching and mock-
magic) not the rite itself. Pangwa are certainly more ‘performative’
across the board, but make dramatic use of song on nominally
private ritual occasions.
285
esoteric seance for maiden and elder women only, to the painted
‘naked parade’ with its noise and whooping, calling on the whole world
to attend. But the dramatic side is all there not only to effect the
change of public status (to nubility and new personal responsibilities
but not to a marriage commitment) in the maiden. The performative
intention of the rite, when read as a whole, is to affirm the struc-
tural dependency of a young woman’s moral career on the
sanctioning power of a matronly cabal not of her ‘mothers’ but her
future peers. That is, the thrust of the teaching is that a woman’s
move into marriage is not a move out of the autonomous circle of
female peers and its intimate sanctions. So the intention is ‘struc-
tural’ not private.
286
social being, your everyday persona, implodes. Oedipus (not in Freud
but in the ancient Greek legend) is an exceptional case which ‘proves’
the rule: in most versions it is not with the act itself but the actors’
recognition of its nature that damnation falls upon Jocasta and
Oedipus for their incestuous marriage. It is a common thing in Bantu
ethnography to find that a couple planning marriage may discover
before the fact that they are related (through links they were
unaware of) and before they dare marry must stage a ‘cutting’ ritual,
mystically dissolving their blood ties. To my knowledge it has
nowhere been shown that two such persons would be treated as
pariahs for having known sexual intimacy before the link was known.
As for ‘avoidances’ breached in ignorance, the problem could cause no
more than a bit of undamning confusion.
287
taboo is not removable, though the ‘extension’ of its rhetoric to
intimacy with more distant relatives or affines may be.
288
of their husband’s ‘fathers’. By drawing them together, the system
draws them emotionally away from dependence on the husband for
intimacy’s undeniable rewards. The whole charade with each
successive addition to the father’s plural marriage effectively
narrows the door of intimacy in it, and for both genders weakens the
fiduciary potential of the marital bond. As I read the ethnography,
the ‘sisterly’ bonds among women are proportionally strengthened—
though I confess to reading between the lines and looking for the
structure of experience not of rules.
289
cited doesn’t speak for itself. A major divergence has to do with his
assumption that the Pangwa once lived in localized exogamous patri-
lineal communities. Pangwa like Kinga and Konde do have patrilineal
rules of inheritance but bilateral rules of descent. Thus their ideas
about kinship are dual, combining ‘kindred’ and ‘lineage’ patterns of
thought about personal identities. Pangwa call their political commu-
nities inana (sing. u-lutanana). As will appear, I do not gloss this major
Pangwa political institution, the lutanana, in the same way Fr. Stirn-
imann does. I avoid using ‘lineage’, preferring the less specific
‘descent group’ as my rendering of the Pangwa term within a citation
from his german text. Where I am myself translating lutanana into
english I refer to it as a ‘deme’, or more specifically a ‘patri-deme’. In
this I am following the reasoning of George Peter Murdock, whose
gloss, dating back half a century, deserves citation here:
290
organized collective work groups, imikovi, in which all able-bodied
members, as well as in-migrant settlers, must take part.
...Assiduous participation in the collective work of house building and
cultivation was reckoned as visible confirmation of blood relationship
and was of fundamental significance for the solidarity of the whole
luxolo [kin group]. “We worked together, helped each other out all
around, and shared everything with each other like children of the
same father,” old men declared. [II 60-61]
This last is intended to mean that two persons with any great-
great grandparent (either gender) in common are too closely related
to think of sexual contact. This is the kind of rule which best
matches a quasilocal ‘kindred’ organization, not any corporate group
which might be generated by unilineal rules of heredity. As will appear,
very few Pangwa would have been in position after 1855 to collect
the information needed for scrupulous clearing of all barriers to
marriage under this rule. In my reading, this would always have been
the case, although the ethnographer supposes the mistiness of
genealogical recall must be only recent. Another point to be kept in
mind in deciding what weight to give this ‘rule’ is that while no one in
recent times has been held to it, Pangwa informants don’t find it
anomalous. That is, the rule of patrilocal residence at marriage does
give the man and his patrilateral male kin constitutional privilege in
the lutanana. But this appears to be a function of local politics and
ritually sanctioned orders of precedence, not unilineal consanguinity.
We are dealing with a patri-deme not a localized patrilineage.
291
necessary condition of order in a society without formally vested
political authority. The rule of exogamy for the lutanana, when it is
coupled with the practice of estrangement as between inter-
marrying settlements, is a structural cinch which puts the destiny
of a young generation in the hands of the old men, who are alone in
position to find eligible brides for their sons. Fr. Stirnimann links this
to the broad incest/endogamy taboo:
The first exception is rather slight. In this case the main impli-
cation of ‘the sororate’ is that a father of two eligible daughters
might, when the first falls short of supplying her husband with the
contractually prescribed three babes, be obliged to settle the
matter either (a) by sending the second daughter after her, or (b)
returning some bridewealth. This is clearly an ‘ideal’ model of an
obligation some fathers might choose to resist. It entails a trans-
local contractual relationship calling for good will. The ‘sororate’
would only be an exception to an incest rule which held that
accepting a bridewealth portion (as a bride’s sister arguably must
do) creates a virtual kinship link, forbidding her (though it had not
barred her sister’s) marriage into the groom’s kin group. As will
appear, it is an author’s inference that this kind of link should set up
an ‘incest’ barrier. An alternative reading would be that we are dealing
with a society in which translocal political relations are mainly
steadied by marriage contracts which are considered as irrevocable,
lifelong partnerships between two families, but depend on each side
having an investment in the progeny of the marriage.
292
to satisfy local young men wanting to get unrelated brides. Regular
local endogamy would mean constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul,
which means canceling credits and undoing the simplicity of a local
exogamy balanced by the gender balance of birth rates. Unsimple
systems of credit are full of snares. All the indications are that this
applies in spades to the Pangwa.
Next: The odd thing is that this kind of incest taboo ‘sets
limits’ much too generous to match any possible system of agnatic
or other unilinear reckoning. Where ‘one blood’ is the key to kinship
imagery it has to be the key to incest imagery. But ‘blood’ just
doesn’t run in ‘lines’ or ‘lineages’ in communities with bilateral rules of
descent and inheritance. Bilateral reckoning joins two lines in the
293
issue of each marriage, so that each married couple represents a
node in a centrifugally branching, all-consuming no-sided kinship
network which generates no overall shape to the society: no segmen-
tation, no possible sort of corporate kin group. To have corporate
groups (as in unilineal societies) you must have unambiguous
membership: each person recognized must belong to one and only
one such group. This uses kinship rhetoric to create the kind of social
structure we have come to call ‘segmentary’. But in bilateral
societies there are as many radically overlapping networks as there
are living marriages. For Pangwa the network of any set of full siblings
is defined for them by the bridewealth arrangements made for their
parents: receivers of bridewealth contributions (represented
directly or in the persons of their heirs) become givers of the
portions passed out of the lutanana community in the next gener-
ation—and so on. But it won’t be immediately obvious how such
arrangements create political stability in the lutanana.
But unless the kinship system is the sort that will build a
regularly expanding corporate group with unambiguous central
direction over land, labour, and the distribution of other necessities,
it is misleading to say this is ‘a kinship group which owns its
territory’. That means my use of ‘local descent group’ to translate
Pangwa ulutanana is still not quite anthroplogically correct. As we
shall see, the Pangwa kindred is a contractual co-op:
294
Then according to reports from elderly informants, such troubles
affected kinship relations in the past, that the scope of the
bridewealth distribution even within the lutanana [descent-group
territory or settlement area] was always unstable. According to
traditional norms, the bridewealth portion at a marriage was
supposed to be distributed not only to father and mother, brothers
and sisters of the bride, but to all patrilateral and matrilateral kin to
and including great-great grandfather and his brothers and
sisters—thus to four ascending generations. As to how this was
possible, in consideration of the modest indemnity paid around the
turn of the century (about six hoes and two or three baskets of
maize, millet, and eleusine for brewing beer), the older informants
pointed to the radical decimation of the population throughout the
decades-long slave raiding of the Ngoni. Many now thickly settled
descent-group lands were...completely depopulated, to the point
that survivors barely managed a wretched existence in a few nuclear
families... Among these remaining groups what was once a lineage
group (luxolo) came down to the universal axiom: Where bridewealth is
shared, there is common blood, and: The recipients of bridewealth
shares are making alliance with the givers. For these, incest limits
and prohibitions of marriage were for at least three generations.
Intimate relations between cross-cousins, such as often take place
today, used to be regarded as incestuous. Any kind of family
disgrace was condemned as witchcraft (uvuhavi), and the guilty ones
were expelled from the kin group and banished from descent-group
territory. Should a married man be guilty of such an offense, they
burnt his house down and, after taking away his wife and children,
cast him out or killed him. They feared the wrath of the outraged
shades (mahoxa) should he remain living in the community. [II 137-8]
295
his holdings in the system outweigh another’s—the credit is
nominally all in one pool, symbolized as ‘one blood’. Behind the scenes,
young bachelor men are rivals, of each other and of some strong
married men as well, for the use of bridewealth credits. It is out of
this subsurface rivalry the real social danger of ‘incest’ arises. The
elders must quietly negotiate around it. They must conspire.
Looking for the ‘system on the ground’ through the lens of the
‘system of ideas’, our main conclusion should be simply that the
virtually boundless nature of the ‘incest-avoidance’ group, in combi-
nation with the modest ‘price’ of a traditional bridewealth, has the
consequence that while kinship (‘blood’) may rule at the level of
conventional wisdom, a strategy of amity rules Pangwa praxis. The
actual distribution of a bridewealth is determined ‘on the ground’ by
a modest series of transactions, amounting to morally sanctioned
contracts of reciprocal obligation, among men of the ascendant gener-
ation. If these men choose wisely they will choose to serve the ends
of neighborly amity. Paradoxically, each such transaction injects a
quantum of idealized kinship sentiment into an existing tie.
Reciprocity is reaffirmed. Whether I am giving or taking a bridewealth
portion I treat the contract as good and profitable, as a bit more
than ‘money in the bank’. Here is an avenue by which ‘forgotten links
of kinship’ can be made new. In short, it is a way ‘virtual kinship’ gets
the ‘genuine’ stamp. The main trick entailed is masking the arbitrary
element of choice in the business by letting key persons represent
whole arrays of the living and dead ‘unto the fourth generation’. It
gives the planners free hands. The most familiar instance is letting a
‘mother’s brother’ represent the ‘matrilateral kin’. A simple twist on
that is this: whenever a local man is asked to give or receive
bridewealth credits on behalf of the bride’s side of a marriage this
man becomes a virtual ‘mother’s brother’ to her. Kinship which is
theoretically established by dimly recalled lore about links is a fine
and flexible tool for carving kinship in the sand of the public mind. If
anyone they want to take into their crowd can’t be gotten in through
the Pangwa door, it is quite likely to be a missionary or an anthropol-
ogist, if not both. ‡‡
296
as well as men; and that, although the social ties in the ‘arranger’
generation are contractual, they are advertised as merging in a
future descending generation to form ties of ‘blood’. It is a provision
which illuminates the active significance of ‘virtual kinship’ within the
Pangwa-Kinga region. But it can be made to speak also to the inner
nature of the lutana. Stirnimann thinks of it as corporate.
297
Konde particulars: intimacy and avoidance
The feeling that sons should not be cognizant of the sex activ-
ities of parents, and that father-in-law and daughter-in-law should
avoid one another is not, of course, peculiar to the Nyakyusa; all we
seek to show is that the extreme elaboration of these avoidances
among the Nyakyusa is dependent upon the existence of age-
villages. [B 160]
298
between ‘born kin’. An extension of kinship sentiments to persons
brought into ego’s circle by in-law contracts has therefore been
considered as an aggravated form of adultery not incest . ‡
Very often the ancestors and the ‘defenders’ are believed to work
together to punish wrong-doers—those who break avoidance and
incest taboos, those who insult seniors, those who neglect tradi-
tional rituals. Amity between relatives is sanctioned by neighbours
as well as by senior kinsmen...The values of village solidarity and of
kinship solidarity are thus coherent. [B 164]
299
Consider once again the dramatic meaning of a taboo of dyadic
facework which has young women bolting out of sight at the
approach of any number of older agnates of the husband. The
panicked bolting says at least, “I dread being caught in his sight
because he is a ‘father’ of my husband.” If there is a good reason for
considering this man as a danger to her marriage, it might be: “He
could try to steal me (back) from my husband.” This is a slight twist
on, “He will say his cattle were used to let me marry.” What this
translates to in structural language is that father and son are, at
heart, rivals for everything important in life: wealth, sex, scope,
progeny. It is a rivalry suspended in thought. Like all the infinitessimal
quanta of envy and resentment within a close family group, this
thought is sustainable only while and because it remains unspoken.
The little drama of bolting in fear at once acknowledges the impasse
between father and son, and taboos the full recognition of the
danger so dramatized. Like an ordinary incest taboo, this one defines
a particular circle of intimate relationships within which carnal
intimacy should and would be explosive, and must be suppressed. A
young wife has entered this circle and can’t be expected to have
acquired the intuitive cover, the ‘spontaneous’ reaction to social
danger, required to keep trouble at bay. So she becomes the trouble
and must herself be kept at bay. The difficult tie of amity protected
is a structurally crucial one to Nyakyusa community life—the tie of
father and son. In the split-up context of ‘family life’ in the Konde
scene, it requires a dramatic public reminder to all and sundry: know
the particular cast of characters in each young man’s standoff with
the older generation, respect it lest we forget who is who in each of
our young men’s invisible networks of kinship ties and expectations.
Subtle avoidance in this case would be too weak to carry the struc-
tural load. A taboo which commands no spontaneous consensus can
be no taboo at all. ‡‡
According to Mwakyonde, the doctor: ‘In the old days a man did
not marry the daughter of a neighbour in the age village. He said:
“She is my child, her father and I eat bananas together,”’ but by 1934
this taboo was not enforced. What was considered impossible was
for a man to confuse generations by marrying a half-sister of his
son’s wife. Her full sisters he never saw—they avoided him; her half-
sisters he might greet but not marry. [E 108]
300
bilateral network of known kin that we find among Pangwa and Kinga.
On the intuitive level it at least taboos sex interest in anyone you
know by a kinship term. In the supremely polygynous society we find
in the Selya studies, their name is legion.
The main thing this says is what the equivalent Pangwa rule
said: you will have to consult your elders from whom you have your
social identity and your bridewealth capital before a marriage can be
made. I don’t think it impertinent to point out that if the elders can’t
actually find a link, in the absence of record they can easily
‘remember’ the exact connection they may need. Memory may be the
winning asset always left in an elders’ keep. They need it, as
truculent as their sons would have become after a decade of
soldiering bachelorhood, and as turbulent as the overall structure of
Nyakyusa society was.
301
Bearing in mind that true brothers are seldom (if ever)
allocated to the same age village, the incest taboos affecting one
village member mean little to the others. They are not actual ‘family’
to one another, yet they owe each other lifelong amity. At an
analytical level this comes close to the maximal-claim bond which is
normal to the family system of other peoples. The difference is that
Nyakyusa know no such family system in their lives. There are several
points of importance.
