Professional Documents
Culture Documents
GEORGE PARK
©2001
0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
i
TWIN SHADOWS, FIRST FOLIO
Having a marriage
A long preserved virginity 95
The view from woman 107
ii
BOOK TWO, CHAPTER ONE
A moral universe
Qualities of an extended youth 236
A phenomenology of values? 244
iii
BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TEN
Psyche and Style
Noticing style 341
Self & ethos 343
Expressive & instrumental action (I) 348
The inner dialectics 353
Expressive and instrumental action (II) 358
Psyche & belief 365
REFERENCES 415
iv
TWIN SHADOWS, INTRODUCTION ONE
1
What I attempt here is more modest. I select published material on
neighbour peoples to put pivotal Kinga characteristics each in a
pertinent ‘cultural array’. My methodological position (‘analytical
phenomenology’) was set out in my privately published Flying Armchair
and derives from the same common-sense premises an honest
policeman employs when choosing men of generally similar appearance
for a ‘line-up’ to confirm a witness’s ability to identify a particular
suspect of crime. Fine discrimination is essential in portaiture. Still,
small children can be relied on to know you with a baffling certainty
long before they could draw your face so well you could be recognized.
From two years in the field (in uKinga) I came to recognize many of the
features of their culture. But recognition is an intuitive form of knowl-
edge. Now I am in the position of the child wanting to draw the picture
which makes my intuitions available to others. I plan to do this by
showing what is un-Kinga as well as what is Kinga. The best way is to
compare them with long-term neighbours who are alike in some ways
while differing in others.<<[lit = see Source Notes]
2
standing with me to Southwestern Tanganyika and wanted to apply it
in planning fieldwork. As this developed, the problem defined itself as
one of portraiture: not the seeing something for one’s self—intuition—
but the showing it to others.<<[lit]
3
learn Swahili, for which a grammar was available, and kiKinga for which
there was (somewhere) a grammar in German. But cultural differ-
ences of some importance had remained in 1900—the approximate
date of colonial contact—within the territory I still had to cover.
Regional history was all question-marks then. Apart from the District
Books, then uncollected, the most useful source was Monica Wilson’s
stencilled survey, The Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor (1958).
I was determined in any event to do what I could to understand the
Kinga in an historical context, and I gradually came around to a focus
on their political past. In the field this meant constant inquiries into
local lore. In the decades since, it has meant more and more of the
same. My partial up-dating of Wilson’s survey has been published in
Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 9 (1988). It is an essay in ‘probabilistic
history’ for the region—a cross-over study between ethnography and
ethno-history—placing it within the scope of Eastern Bantu civiliza-
tion.
4
field, but other monographs are much mulled over—aged in the brain
before publication. This is one of those. It is not much like the book I
would have written thirty years ago, fresh from the field. Much of the
difference is owing to my learning a great deal about the regional
culture Kinga share with their neighbours; much more is owing to
rethinking what I knew about Kinga in light of my later comparative
study. The book is designed to record not only what I saw in the field
but what I have since managed to see from my ‘flying armchair’—the
actual revisit I hoped for has not proved possible, but I am rescued by
much relevant work which has by now been produced by others working
in the region.
5
world of your ideas with the real world other people inhabit, the
portrait with the subject.
The second step in my design for the book deals with organiza-
tion—how to present arguments for my findings. I move between
‘interpretive analysis’ or ‘analytical phenomenology’ of the culture
(Part One, returning in Part Three) and a more intuitive, descriptive
mode which I conceive as ‘close and middle-distance portraiture’
(Parts Two and Four). In this way the conceptual sequence (break-
down—redintegration) is repeated twice. Since this is the trick of
design which is most likely to go unnoted and unused by a reader, I’ll
explain my thinking further.<<[lit]
6
moral careers of men and women as they are pursued within the world
they are fashioning. The ideas of Robert Redfield which originally drew
me into anthropology doubtless lie back of this double approach. I
resist, like him, the idea that any one conceptual approach to human
nature and culture (one ‘paradigm’) should preoccupy anthropolo-
gists. I have found many or most of the novelties in recent anthropo-
logical writing fresh and fun—but I have also found them, in the end,
distracting. My enduring concern is to understand what I have seen in
the field. I find the best use for my armchair is for flying back there. I
am satisfied that methodological wheels do not really have to be rein-
vented by each new generation.
Documentary sources
From the precolonial era I have consulted what accounts by early
European explorers are to be found with a bearing on the Sowetan
peoples. In the post-colonial period a certain amount of history and
archaeology has been produced, some of it directly touching the
region and more of it bearing on pertinent aspects of the still more
inclusive historical and cultural entity, Eastern Bantu civilization.
Supplementing these new sources there has been a development of
glottochronological studies of East Africa. My recent cooperation
with the linguist Derek Nurse has allowed me to make the earlier ‘qual-
itative dating’ scheme I had worked out for the Kinga into something
reasonably firm. But the main documentary sources for this volume
and my earlier diachronic survey of the region come from the two
colonial periods: the main German sources are detailed ethnographic
surveys and missionary publications; the main British sources are the
District and Provincial Books. While there is not a lot which is ‘news-
worthy’ today in these documents, reading them through has contrib-
7
uted immensely to my sense for the regional culture—its reality and its
special character.
Book One
A preliminary chapter is followed by seven more which are
devoted each to an essay on Kinga culture seen in a particular concep-
tual frame. The eight topics are in order: (1) general, (2) social
networks, (3) violent action, (4) creativity, (5) sexuality, (6) status
relations, (7) political ordering, and (8) emotional life. There is no
inherent reason why the very same episode could not be examined
within each of these frames, since their locus is in the mind of the
beholder, not in the social situation under scrutiny. Obviously, though,
8
each frame will tend to encompass special material. Each will comple-
ment the others rather than simply duplicating them. Any overlap, if
noticeable, ought to be interesting. The eight chapters taken
together will comprise one ‘scan’ of the Kinga world. Another such
scan, complementing this one, is the main project for Book Two.
The Folios
Five descriptive folios are inserted between the two more
analytical Books. The Folio section comprises an ethnographic
sampler of the Kinga community I observed directly in 1961-3. These
accounts, some in the form of brief ‘case reports’, are designed to
bring a reader closer to the people and their lives. The materials touch
marriage, growing up, and growing old. I consider ‘individuality’ and
‘intimacy vs. autonomy’. The general plan of this section will seem
more familiar to readers of earlier field studies situated in an ‘ethno-
graphic present’. But I have organized the third and fourth folios so as
to minimize my own presence in the act of observation. If I seem to
shift at various points from panorama to close-up, it is because I hand
the camera over to a young assistant (Soda) to capture moments in
the lives of his friends and neighbours. My assistants in the field were
partners not pawns. Soda worked as I normally did with a notebook not
a tape recorder, and provided texts in Swahili for my translations.