(a) Peer nurture: Though Nyakyusa boys are raised through their
herdboy stage (six to eleven) living at their father’s place and herding
his cattle, by ten or eleven they are living and keeping house with
their peers. Girls stay ‘home’ (as we might put it) while boys, first
with the herding group, then with their chums in a village of their own,
spend their personally formative days with age mates. In this way,
by nurture they are not very likely to be as close to a full brother or
sister as to half-brothers and the offspring of ‘father’s friends’. As
comradeship is confirmed by joking and needling, by petty rivalries,
and by non-possessive sex—the kind where ‘nothing happens’—it is
gradually deepened to a kind of male bonding (intuitive mutual under-
standing) able to support lifelong amity. Girls, first ‘at home’ and
then briefly in ceremonial withdrawal with friends in the isaka—held
to separate their sexual careers from their parents—live a super-
vised life by comparison to their brothers. But in the context of
rampant polygyny, even a girl’s ‘family life’ allows little intimacy with
her father.
302
debt which revolves about marriages, cattle, and patrilineal kinship,
and provides a concrete measure of the kind of reciprocal trust
though which the elders of a chiefdom build and maintain their
effective command of public affairs:
The heir killed the funeral cows and this act established a respon-
sibility for dependants of the dead. ‘If my younger brother comes
claiming a cow for marriage and I refuse he reminds me: “You are the
senior, you killed the cattle,” and I agree. Or if my sister’s husband
brings a cow when my father dies and I kill it, then later her son
comes to me and says: “Give me the cow of mother’s brotherhood
(ubipwa), you are my superior.” If I refuse he reminds me that I killed
the cow, and I give him a cow.’ [E 38-9]
303
claimed compensation from the kinsmen of the original...murderer or
adulterer, not from the avenger. [E 56]
304
purification; but after the death of the father and his full brothers
these same women become wives of their former ‘sons’. [B 161]
Taboo, in short, puts the women with the cattle in the elders’
keep until the root village begins to disintegrate from within, losing
its self-sufficiency from aging. But if the ‘fathers’ have been making
careful decisions in the handling of their wealth and influence, most
of them will have been able to pass on, by distribution during their
later years, substantial benefits in cattle and women to the sons
they find deserving. There is no indication, in any event, that all a
wealthy polygynist’s estate is destined to pass on to the next
generation in one package (as it passes in lateral inheritance to a
brother, or in quasi-lateral inheritance to a generationally elevated
son). The big point of polygyny is progeny, and in a system of genera-
tional inheritance the keeping of your peers and your progeniture can
be a difficult balancing act. Would the kind of filial inheritance so
often found in other Bantu communities work out in this one? It
would make age-villages not only pointless but impossible.
305
The Konde pattern is not in its deepest implications quite
unlike the Pangwa system for nurturing solidarity (amity) in the local
group. Contingency is the basis for the original recruitment of men
to a local group, only partially mediated by kinship. Amity is the
condition for continued membership. The management of marriages
and the political affiliation of progeny is the responsibility of male
elders. Through a bridewealth system they are given the keys. A
delicate web of dyadic personal alliances—ritually solemnized
trusts—obliges these men to work in comity even while committed
through kinship to partisan values. It is when we consider how
without kinship peer solidarity would be a sole and tyrannical basis of
a man’s personal status, that we find ourselves in position to appre-
ciate the contribution great, if delayed, expectations can make to a
young man’s freedom of movement. We have a clue, at least, to the
often unclouded and seemingly unburdened character of his bachelor
years.
306
the pattern of settlement was ‘sprawl’ around court, mission, and
market. But until the new government legislated against living in
consensual hamlets, few Kinga could have imagined being ‘villagized’.
307
girls and maidens in their extended bachelor years, peer nurture is
the dominant force in their lives. After the break from her childhood
peer-group (at marriage) a woman can’t be happy until she has
established a like relationship with new (married) friends. When she
has found herself anew, she will not be ready to leave if there is a way
to remain. There is good evidence that re-establishment can be
difficult for some women to accomplish. The good life is not to be
plucked from trees.
308
and bring his food to the ikivaga where he lives. Rights in land are in
the long run pretty flexible. Services for which a woman needs a man
are few once a fair house is built. His main tasks from a healthy
young woman’s point of view will be organizing help from his friends in
the fields at soil breaking time, supplying the necessary tools and
pots, tending to the thatch, and the business of begetting, which
need only come up periodically.
From the start, boys will choose to build farther apart from
their parents (up to a kilometer) than girls do. For both genders the
need for distance is set up by the child’s desire for same-sex
company, peers who must be drawn from different kitchens. A local
boys’ group will visit all the kitchens in the evening, while the girls will
309
rather be helping, each at her own mother’s fire. Boys and men during
their long bachelorhood will normally have less contact with a father
than a mother, as the father is often sent food where he sleeps in
barracks, while the son will be fetching his own with friends. Boys do
the rounds of many kitchens, just as Konde boys do. Bachelor girls,
for their part, spend the day with peers in their own gardens,
returning to a mother’s kitchen with often ample provisions. Always,
seasons and situations vary. But these are the prescriptive
routines, and it will be seen that they differ from those of any true
‘kinship society’ by allowing great scope to amity and the free choice
of associates. I have remarked before that, judging from its
expressive culture, youth is the best of times for either gender. It
seems to me uncannily rational of the Kinga to extend it through half
the normal life span. Many cultures may seem, in Kinga perspective,
to throw youth away.
310
especially if the son has already beaten up his father in a fight, the
father will settle for verbal chastisement. Here are some cases:
(a) A father was beating a boy about nine. He had him in the
house and beat him severely. When the boy emerged he grabbed a
heavy log and swung it at his father’s head as he emerged. The father
parried the blow. The son threw rocks, but none of them scored. He
ran away.
(b) By the time he was nine, Soda and his friends were skilful at
throwing rocks to fend off father or mother. Soda recalled fending
off his father that way, hitting him on the leg. That was enough to
turn the father back. I asked what would happen if a father was killed
by such a rock. Soda recognized that could happen, but had nothing
to offer on what the consequences would be. At the time, Soda
himself was ready to marry and beget, but I couldn’t evoke any
‘Greek’ sense for parricide.
(d) Soda had heard of a father beating his daughter after the
age of menarche, but had not seen it.
311
parade, a comic procession louder by far than Lwembe’s and one that
might make that dour patron-divinity of the Sanga rulers lighten.
312
But as for adultery with a ‘mother’, the father’s cavalier
treatment of such a transgression was roundly deplored by
Mwanadyo, a majestic man still, and a long-time court-leader raised
in another and more tightly structured realm. Only discover such a
case in traditional times and it would be taken there and then for
‘witchcraft’—unthinkable. If it were not punished by death (the
chiefly court so ruling) quite surely the son would be banished from
the father’s life forever, and the woman sent packing, the brand of
scorn upon her, to find another man. Partly, this difference of jural
perspective goes back to precolonial variance among the several
realms. In the East, the Sanga court was not so firmly established,
the ‘bush culture’ not so seamlessly fitted to Sanga court custom,
as in Mwanadyo’s Northern realm. Partly too the differing perspec-
tives reflect the decimation of the East in the Maji Maji uprising, and
its gradual repopulation since. But most I count rank. Mwanadyo was
co-opted on account of aptitude to the highest position in a
principal court. His project in his world had been one of closing the
gap between categorical orthodoxy and merely mundane social
practice. He would have seen the power of law used to enforce a
taboo which spontaneous sanctions would not. Wisdom seems to
stand astride.
313
All this appears again when certain of a boy’s best friends
marry. One of them is so related by kinship that the boy calls him
‘father’, but they are age-mates and only make fun of the paradox.
Theirs is a personal tie of privileged intimacy, in Swahili ‘utani’. They go
courting together and extend the joking utani familiarity to mock-
intimacy with one another’s girlfriends. But all this ends forever
when one of the boys is married. The wife of a ‘son’ is a daughter-in-
law, the wife of a ‘father’ is a ‘mother’ and there are respect-
relations. The boys who once shared a bed can’t even share the same
room. The boy who once played with a girl’s cloths and sat on her bed
finds the girl who used to heat his wash-water for him taboo. Any
cross-generation tie within the great-grandparent range can be
suspended among young peers but remains there in the utani mode,
dormant. When a boy gets to know his older brother’s wife, he is soon
into utani with her, badgering her for food and calling her ‘little wife’,
but the wife of a ‘father’ (though she was formerly privileged) may
offer him food or not. He can only stay and talk with respect. They
are now of different (adjacent) generations and occupy compart-
ments in the generational structure which must be denied intimate
contact. Should we call this a taboo of ‘incest’? of ‘own-group’ wife
adultery? It is cognate to both but a marginally different logical use
of sex-avoidance to flag a structural feature limiting and defining
the community of trust an individual needs in the delicate dealing
demanded of kith and kin.
314
of the rules (taboos) are part of early learning. The generational line
which must not be crossed was learned while the child was young
enough to be privy to his parents’ house: bedding, sitting places, and
intimate garments of other-sex elders on both sides were
untouchable. It was particularly dangerous to overstep a father in
this way, the more so for boys than girls. A boy should also avoid
such circumstantial intimacy with a father’s sister or a mother’s
brother’s wife, and to a lesser degree with a father’s co-wife. When
married he must cleanly avoid overstepping his wife’s mother. A man
must greet his mother-in-law with great formality, avoiding direct
address, keeping his voice in a child’s register. Both should kneel to
greet at a distance. The intimate greetings of older peers entail
prolonged arm contact and face work, repeating good words and
eventually exchanging any news. These performances speak to the
structural norms of the community in ways no child can misunder-
stand. At grandmother’s house (I was always told) there was only
indulgence and great fun, no carried-over tensions. Even Christian
men in 1960 would dread entering a mother’s sleeping house, or a
married daughter’s.
315
sides for sleeping. Big boys, being sexually mature, must on no
account sleep with younger ones. When Ego is seen to have matured
(there has been a night emission) it may be his own elder brother who
takes him over to sleep with the manly set. For practical purposes,
this is his ‘rite de passage’, and it must always be memorable. For
girls in their isaka the transition is not so explicit; they are declared
nubile by the women’s ‘school’. But they return from the ‘school’ to
the same isaka and remain through their mature bachelor years
closer to their ‘sibling-cousins’ and other friends than to any other
human beings, unless it be their own mother.
316
The ‘free house’ of a mother’s brother can be, like a grand-
parent’s house, free of ‘fear’ because, structurally, it is remote from
the day-to-day world of intimacy wherein the rights and wrongs of
conduct are defined in a young person’s deep experience. As with
Ego’s home kundi the ‘spontaneous’ balance of sexual license and
taboo which prevails among his cross-cousins and their friends will
be assimilated to his own. The status of sister’s son to a mother’s
brother will remain, for life, one of Ego’s kinship resources where
mutual claims must be honoured. It takes only a moment’s reflection
to see why, if your mother’s personal close is not open to her own
child, that of another ‘mother’ who feeds the same little kundi
cannot be a free house. The very presence, for boys, of many kitchens
and ‘mothers’ to beg from, the ‘grand tour’ boys will make each
evening in twos and threes with their begging cups, extends their
world. It comes to overlap, in a disciplined way, with the worlds of
other neighboring makundi. The ‘system’ in domestic life wherever it is
found is not spontaneous: it is, interestingly, rather the source of
that special spontaneity which leads its members to keep the rules
of the family game.
317
of ‘fear’ it is likely to provoke is the kind which is a necessary ingre-
dient of respect. When a Kinga boy says, “Ndidwada udada” (“I’m afraid
of my father”) he is speaking to the moment. When he tries to
describe the quality of this, his most difficult relationship he is more
likely to say, “Ndikundwada udada”. The noun udada refers to one’s own
father and others who stand in the same sector of the boy’s kin
network. The verb -dwada means to fear. But when it is used
indirectly (as in the latter of the two phrases cited) it carries the
meaning of a Biblical fear, ‘My father commands my respect.’ We have
been considering the warp and the woof of a system of rooted amity.
The vertical strands hold nothing without the lateral, nor can the
lateral take orderly form without the other.
318
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER EIGHT
319
which distinguish for each culture the dominant moral strategies of
men and women. In considering what Murray meant us to understand
by ‘regnant processes’ bear in mind that mid-century academic
psychologists usually thought that by studying the highest of the
‘higher organisms’ they were covering everything in human nature
relevant to their interests. Partly for this reason and partly, I
suppose, in diffidence to critical readers more conversant with a
‘harder’ version of science, Murray doesn’t want to be taken for a
student of thought but of ‘brain processes’. But in saltier language,
he is interested in what is actually and deeply ‘on the mind’ of a
subject when he or she is doing his or her thing. A regnant process is
a special concern, evident in a person’s conduct, bespeaking a charac-
teristic mode of involvement with the world.
320
normally a link between a person’s objective and subjective situation,
but not a determinate one. In considering regnancies in relation to
culture, though we can’t speak confidently about individual cases we
can about well-defined social roles. That is the premise of my notions
respecting moral strategies and the moral career. They let me model
the systematic connection between persistence and change that I
need if I am to deal with the rise of a new cluster of institutions
associated with protostate politics.
321
Deep divergency: Kinga/Pangwa
(ii) The great change, and presumably the priming one for Kinga,
must be put to the account of Sanga politics. This was taking men
substantially out of the fields and into a barracks life as cooperative
guardians of peace, subduers of the forests (for clearing, for timber
and wood, or perhaps a smithy’s charcoal), protectors against two
and four legged predators, and labourers on private and public
projects. In early days, before the land was so nearly cleared or put
into secondary growth, many men were regular hunters, using dogs
322
and the bow and arrow (the unanticipated forest-hunter’s weapon
which seems to have cleared the Ngoni out of Kinga territory at mid-
century). To accomplish this change, a man’s nagging demand for
wifely sexual services within the long period of her nursing (a demand
which Fr. Stirnimann finds problematic among traditional Pangwa)
must have been convincingly abrogated in the Kinga case.
323
In briefly outlining this as-if historical agenda for carrying out
the Sanga protostate process I may seem to have thought many
generations of Sanga innovators—all the while spreading out over
more territory and occupying more separate, autonomous
domains—had nursed in their heads a neatly programmatic scheme
of manifest destiny. But the real narrative is less unlikely and I think
it will bear examination on evidence. We need to model in some detail
the moves by which a people as determinedly traditional as Fr. Stirn-
imann’s Pangwa could have gone through the structural changes the
scheme suggests. The technological starting-point of the two
societies was about the same, as the two populations took form
with the same migratory wave, with iron-age Bantu replacing
(absorbing) an earlier, less sedentary, pre-Bantu population. Perhaps
Kinga enjoyed some marginal advantages of environment and dispo-
sition. But it is the political and psychological changes for which we
have sufficient evidence to draw conclusions. I take it on myself to
present enough of Fr. Stirnimann’s findings in his own terms (always
in my translations) to provide the evidence we need of the way
‘tradition’ was maintained by the Pangwa in the absence of
distinctive political institutions. Tradition is not automatic. It
required in the Pangwa case an enormous and whole-hearted effort
on everyone’s part. Even the tiny suckling was not exempt.
324
men ate and slept. Its openwork walls betray its origin as a
protective house for goats, where herdboys had their fire and slept
on guard. Detective work is wanted on its enlargement to serve
higher purposes.