Names are altered, but the mind behind the ‘close-up’ texts is Soda’s.
9
deciding the long-run drift of culture than the ‘weak force’ exerted by
individuals over the very long term in their efforts to protect and
improve their lots. A phrase like ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is more
descriptive here than simple ‘self-interest’. What I intend by ‘moral
strategy’ does touch ‘ethics’ but is nothing noble. As a weak force in
history, it is hard to observe and harder still to demonstrate effec-
tively. But in Kinga culture, with most of the stress taken off the
marital relationship and the family fairly atomized, I was faced with a
case which challenged common-sense notions about the importance
of family systems in the ‘stabilizing’ of society. In the field I was
struck by the structural importance of ‘the culture of women’, which
their unexpected measure of independence made clear. The argument
of these final chapters tries to bring closure to a line of thought which
started in the field. What can we learn about sources of individual
strength?
10
The position I’ve taken is probably incautious as conventional
anthropology would judge it, but seems to me reasonable. Did Kinga
reinvent their culture in the sixty years between the Germans’ arrival
and my mine? They invented a good deal. I’ve written about one prize
example, new bridewealth customs. But their moral life, which is my
subject here, is source not object of this kind of change. Tactical
thinking (Max Weber’s Zweckrationalität) in that case only shifted the
better to serve strategic plans (Wertrationalität). It is the latter I’m
concerned with, and I have the advantage that lifetime strategies do
tend to be lasting. There are also some philosophical concerns.<<[lit]
(b) When you consider the consequence of this principle for well-
bounded human communities as a whole you will see in it the essence
11
of the winnowing process by which a cultural style is produced and
refined over time. Politically fragmented societies with high levels of
stress are unlikely to exhibit the kind of moral strategy it is easy to
label ‘enlightened’. A few anthropologists simply rejected Berndt’s
major monograph on some such communities in the Eastern Highlands
of New Guinea. They found some of the most lurid narrative evidence
incredible. When you read the monograph you wonder that ‘culture’ in
such conditions can persist at all—yet it obviously does under even
terribly stressful conditions, and I think the reason is that the ‘weak
force’ operates, and the winnowing proceeds, much more continuously
than the ‘strong forces’ in the social life, with their ever-gathering
storms and scattered episodic dramas of strife and rampage. In
relative terms, Kinga were isolated—one might say, electively so. They
developed a strong, low-bloodshed political system. The circum-
stances favoured lifestyle continuity at the deeper levels.<<[lit]
12
my main obligation to them was to capture, in the kind of picture
ethnographers are wont to construct, as much as I could of their
culture. I have taken a few jabs from colleagues for seeming to devote
my work to the past. They are drawn to a search for solutions to the
Third World’s mounting problems. I defend my stance. I think it would be
useful to know what makes a people cheerful in face of quite consider-
able hardships.
13
The slogans of the independent government were insistently opti-
mistic. But a modern political system is no friend of free tradition,
and in retrospect it seems the colonial system was little more than a
prelude to ‘modernization’. The best-intentioned post-colonial
government in all Africa could not want to repeal that consequence of
European intervention and give power back to its several, separate
peoples. Wherever ‘tribalism’ has gained ground in independent African
nations the result has been catastrophe. Tanzania to date has been
spared, and the integration of all its ethnic groups into citizenship has
proceeded under an admirably stable political system. One conse-
quence, of course, is that the Kinga and their neighbours have
gradually lost many of their differences of style and perspective—the
very differences this book is about. It is not a book of advice or
advocasy.
None of the three volumes in this series is, in fact, about worlds
to come, all are about worlds we have lost. Their value is not as cata-
logues or inventories of the cultures dealt with, or as history in the
usual sense. A number of archival sources have been consulted, from
German times and the British period of indirect rule; but a reader
interested in an historical survey should consult an earlier work (Park
1988) and the sources listed there. The purpose of the present work
and its sequels is to propose a reconstructive ethnography of the
Kinga in their region as it was in the closing years of the nineteenth
century, and to elicit its most important lessons.
14
TWIN SHADOWS, INTRODUCTION TWO
15
cross-gender attachment is more serious. The heterosexual tie is
meant to be permanent. One approaches mutual commitment with
care if not caution, wanting to keep one’s own counsel.
16
could generally expect good health and a long lifespan—they could, at
least, before AIDS. But youth ends late. Traditionally, men might
remain bachelors well into their fourth decade, maintaining the free
lifestyle of youth all the while. The high callings of youth in the days of
the princely courts were those of warrior, minstrel, and dancer. Men
who were drawn to the life at court refrained long from marriage,
sleeping with their fellows in barracks, partaking in war games, raiding,
and warfare; collecting taxes; constructing and reconstructing the
houses of the court or princely harem and the stockade; doing male
work in the fields cultivated by the royal women on behalf of the court
establishment.
17
to this would be a ruling lord or a prince with many wives and a cohort
of sons holding to the court for its perks and subject to its disci-
plines. A ruler enjoys a stabilizing structure of expectations denied
the common man.
A man could not really count very much on his offspring. Most
often he would have loyalty but no close ego support from his wife. The
gesture of sacrificing to his own ancestors might entail a long journey
into unfamiliar country; the idea was more often entertained than
taken up. But when friendship is called upon not just to supplement
kinship but to substitute for it, friendship can fail.
18
Dispersed families
Kinga prefer not to live in conjugal families. While it is normal to
marry, it is not for husband and wife to cohabit with infants or
children. Babies are nursed three or four years, and a nursing woman
has no use at night for her husband. He is likely to sleep in the men’s
house or he may pass some time at court or on business elsewhere.
Kinga do not say nursing is a woman’s substitute for sex, but they
know a woman with an infant is fulfilled. There is no reason for her to
encourage a husband who wants to sleep with her. Only a prince or a
lord has risen by virtue of his office above sleeping with other men—he
has to be distrustful—and so needs women. That is why he will have
many wives. For the ordinary couple, intercourse during nursing would
endanger the child at breast—infancy is finished when a mother
conceives again. After weaning, a child is brought up by older children
living in a house they have built and which they keep for themselves. In
the smallest hamlets children of either sex might share house tempo-
rarily, leaving as puberty nears. Kinga say rules of modesty are
pointless before children begin to mature sexually. They will feel the
pangs of shame when their time comes. If there are only a few
maturing boys and girls in a small hamlet they may have to join a neigh-
bouring peer group away from home. For boys, especially, the distance
will not matter.