325
fertility is thought of as severe punishment from the shades. No
wonder then that nearly all the important events in house and field
are symbolically ‘identified’ with the cycle of procreation. The most
important forms of specialized knowledge—iron smelting and rain
making—were associated with marital coitus, in the same way as
daily activities were: the fire-drilling, grinding, pestling, winnowing,
eating. [II 291]
(a) Sharing:
326
achieved mainly by disengagement. The same structural principle
was applied to the sharing of personal space within the homestead
and in the work of the fields in which several households would
participate. The homestead was a school in microcosm for later life
in a systematically self-privatizing world. Since the ethnographer’s
picture is necessarily a pastiche based on informant reconstruc-
tions, care is wanted in our readings. In the painterly rendering of
family life which follows, only the bits on herdboys in the bush are
suggestive of the Kinga scene—close family life in the Pangwa sense
was beginning to appear in Christian Kinga communities in the
1960s. It had played no significant part in the court culture in Sanga
times, though it remained a recognizable feature of bordering bush
cultures throughout the mountain slopes ecozone.
With the sons in the boys’ house, the father was the uncon-
tested authority, calling for respect and obedience from all, and who
saw to it that all mothers sent the necessary food for meals, as well
as that peace and harmony ruled the group....After breakfast the
boys led the goats into the bush in the grasslands and spent their
time there in games, with trapping bush rats and snaring songbirds.
But the father controlled the herding regularly and should the boys
let the herd wander into tilled fields, they would be given serious
warning and in the case of another offense would be punished by
withholding supper and caning. When they were rough-housing and
fighting over small things, the father would not intervene...
The evening food is the main mealtime of the day. The little sons
fetch the laden eating baskets from their proper mothers and place
them, without touching, before the father....No son, big or little, was
allowed to touch food before the father or a guest present had been
satisfied. They sit on quietly in the background and wait patiently
until their turn comes. ...The father sees to it that the little ones
get their portions just as the big ones do, and are not discriminated
against.
After supper the father sits with the sons in cheerful conver-
sation by the warming fire, inquiring after the day’s experiences and
success in the small-animal hunt. Later the mothers, nurslings on
their backs, and the girls arrive at the shyengo [male sleeping house],
but sit at a separate fire for conversation. When it is time to retire
for the night father, mother, and girls take their leave...Father and
mother go to the elders’ sleeping house, the girls to their hut.
[II 109-10]
327
In earlier times, when the child was nursed until loss of the milk
teeth, six or seven years after the birth, the nursling remained until
weaning under the direct care of the mother. Only afterward did the
boys remove to their own sleeping house (ishyengo), exchanging the
mother’s nearness for increased contact with the father and other
boys of the settlement. Little girls stayed during the day with the
mother, but slept in the shared sleeping house (inanda). [II 109]
Through the day goats remain in the care of boys and girls of
about 6-12 years. Now and then in thinly settled parts today you
may even find one single talking-and-sleeping house for boys in the
lutanana. The goats are in any case kept apart in one corner of the
ishyengo hard by the sleeping platform of the boys. Should predators
show up, they are chased off with glowing coals from the hearth fire.
[I 251]
328
sent in via the smaller boys, to serve all. But the father(s) of each
uterine sibling group will normally be taking the same meal, while boys
obediently wait for their share in the background. ‡
329
said no. Would such a household expect to flourish so well in the
normal course of things, that it eventually required its own ishyengo?
But the purpose of such a house is night-time defense for the herds.
This is a house with the strong open-work walls proper to animal
pens, and a smudge fire to control flying pests. As we are told there
were regularly two fires, it can only be the biggest roofed house in
the compound, and the most expensive (in firewood) to maintain. As
will appear, both of a polygynist’s wives and children attend an after-
supper concourse in the one ishyengo. But if (as I am now supposing)
that house is not the private property of one family, all the girls and
women of the sharing families would be there. Nothing in Fr. Stirn-
imann’s hard evidence suggests that brothers and parallel cousins
would not have grouped their households, at least initially, so as to
permit using a common ‘boys’ house’ and nanda ‘girls house’. The
question then is how the ishyengo was conceived by Pangwa in 1850.
Specifically, how many adult men (‘fathers’) slept away from the
boys and the goats at the other end of the ishyengo? I hate to leave
that question iffy.
Consider the odds. The term ishyengo is rendered now and again
as “boys’ sleeping house” in the ethnographer’s text, where that
rendering serves a reader’s convenience. The house is in fact much
more than that, though much less than the communal mixing place
the Kinga counterpart, the ikivaga which I translate as a barracks
house, had become. There were only a few of those still in traditional
use in 1960, but there were isivaga everywhere of the sort used for
boys and goats. I don’t suppose the Pangwa ishyengo cannot offer us
a fair picture of the original ikivaga, and explain the dual use of that
term by Kinga. A boys’ house (called ikivaga in some communities at
least) is closed to grown men—‘fathers’ and the like. But the men’s
barrack house in many communities, such as not-modern Maliwa, is
shared by men at their own end and boys at the other. There will be
two fires, as nights are cool to cold in these mountains, but as with
the Pangwa neither fire is for cooking. That is done by women at their
kitchen houses.
Every tilled field in the lutanana has its individual owner, i.e.
usufructuary, who planted it with [his/her] own seed and harvested
it as well. Should a man have more than one wife with children, they
330
don’t live together in a distinct settlement but in their own houses
near their own fields. [I 82]
All this, with but one exception, could be said accurately of the
Kinga but has quite different implications in their case. There are no
bounded ‘farms’ in a slash-and-burn landscape. Any suggestion in the
citation that there may have been such in uPangwa I think should be
discounted. The Pangwa/Kinga divergence is not black and white. Land
holding was not land ownership but usufruct right. Fallow years were
many more than tillage years for any field except ‘bottom land’.
Both in burning the dried vegetation mounds before the first rain
and also in planting the gardens and taking in the first fruits of the
year, the age-ranking of the field’s owner must be observed... Before
puberty the father apportions each child a field. When after the first
rain it is time to plant, the children must begin this work according to
their own age rank, not their mothers’ standing. Married daughters,
young women, follow the age-rank of their husbands. In the patri-
archal lutanana the brothers, sons, grandsons of the mkoyo observed
their age rankings precisely, since their conviction was that the
seedlings of one’s older siblings would fail to germinate and sprout, if
a younger one, or even the mother, planted first, thus overstepping
age-rank.
When a man had several wives, in October the eldest child of the
head wife, whether a son or a daughter, kindled fire in the first heap
of dried vegetation in his/her field [and the others, with the mother,
followed in order, taking coals to burn their heaps]. [I 93-4]
331
adultery. In early times women and maidens wore only narrow
barkcloth strips loose on a belt, which would flutter in a light wind,
uncovering the genitals. ...Therefore, lining up the work force for an
mkovi in the field required observation of certain avoidance taboos. [I
91-2]
Both in the past and also even today in districts with less mixed
populations the uluxolo [family, archetypal kin-group] was reckoned
the paradigmatic social unit. It comprises patrilineal relatives of 3-4
generations in one or several extended families and stands under
332
the authority of the ‘great father’ (dadi mxomi or mkoyo) who is the
direct descendant by first-born standing of a recognized founding
father. [II 57-8]
As soon as the first hut is erected and fields tilled, the new
settler is recognized as land- and house owner, mwenye inyi [owner of
the land] or mkoyo. [II 58]
333
by the firm association of these spectral ancestors with the soil
they once tilled.
This gives us, then, the sociological basis for the semiotic
merging of ‘neighbour’ with ‘cousin’, kith with kin. We shall see that
this is fundamental to Pangwa social organization, not a merely
opportunistic fiction or ploy for allowing non-kin settlers in, against
tradition. In effect, the greatest thing a man can share with his
neighbour is kinship. Just as a Konde man moving to a new chiefdom
understands his destiny connects him to a new chiefly ancestral
shrine, a Pangwa in a new lutanana understands he is part of a
community inhabited by the invisible landowners interred in the soil
he has chosen to cultivate. Sharing ‘kinship’ whether genetic or
contractual remains the most profound way of sharing identity the
Sowetan cultures have established, and we find it here in a form
special to peoples living from land their ancestors still own.
334
Kinga food routines assign it a radically different meaning. To
begin with, it is the woman who is in charge of all the food. She takes
responsibility for feeding men and boys and rarely will face complaint.
Boys come to her kitchen in threes and fours, gratefully take from
her, and go off to share it before going on to another ‘mother’. Every
boy seems to have a dozen ‘mothers’, and though many are
unmarried they can be begged from during the day, as when they are
met on the trail with edible roots or other finger food. As there is
only the one prepared meal a day (in the evening), women are off to
the fields in groups early in the morning, usually before men are
stirring. A woman and her daughters keep common stores, and
passers-by may be offered food from a woman’s fire. Food is part of
the language of openness to sharing—the rhetoric of amity.
As for personal space, the centre of early life for Kinga children
of five and onward is a sleeping house where friends of friends are
welcome, and there are two main sleeping mats, one for the young
and one for the older. Peer socialization achieves discipline but
grounds in amity not fear. Games, conceits, stories, lampoons—if
they seem to be endlessly amusing it is because they are endlessly
reflective of local incident and character—these are not hallowed
tales told at grandfather’s fireside. Words before sleep can form the
cutting edge which deepens friendship and the tutelage an older boy
can afford to offer a younger, or a bright girl offer a slow. Of course,
my remarks are based on only a few good friendships and visits in the
field, and are biased by the same awkwardness of the anthropol-
ogist—asking for confession and getting testimony instead—which
led Fr. Stirnimann to his homilies on peace and harmony among the
Pangwa. But I could never report that peace and harmony were
imposed on the Kinga by any sort of patriarchal fiat. When you see
fun going on all around you, though you may have no clue really to its
deeper springs in personal experience, the one thing you know well is
that it is spontaneous. It is particularly striking to see men and
women of every generation enjoying the prodigiously energetic work
of turning the soil, the women clearly bound to outdo the men, in the
Kinga version of the Pangwa umkovi [Kinga ungovi]. In the part of
uKinga where I joined some of these ‘hoe-ploughing bees’ it was the
custom to hold the beer until evening. The party was as lively as the
work; but the work had been as merry as the party and had managed
it all without beer.
335
work is wanted. The particular truth has to represent the general,
because the writer, be it Fr. Stirnimann or Dr. Park, has asked himself
the meaning of behaviour he can best know only in his own experience
of others, not in the tracks left behind by that experience on paper.
Granting that any step of inductive reasoning risks error and the
need of correction, the divergence between our two models of the
two Sowetan cultures is real enough, however differently two unlike
observers might paint the particulars. Even as I left the field I would
have said of older Kinga men that they were strikingly fond of beer,
and of older Kinga women that they were impressively self-reliant.
On reflection I would have to downgrade beer to give it less impor-
tance than the wide net of long-lived personal friendships men feel
compelled to maintain. And for the persistent freedom of widows
from dependence on men I would substitute the lifelong reliance of
women upon the company of the peers with whom they share their
days.
(b) Sexuality:
336
xukida umwana ‘shortening the child’. What is done was described
thus by a (Christian woman) specialist practitioner:
337
pregnancy (a) Pregnancy taboos (b) The pregnancy girdle.......5. Birth
and early childhood (a) Birth (b) Mother’s return to house (c) First
purification and integration ritual (d) Naming (e) Child’s presentation
to its grandparents (f) Final purification of the mother (g) Weaning
the child. Appendix: Abnormal birth......6. Burial and mourning rites.
Burial of an mkoyo [ritual leader] in 1922
338
Drill. The celebrant-teacher is a learned woman past her
menopause. Such women are tabooed sexual relations. (Presumably
her husband sleeps in the ishyengo just as Kinga men do.) There is a
learned chorus inside the hut, listening with care to events behind
the heavy screen which the teacher has erected to shield the
sanctuary where the crucial rite unfolds. There is a protocol to be
taught concerning the three containers of wash-water. The parents
must be taught to pull back the foreskin and address the opening of
the glans. There are several steps in the procedure of ‘spraying’ the
infant: the foreskin, the calabashes, cleansing, hand-milking right and
left breasts to spray into the penile orifice without touching the
breast to it. The husband’s full attention and assistance is wanted
at each stage. Milking should continue in each session until no more
milk presents. There are insistent teachings and repetitive songs
from the ‘first chorus’ following each step by ear and urging the
‘labour’ on. The emphasis is on application to an onerous but
necessary task. An outside chorus supplies more song.
Repetition. All through the night, as the mother gets more milk,
the ‘work’ must be repeated. (Presumably the babe is fed also orally
on demand.) The ‘labours’ and teachings are reiterated, the chorus
attentive, until the second cock crow and daybreak. But outside
there is an all night party with an assembly of the entire community,
excepting the own parents of the couple, who must absent
themselves. Throughout, both mother’s side and father’s side are
well represented and made to feel responsible for the success of the
performative aspect of the ritual, which is its overt purpose.
339
[Verbatim excerpt of a taped interview with a celebrant-teacher:]
When a husband is having frequent intercourse with his wife, the part
of the semen which he gives into the womb is turned to building and
nourishing the child. The other part gathers in the breasts of the
wife. When a maiden reaches puberty and is not soon married, her
breasts grow limp again. But if she is married, and with daily coitus
there gathers a rich supply of semen in her womb, her breasts begin
to swell again, so they will be full at the child’s birth. When the
mother of a suckling is nursing, paternal semen flows with the milk
into the child, whether it be a boy or a girl. Our forefathers have
taught us, however, that we must inject semen into a male suckling
along with the mother’s milk, letting it gather in the testicles. When
a maiden is still at her father’s place and has no contact with a man,
there is no semen in her womb. When she marries, though, and
frequently accepts semen from her husband, she becomes pregnant,
and later a child is born. The semen given by the man to the woman in
intercourse was planted in him by his mother through the injection of
milk into the testicles. We inject no milk in the maiden. Later on
semen will be coming from her husband and pregnancy will occur.
[II 186]
The right side symbolizes...the man’s side of the family, the left
side the woman’s. From the right breast accordingly flows semen for
the later forming of sons, from the left breast for making daughters.
[II 180]
This unyago rite takes place by dark of night. Night is holy time, as
after sundown the mahoxa [shades] rise from their graves to walk
the land. The sleeping room is a hallowed place, as it is here the
shades work together with the parents in intercourse, calling
340
descendants to life. No more could the shades enter a brightly lit
sleeping room than they can appear in daylight. [II 179]
341
the father will accept him home. These are charades of transparent
meaning establishing the limits of claims and exemptions from claim
in the marital relationship considered appropriate to the occasion.
The sexual expectations of a Kinga marriage are legitimately met by
the pregnancy and the building of the foetus to the point where the
child is felt as a presence in the womb. Men cede control of the cycle,
from conception to weaning, to the woman. Withdrawal from the
coital relation, whether for nursing or to reward the timely sterility
of menopause, appears to have been taken in stride from traditional
times by the husband, and to have been deemed not unsatisfactory
for the wife. Begetting is a duty around which privileged sexual
access is laid on by Kinga rules. For the most part, Kinga men and
women outside the Christian dispensation have seemed to approve.
But what is most significant to my view is that only a ‘spontaneous’
avoidance taboo would have protected the long period of nursing
wanted in either society—law is not enough.
342
fourth honeymoon. But the period of renewed intimacy need not be
long. In a few months a man’s wife will feel sure of the pregnancy and
cease requiring masculine attention.