19
pattern. Kinga courts are armed camps. In season, men do much of the
heavy work in the fields, but for most of the year they opt out of
drudgery, tending to odd jobs and, especially, attending court on days
when there are cases to be tried or when the beer may be flowing. The
high calling of a man is to be an effective Protector—of the realm, of
the fields and homestead, of women. Women carry no weapons and
rarely think of turning a bush-hook or hoe to that use. In time of war
the danger men have to confront may be human, but a properly staged
war will only last a day or two, and everyone knows about it in advance.
Most of the time no one has to fear human violence.
Men did hold in 1960 that a maiden should live close to her
father so she could call for help in case of an aggressive suitor. I never
heard of an actual case of alarm of that kind, but in 1960 the Kinga
bridewealth was greatly inflated. A father stood to gain a fabulous
wealth with his daughter’s marriage, and suitors could well be frus-
trated by that—there were grounds for a father’s concern. Yet tradi-
tionally bachelor women lived in their own places with up to a dozen or
even a score of roommates and no sign of insecurity. Women do more
of the steady hard work of farming than men, and where a man may be
taller and more agile he’ll know women are very strong, especially in a
group. Anyway, men just don’t conceive the powerful lust for a woman
which would lead them to impose themselves on her. She only need say
no, and she is expected to. The world is not like that outside Kingaland,
but only a man is likely to have been there, and it’s not certain he would
have found out.
20
rival gang trying to steal your goat, you are instantly at war—but you
can’t expect a ruler or grown men to intervene. Boys have a world of
their own. When they are grown past youth all the best of them will
seek to the local ruler’s court. They’ll be his army and retainers, men of
all work, for a decade or two unless they should be drawn further to
the court of the prince of their realm. The court in its heyday was a
ceremonial centre and a school in the fullest sense.
Only when they tire of the bachelor life will men marry. Tradition-
ally the bridewealth was nominal—no bar to marrying. The delay is thus
technically optional but actually a matter of ‘structured choice’: a
pattern most people go along with for a whole host of reasons.
Normally, men until middle age prefer living and sleeping with their
peers. When age begins to slow them down they think more seriously
of marriage—moving away from the court to a smaller place where a
man can be his own boss, with a wife to garden and cook for him. The
court life is exciting, but you are a dependent of the lord, always
beholden. There is no need to ask why a man wants to marry—if he is to
go out on his own he will have to marry. Sometimes the lord himself
may notice that a man is ready and give him a wife. A quick man will be
sent out to a frontier place with a royal daughter as wife, there to rule
the march on his chief’s behalf; a slower man will be told to follow. From
the man’s point of view, delayed marriage is built into the political
system.
21
ship. A bond of love could be formed with a stranger, a sort of
honeymoon phenomenon which your friends would always look upon
with indulgent sympathy. But such a bond would not outlast the few
days of honeymoon. If love settled down into friendship, things were
going well. A deeper (but still not possessive) relationship was that a
young man might have with his next elder brother, who would make him
his protégé, even opening his own marital bed as a kind of school for
marriage.
22
In spite of delayed mating, the evidence is that fertility
remained reasonably high throughout the Kinga medieval period.
Doubtless, the four-year nursing term protected the child as well as
the mother. A woman who has nursed four children is in Kinga law done
with reproduction. The marriage doesn’t end, but her husband will now
live permanently at the men’s house, where she’ll daily bring him his
supper. One old man I knew in 1960 had built a new house for his wife
with a fine prospect—it was a site well chosen, had the two of them
been ready to move. But now she was living alone and he in the men’s
house not far from her. When she found she had to turn down the new
place, the underlying reason was that it would have meant moving
away from women friends. Her disappointed husband had not had the
insight to predict that turn of events nor, evidently, had any of his
close peers. He hadn’t thought to consult his wife about her house
before building it; he was being ‘modern’. If he had thought to sleep
there sometimes himself, and keep effects there, that plan was
dashed when she decided she couldn’t move. Men don’t sleep alone in
closed houses the way women do.
23
stores, cookhouse—and what justifies all this, children. A woman
wants marriage and progeny for much the same reasons a man does,
but with far more intensity. As a maiden she looks forward to hetero-
sexual relations not out of lust for the act but for the realization of
her own moral career—for being a woman with child, with a place of her
own, fields, family to feed. For both men and women these are gender
needs, deriving from Kinga ideas about autonomy and personal fulfil-
ment.
Kinga men don’t often worry that a man without sons may be
doomed to woe after death—ancestors are not often troubled or
troublesome in a society where friendship is more basic than kinship.
A man with four daughters in 1960 (when the sums entailed were going
up to the sky) would only be delighted at the prospect of four
bridewealths coming in and nought to go out. A son is traditionally no
companion to his father. A man is not apt to move back to his father’s
settlement before the old man dies. Kinga say one son, usually the
youngest, should be there to help his widowed mother—at least, he
should have a place there and keep in touch.
Can this mean that for Kinga heterosexual relations are just
instrumental, good for reproduction and nought else? If so, the impli-
cation would be that only one deeply meaningful sexual orientation is
possible in the circumstances of their lives, and a second orientation
can never be more than a psychological add-on. That is the way I saw
the matter at first. Boy-girl relations seemed to be sibling-like,
friendly and informal but erotically neutral. Then I began to notice that
sexual excitement was running high in any open encounter between
groups of young men and maidens. In the traditional court culture
dancing was the most important form of display, and the form of the
dance was contrived so that men and women were aligned like two
24
Kinga armies opposing each other on a field of battle. Instead of
weapons and war paint they wore bells, monkey tails, and head
displays. The two sides displayed first as groups, swaying forward and
back but always carefully aligned and keeping an ample noman’s land
between. As the evening progressed individuals would stand forward
in the dance, now from the one side now the other. Just as in Kinga war,
the champion of either side stood to gain royal honours, fêted by the
whole community. The stories Kinga particularly like to retell are
about the minstrel-dancer who took the court by storm and was
rewarded with the royal princess of his choice. Here, I had to recog-
nize, was the stuff of fairy-tale romance.
25
tions are not only equally legitimate but equally expected of all. Kinga,
for their part, had trouble with the notion that ‘homosexuality’ could
stand in the way of ‘heterosexuality’. I did what I could to explain those
two ideas, which we find it easy to treat as categories of natural
reality. Kinga understand a man can be impotent—they know it as a
rare pathology. But how could copulating with men make it harder to
copulate with a woman? Our way of looking at this is not reasonable to
the Kinga mind. Semantically, men and women both have ‘vaginas’ only
differently placed. When Kinga see a man neglecting his wife’s sexual
needs they just suppose he is intent on prolonging his own bachelor
youth. Perhaps he has come to feel he isn’t competent to set up on his
own. If she needs to, she will find another man.