The shades live throughout the daytime hours in the deep below
(panyi) and appear to their progeny in dreams, their clothing covered
in dirt. Nonetheless, they are taken as manifestations of the life
principle. In this a certain ambivalence shows: Life and Death, fertility
and pollution come out as opposites. Still they almost seem recip-
rocals. Between them lies as a protective layer taboo with its
sanctions: bodily and spiritual sickness. [II 284]
343
Various rituals find their expression and climax in marital coitus,
thus the installation of the bridal pair in the new house, the great
mourning for near relatives, the purification of the husband after the
death of an infant and the reconciliation of quarreling marital
partners. [II 283]
344
our knowledge of the typical biography in either culture is sadly
wanting for case studies, approaching the matter through the
frame I’ve chosen offers some safeguards. Moral strategies are
formed by men and women pursuing a living and making their name
within a social maze we are able to study and describe with some
precision. Fieldworkers gain a sense for the drama in lives they have
shared, if only in short term. Fr. Stirnimann and Dr. Park had their own
gender in common with only half the people they might have pestered
about all those small matters one finds missing in one’s notes, and
special gender avoidance patterns are built into each of the four
mazes entailed, the two ‘European’ schoolings of the observers and
the two ‘Bantu’ solitudes. Still there is much that we know from
induction and much to be gained by deduction if it can be guided by
common sense.
345
apply to the case of the female celebrant-teacher, who has full
license to bully a young married couple. In her person she represents
the category of elders of her gender who have managed to pass
through all the ritually celebrated dangers of a woman’s career from
puberty to menopause and earned the sanctuary of a taboo which
bars her husband or any other man from her house and bed.
News of his death was not allowed to spread over the country, as
public recognition of his death would mean famine for the country.
The grave was dug overnight, the burial itself taking place at dawn.
The medicine man M. spread a mixture of river slime and strong
medicines over the open grave. Matching the rank of the deceased,
he was carried by four esteemed householders. [II 276-7]
346
in the medicine game. The mkoyo, without that claim of majesty,
owned only the tokens the game was played with. Stories about
necrophagia and night-flight in the world of witches are everywhere
in the region. They dramatize the moral basis of a witch’s powers.
But when it comes to imagining actual uses of witchcraft by one of
the kinsmen or neighbours you know ‘on the ground’, there is always a
medicine horn or equivalent ‘chemical’ vector implied. One conse-
quence is an absence of charismatic villains, as it is the mere
possession of the right weapon which distinguishes the witch from
his friends.
The signal difference between the two fears, for the sociol-
ogist, has to be the affective response an accusation begets. If
Ego’s bane is an ancestor, Ego can only bow to power and atone. The
dead man has already played his hand, and only he can redress. But
when Ego accuses a living person, though he nominally concedes rank
by doing so, it is the kind of play that murders sleep. I think the
absence of a court of judgement or communal moot in Pangwa
tradition meant that small antipathies and sometimes-groundless
suspicions could fester to the point of triggering direct retributive
action and openly devious ploys. The resolution most probable would
347
be the antipolitan choice, moving away. The power play in the end is
going to be deciding who is the chicken. In Tunginiye’s case it was he
who moved away. In the compact ambience of the Nyakyusa age-
village, it was the one chosen by ‘the breath of men’. In the Pangwa
lutanana as for Kinga, the odds-on favorite to leave would be the less
openly assertive of the two men. Nothing like the formal ostracism
of the Konde was known to Kinga. When friendships broke they were
replaced by quiet avoidance, as such a break diminishes both men.
348
made it possible to promote peer amity as a basis for spatial
settlement by developing stepped fields (often mistaken at a little
distance for terraces) where the necessary fallow period is shorter,
turning the soil there massively with annual planting. By remaking
the soil annually in this way over an entire hillside, they built up a
series of ‘condominial plantations’ in promising areas, slipping the
need to bring them close to every user. After the massive soil-
turning work, women did the planting and cultivation, planning with
peer-partners what plantation was to be worked each day, then
walking out together with hoe over shoulder and everything else on
the back with the baby to garden (each woman all day on her own
plot) in concert. This part of the Kinga adjustment is obviously to be
attributed to women adopting an appropriate moral strategy which
could gradually remake the maze the better to suit felt needs.
Sanga men could perhaps claim some connivance in giving women
their own heads in this, as the greater productivity allowed men
more time for soldiering and ‘bringing things together’ in the many
ways they were wont to do. I find the suggestion repeatedly in Fr.
Stirnimann’s account that Pangwa men like to ‘rule their roost’. This
is an inversion of the extroverted consciousness of peer rivalry.
Kinga men don’t crave, or at least don’t put it high on their moral
agenda, to dominate a wife, a daughter, or a son. I expect they would
find a Pangwa man tied down—sleeping at home every night, close-
handling the boys, monitoring every task the others perform. That is
distinctly not a picture of the good life among Kinga men.‡
349
girls’ sleeping house and always able to get home before the second
cock crow, keeping up appearances. It is quite a different picture to
that of the Kinga. As a starting point for the evolution of the Sanga
system, where the Pangwa dispensation is credible the Magoma is
not.
350
the pop-up kind of leader who only takes authority when the
occasion calls for it. Though he was accorded respect as the eldest
direct descendant of a founder, there would have been some
measure of self-selection in his succession to title, from among the
small elite of experienced ritual practitioners who might qualify.
Obsequies for an mkoyo do not suggest more than an important man
and do not make provision for installment of a ‘successor to office’.
The political localism of the Pangwa was closely tied to the kind of
‘Bantu egalitarianism’ which favours the indirection of ritualism and
the imperfect social cohesion it fosters, over the kind of vested
authority against which a self-reliant man dare not raise his voice. ‡
351
which set the framework for the ritual intercourse of the living and
the dead. The annual execution of the rite became a religious
experience, through which the kinship group not only became aware
of itself as a united society, but also the consciousness of shared
values came to life, and each partaker came awake to the responsi-
bility which had fallen to his share in this society. The rite furthers
peaceful, generous co-operation among men of different ranks, and
cements the kinship group. [I 221]
352
Is colour symbolism ‘natural’? What is special about it is
perhaps that colors are (in good 18th-century language) ‘secondary
characters’ of a thing. Does every white thing (a ghost, teeth, a dry
bone) look pure to Pangwa eyes? Better say that ‘whiteness’ is an
idea abstracted from visual experience of the world and put to
semiotic use in the language of (Pangwa) ritualism. Colour symbolism
supplies and enhances the rhetoric of discipline. Ordinary Pangwa do
not need to ‘understand the symbolism’—we are not dealing with the
cogency of an encrypted worldview but with the cogency of a
teaching. Fr. Stirnimann almost agrees:
What this does not quite do is make clear how ritualism works.
What is missing? I find that ritual here, as in so many of the mid-
last-century studies Fr. Stirnimann has used as his models, is
described in the language of dogmatic theology, while the practices
in question belong to a belief system—animism—which requires its
own appropriate analytical scheme. Animism is not a religion of faith,
hope, and charity but of prudence and of rules. Pangwa moral strat-
egies are not abetted by Pilgrim’s zeal or the good Father’s urge
toward peace and harmony. There is dread not of doing but of going
wrong, of being blamed. What the insistent, all-pervasive teachings
of Pangwa ritualists are doing is building and fortifying a social maze.
The material of the walls is psychologically opaque and strong. Our
best word for it is ‘taboo’. What rituals are about is mending wall.
What they say is, Do this thing right or the spirits will be angry with
all of us. What they tell you is, Do this thing right or your neighbours
out of fear will be angry with you.
353
the fields, in the sexual ‘shortening’ exercises of childhood, particu-
larly at night as the fires die down. The collective freedom of all
depends on each one individually staying on track. The whole is only
as sound as each of its parts.
354
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER NINE
355
manifests itself in the fear and blame drama of ‘witchcraft’
incidents. The logic of witchcraft in Sowetan discourse is to locate
public danger in the private behaviour of certain others. These others
are ordinarily to be found among a self-defined victim’s own kith and
kin. In ‘amity societies’ where the claims of friendship are pressed
wide among own-sex peers, it is the more likely that one of them will
be found to blame.
356
relation of father to son (or daughter?) is potentially explosive once
puberty intercedes. There is in fact no ‘lineage’ backup for keeping
the peace privately. Further, when the typical age for starting a
family is shortly after sexual maturation, a marriage can be
managed by elders without much fear of refusal on either hand.
357
prepared to let someone else call your moves. The difference wealth
makes does not tie you down in space but in other ways. The
antipolitan ethic in agrarian and nomadic societies is not deeply
different, though. It encourages self-reliance.
358
with as John-and-Jane units. Doubtless, a fair proportion of our
bachelors don’t plan to marry and ‘have a family’. But for Kinga
women no alternative moral strategy will serve, and Kinga men are
ever willing. Yet the Kinga formula seems to stand alone. It has in
common with today’s Western scene that Kinga women have ‘full-
time work’ but differs radically in that a Kinga woman experiences no
structural conflict between work and children. This is possible in her
circumstance because she rears her four children serially, one at a
time. Each child leaves the mother’s close care only at weaning
(having reached what most Western countries take to be ‘school
age’) and starts a second stage of socialization and a quite new kind
of schooling by joining older gender peers in their separate house.
With this the ‘primary care-giver’ withdraws to herself. Her project
will be to conceive again and dedicate another half-decade to raising
a second, third, or fourth new baby safely through infancy and its
early childhood years.
One thing that is clear about this social maze is that it doesn’t
meet the necessary conditions for acephalous societies. Though
buffered amity is one condition that is met, the Pangwa style of
self-reliant households—politically buffered by an established
culture of rules placing every individual in a fixed, pyramidal, and
patriarchal status order—won’t be found within the ambience of the
Sanga courts. At the same time we have seen that the women’s
regime of the Kinga echoes the Pangwa in striking ways. Women free
themselves of their marital sex relation at menopause at latest.
Nursing is continued for four years (Kinga) or rather longer (Pangwa).
The same phenomenal all-night effort at begetting is the norm in
both cultures. Children after weaning live in small gender-segregated
dormitories. Marriages are virilocal but not made locally—brides are
brought away from their home communities. Yet despite the obvious
historical connection, the Kinga are wholly affirmative about
homophilic relations, regarding the two sexes as having only partially
compatible natures. Pangwa are negative on homophilia and show
little candid interest in the social values of sex—apart from
begetting, which must be done according to the explicit teachings of
the shades and even, it appears, with their active complicity. Too
ghoulish for Kinga? For the younger men I knew, at least.
359
Logics of the age-village system
360
before a marriage debt is counted paid-in-full, only well-buffered
amity can make such a debt collectible. Konde cattle, situated in the
turbulent Corridor itself, are themselves complicit in the major
‘buffering’ system which dampers conflict between local groups. A
cow itself can be retrieved wherever chiefly jural authority can be
made to prevail—a cow makes a good counterpart to a wife. Though
residence is virilocal, age-village mates are not often brothers,
kinship is not a basis for local solidarity, and local exogamy doesn’t
follow from the residence rule. Konde bilateral incest/exogamy rules
mean little more than that a young man must be aware of his kinship
identity as he seeks a potential wife. What he thinks important is
hustling the cattle for a bridewealth, but in this he is a rival of all his
father’s or father’s brothers’ heirs. The familial relation is thus one
of clientage, set up by kinship rules which imply no intimacy. A young
man’s career strategy revolves about a prudential interest in
pleasing his patrons in the elder generation and a shorter term
interest in something closer to sport. To please fathers, young men
work their fields in the same teams that come around to their
mothers for cooked food. To please themselves, they want to shine
especially in such activities as dance, banter, flirtation, cattle-
raiding, and war.
361
less likely when the level of ‘private’ violence becomes a focus of
social danger. The proto-Konde people we have to consider would be
reaching a degree of structural turbulence that would prompt
wronged individuals to abandon the buffering code, leading to
broader, deeper, untimely patterns of conflict.
362
himself. Retaliation has lost its sanctioning power, which depended
on the spontaneous, endogenous sanctioning qualities of the target
community. Taboos are above all a product of much time spent in
significantly reciprocal relations in a company of others.
The problem is, how can we have both chiefly authority and
transactional sanctions? What keeps a chief in business? A simple
answer would be that we are looking at a transitional stage in a
protostate process. Chiefs have not yet reached the power position
they require for making effective decisions on divisive issues. Trans-
local delicts and ordeals are both transactionally managed. But while
‘transitional’ is a label that fits, just putting a suitable categorical
frame on an institution doesn’t bring it a lot closer. The best way
363
forward would be studying the quality of chiefly/princely power in
Kondeland. How secular, how sacerdotal, how militaristic—how
charismatic? How translocal, and how come? Chiefship is a famously
context-sensitive institution. It says too little to say its context in
Kondeland was transition.
364
1 Loosening of the patri-deme structure results from a growing
pattern of colonizing expansion, entailing assimilation of marginal
peoples, less effectively organized. Political pragmatism broadens
the ethnic horizon, permitting translocal alliances. Transactional
sanctioning is applied to trouble cases among neighbour demes, but
increasingly leads to settlement by amercement. A modest level of
turbulence favours a political agenda of strengthening the deme
through attracting young men who see the opportunity to settle
new land, win cattle, and take wives.
365
women. But unlimited polygyny means that the reigning married/
marrying age-group of men meets a point in aging where they must
place the political future of the league (chiefdom) in the hands of a
new generation. Then there is the Coming Out, which sends adult
young men out to build village centres at a distance from the stem
village. As this must be replicated by all the commoner villages
(erstwhile demes of the league) as well as the chiefly one, their world
becomes a bit of a circus for a while, but always an enterprising one
not to be trifled with. As with the celebrated Nuer of Sudan: power is
generated at the local level, where men ask full loyalty from one
another. This makes quick defensive alliances easy to form in crisis,
after which a fighting force falls back into its several solidary parts.
These parts in early stages of the developmental cycle are the
villages formed by young men with their new wives and progeny. In a
later stage a ‘village’ becomes a ‘village cluster’ as boys in the next
generation are set to building for themselves.
366
Logics of autonomy
367
favours a schismatic politics—maximizing the autonomy of viable
units as they strain the geographic limits of pedestrian oversight. ‡
368
antipolitan norms to playing ‘first among equals’, he has become a
genuine ‘politician’ able to trade on his reputation to continue
promoting his wealth and mystical powers as patron to the client-
rulers he has ‘sent out’ at their ubusooka. If someone is ‘driven out’ in
the course of this turbulent ‘political’ decade, it is more likely his
favoured client than the old chief himself. He is, we are told, no longer
a leader of men in the field. But we have no evidence that privilege is
denied him if he is inclined that way.
369
occasionally a bull) as a thank-offering from the party for whom
judgement was given, were the perquisites of a chief alone. [B 137]
370
Dramatic models are better than structural for disclosing the
moral strategies by which a ‘client ruler’ becomes a chiefly one. The
model I want to adumbrate is essentially theatrical. The client who
turns out to be princely in the fullest sense is the one who best
makes use of his initial position of authority to magnify a political
persona. He must be opportunistic in using the arts of clientship
without incurring the losses which accrue from abject dependency.
Always his underlying strategy will be fortifying his chiefly persona, a
thing best done by accruing wealth and putting it to tactical use in
building a following. He must come to hold public sway well beyond its
initial scope at his Coming Out, when he was a mere client ruler within
a father’s sphere of influence. In this respect his career is parallel to
that of a successful ‘chiefly’ priest in the same arena. Each has been
given a mandate to pursue a career of influence, but each in fact
must prove himself a man chosen not by his patrons but the shades.