Kinga are puzzled to hear that a Westerner may let his whole
career be dictated by a gender preference in sex relations. Cases I
tended to perceive that way were differently understood by their own
communities. Only two cases of (self-dramatizing) masculine women
were known. A commoner woman in the 1930s took in several (female)
wives, living with them as a polygynist would, and was eventually sued
for adultery by one of the ‘cuckolded’ husbands. The native court,
always representing a masculine view of life, took the position that
unless a dildo could be found there was no case. When court inspec-
tors found no such incriminating instrument there was no further
intervention. The lesbian wives explained in court that they had
chosen this way of life for their own safety, after earlier troubles in
childbirth. I gather from this case that the official mind of the (male)
court finds it absurd to picture two women arousing and fulfilling their
amorous needs without coition.
26
realm), as none of her brothers was old enough to take office, Kipole
was made ruler. She inherited all the queens except her own mother,
according to rule, and slept with them on a regular schedule, as a king
should do. She also did a good deal of courting in the maidens’ houses
around her royal village. She was eased out of office when a suitable
brother came of age—there was no real precedent for females ruling,
and the arrangement came to be regarded as a makeshift kind of
regency. War was not necessarily the business of a High Prince, but he
usually would have come to the office from doing heroic deeds in his
youth.
27
In their traditional setting and in isolation from our venereal
infections, Kinga didn’t seem to me to be making problems for them-
selves by the way they conceived human nature. But when your meta-
physical mindset is meant to match stable conditions of economy and
structure it can make you terribly vulnerable to change. Western
scholars have lately been becoming aware how deeply their own
psyches are produced by history, the chaos and the order of it all alike
overlaying and sometimes seeming even to overwhelm nature. But a
little rumination on other peoples’ mindsets can’t be amiss. The very
difference between the Kinga view and our own ought to help us see our
sexual orientations better for what they are—doctrinaire beliefs,
metaphysical persuasions which, once we have begun to live by them,
will be hard as chemical habits to shake.
28
gone in favour of smooth relations with all their friends. You can’t be
possessive without exposing yourself to envy, and envy is the surest
enemy of friendship.
Kinga who want to have a good life have to share their deeper
moral premises with others, men and women mainly of their own gener-
ation, who command the passes along the way. A young man who
convinced himself his troubles with a lady love could be blamed on his
or her ‘homosexuality’ would be taking a long step on the wrong path
for a happy career in Kingaland. Suppose an older woman began
thinking all the hard work she’d done all her life in the fields to produce
a ‘surplus’ could amount to nothing but her sacrifice to a ‘ruling class’
of inverted ‘male chauvinists’. How could she judge herself anything
but a fool who had thrown her life away? In prospect or in retrospect,
if you pull the rug out from under me by changing the rules and
landmarks I have to set course by, I’m unlikely to prosper. It is not hard
to see why Kinga resisted what were to them radically devalorizing
Western ideas about sex and human destiny. It is only disinterested
persons in my culture who are likely to give more time to Kinga views.
29
to cloak our sexual worlds in myth. Two of the main myths, left and
right, about homosexuality are:
It’s a sign you are very sick. This view has so far found unimpres-
sive support from science.
30
TWIN SHADOWS: BOOK ONE, CHAPTER ONE
31
like those of the Sangu (under the Merere dynasty) and Hehe (under
Munyigumba and later Mkwawa), the really solidary political groupings
throughout the region were personal chiefdoms seldom encompassing
more than a thousand huts. Contact was normally experienced not
between ‘peoples’ or ‘tribes’ but between much smaller, face-to-face
polities—at least, this remained so for Nyakyusa, Kinga, and many
Bena. Probably in 1800 the traveller would have encountered many
more ‘peoples’ (named ethnic groups) than were recorded a century
later. In 1700 there would have been even more, the typical size being
smaller still. Nevertheless, the beginnings of chiefly political develop-
ment were present in islands of intensive cultivation comprising a ‘po-
litical archipelago’ running in crescent form from Hehe in the
northeast of the highlands region to the lower-lying Nyakyusa in the
southwest.
All that the Handbook says of the Kinga is given in four sentenc-
es:
The Kinga are believed to have come from [Hehe country] many
generations ago. The chieftainship passes to the eldest son. Ukinga
is a deeply dissected mountainous country where the headmen are
almost autonomous, obedience to the chief being more religious than
political. The Kinga used to dig underground houses in which they hid
from their enemies (Moffett 1958:237).
There was not much information available to the colonial power
even in its final years. Notes in Moffat’s compendium are a bit meatier
in reference to other peoples in the same region, but not much better
32
informed. In fact the underground houses he alludes to had the more
practical purpose of providing cosiness for young women on a frosty
night. In war such places would have been traps, since any human set-
tlement puts scars on the land, which a practised stranger might
follow to source. The Handbook’s notes on fragmentation are correct
so far as they go; and the writer’s failure to learn and say more is also
a reliable index of the attention which his government, even in the Ter-
ritory’s last decade, had managed to devote to sociological informa-
tion.
The Germans before being forced out in the 1914 war had
managed a good deal more. They established the Lutheran church at
several centres, where they also planted apples and peaches which
have survived, and introduced wheat which has become a Kinga staple.
German missionaries and scholars left a legacy of descriptive
material of a rather more scholarly sort than the District Books of
the British period afford.
33
put in the ritual undertakings of their priests, designed to placate the
gods of pestilence. The clearest evidence for the regularity of surplus
is the traditional division of labour, which put women in charge of the
gardens almost to the exclusion of men in all but the preliminary soil-
turning parties [imigowi] (which prepared a field as well and as quickly
as the European’s plough) or in the original clearing of brush and
forest. During the long season of growth and cultivation the work of
the fields was mostly for women. Half the population was freed in this
way for less productive if no less honourable pursuits: for a little
hunting, for the barracks life at court, and for discussing low deeds at
a moot or high deeds over beer.<<[lit]
The Prince must have a grand harem, and all his wives produce
offspring—the royal Sanga.
Captive women must bear children to the Prince and wean them
before being released; such children would grow up at court bearing
the royal surname—we may call them booty Sanga.
Sanga princes (no relation to the Sangu people living with their
cattle on the plains below the northern escarpment) had devised for
themselves an open class system tied (as such a system has to be)
to territorial expansion and improved productivity. Sanga courts
34
promoted the smithy and trade in its products, as well as fostering a
grain surplus to meet ceremonial needs.
In the ruler’s ideology his mandate came from the east and was
destined to extend the Sanga dominion westward. When European
Contact broke the spell there were in each realm fertile slopes still to
be won from the forest, and Sanga rule was yet unconsolidated on the
southern and western frontiers. Two of the five princes mentioned by
Wolff were rivals for dominion in the Western Realm, and a less
flagrant rivalry, brewing in the East, appears to have escaped the mis-
sionary’s notice. These were not the conflicts of breakdown. Princely
struggles, schism and alliance, were the stuff of a slow pattern of
political growth measured in generations not years.
We can’t know how far this kind of rule ever was actively demon-
strated for all Kingaland. Their own military history deals only with the
nineteenth century and affords no clear instances. Most likely, the
co-operation of even two princes in war would have been rare. Kinga
rulers, though they may rightly have called themselves “sultans,”
owned no impersonal authority. It is the essence of such segmentary
states that a hierarchy of rule cannot exist since no citizen will
accept the authority of a ruler he has not chosen to side with in war,
and the choice is direct not mediated. Since in principle any ruler may
eventually quarrel with any other, alliances are temporary and don’t
have the effect of merging citizenries. A prince as headman of his own
village has absentee prestige but no command in the other domains
comprising his realm: from their point of view he is always on proba-
tion.
35
modate my analysis to a culture which at a deep level of structure has
remained the product of its own free tradition. This is anthropology of
the eleventh hour—in the years I worked among Kinga only a few men
and women survived who had known that freedom—and anthropology
worth doing.
36
fluent in Swahili, the language of news. Only a few women travelled to
work abroad, so getting the chance to learn Swahili in the usual way;
and only a few school-educated women had resumed the rural calling,
though that was becoming common for literate young men. A direct
effect of the colonial pax had been to enhance the status of women
(the influence, especially, of the Lutheran church) and demythologize
that of men. A man could counter this by keeping past glories alive and
by earning money which could be used to assert control over clothing
and other luxuries valued by women and children. As pragmatists men
devoted themselves to money; but as visionaries they ranked high
deeds over wealth. The age of the warring camps entered into their
traditions as a world of triumphant masculinity, confirming the
dominance men continued to claim in political, jural, and (though much
less fully) religious affairs.
The final (and first radical) break with the past in 1960 awaited
a new rationale for male careers, able to compete with the warrior
mystique. The interim solution of the Pax culture was migrant labour—
a transfer of the barracks life from the court village to the sisal or tea
estate some days’ journey away. By setting themselves to accumu-
late far more than the tax money needed to meet the colonial poll tax,
Kinga men were able to escape the demands of domesticity from which
the barracks life had protected them in the Old culture. By tying
wealth to prestations for women (for wife or mother) and by saving
for or paying off a prodigiously inflated bridewealth, migrant men
maintained a perennial absence without breaking their ties to home.
Census figures for 1948 showed that more than half the male adult
population of Kingaland was living elsewhere, leaving their families to
be reared at home. The independent Tanganyikan régime took strong
measures to repatriate migrants, and toward the end of my tour
some Kinga men were becoming cash farmers, growing pyrethrum.
Either they must find an accommodation to domesticity at last, or
the mystique of the warrior role must be kept alive.
37
and peer discipline for the young of either gender. But the lurking
malaise one observes in men can be shown to have deep roots. Oddly,
the Christian missionaries I knew, apparently judging Kinga values by
those their Christian converts espoused, had little to tell me about
male wanderlust and its meaning for domesticity.
38
Periodizing: Discontinuities from Old to Pax cultures
Since the ‘least political’ people in the region are the Ndendeuli,
and since the Mawemba, Wanji, Magoma, and a few others named on
the German maps but not in the Handbooks of the British period were
on about the same level with respect to political development, the
best model I have for their collective lifestyle must be the one Gulliver
39
gives us in Neighbours and Networks (1971). It is most important to have
in mind that the protostates had centres of power which, though
sometimes shifting, always could be located; but that the horizon of
influence of any political centre was never either quite definite or per-
manent. Any ‘protostate’ will have a developed system of law and law
enforcement, but if this suggests nascent bureaucracy it should not
be taken to suggest a fully fledged one. You can have all the law you
need in a pedestrian community without record-keepers.
40
cially pertinent. It also happens, I am thankful to say, that Hehe-Bena
and Nyakyusa ethnographic information is of a high order for my
purposes.
41
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER TWO
Kinship—Friendship
The Nyakyusa and the Ngonde reckon descent in the male line and
agnatic lineages of three or four generations’ depth were tradition-
ally held together by common interest in a herd of cattle and partici-
pation in common rituals... Lineages were not named or associated
with any special taboo or praise-name, nor were they grouped in
clans of any sort, and in this, as in their system of age-villages, the
Nyakyusa-Ngonde differed from their neighbours. Kinsmen did not
live together... (1958: 10).
The Kinga fit more closely to the pattern Wilson described than
at the time she could have known.
42
their peculiar age-village pattern with hosts of their Bantu-speaking
brethren. Kinga, placing little emphasis on domestic achievements and
relegating their few oxen mainly to the political realm, made little of
competition among men for reputation through wealth in herds and
wives. The Bantu trait the Kinga have relinquished might be called
heterosexual careerism. Ethnographers have tended to see this trait,
in its worldwide distribution, as structure: a sort of peasant patrimo-
nialism, so common as to be taken for granted. But like other ‘isms’
this one is an ideology and—seen from a Kinga vantage-point—is
neither ‘natural’ nor the mere creature of rules.
43
produce large political units but do extend the lateral reach of the
component political units in a region. They make organized social life
possible on a grander scale than bare face-to-face politics can do. As
an Eastern Bantu people, the Kinga ought to have a strong unilineal
kinship system, and the fact that they don’t makes them the kind of
exception to a general rule that can throw light on it. Anyone who
argued that the evolution of the limited liability company wasn’t
guided by an active political intelligence would be laughed out of an
economics seminar. The like should happen to an anthropologist who
sees no evidence of political intelligence in a complex kinship system
such as those one may find so widespread among the Eastern Bantu
peoples from Kenya to Zululand.<<[lit]
44
to sanction it directly—their attitude toward friendship is at least
less explicitly political. They generalize their concept of kinship/
kin-group [ulukolo/ikikolo] to mean friendship and community. The
values of kinship and friendship flow readily into one another.