371
(committed to heroics) whose moral fortunes are avowedly at
stake. The politics of high deeds is everywhere inclined to play itself
out on a plane of its own, an arena imaginatively laid out by the local
makers of myth. Leading roles are ordinarily assigned to persons
who stand above the rest in wealth, influence, and destiny—in the
Konde case, cattle and wives, patrons and patronage, and high birth.
Our most common mistake, as Tolstoy might remark, is supposing
that the theatre of high deeds is about history. It is closer to smoke
and mirrors.
Konde chiefs are not quite like Melanesian ‘big men’. While both
depend on having wealth enough to be generous with, and both have
their most telling years of fame and influence before they are slowed
by age, Konde chiefs don’t lose their élite standing by losing wealth
and power. Even if they may lose, piecemeal, whole measures of trust
in their contact with followings, they enjoy a hallowed position as
heritors of greatness in the form of medicines of special grace
linking them to past rulers. A chief’s ancestral claims can be read
from the grave-shrines he honours and (feigns to) dare not closely
approach. Priests, since they apply these medicines, will not belittle
their power. Priests also must decide what chiefly oracle to consult,
with what slant, in a given contingency. It must be a decision which
will carry the main publics concerned. Of course, only a positive
response from a great ancestor is likely to help the career of his
postulant grandson. But a good dodger can deal with bad news as
well as good. Konde chiefs have a flare for backing away from trouble.
Losing face in this society is not forever. The man himself is absorbed
into his persona. This is a character in Konde political theatre who
can sulk, rant, curse, and come on strong. Can we say that in the
frame of political theatre he may have a very chiefly authority, but
one which inevitably softens in conjunctions with his age mates? I am
minded that Kinga priests reserved the right to warn and chastise
an errant Prince. As in both countries the antipolitan ethic rules, the
price of unpopular acts is losing one’s following. In Konde conditions
as I understand them, this can happen without any man having to
move house, as whole commoner villages can withhold support on
some particular issue while remaining safely in situ. It is a state of
things which makes chiefly authority iffy. Here is Godfrey Wilson’s
account:
372
also the adverse opinion of a single village or of a whole chiefdom is
believed to have power against a chief, to bring sickness or even
death upon him. As in the single village, so in the whole chiefdom, the
great commoners are the prime sources of this spiritual power; they
are believed severally to protect the members of their own villages
and jointly to protect their chief from the wanton attacks of
witches; but if ever there is a just ground of offense they are believed
to join their own power of witchcraft in the general attack. I know one
chief who dare not give a judgement in a dispute between two of his
villages for fear of the indignant witchcraft of the losing side. [A
287]
373
Traditionally, sacrifices are said to have been usually prompted by
prophecies of coming misfortune which was then averted by them. In
each chiefdom the ruling great commoners [village heads], the
hereditary priests, and some private persons as well are believed to
have the power of dreaming of misfortune before it comes. And the
chiefs are said always to have listened to these dreams. [A 287-8]
Lest this leave us with a chief who is no more than the local
representative of his corporate ancestry, have in mind that an
eminent ancestor’s shrine, if only for a limited public, operates in
parallel with the translocal cult centres such as Lwembe’s at Lubaga,
and without the protective privilege of reclusion for its living repre-
sentative. His two sidemen, the ‘senior village heads’ of his chiefdom,
may have led the men into battle, but their importance was trans-
local only in that indirect sense. Where Kinga ‘chiefs’ can opt for
reclusion to escape just those threats of popular disgrace which
haunt a Konde counterpart, and where Kinga rulers had ‘enforcers’
(their avanyivaha) to take tax and tribute to feast the court with
meat and beer, Konde rulers had to depend on private funds and
individual political skills of an ‘in the face’ style. In this matter of
style, as in demographic scope, most Konde ‘chiefs’ compare not
with the unkuludeva (prince or high prince) of a realm in the Sanga
system but the untwa (lord) who ruled only over his own pedestrian
domain and lacked the option of reclusion. But Monica Wilson must
be trusted that some Konde chiefs do achieve high mystical
standing. We see it plainly in the special importance of some chiefly
burial groves which serve as the sacrificial centres for particular
chiefdoms over many generations.
374
sanctioned boundary in a chiefdom was an internal line between two
ritually planted trees, dating from a chief’s Coming Out and forever
dividing the two ‘sides’ of his country, to neither of which he solely
belongs. Only the chief, by rules of state, lived with both sides. His
problem very often must have been showing impartiality. It is for
that reason, in particular, that he must look to devolving power
within his own two villages. His moral purpose must be an heroic not a
villainous career. ‡
375
Much will depend on a man’s own success in external raids, but much
also depends on his handling of transitory tides in public opinion.
Konde settlements are at once dense and open to pedestrian
traffic from any direction. It is an ideal situation for the rapid mobili-
zation of public concern in response to rumor, prophecy, and ominous
‘signs’. Interpreting such alarms for a chief is largely an internal
matter in which local groupings of priests with their medicines and
oracles are likely to play an indirect but decisive part. But Godfrey
Wilson made it a particular point that the political scope of a
prominent Konde chief always overran—must overrun—the concerns
of his own chiefdom. ‡
A Profusion of Priests
376
The mischief here is failing to recognize the gradualness of
career achievements in societies seemingly governed by pat rules of
thumb, but conditioned over the years in the business of their opera-
tional use and non-use by ever more deeply situated action. I prefer
to deal here with ‘commoner priests’, pictured as a set equivalent to
‘village trustees’, and with ‘hereditary priests’ as officially recog-
nized doctors of medicine. The best documented hereditary priest
was Kasitile the Rainmaker; the laying-on of hands would have been
the passing on to him of the local set of rainstones, by a series of
‘hereditary’ steps with beginnings too early to chart. It would have
been from the set of such career professionals as Kasitile, resulting
(for a given generation in the Selya arena) that a ‘living Lwembe’
would have been co-opted, elevating the territorial claims of a rain
maker to translocal scope and the fullest range of destructive-
protective faculties.
377
those peripheral somatic parts doesn’t normally require the acts of
torture the European literature on the subject presumes. To be
effective, only the rumor of such mysteries need be kept alive. The
education of a priest has to have been mainly through appren-
ticeship and has to have achieved the standard of ‘cultural repro-
duction’—passing on a tradition intact. But it isn’t wise to assume a
clinical sterility, no blarney at all, in this kind of training. A priest who
says ‘we do thus and so’ has surely heard it earlier said to him. He
has not necessarily done it ‘thus and so’ himself. What is required is
only that he will reiterate this teaching in his own turn to another
generation. I don’t reject the possibility that everything said to have
been done in a secret seance was truly and often done. The Kinga
priests may have caught and sacrificed a little boy in the bush for his
blood every time they marched to Lubaga, and the Konde priests
may have strangled many a chief who caught sick. But it isn’t neces-
sarily so. What can’t be doubted is that it makes better theatre if it
is dramatically true in the telling. It is the same, of course, with talk
of witches around the evening fire.
[Ali]: “The pagans say that if I dream of flying that means that
the witches came and tried to eat me. If I do not dream at all, but
wake up in a sweat, then they say: “They came to bewitch you by
night.” ...Again, if I dream that someone comes and holds me
down...they say: “The witches came to kill you.” They say a man is a
defender if he does not merely dream, but sees in his dream who it
was that came. So with dreams of fighting, if I recognize that my
opponent is so-and-so, then they say I have mystical power... We
Christians have all these dreams but say they mean nothing and do
not fear them. [B 226-7]
378
spiritually closer to the invisible persona of divinity invoked in
sacrifice, it would not be the one we are sometimes prepared to call
‘priest’. It is the one we know for inspiring fear.
379
FEAR & BLAME, CHAPTER TEN
Implications
380
culture and what regional. In the present study I’ve leaned on the
concept of ‘deepstuff’ as a touchstone for recognizing cultural
difference within a region. I mean to explain this way of thinking
about emotional interaction, its roots and consequences.
How general is taboo? To begin with, the word does not in its
general sense refer to a human institution, but is nevertheless
about how mainstream human life is organized. The difference
between a trained and an untrained dog can actually help us to see
what training a child amounts to. The procedure shortcuts reason. It
takes human institutions to do the training. It is also the case that
it takes training to make or maintain a human institution. But there
is no contradiction. The circularity is inherent in the phenomenon we
call culture.
381
perfect a language of self-control, an intuitive routine completely
private to each individual. Some are much better at social tactics
and moral strategy than others. For the most part, social skills will
never be learnt without mentors, and no two individuals ever have
the same mentors, nor are any two mentors alike. So some voices
have to be more equal than others. Politics is not about equalizing
social training. That may be attempted some day in a Brave New
World. For now, Bismarck’s ‘art of the possible’ is about managing the
distribution of voice in society.
382
adulthood, who were able to continue the long dialectic of a people’s
history without break. I set genocide aside as related to the
phenomena of barbarism not systems of civility.
383
routine, be put and kept in motion by successful—insightful—
emotional bargaining. In peer socialization the two ends of a conver-
sation are reasonably balanced, if only because the green ones are so
quick at catching up. The name we give to those scaffoldings of
routine is ‘institution’. Social structure is a condition of the
existence and reach of any human institution, but is the skeleton
not the flesh of it from which we can discover its nature. What insti-
tutions are about is making community possible. They are set up
against the great odds posed by human ingenuity. We are not and
never were the automatons William Graham Sumner discussed a
century ago in his essays on ‘primitive custom’. We are not born
programmed in advance to build our own mazes, as socio-biologists
seem sometimes to suppose. But in struggling against the layout of
the maze we are allotted, we earn the insights which make it livable.
384
can’t be planned. It is always a result of what actually happened,
sum total, not what anyone in authority or in any ‘planning’ agency
meant to take place. Cultures are not conceived in heads but in what
happens when heads meet, Origins obscure, future inscrutable, even
in the here-and-now a culture is always too big with potentialities for
its implications to fit in a human mind.
385
notice about pragmatism is that it also comes in schools. Its
premises are learned—dogmatic.
386
mean that kind of insight into one’s fellow’s condition as well as one’s
own, which is the only firm basis for enduring ego-concessions.
Insight in this sense is not possible without interpersonal collisions
of the sort which generate emotional heat. The whole process
entailed in the evolution of a culture of insight favours localism
because it depends on direct personal interaction. In the circum-
stances of a pedestrian civilization, this means that within any
broad regional culture of rules there will normally be a plurality of
more locally focused areas of cultural intensity reflecting the
struggle for community through face work.
387
writer’s viewpoint is not often regional. I find the terms I lay out here
suitable at least for the Sowetan case. But what is distinctive of
this presentation is the idea of ‘deepstuff’ as an integrative force.
The connection I make to ‘personality theory’ is less important than
reference to a concept of culture as social environment—context for
the quotidian pursuit of happiness. I see the consistent effort to
improve personal moral strategies as the principal contribution
individuals make (whatever the flavour they give it) to their cultural
lives. Social behaviorists will see a familiar irony in this view, which
makes of minding one’s self interest an essentially constructive
business.
388
tion, panic, the rage of personal desolation) is socially transmuted
into a legitimate grievance. The blame may fall on a ghost (ancestor,
local spirit) or a ‘living ghost’ (witch, sorcerer)—in any case, a familiar.
In acephalous societies, even when the culprit can be faced, and
retributive action is wanted, the procedure may be unspectacular.
The victim undertakes an errand not a crusade. The accused is apt
to show surprise and do what seems to be required to cool the
accuser out. But where chiefs have set themselves up as powerful
protectors, they will want spectacle. You get the ordeal. You get
diviners using special effects. You get the magnification of incidents
into emergencies. In the Sanga case you could get summary execu-
tion. The contextual meanings of anger and blame are, we might say,
politicized. The culture of anger in Kinga court culture has changed in
pace with a shift from transactional sanctions to authoritative.
What this means for blame is that its quality as a deeply personal
transaction between private persons begins to take on a public
burden. We have seen this on a fiercely local level in the cases of
ostracism for witchcraft, which Monica Wilson reported in detail.
But Tunginiye’s near-death experience was a deeply private event. It
would not have been, even in its colonial circumstance, if Tunginiye
had been a less private person. The Sanga courts as they are
described for precolonial times must have cultivated a more extra-
verted, more collective lifestyle than I found half a century later. But
the Sanga courts were balanced by a systematic circulation of men
(in particular) between the bush life and the court. Close and lasting
friendships were always more significant than mere ‘male bonding’.
389
What I have taken to be distinctive of the Kinga and Konde
protostates is the intensification of masculine solidarity through a
politics of friendship. The two ethnic approaches are quite
different—one can be seen as an inversion of the other. Nyakyusa
keep boys and bachelor men ‘at home’ in a permanent men’s age-
village temporarily grouped closely around a perishable political
centre until at last they are ‘sent out’—whole villages of them—to
marry and fight and create new centres. Kinga do otherwise. Boys
are at home in the political periphery. The bachelor youth seeks to
the local court, where he associates with men gathered in from all
about and is re-sophisticated. He forms in this gregarious context
lifelong adult friendships some of which are eventually carried with
him in his return to the political periphery as a married homesteader.
Homophilia is expected of the Nyakyusa youth in early life but cooled
down as an affective basis of friendship with maturity and marriage.
For Kinga, open homophilic association is lifelong for both sexes. It is
linked to a predominant preference for (heterosexual) monogamy
and a matrifocal strategy of reproduction. The contrast to
Nyakyusa polygyny and patrifocal parenting is striking. In the one
case it is mother and daughter who garden together, joined only
seasonally by a father with his circle of friends or a son with his. In
the other case the main gardens are in the fullest sense the father’s
and the devolved responsibility for them the sons’. Yet in each
society homophilia among men is a politically sponsored basis for
social cohesion, without which the system as a whole would lose
rationale. It makes a nice paradox. On the one hand, solidarity within
the bosom of the family is quite generally fostered by incest taboos,
which damp petty jealousies and favouritism. On the other hand,
sexual license is condoned to favour solidarity among (particularly)
same-sex bachelors.
390
systems is a base-level politics of settling trouble cases and of local
issue-management, overlaid by a chiefly political theatre playing on
themes of booty warfare and mystical power. For Kinga the political
centre is the Sanga court, for Nyakyusa it is the person (persona) of
the chief, wherever he may be resident. In each case there is a
political team prepared to legitimate chiefly rulings and execute
them at need. In each case also this team is party to every legiti-
mate ruling, and in the scene of such decision boldly plays guardian to
an effective antipolitan ethic. Without that, the tempered totali-
tarianism of the Malatan cluster would soon lose its temper.
391
over all the chiefly histrionics and princely pretension there is the
entrepreneur’s pragmatic awareness of a simple truth: if nothing
succeeds like success, the obverse also holds. Maladroit leaders
stand to lose following to rivals, each loss only further prejudicing
the chances for recovery.
392
be a plurality of centres, with tolerance of mutual leverage, to
deflect mutinous coalitions. What best distinguishes the Sowetan
systems from kinship societies (as we generally conceive them) is
the ease with which individual men can bring their grievances directly
to centre. It is a kind of individualism which builds on a radically open
domestic group and dispersal of the extended family. We have seen
that this kind of balance is achieved in quite different ways by Kinga
and Konde rules. But both societies depend utterly on a multicen-
tred chiefly politics above the level of local amity groups. For Kinga
the peculiar bush-court-bush circulation of men is a fundamental
determinant of a man’s adult status and political enculturation. For
Nyakyusa the peace within the age village of lifetime male peers
would never be maintained without the broader Konde pax which
allows a man free movement to a new chiefdom and new peer-
mentors when that internal peace is broken. In both cases political
alienation is relieved by a system which enjoins fear of a magnified
ruler’s wrath even while offering the right of asylum in a neighbouring
vicinage. In neither case is it easy to imagine that the system could
persist in the absence of politically magnified seats of power. Still
the system survives the incompetence of incumbent rulers: the Sanga
prince may be cloistered away, and the Konde prince treated as a
living relic, while their denizens in power see to keeping the peace
under that royal aegis.
To this point I have argued that fear, anger, and blame comprise
an affect bundle energizing the power systems we find in the
Malatan protostates. Most individual experience even in the most
‘political’ settings remains, as everywhere, at an apolitical level. It is
existential dread—awareness of one’s mortality, fallibility, secret
vulnerability—which is the extra-situational source of fear. Politics is
the art of giving a realistic, situational focus to the fears all of us
have, and have in common, but can’t easily share. Franklin Roosevelt’s
cooling formula was ‘Ye have nothing to fear but fear itself’. Some of
my school friends were sharp enough to answer with a chorus of
‘death and taxes’, but we were all soon enough into war. It proved a
political product even worse than the taxes we would later learn to
pay, if seldom without a muttered frenzy of fear, anger, and blame.
The chiefly systems anthropologists study have learned to deal with
extraprocessual episodes beginning in fear, and to gather round the
cadres needed to handle them. Trouble cases require that blame be
legitimately allocated and anger cooled. Maintaining the cadres
seems to have called for taxes in meat or iron and, from time to
time, death in war.
393
Blame, taboo, and the problem of order
394
Mahomet did just that. But this, in the context of Bantu civilization,
is a nonsense. The reason wouldn’t be that chiefs are not big enough.
It is rather the animist’s premise that trouble arises in molecular
form and must be handled in molecular form.
395
often say this elliptically by reference to significant others ‘being
present’ to ego when they are not demonstrably so. I find the most
telling and enduring social learning, at least, does take place in
contexts of emotional interaction. These contexts, I further
suppose, will most probably be primary groups, in the inclusive socio-
logical sense.
But we have seen that for Nyakyusa men the taboos exposed
by witchcraft revelation normally do fall within the intimate age-
village. So also for Kinga men, in later life it is the comrade of
youthful times who is thought likely to carry black secrets. He may
act through what we call poison or through less tangible means, but
in either case if there is no political intercession, the drama of witch-
craft has only episodic weight. The social danger presents itself as
immediate and belongs, when it is over, to past time. It remains, no
doubt, as current in the form of personal bemusement on the part of
any principals who survive: personal enmity lives on. In the 1960s a
witchcraft episode might remain as delicately scarified brows on
men who had been cleansed by a Malawi prophet. But the badge was
not read as a sign of lingering guilt. The nearest phenomenon in
European law is the crime passionnel, considered to belong to a unique
relationship, and not to be evidence of the perpetrator’s danger to
others. The difference to be made for understanding Malatan witch-
craft is that the deterrent force of taboo (upon whatever inimical
behaviour) is to be taken as objectively real. Consequently, someone
in breach of taboo doesn’t require ‘correctional’ intervention by
society. Taboo is in this way an obverse of law. A man in breach who is
fortunate enough to survive the episode will not learn to be careless
of taboo but, from the grueling experience of social alienation, to fear
it the more.
396
to-face relationships where the prevailing expectation is that social
danger is maximized in the breach of taboo. Political intervention in
the Malatan milieu occurs when the sense of social danger is
highest, and must aim to quell it. The means of riddance range from
absolution to death, and respond less to the considered gravity of
the offense than to the authority’s quick estimate of political
points at risk.
397
spirit beings as familiars. They are demanding, not ‘giving’ beings. In
the (unseen) Sowetan pantheon there are no spirit beings who can’t
be depicted as ancestral humans. The moral emphasis in animism is
on exemplary behaviour toward those who deserve your trust. In
ancestral religions the demand is focused in the taboo construct
which comprises the moral code of seniority by which ego is
expected to orient action with close kin. All of Eastern Bantu civili-
zation reflects its development from a seed culture imbued with
such a seniority code. But for Kinga, moral seniority is partially
displaced from the kin toward the peer/age and political identity
groups. Animist belief systems elsewhere range through quite
various systems of moral orientation to village and political life,
coded into their teachings about the supernatural world.
398
noticeable cumulation in experience, the Sanga pageant would
repeat itself, the bearing of gifts in fear and trembling re-enacted
with fresh hardware, crisis management achieved once again with
the stilling of Lwembe’s histrionic anger. As the ritual recapitulation
of an ancient mythological charter, this was drama going beyond the
minimal scope of animism in its political significance, but not in its
theology. We can mislead ourselves when we call Lwembe or Mbasi a
hero—Trickster is not quite right either. They are the heavies, the big
men of the underworld, anti-heroes needing appeasement.
399
translocal stability required a full-scaled shift toward authoritative
sanctions—what ethnographers think of primarily as ‘chiefship’. But
it needs be said that chiefs are not in place to ‘keep the peace’. The
sense of good order they can maintain flows from their ability to
protect and cultivate the solidarity of the village. The shaping force
toward stable polities radiates from the internal domains to which
we can metaphorically refer by this word ‘village’. We have to examine
again the twin notions of taboo and law. The distinction I have been
making parallels the distinction I make between society and culture.
Law can be tempered, laws can be changed. Taboo is either change-
less or it changes in spite of men’s best efforts—or more simply, it is
no longer there. Culture is only predictable in the way narrative is.
400
kind of mystical surgery. In a highland Burmese village where animism
lives on in the shelter of an ancient Buddhist establishment, pain and
suffering may be caused by witches or ghosts or demons, or by
powerful supernaturals called nats. Every village also has a few
known and several more suspected witches, all female, who appear to
be living ordinary lives though ‘known’ to have killed or otherwise
bewitched someone. Compared to this up-country Burmese cosmos,
the Malatan is uncomplicated. In Konde culture it makes little sense
to blame a child’s illness on ancestors—how would they think to act
this way? why cut off a nose to spite a face? The sole available alter-
native in this religion of blame is claiming witchcraft. Further, the
outcome of crying witch and sending the culprit off in exile is in
‘system’ terms positive, whether the child recovers (because the
witch was stopped) or dies (so the past can be put away). We have
seen how this works.
401
thrown to his death on rocks below and left as carrion. I assume the
culprit who might earn this treatment was close to the court circle,
where witchcraft would be tantamount to disloyalty—treason in
presuming powers equal to the ruler’s. There is no indication the
ordeal was at home in Kinga bush culture. Tunginiye thought elders
would take up the case and make decisions. A serious outcome
meant one or both principals would move away. In this apolitical
context, the theatrics of face-to-face accusation and judging made
spectacle enough to incite a move favouring solidarity under the
code of amity. Taboo required no re-institutionalization in procedural
law.
402
from the long-term observation of moral careers as they are every-
where pursued.
Least polities
403
Is it true there are specific provisions of moral restraint in
dealing with others, which are equally written into all the main scrip-
tural religions? I find it hard to conceive the notion could be either
confirmed or denied without getting down to detail, as ‘moral laws’
are inevitably stated in the broad sort of terms no lawyer can
respect. But I think the question may well be posed, whether all
human moral experience does not have a centre in the restraints we
may call ‘intimate taboos’. These are constraints on conflict and
congress in the internal domain. They can’t be defined to suit a
lawyer’s standard, because they are context-sensitive and enjoy
distinct contexts from one culture area to another. They have to be
intuitively grasped in each such context—they are taboos.
404
face. What is the same wherever the tabooing of incest is found, is
that each new generation is born into a uniquely placed genealogical
slot, through which an unambiguous social identity of its own can be
conferred on each offspring. (I set aside twins. Some societies find
them problematic as lacking a firm birth order and defying sure
identification.) Everywhere, individuals must each be assigned an
unambiguous role in the structure of rights and responsibilities
which prevails. This is normally done by birth-placement in a least-
polity tagged by a marriage—a mooring in social space. ‡‡
405
systems, war regularly breaks out between intermarrying groups.
When a man kills his sister’s husband we see legitimate and morally
defensible harm indirectly done a woman within the man’s primary
‘incest circle’. The two sets of taboos are not confused the one with
the other. Still, I think within the primary socializing process itself
the two kinds of ban do reinforce each other.
406
secure social identity for all newborns who will be taken up from the
birthing mat and offered a chance of life.
(b) Market forces do not see to it that children are well fed.
The system which does do parenting is another one, arranged to put
children in the position of wanted members in a solidary small group.
Economic responsibility for raising offspring to the age of self-
support devolves upon the parenting unit. Usually we call it ‘the
domestic group’, but for careful analytical purposes I prefer ‘the
least polity’. Motivationally, this group is set up to make a decent
living for all its members, and at least to reproduce itself in a new
generation. Except for special cases the pertinent group is some
kind of ‘family’. No society this side of a Brave New World can prove
itself viable without these ‘least polities’ which are dedicated to
managing and handing-on the arts of reproduction and survival on a
quotidian basis. Market forces do not imbue the very young with
social and moral skills which lead into lives of greater than market
value. It is the genius of the internal domain to produce individuals
easily trained into the roles the external institutions require.
Policing cases of child abuse can occur even in uKinga—thumbs show
up when dikes leak. But there has to be more to the external domain
than handling trouble cases and common defense. It has to be
involved in keeping its ‘families’ viable—there is rarely any other
recruiting ground than its own ‘internal domains’. We have seen how
Pangwa elders, as a community force, have their way with the young.
They do this mainly through powerful ‘ritual schools’ staffed by
graduates of the same. Their ‘external domain’ has perhaps no
houses of its own. But because the Pangwa system gives great
scope to these distinctive teach-ins, we are struck by the interven-
tion of the community in the intimate affairs of a private household.
In fact, the practice is universal, only less obvious to us in cases
where procedures are less dramatically intrusive.
407
dures become more visible for according voice or forcing exit. My
point is that households in a subsistence-economic community are
‘members’ in a polity. One can think of the household as a ‘micro-
polity’ nested in a ‘local polity’ nested in an ‘ethnic polity’. Kinship
societies are often formally presented in that way, where a term
such as ‘lineage’ can substitute for the less specific ‘polity’. I find
‘least polity’ the better term than ‘domestic group’ to think with,
where general statements are being made in a cross-cultural forum.
Wherever a family system is in charge of the process by which
citizens are recruited from eggs, the political responsibility for this
process will belong to the ‘least polities’. It is their work, and doing it
comprises their claim to deserving a fair morsel of autonomy.
408
For clarity, consider now the same segmentary ‘nesting’
structure familiar to students of lineage systems, as it will appear
in its planar aspect. Look at the ‘system on the ground’ which
results. Heads of household, like their children, deal more often
directly with their neighbours than they deal with them ‘through
channels’. Torts and witchcraft accusations occur on the ‘civil’ plane,
and in such everyday neighbourly politics each voice is about equal,
and each member’s interests are (as is not the case the world
around) best defended by himself. The main guarantee for this
condition is that each voice in this system of keeping order through
kinship should be close to and inclined to take care of all his or her
own folk, but disinclined to expand claims on the common good at the
expense of neighbourly envy. Every society studied by ethnogra-
phers has its own ways of working this kind of system. Scale and
detail in the use of kinship links are always relative to local norms.
But the main way the neighbourly entente is engendered is by
sanctioning an optimal model of the self-sufficient subsistence-
cum-socializing group—a made-to-standard least polity—to suit
the setting. The combination of equal voice with exit-autonomy for
the householders is the mechanism which serves this purpose of
mutual adjustment in the Malatan communities under study.
In the Kinga case there are quite a few different kinds of group
which can be reliably mapped. There is a central court and outlying
isivaga barrack houses for men. There are boys-and-goats houses for
every grouping of households into a hamlet. And there are the isaka
bachelor girls’ houses. Of course on this map you might also want to
indicate ties between particular households and particular fields,
storage structures, and the like. But ask, What are the parts, the
‘member groups’ through which individuals are counted as members of the
inclusive political community? The answer, which for other societies
might be ‘the domestic groups’, has to be couched for Kinga in terms
409
of ‘multilocal households’ or ‘dispersed families’. A map of the planar
constitution of the polity surrounding a central court has to be
coded to reflect lines of right and responsibility. These lines pass
through a household head to individual family members. The Kinga
family system is not typical world-wide. Heterosexual motivation is
bumped from first place, and facework in the parent-child relation-
ship perhaps from second, in the moral strategies of either Kinga
gender. What is most obviously different, structurally, is the spatial
dispersion of the sleeping quarters for household members.
410
groups have proven hard to govern, requiring quite special constitu-
tional arrangements. The tendency to press for such time-binding
domestic groups, at the expense of neighbourly collegium, is present
in most Bantu lands. It is obvious in the Wilsons’ ethnography of
Nyakyusa, where the full members of a village collegium are few and
comprise a greedy gerontocratic elite. Young men are kept in
bachelor status and young women hoarded as surplus wives of the
elite. But eventually the elders’ big stem village is allowed to
complete its cycle, and the bachelor men are sent out on the elders
road to join the game of privatizing women and cattle and exiling
their sons in turn to satellite villages. ‡‡
The political logic of the incest taboos has now been outlined. In
order that something like ‘equal voice’ may obtain, the Least Polity
Rule must hold, so that the inequalities which are generated by one
generation are not geometrically multiplied in the next. The result of
unequal voice is trouble, often followed by exit or other symptoms of
a broken peace, always in principle perceived by the collegium as
weakening the whole community’s position. ‡‡
411
chiefdom. All must join in the Coming Out. It takes place about thirty
years from the time the village was granted autonomy with the last
Coming Out. So that all these villages can cycle as one, a son or
nephew may be coopted from bachelor life to replace an elder whose
death has left an elite identity vacant. The custom underlines the
importance of maintaining a peer village intact to the end, even if it
means bringing in a half-grown ‘peer’. This stem village is no mere
network of chums but an equal-voice peer polity. The rule is equality
through (say) ‘matched domestic standing among male elders’. So
does the logic not hold? There are no smaller polities with voice.
412
loyalty of a son by employing him in the gardens, with the herds, and
in war-making, which is a high calling. There is in the age-village
system an effective provision for neutralizing citizen envy: men of
the bachelor generation are at once held out of the political loop and
held to the game of peer rivalry. Since they run their own village, the
game is a political education in any event. Meanwhile, by using lateral
inheritance, the decay of the older generation is systematically
delayed, and young man’s invidious sentiment for his father is
deflected as ‘incestuous’ design on some one of the elder’s young
brides. If this logic bends the word, it trades on the incest code in a
politically strategic fashion.
413
formula: the life is in the roots. I have argued it is the salutary cover
of moral taboo which keeps it there. Taboos have a way of cooling
down quibbles before they escalate.
414
out any move toward an entente against the throne. Separate
‘families within the family’ of the king could more easily build power
structures of their own. As for the psychology of breaking taboo,
there is the dramatic meaning of flouting convention: it makes of the
royals one kind, able to see its interests solidly in opposition to the
masses of commoner clansmen. Flaunting evil makes the king’s kind
special and keeps royal aspirants to power from being trusted by
commoners who might otherwise be teemed up in revolt. Most
important: each Zande court faced a chronically turbulent military
situation. Azande by the late nineteenth century was a rapidly
expanding despotic system of principalities with rubber borders. ‡
The key to the Zande court’s inner structure was repealing the
incest taboos and centralizing the political-jural-ritual institutional
complex—the stuff of the ‘external domain’—in an expanded court
always under the royal thumb. The fact that a community, however
uniquely situated, can so readily slough off the incest taboo makes it
clear such taboos must be socially enforced or cease to exist.