45
never got the news either, unless I happened to notice the newly burnt
remains of a country hut and carefully inquire.) Self-help as a response
to the breakdown of fiduciary relations is transactional sanctioning
not authority. Supposing a politicized kinship organization, with a
constituted lineage authority for mobilizing force, had once existed
among these communities, it would have persisted under such condi-
tions. Efforts of the Sangas to control it would have been famous in
barracks histories. I take the message of their silence along with the
absence of local descent groups in recent times.<<[lit]
The rubric I use for the major cultural schism in Kinga society (to
which I have just alluded) is court-bush dualism. Kinga support two fairly
coherent value systems or subcultures, roughly comparable to those
so interestingly explored in Highland Burma by the British social
anthropologist, Edmund Leach (1954). I positively don’t want to
suggest by this comparison that Kinga communities ‘oscillate’ in any
sense between two polar ethical schemes (about which more much
later); but individuals circulate between the two kinds of community,
learning how to be comfortable within either system, and on the
ground every settlement has to find its place in the range between
the two ideal poles.
46
room being intended for small children of mixed sex or for an adoles-
cent girl; in acculturated (Christian) communities where the use of a
men’s house was dying away; and commonly where a bachelor male was
content to keep house alone, accommodating to the absence of his
friends at migrant labour. But a second room for a girl must always be
a separate apartment with its own entrance, and a solid barrier
should segregate children from the parents’ sleeping room; a man who
didn’t frequent a men’s house was often away from home, earning,
visiting, or accomplishing an errand; nor did I see any bachelor house
with bedplace for only one. In my outsider’s view, these domestic
arrangements tend to atomize the nuclear family in favour of
extended peer relations, whether with cousins or friends, for each sex.
But mutatis mutandi typical nuclear family arrangements elsewhere,
seen from a Kinga point of view, mix sexes and generations together in
a heedless manner, de-emphasizing community in favour of familistic
privatism.
47
treks there as lying outside recent history. In times of trouble, I was
told, village elders themselves would take gifts to an Earth Shrine (in
Sanguland) without the mediation of any local political-ritual offices.
The remembered past in 1960 was not one of lost glories: as cultiva-
tors they were pursuing, with the modifications introduced by govern-
ment taxes and the need for migrant labour to pay them, their full
tradition. So this pocket region deserves to be taken, cautiously, as a
suggestive model of pre-Sanga bush culture in the Livingstone moun-
tains. It is at least one secure enough from tax collectors that the
inhabitants didn’t all vanish off the earth at the approach of a
pink-eared Mzungu.
48
and children are understood to have lived apart from adults—all from
time immemorial. Except for their use as temporary huts for guarding
fields from night-marauding animals only a few old men, in remote bush
hamlets, built such dwellings in 1960. They are much less substantial
as shelters than even the ‘gingerbread’ huts (as my children knew
them) of bachelor boys today; and the maidens’ huts of course are
finer yet.<<[lit]
49
about “incest” are just that, but serve as explanatory myths. Perhaps
any society aware of the comparative peculiarity of its own struc-
tural patterns will find convincing moral principles to explain them. But
when you have grown up knowing your culture as the ground of all moral
being you do not crave an explanation of it which would appease the
comparativist. Any child growing up in the bosom of a well established
family system may be expected to accept the natural basis of kin soli-
darity. Likewise the Kinga child may be expected to accept the natural
bases of friendships reinforced by sexual intimacy.<<[lit]
50
featureless plain, supporting impressive herds. Hehe country as well,
though more varied, would have seemed open.
Hehe, Bena, and Kinga shared roughly the same set of political
offices and ritual orientations, though the emphases differed charac-
teristically, and in respect of these institutions belonged together,
with the Nyakyusa standing apart. But Hehe went far enough beyond
nominal recognition of agnatic principles, that their local settlement
could realistically be classed as a sort of descent group. By contrast
to the Kinga they emphasized domesticity, polygyny, and the accumu-
lation of wealth. Symptomatically, the traditional Hehe house was the
massive tembe, a structure into which you feel a dozen of the “original”
Kinga huts could easily fit, perhaps even a half-dozen of the more
substantial rondavels the Germans found in the Western Sanga
realm.
51
Because Nyakyusa villages, though independent, tend to remain
tightly clustered in space, the fact of their being composed of male
householders who are peers not kin is no impediment to the expres-
sion of solidarity with agnates within the same chiefdom or princely
realm. As Monica Wilson details at length (1957, 1959), Nyakyusa
have elaborated two complete sets of rituals—of kinship and of
political community—which may be said to run in parallel rather than
intersect. Without them I think the maintenance of two such distinct
principles of association wouldn’t have been feasible. As it is, their
distinctness remains one “in principle” since in practice they are bound
to intersect.<<[lit]
52
How Bena and Sangu would have fared on the same question-
naires we can’t know—impressionistically from the evidence of the
Culwicks (1935) I would expect the riverine Bena to place their trust
more freely and, likely enough, about evenly with kinsmen or friends. I
should be more hesitant about guessing the Nyakyusa response—with
so strong an ethic of trust they could hardly escape self-conscious-
ness in this, and it is in such circumstance the ethnographer is least
sure of the difference between what someone “thinks” and what the
same person “thinks one ought to think.” Still, the balance of kinship
and friendship would presumably find expression in Nyakyusaland.
53
Like men and women everywhere, in associating with intimates
Kinga operate within a framework of moral reciprocity, avoiding shame
and disgrace. They seek approbation and, behind it, transcendent
merit: they want to be worthy, as such things are judged, according to
mystically validated standards. The kinship-friendship dimension illu-
minates especially three facets of Kinga concern with the mainte-
nance of moral reciprocity: facets tangent to the questions of
boundaries, residential alliance, and solidarity/authority. In contrast
to kinship rules, a friendship ethic generates impermanent boundaries.
In principle, since conciliation or realignment from strength is always
possible, any boundary may be annulled or re-predicated. In practice,
individual networks tended in 1960 to show a remarkable independ-
ence of political boundaries as such.
For men who chose the court career, marriage was especially
late. The ties of continuity from which the practical strength of
kinship claims must grow had been broken before a man committed
himself to a permanent residence. The choice of a place was accord-
ingly the choice of a group of companions, and this meant the main
guarantee of local solidarity at the hamlet level was friendship—a tie
not of the axiomatic sort (ethically not like kinship) but one contin-
gent on regular affirmation. Belonging to this pattern of voluntary
residential alliance is the old system of social sanctions of the self-
help variety: reciprocal (as between individuals) or transactional (as
between relatively autonomous factions or groups) retaliation for
wrongs, a system which if it does well does very well without hierarchy.
It was always sanctioned in Kingaland by the bush culture and only
suppressed where intervention was feasible by the courts. They would
have any internal dispute referred to authority and any external
dispute sublimated into militarism. Not only kinship but innocent
friendship itself may be cooked in a fashion to feed the military mind.