Biological factors are of marginal importance. But wherever autono-
mous households are spread like tiles across the ground of an ethnic
community, incest taboos will be retained. They are crucial to a
system by which a self-stabilizing infrastructure can reproduce
itself. Call this ground-zero politics.
415
I am now in position to review the lessons of Kinga sociology.
The problem is to show how Sanga deviation from a standard-model
family organization affects the form of incest taboos and illumi-
nates their nature. The Kinga case may challenge the view that
family life is the cradle of morality. Parenting is not central to social-
ization in Kinga tradition. All the same, manners and morals are
surely no worse (and likely better) than standard. The case is not
without general sociological significance. A point for educators to
note is that ‘peer socialization’ in this case entails small groups
ranging in age from about five to (say) maturity, with a break for
each individual at puberty to move from the children’s to the youths’
sleeping mats. If all a boy’s peers were in his own narrow age range, or
if the longterm continuity of the group were less ‘family-like’, the
process and quality of the education would plainly be different.
416
means of subsistence, and attach themselves to offspring in the
possessive and emotionally overloaded way they characteristically
do? Yet for Kinga the bond between husband and wife was tradition-
ally nothing like the happy Christian marriage I occasionally met in
the Kingaland of the 1960s. The scene of cohabitation in the uncon-
verted bush culture was a tiny grass hut with no fire, which a man
would crawl into backward to avoid showing off his bottom. Under
the Sanga dispensation, except when a woman was in search of a
pregnancy, the man would prefer the barracks building where he slept
with his fellows. Even for recent times, the self-sufficiency of the
Kinga wife is famous. The attention she needs, so long as she has a
pregnancy advanced or finds herself in the four-year-plus period of
nursing, is strictly practical. The sexual relation does not noticeably
magnify the emotional tie, and can’t compete at all with the nursing
tie. We have seen that Pangwa traditionally extended nursing several
more years and without pregnancy. It appears that erotic attach-
ment, as distinct from episodic lust, may not be particularly
important in shaping a human social system.
417
the institution of marriage as a basis for bestowing a distinct social
identity on most children. Kinga practice neither confirms or
weakens the premise. Descent is not by any means the prime basis
of social identity for men, except in direct relation to sex taboos,
which come to be reckoned at the time a man and woman feel ready
to marry. If the elders can’t name a common great-grandparent,
marriage and sexual relations are approved. But it is notable that
even with the advent of writing Kinga seldom had a clear view of the
two sets of grandparents and four sets of greats who must be
identified. The problem is not made easier by the freedom with which
individuals choose new names or go for periods under an almost
prankish alias. In many or most local areas, there are only a handful
of surnames, and these do not often reflect known kinship ties. In
some areas everyone has the same surname and no one would
suppose that indicated close kinship. The original birth name is
discovered on the spot, when a sisterly attendant catches the
mother’s first clear words and takes from them a distinctive
expression suitable as a name. In short, descent matters but lies in
the background of ordinary life, seldom coming to the foreground.
Wherever society is on a favoured-name basis, no one uses any other
to refer to a friend or acquaintance; very often I would find a well
known man in one community instantly recognized by his idiosyn-
cratic favoured name in another place, however far.
418
of their kinship link. The point to have in mind is that incest in the jural
sense is impossible without unambiguous data on descent, for each
individual in the community. This is to say that a clearly reckoned
descent structure is a necessary condition of an incest taboo. The
taboo, then, is not (as Levi-Strauss and others had it) the genetic
source of the family as a human institution. Premise Two is not inval-
idated by the Kinga evidence. But packaging marriage with descent
reckoning, even if it could be empirically affirmed as a universal
feature of cultures, leaves us the question, whether the incest
taboos are to be reckoned as part of that package. Inconveniently, I
don’t think so.
419
together in a house with somewhat older peers; but well in anticipa-
tion of a boy’s puberty he will shift or be shifted to an all-male house.
Heterosexual awakening is deliberately delayed. Adolescent girls
enjoy caring for young girls, and don’t let them interfere with more
‘grown up’ matters at the other end of the hut—there are only the
sounds in the dark, and until sleep the small ones will usually be busy
with their own talk. I take it the scene is much the same in a boys’
house where both age-groups are present, except that older boys
would be heavy-handed with discipline. Talk across the floor, when it
is meant to be heard, helps the small ones grow up quickly. For one
thing, the small ones will soon know that the only answer to ‘What
was happening last night?’ would be ‘Nothing happened’.
420
The man A in a group trying to drive off a rogue leopard threat-
ening their community lost his spear and saved himself by grasping
the creature’s tail. His friends were unable to attack the leopard
without stirring it up to the point of endangering the man behind it.
They therefore kept its attention while sending for A’s brother. Only
a brother, they tell, could take the responsibility of rescue with all its
risks. A’s brother comes, and between the two of them and a little
help from their friends they kill the leopard.
The first point to make is that amity has been shown weaker
than kinship. But to follow that up, we must focus on the kind of bond
which features in the tale—the fraternal or ‘BB’ tie. This is in a Kinga
community the one peer bond which is seemingly overloaded with
affect. Not only does an elder brother serve as mentor and model in
what might elsewhere be a father’s place, but the sexual bond
between brothers has a homely ritual place in bridging a young man’s
orientation from homophilic to heterophilic relationships. The event
is rather similar to the procedure at male puberty, when a boy is
discovered ready to be formally shifted out of the prepubescent
crowd, and is taken over by an elder peer (perhaps his brother) to join
the crowd at the other end of the local boys’ house. I think it is
crucially important to know that this special case (BB) is sexually
toned and condoned. I am about to deal with the question, how this
sexual bond can be condoned within the very heart of the family when
we expect to see sex tabooed for all but the conjugal bond. That bond
is licit because one partner is an outsider to the home kinship group.
For now, the import I would focus on is that the BB tie is redoubled
in strength when compared to the peer-amity tie alone.
421
members. Add the husband and you are essentially bringing in an
absent male. Father-daughter relations are seldom intimate. The
father is by objective standards a sometimes member. He is needed
in the circle only for begetting, the rest of his contacts are tangen-
tial. Further take into this picture the sons and you are adding boys
whose nature is conceived as untamed—‘wild’. They show up once a
day at feeding time, and are polite, as if to deny their natural
wildness. Another special feature of the family is that it is by Bantu
standards small. The maximal size limit is four offspring, and
extension (or reduplication) of a family through polygyny is almost
reserved for lords and princes. The principal domicile for bush-tradi-
tional times is a woman’s hut where a husband stores his things. For
court culture the domicile is more sturdy and contains the family
fire, but commensality is not the rule.
422
which we may go so far as to call a ‘father-son incest taboo’, which
deserves special attention. What would happen if that prohibition
were ignored and dropped? The structural separation of ‘family’ and
‘peer’ houses would collapse. The non-binding love relations of peers
would be overlapped by the binding relation of lineal descent. It is the
special feature of male descent lines which requires marriage bonds
in the service of planar structuration. Filiation ties to a mother may
be regarded as given by nature. To a father the tie is not such but
needs be unambiguously asserted by social rules.
423
meant to survive hostile involvements. But they are unlikely to
survive ego-involved distrust. They will be treated as contingent.
424
in southern Africa to the once-majestic states of Ghana or India.
The deepstuff that determines the cultural style of a human
community is product of the socializing institutions of the inner
domain of social relations. It is mostly socialization by contagion.
Any system of ‘marrying out’ means that the principals in the social-
izing process will be a cross-section of the larger, in-marrying
community. Institutions of the external domain which comprise the
political, macro-economic, jural, and ritual or spectacular activities
of the larger community owe their manners and logics to the social-
ization purveyed within the many-tiled world of the community’s
internal domains. Tiling—planar structuration—is the border-to-border
infrastructure. It is the prime source of that social stability which is
vested in the rights of citizenship.
The quickest way to see this is to ask how incest taboos might
be related to exogamy. Since a rule of exogamy presupposes a
society comprised of domestic groups, such a rule can only come
into being where a homogeneous interdomestic structure already
exists. In short, exogamy is an institution belonging to the external
domain—a kind of law, not a taboo. But an incest taboo must already
be in place before a society can envision the use of exogamy to
extend the horizon of domestic compatibility on a plane which makes
a sense of common citizenship possible. There is no Solon and no
Napoleon to lay out the groundwork. The pattern must emerge
locally, bit by bit, before it becomes general. We have seen it at the
emergent stage in Fr. Stirnimann’s reconstruction of mid-
nineteenth century uPangwa: the language of patriarchy was used in
the elders’ narratives of life in the local settlement [lutanana] which
in fact was far even from being straightforwardly patrilineal.
425
by self-respecting citizens. Every human institution has an appro-
priate structure and limited freedom to alter it without default.
Rogue institutions plague particularly modern societies. My reading
of the ‘Mbasi case’ suggests premodern societies may also be prone.
The stability of any social structure depends on control of deviance
by whatever combination of sanctions fits the case. Planar structu-
ration is not restricted to the macro form of ‘least polities’ but can
be seen in micro forms: schoolyards come to be kept in tenuous
peace. Writers, entertainers, marketers, industrial designers—all
have to heed one another and keep up to changing standards. No
social structure can be reduced to mere roles and rules. Fiduciary
relations are always the basis of structure, and while they can be
sanctioned under the guidance of rules, they can’t be created by
sanctions or inspired by rules. Players can be too slippery to depend
on. Ground-zero politics always apply.
426
Where out-marriage applies to both genders, as with Kinga and
Nyakyusa, no one keeps home. No one stays on to inherit. Another
system than kinship is needed for establishing solidarity beyond the
least polity’s spatial-temporal frame. For Kinga it is the movement
from boys’ house and men’s barracks to marriage and life with a few
chosen peers in a newly settled hamlet; or from girls’ house and
bachelor women’s quarters to marriage away from home. For
Nyakyusa the whole emphasis on solidarity is laid on the masculine
ethos of the age-village. The critical variables in both cases are
propinquity and group-sanctioned ties of (absolute) amity. I suggest
calling the prescribed solidarity ‘absolute’ because I find it a
simulacrum of the maximal-claim tie of close kinship, informed as it
is by a stubborn premise of mutual loyalty grounded in trust. Where
kinship is not kept close, amity must be. Some earliest peer ties, at
least for men, are lifelong ‘on the ground’ in either setting.
427
the act has to be sensed through insight in the private arena of
emotional interaction. Yet as a species, the evidence is we are apt at
observing scarcely-mentioned rules about the unmentionable.
428
domination, and can be unaffectedly non-possessive in their mutual
dealings. Consanguine solidarity in a Kinga family remains tied to sex
avoidance in the form of bilateral exogamy. Boys’ and girls’ houses,
being the near-total institutions they are, manage socialization
outside the family. Solidarity there without sex avoidance is
therefore appropriate. We have seen that it applies to siblings of
either gender. Sex within a close kinship tie for such sibling pairs is
comparable to sex within connubium: a tie of amity is enjoined, and it
therefore lacks the perishability of affective ‘involvements’ and
transcends them. We have to deal with caritas not with eros,
structure not involvement. The norms of the ikivaga and isaka have no
bearing on the fastening of birth identities. As if to say as much boys
often change their names and girls always use riddling pseudonyms
in telling tales on their friends or on themselves.
‡‡‡
429
Through time and history translocal organization, as it grows,
will move the sanctioning procedures by the zigzag of trial and
confirmation toward the idea of crime against society—a
cataloguing of culpable acts, with moral sanctions meant to
measure and punish infraction. The word ‘punish’ in the common
tongue may still carry its latin meaning of doing vengeance, but it is
hard to show that Western procedural law in practice goes farther
than fixing responsibility and matching it with pragmatic measures
of dissuasion. Taboo is submerged with the sanctions of constituted
authority, even dismissed as insubstantial. It doesn’t match the
new ‘rational’ politics of procedural intervention. In yesterday’s
terms, we are looking at the long transformation ‘from sacred to
secular’. Solemn rituals no longer celebrate and ‘teach’ the taboos by
which a people must live. The spirit of ‘substantive law’ grows with
the practicality of enforcement. But a ‘least poity’ that depends on
enforcement is doomed. Taboo remains to guard that aspect of
human cultures which must be submerged to persist. The spirit of
this ‘custom law’ is not pragmatic, not even corrective unless in the
absolute sense that fundamentalism has to be.
430
431
FEAR & BLAME, SOURCE NOTES
Source Notes
Preface
4 A Kinga priest calls Nyakyusa priests ‘all witches’: Monica
Wilson (1959:39).
Chapter One
9 M. Wilson 1958
Chapter Two
21 The major source for the culture of amity among Bena is the
Cullwicks’ monograph (1935) on the riverine group, displaced by late
19thC. wars. Other learned studies were done at survey range, not
close up. Njombe Boma archives are concerned with social and
economic mapping and offer little in the way of a cultural portrait. I
have opted to write about the riverine group as ‘Bena’ on the assump-
431
tion that the Culwicks’ warm portrait is not deeply misleading for
other Bena groups.
38-9 For the Coming Out tradition the prime source we have
from the ethnographers is Godfrey Wilson (1951: 280). For the
developed view that the Nyakyusa Coming Out is to be seen as a
handing over of power from one generation to the next, and implicitly
lilnked to ‘divine kingship’ see Monica Wilson (1959a: 49-57 & 1959b)
and other indexed references in her several volumes. In chapters which
follow I shall be rethinking the institution, taking up her account in
some detail, as well as some published critiques. Just here I am
concerned to set the terms of a puzzle, not to solve it. My position will
be that power is devolved but scarcely given over. I think the root
misunderstanding derives from overestimating the corporateness of
a Nyakyusa chiefdom before the pax. For detailed source references I
suggest looking at the later notes, particularly for Chapter Nine.
39 The history of the Kyelelo the Cruel and his wars is reviewed
in Four Realms.
432
Chapter Three
433
85 On the ‘constitutional’ character of chiefship: Godfrey
Wilson (1937: 22). But I find charismatic heroics were no less
important than such ‘committee work’ before the pax.
89-90 See the same source for this political wrangle. While
Monica Wilson thinks Mwaipopo is motivated by fear of witchcraft (in
form of ‘the breath of men’) a more economical hypothesis would be
appeasement politics.
434
Chapter Four
98 Main source for Burmese nats: Melford Spiro (1967).
435
in the less turbulent mountain slopes of uKinga. On the basis of pax-
period politics in the region, that notion would not have arisen.
Chapter Five
181 The linguistic evidence (Nurse 1988) calls for a time scheme
of close to two millennia to account for the pattern of differentiation
in situ , and shows two culturally discrete groups dividing the Sowetan
region. This implies the long-recognized political affinities which cross
the divide (the great escarpment which separates the Kinga from the
Konde world) must have developed in recent centuries. On linguistic
evidence, Nurse’s ‘Southern Highlands’ cluster (including Hehe, Bena,
Sangu, Pangwa, and Kinga) has had a history distinct from that of the
Konde cluster for well over a millennium. The time-depth of oral
tradition is slight by comparison, at least until a particular myth can
be shown to have held a hidden clue. On the other hand, the combina-
tion of lexical and phonological evidence does let us infer the degree of
ethnic isolation as between two related tongues with measurable
confidence. I am thus indebted to Nurse’s work for showing me that
the institutional connexions between Kinga and the Konde peoples
must be judged as coeval with the rise of the Sowetan political archi-
pelago. For one thing, this does breathe a bit of life into Kinga/Konde
tales about the ‘coming of princely rule’ to the Rift valley. The princes
are said to have descended from Kinga/Mahanzi as long ago as a.d.