54
In kinship societies patterning co-residence of small descent
groups (minimal lineages), a respect hierarchy is usually found coded
into the structure by rules about age, genealogical position, and the
inheritance of wealth. Dissensus is absorbed within the group without
affecting the strength of the alliance it represents, until actual
schism or formal segmentation should occur. The moral strategies of
individuals then have a fixed dimension, the overriding commitment to
a kin-group and its fortunes. Alternative residential options exist but
only as a concession of doxy to praxis. By comparison, the moral
universe of the Kinga is an open and unbounded network whose resi-
dential centre is fixed rather late in life, after an extended period of
shifting between natal hamlet and local and/or royal courts.
55
so favour Friendship as a principle of association that, while they give
nominal weight to kinship principles, their social system falls within
the opposite range. It is not quite true to say a Kinga man who has
lost his friends has no one to extend him personal support, for some
Kinga (especially rulers) do build big polygynous families and rely on
them for a firm identity in their communities and for personal support;
but it is true that the typical Kinga man or woman would be bereft
without friends. Even a close kinsman who is not within that category
will hardly honour a serious claim. The cardinal moral strategies of
Kinga take their orientation from the need to keep faith with peers.
56
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER THREE
Gentle Warriors
57
times the age-village with its ethic of civility among males had a hard-
core rationale. In the absence of politically accessible kinship solidari-
ty, these compact bachelor cohorts, closely grouped about the court
village, gave a Nyakyusa chief his fighting strength. The centrepiece of
the communal rituals, the celebrated though puzzling Coming Out
[ubusoka], is best understood as a renewal ceremony dedicated to the
same ends. The Kinga equivalent to this was an elaborate succession
drama which I describe elsewhere. Nyakyusa also showed Monica
Wilson their truculence in armed fighting at funerals, where the
parties were kinship factions; they seem to have lacked the regular
war games Kinga courts put on.<<[lit]
58
course, but not of the kind that doesn’t know a face from a mask,
person from persona.
Histrionic warfare
One point which emerges from a comparison of Nyakyusa or
Kinga with the faraway but especially interesting Nuer of the Sudan
concerns the subjective test of heroism. For each of these peoples
the preferred arena was battle with one’s close neighbours not a
distant enemy or alien people. But Nuer were expanding at the
expense of a (perceived) alien people with equivalent or even superior
59
technology. If facts sometimes speak for themselves this seems to
say the Nuer get higher marks for pugnacity than Hehe, the Sowetan
contenders. Kinga and Nyakyusa expansions by contrast to Hehe were
hegemonic invasions, intrusive colonizations, backed by a show of su-
periority at arms but culminating in co-optation. Aidan Southall
(1954) reported in detail on such a process of political expansion by
Nilotic speakers, the Alur, which continued unabated during his field-
work. Ideally, whole settlements would be taken under the wing of a po-
litically talented man styling himself as chief or prince, and in short
order take on the cultural identity of their new host.<<[lit]
The summit of the war pattern was the armed rivalry of princes.
The prize was not usually territory so much as cattle or women in
token numbers. Nyakyusa commoners explicitly call their rulers an
intrusive set of lineages who brought the first cattle and fire, symbol
of authority, from Kingaland. Cattle and the transforming fire of the
smith are presumably as old as the Iron Age in this part of the Rift
Valley (early in the Christian era) but the transition this myth is likely
to concern is the onset of the Later Iron Age (say, 1400 a.d.). Kinga
legends make an equally explicit distinction between the intrusive
Sanga ruler and autochthonous lineages, cowed by the superior
culture and technical mastery of the newcomers. Part of the cultural
baggage which the intruders brought was evidently a war pattern with
which they were able to set themselves up in business.<<[lit]
60
to hurl insulting language at the enemy, challenging them to “come
on,” and be scattered by his single arm. When the fighting became
close, stabbing took the place of throwing, and if a very few were
killed on either side, the losing side retired. But only for a short
distance; for a hero stood out, and called the others to rally round
him, and a few desperate men would drive back the enemy. And so the
battle swayed to and fro, until one chief considered that his men had
had enough, and made his submission; or perhaps the fight was
renewed the next day when the tired men had rested. (MacKenzie
1925: 171-2.)
War horns and whistles were being sounded all the while on both
sides, and medicine vessels advanced and retired, whose relative
powers were thought to control the bravery with which men found
they could fight. MacKenzie found his people shocked by reports of the
casualty rate in European wars, and their fathers must have been
equally shocked by news of the mutual slaughter of Hehe and Sangu
warriors in confrontations like the one Elton happened to witness in
1877, only a day’s walk to the north.
Since the Western realm was openly, and the Eastern covertly,
in schism at Contact, we have to suppose Kinga theory would have
61
been adapted to new circumstance if either schism were eventually
conceded as permanent. This is what the theory of just four realms,
promulgated by the High Prince at Ukwama, served to resist. The act
of legitimation would have been taking a new prince into the summit
group and reconstructing a genealogy of some fourteen generations
showing him to be a collateral descendant of the Founder. As between
princes, rank order was expressed in ritual procedures and through
nominal tribute—a few goats sent “from time to time”—rendered
through priestly officials. As to the priests, their protean calling
made them free of boundaries, unless in the very heart of battle, even
while their local loyalties were the firmest of any men’s. While in the
nature of the case we can’t know how stable the rank-ordering of
princely offices may have been, we have abundant evidence that gene-
alogical right was supposed to establish military might, not the other
way round. However independent the actual behaviour of local rulers,
the constitution they operated within afforded a more coherent ideal
structure than the one Nyakyusa knew.
How much real time was devoted to war? Tunginiye, the Kinga
historian, was sure that war had been restricted to the dry season,
the half-year beginning in May. The rituals associated with sacrifice at
Lubaga would likely occupy six weeks or more of this time, during which
any hostilities must be suspended. A preparatory rallying of forces
through war-games at the courts, combined with the launching of
young men’s cattle raids on distant (culturally alien) targets, would
presumably fill the time to midsummer. Wars were not fought to any
calendrical schedule, of course—even major ritual occasions were
unfixed, following only the perennial rhythms of weather, vegetable
growth or decay, and presentiments of doom.
62
and events on both these fronts. But the borders of Kingaland in its
final period (1926-1961) served the convenience of the District Office
well. Local ethnic alignments were served less well, but the pax had
brought in a new game.