1600. My argument assumes the absence of any serious flow of
influence eastward or westward prior to the (militarism of the) proto-
state era. Still, I take it as probable that a mix of amity with kinship,
as well as standing bilateral rules of ‘incest avoidance’, prevailed
among the acephalous local groups on both sides of the divide in early
times. Partly, this is because I see the earliest Bantu settlements in
the region as cumulative not massive. Early Selya like early Kinga
communities would have been assimilating and acculturating
migratory drift from whatever direction through their centuries of
436
gradually developing intensive agriculture. In the regional culture as we
still know it, the scion of a first settler, the clearer of the land, is
always imagined to ‘own’ it. Newcomers and their heirs are beholden.
(See Park 1988 & Peter Weber 1998: ch. 8)
437
When [Captain] von Elpons and I a few weeks after the battle were
visiting Mwaya and they were informed that peace now reigned, their
response was cheerful and jocular, they showed us their wounds, talked
laughingly about the massive effect of the breech-loader, telling von Elpons
quite naively that they had wanted to take him alive, so as to undress him
and put Nyakyusa-style brass rings around him, as he had teased some of
them about their nakedness. They behaved themselves overall as harm-
lessly cheerful as though they had been in league with us against a third
party, even though almost all of them had lost family and friends to our
soldiers’ bullets, and the respected chief Mwakalinga had fallen in the
combat. [1906: 292, my translation]
185 Citation from Charsley (1974: 422).
191-2 The distinction of structure ‘on the ground’ from ‘in the
head’ is at home as ‘the system on the ground’ and the ‘system of
ideas’ in Edmund Leach (1964: xiii). The original 1954 printing did not
contain this illuminating introductory note. For my take see
‘Rethinking Highland Burma’ in Hard Cases.
438
dance, or lost. Finality is more often expressed than experienced. By
comparison, Kinga politics is distinctly consensual.
Chapter Six
210 The citation is from Weichert’s memoirs (1928: 59-60) and
is given in my translation. I believe he wants praise among his fellows
for deciding not to overlook the obvious.
216 The major sources for Marcia Wright’s thesis of ‘rival cults’
are her book German Missions (1971) and an article, ‘Nyakyusa Cults’
(1972). Sources cited on shrines: (1972: 164) & (1971: 55).
266 The word ‘cult’ can hardly be banished despite its too-
generous connotations. But it remains a term which needs grounding
in context. Is one single agency entailed or more? How are clients
recruited and their affiliation nurtured ? Is there a track record of
historical importance? So far as the revistionists’ use of ‘cult’ may
seem derivative of ethnographic work in Zambia, Malawi, and
439
Zimbabwe the problem becomes one of subtle shifts in social and
cultural context. Where ‘kinship is politics’ and cults have no relation
to political alignment, conceiving of a cult’s clientage in terms of
congregational rivalries might not badly miscue us even if it is off the
mark. Allegiance, which normally goes with such terms, doesn’t apply
in animisms, where individual clients shop around for cures, and collec-
tive (‘territorial’) tribulations are associated with ungenerous divine
anger. If an African ‘cult of affliction’ were in question (as Peter Weber
supposes in the Mbasi incidents) we would have to see some appro-
priate ‘sisterly’ signs. Paying clients are not cult members, nor are
boughten wives. In the Ngoni conquest region of eastsern Zambia, Rau
(1979) shows that the Chisumphi cults were informed by a local
history of government by pop-up leaders, ‘owners of the land’ whose
status was sacerdotally sanctioned. This has its parallels in the
peripheral communities affected by the Konde protostate process,
but the political situation is quite other. Schoffeleers (1979a) shows
that in Malawi cults related to those of eastern Zambia operated in
very loose relation to more properly ‘political’ structures. The
extreme localism of the ‘owner of the land’ ideology was obviously
anathema to the chiefly system developing in uNyakyusa. My position
is that a political system built on two tiers of executive authority is
scarcely possible without its reducing the pre-political institutions of
government to marginal status. We have seen that the secular
authority system controls access to ‘witch finding’ in the Selya
generation of elders studied by the Wilsons. If people don’t seek
elsewhere for protection from witchcraft, the secular system of
authority seems to be intact. I have described the Sanga system as
dualism in a reasonably steady state. Konde turbulence suggests
pluralism, with secular affairs fairly well in hand where ceremonial
chiefship is strongly developed, but a decentralized and spontaneous
organization of divination and remedy would have been kept alive by
the kind of ecological disasters which followed one another during the
early mission years.
440
form on a neighbour people. But a case lies for this: the proto-state
process of its very nature seems to draw energy from this duality,
and ought not to be conceived as merely ‘transitional’ to the
formation of a ‘genuine’ form of the state. This notion bears in turn on
the question of time-depth for the two protostates, favouring the
structural credibility (excepting particulars) of long kinglists, with
their suggestion of a system-maintenance ethic. The political balance
in these two protostates is not predicated on the triumphalist ethos
of the Sangu or Hehe despotisms. An antipolitan ethos takes its
place, favouring conditional loyalty and exploiting the politics of
(prescriptive) male peer-bonding.
441
252 The pertinent material from mission records lis to be found
in Charsley (1969: 12-15).
Chapter Seven
264-5 Meyer Fortes (1958) was careful to show that the same
human experience (for example, passage from one life stage to
another) usually has context in both internal and external institu-
tional domains. From the viewpoint of individual development, life
within the family of orientation proceeds by a widening out of personal
involvement outside that in-group circle. Much can happen to the
psyche.
442
272 For Balkan familism see Sanders (1949) and J. K. Campbell
(1964). For ‘amoral familism’ see Banfield (1958).
When a boy reaches puberty he may take his sister and with her build
their little hut near his mother’s home and go into it with his sister and lay
her down and get on top of her—and they copulate. His father then begins
to keep a watch on them to catch them at this and seizes him and gives him
a good hiding and asks him what he means by going after his sister, she is
his sister, has he seen people going to bed with their sisters? Then he is
afraid. He keeps a look-out for his father and when his father is away he
again takes his sister and they go and hide in the bush to copulate...So
people say that children are like dogs, for a boy will go after his own sister.
After they have been stupid for a time, when they grow up they get a sense
of shame...Since I have grown up, should I see my sister’s nakedness I would
compensate her [with a gift] for that is just children’s play, I have long
forgotten it; since I learnt sense I left off childish things; what I used to do
with my sister when we were small we have given up. [Evans-Pritchard 1974:
107-8]
281-82 It was Franz Steiner (1956: 21) who noticed that “taboo is
an element of all those situations in which attitudes to values are
expressed in terms of danger behaviour.” Evans-Pritchard’s Zande
informant (cited just above) is not atypical in having ‘missed’ the danger-
messages (if any) in early years. We see him adopting danger strategies in
adult life—a little ritual act of expiation as a ‘cooling out’ response to her
nakedness. It is when the sense of danger becomes ego-involved that
‘taboo’ has made its appearance. In societies which make much of sexual
443
modesty in early years the sex-avoidance response is more likely to be
triggered earlier and is more easily extended beyond ‘incest’ to cross-sex
peers generally. Kinga allow the condition of danger-avoidance to stay in
place into adulthood.
282 Oversocialized people are, of course, fictions of the would-be
scientific observer. As a general fault in social anthropology it must be said
that every model of a social system comprises such a fiction. I wish it to
be clear that I find Stirnimann’s ‘fictions’ as close as any ethnographer’s to
a ‘system on the ground’. This is because of Pangwa ritualism, which
depends on popular not professional theatre and extends right into the
bosom of the family, allowing less latitude in the pursuit of individual moral
strategies. What at first seems implausible is the model itself. We are
attuned to a more ‘pragmatic’ style in the description of a social system.
Stirnimann’s Pangwa model is counter-pragmatic. It seems to demand
‘model behaviour’, as though the ‘system on the ground’ could be a clone of
the ‘system in the mind’. What becomes apparent as you read is that in
this acephalous society popular ritual serves the functions of social
control we usually conceive as ‘political’. Latitude is not disallowed but
significantly controlled by taboo.
290 Murdock (1949: 62-4).
296 Legitimizing identity by putting a ‘genuine’ stamp on what was
at best ‘virtual kinship’ illustrates the way the ‘system in mind’ can be
affected by praxis. It is not that mental modeling picks up the system ‘on
the ground’. Rather say the mind sees ‘how things ought to be’ and how, by
the simple pragmatic move of ‘labeling’, things can be made right. The full
importance to acephalous societies of such ‘creative kinship’ is explored in
Gulliver’s close study of Ndendeuli moral strategies, Neighbours and
Networks (1971). In the two Malatan protostates the problem of using
residential freedom as a way of escaping a destructive personal involve-
ment is facilitated by the importance of common political loyalties. Praxis
under the antipolitan ethic is that a man moves from one military camp to
another. Amity (prescriptive male bonding) is the basis of this social
contract. But for Nyakyusa the ancillary ploy of ‘creative kinship’ is
obviated by a dependence (for inheritance) on actual kinship, system-
atically maintained.
297 Rite of installation for a new household: Stirnimann [II 217-19].
298-9 On ‘group-wife adultery’ see Goody (1956).
300 Structure and sentiment are intricately braided-in to give firm
structure to the ‘internal domain’. This should be true of any stable human
community—it is a condition of such stability (as Aristotle had it) that
patterns of motivation should match the patterns of behaviour expected
of good citizens. Nyakyusa avoidance drills use the phenomenon of social
danger to define boundaries and embed the individual identities those
444
boundaries imply. In this case, festive license at funerals also serves to
confirm and give form to a young man’s kinship identity. Avoidance taboos
create the possibility of license, in the same sense that any systematic
restraints create the valued possibility of freedom from them. Ego-
involvement in the acting out of kinship roles is governed both by social
danger and by the kind of merrymaking which courts it. For Nyakyusa men
kinship identities are far more important than for Kinga men, yet they are
marginal to daily experience in the peer village. Accordingly, Nyakyusa
kinship rituals have a more theatrical or ceremonial style, imparting struc-
tural weight to kinship identity—the political counterbalance in the men’s
culture to the peer-village experience. Any kinship system adapted to
rampant polygyny must cope with the fact that father-son relations are
diluted by the sheer numbers of a man’s sons. Kinga male moral strategies
are not often built around unilineal kinship—there is no solidary kin group
beyond the family and rather limited solidarity within it. Yet I will insist
that individual identity, as it is reflected in maximal-claim networks and
the depth of mutual trust they hold ready , is as much a matter of kinship
for Kinga as for Konde youths. It is in the number of individuals in a given
youth’s kin network that the two cultures most clearly contrast. But the
importance of peers in the socializatioin process of both genders in uKinga
certainly means that amity—sentiment and structure braided together—
will prevail there as the basis of political trust. For uNyakyusa it appears
that amity is more deeply laced with rivalry.
305-6 Monica Wilson (1977: 86, 196n.).
310 For the distinction of the kinds of structural tie (axiomatic and
contingent) see The Idea of Social Structure (1974a: 204). In other terms,
axiomatic ties are governed by taboo (incest avoidance, age respect,
loyalty, trust) where contractual ties are governed by mutually accepted
terms of agreement. Axiomatic ties are those considered immune to final
broach, contingent ties are those considered sensitive to the degree and
mood of reciprocal affective involvement. The structural weight of any tie is
indexed by the danger behaviour it commonly evokes.
Chapter Eight
319 Compare Henry A. Murray (1938: 164-73) on ‘the need for
achievement’ as one of the phenomena he calls ‘manifest needs’ with
the appearance of the concept in David McClelland’s Achieving Society
(1961‘).
445
328-29 For the involuted, formal structuring of the internal
domain in traditional Pangwa communities see especially Stirnimann
(1979: 64-5 & 108-113).
Chapter Nine
360 Citation from Monica Wilson (1950: 129).
446
375 The two sources on Nyakyusa chiefhood and priesthood are
Monica Wilson (B 27 & B 25).
Chapter Ten
381 Franz Steiner (1956).
404 The structural rule Aristotle offered was that the citizen
should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives.
He taught that ‘customary laws’ (taboos) have more weight—concern
more important matters—than written (positive) laws; and where a
strong ruler might have to protect us from the law, taboo could be
needed to protect us from him. ( Politics , Book III).
447
marriage. If this work is to be accomplished predictably by self-reliant
primary groups, and in such fashion that offspring always have a
unique and legitimate social identity with the rights and responsibili-
ties adhering thereto, the non-contractual mechanisms for accom-
plishing this work must comprise the ground-zero structure of the
society in question.
448
bours. Evans-Pritchard’s Zande (commoner) informant on the topic
makes clear that ‘incest discipline’ within a family may be lax. (See pg.
275 and source note.) But the wisdom in anthropology has tended to
play on the internal domain as a microcosm, looking for rifts within the
microcosm as the ‘bad news’ which might account for the taboo. In
that case, Zande children could regularly copulate in secret, and only
a cranky father would be giving them trouble. The Zande case
suggests the real problem is more likely to be the continuation of an
incestuous involvement after an offspring has been re-nested else-
where. If we can’t explain the maintenance of the taboo as a crucial
feature of the social system, we can’t explain the (continued)
existence of the taboo. It is most cleanly seen as a necessary if not
sufficient feature of a generic kinship system. Without the incest
taboo, a least polity becomes a rogue, unable to pass on to a new
generation the unambiguous social identities which are the result of
keeping social and genetic (natural) models of parenthood congruent.
426 It is the taboo which must be intact, not the maiden. She
will have had her hymen cut before her first menstruation, ‘to make
the blood flow better’ (Stirnimann 1979: 165-66). If the taboo were
not intact, it is the social identity of the bride which would be would be
questionable, leaving distribution of the bridewealth contestable, and
longterm certainties about debts and more general moral obligations
in jeopardy. Actual incest might pass, if it did not become ‘jurally
relevant’ through disclosure and the full scenario of moral indignation.
While many societies are slow to trigger sanctions, I take the sense
from Fr. Stirnimann that Pangwa were not lax about sexual conduct.
449
presocial competition refers to the situation of the many claiming
parallel access to a limited pool of social goods—the situation at
ground zero in any society the world around. Least polities are the
smallest groups effectively organized to reproduce their format in
succeeding generations. In the Kinga case they are ‘hearth centred’
rather than ‘domestic’ groups, as the latter term denotes a group
with common domicile. For each cooking hearth in daily use there is a
primary group, organized as a nuclear family, with primary claim to the
product of that hearth and the primary responsibility for providing it.
The law by which conduct within the family is governed is customary
law or taboo, and custom governs conduct within the same-sex
sleeping houses they share with neighbour families. What gives prime
political importance to ‘family’ before ‘peer group’ in this circumstance
is the responsible role a family takes in making a living for its member-
ship. In this all-important respect, the pivotal role in the traditional
Kinga system was certainly the wife-and-mother’s, though her
political voice (be it in choosing garden sites or in ‘troubles’) was
always mediated by a man. It was the devotion of women to their
gardens and their fires which made a firm centre for the Kinga ‘least
polity’ despite its dispersion in social space.
450
F EA R & BLAME, REFERENCES
References
443
Elton (J.F.) 1879: Travels and Researches among the Lakes and Mountains of Eastern
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