63
The continued bachelor status of actual warriors would have
contributed to their reckless bent both in the formal war games and
in battle; and a special feature of barracks life for the Kinga (as with
age-village life for the Nyakyusa-Ngonde) was the personal intimacy
enjoyed by fighting mates as individuals. Particularly in the British
version of current-and-recent Western culture, we know a parallel in
boarding schools and university men’s residences. But there can be
only limited comparison to Western barracks life as such—Kinga and
Nyakyusa youth culture stressed self-government and generated its
own lively ceremonial life. The Bena court school differed in respect to
sexual orientation and achieved its integrative ends in its own way
(Culwicks 1935) but shared the regional pattern of educating and
resocializing youth to the political culture of a court claiming
more-than-local authority. Each of these systems of schooling is
matched to its own gender and career patterns. For Kinga this
dimension of the culture informs in a special way the absence of close
family living for children, and the substitution of peer intimacy.
64
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER FOUR
Imagination
65
Cultures weren’t well conceived in the culture-and-personality
literature of a generation ago. They were pictured as expressions of
the typical or modal personality found in a defined population. That
idea derived from the notion that cultures were ‘internalized’
phenomena located inside their exemplars. This is rather like saying
that its special timbre is ‘internalized’ in a cello: the statement is not
so much wrong as out of focus. Culture like music is sui generis. As the
body of the cello forms a hard surround for the air set in vibration by
bow and string, and the broader surround of a still room is wanted to
translate the vibrations into music; and as in fact there must be a
sense of change, sequence, and aesthetic expectation created in an
audience before music is realized; so it is with culture and the individ-
ual mind. Only those personal vibrations to which your particular
culture can give resonance are truly expressible. A culture, being inter-
subjective, is identical with no mental phenomenon, though it may
partly lend itself to description in psychological terms.
66
at such occasions: exuberant, joyous, and gender-equal. The energy
level was a cut and more above the simpler drum-dancing I observed
elsewhere in East Africa: the occasion seemed to have more special
meaning—a true celebration not mere entertainment. More than
these impressions I can’t report from observation, but I’d cherish the
chance to be back there, dancing with ankle bells by torch and
moonlight in a high valley transformed by night. I had to depend on the
memories of informants and their readiness to paint word-pictures
for me—these supplemented by a few documentary references—for a
reconstruction of courtly dancing as it was done in its proper time. We
do know that excellence in the dance was honoured only less than con-
spicuous proficiency in war. These two were the cardinal arts.
67
Much of Kinga verbal art had its proper setting in the evening,
whether indoors or by an open fire, among intimates. That universal
setting of the myth or folktale, the family hearth, did exist, since
children from time to time would gather in the house of a grandmother
for a night, though a parents’ house was never open to such slumber
parties. But the quintessentially Kinga setting was the bachelor
house where young maidens or young men entertained one another
with their wits and with games of veiled meanings. If the minstrel-
dancer at court was virtually a professional entertainer, apt to be
loved and rewarded by royal decree like a hero in war after a fine per-
formance, the minstrel’s formative training in wit and the art of
holding an audience would have been at home with his special friends.
That being at home was being with friends not family is an essential
clue for understanding the culture.
68
virtually random fashion, the same group will remain together, barring
defections and replacements, a steadfast fraternity to death. Kinga
residential patterns were always more shifting. Even for those who
took up a full career at the princely court of their realm, the solidary
barracks group would be seasonally dispersed when men’s work was
wanted in the fields. Recruitment and attrition were continuous proc-
esses, and the peer group’s exclusiveness was compromised in a host
of ways. No man was tethered. Only small contingents normally
stayed together when it was time to marry and settle down to
farming. Hence Kinga peer relations can be said to have a comparative-
ly transitory and apolitical (non-communal) basis. Is unpredictability a
spur to the human imagination? That is a vague formulation but
probably sound. One connection particularly worth exploring with
Kinga materials is that between stress-seeking—courting danger—
and creativity.
69
In my model life-cycle for Kinga men there is a ‘post-creative’
phase. It comes after withdrawal to marriage and the initial establish-
ment of a household, which is likely to evoke a burst of constructive
energy. I suppose the end of youth, its style and its mood, used to
come gradually in the old culture, so that the mature style of the
householder would be prefigured in the more settled habits of the
aging bachelor-warrior. This was so in 1960, when marriages were
entered earlier but migrant labour continued, with only short visits
home, up to the same age at which a man in the old culture would have
married—what we regard as middle age and they as maturity. This is
the time of life when physical ailments begin to feature increasingly in
a man’s experience as well. His perspective darkens: how can he trust
his friends when they seem envious of him? Men notice his absence
from the convivial life of the men’s house and the occasional beer
parties at places he used to frequent; it is known that attempts have
been made to poison him.
70
community of older men, leading to individual phantasies of witchcraft
or murderous intent which are beyond the exorcism of art. A dour
judgement seems to emerge: the deepest intention of the arts among
Kinga is holding back the knives of time. I can’t fault that intention,
though. It is the Kinga maiden not the older woman with a child on her
back whom I and the German missionaries before me heard singing for
joy through the fields at harvest time. In the theatre of everyday life,
I suppose the art of song is spontaneous and belongs to youth.
71
TWINS SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER FIVE
Ambisexuality
72
an Englishman, I suppose we should be calling a Peter Pan complex. At
the psychological level the most probable immediate meaning of the
rite is, “It is good that I sacrifice (a vital part of) myself for my (yet
unknown) partner in procreation.” The operation has no direct meaning
for men, who know little or nothing of it.<<[lit]
For the Bena, who performed the operation on little girls, the
meaning would presumably have been stronger on submissiveness; and
that of course was also a theme of the Kinga. All considered, we can
still say for the Kinga that the rite was practised by women on girls,
not by women on women, since the rite itself marked the passage from
girlhood to bachelor adult status and was administered by parous
women. The difference is that for Bena the subject was a child—for
Kinga she must be physically full-grown only socially still in her
minority.
How deeply cut is the female psyche? Here is a custom the Kinga
share with peoples of the larger region who haven’t institutionalized
ambisexuality. (But it is true for the riverine Bena, the one case where
we have an adequate account, that children approaching adolescence
move away from the parental home to peer residences.) In the absence
of proper eye-witness accounts it is difficult to know how Kinga
teachings were suited to their special context. A girl learned well that
women generally discount the erotic potential of the organs they cut
away, and that (with compensating energy) they prize the clitoris
instead. Girls’ initiations were manifestly women’s affairs—a good
part of the point seems to have been the mystification of men, and
the anthropologist fell unhappily into that category. Any search for
meaning should be guided by the mood of the institution, which
throughout the region is one of celebration not sexual alienation.
Kinga initiations (virtually lacking for males) were not tunnels to
marriage. They were schools more than they were rites of passage.
The bachelor life might continue, at least for women in the court
culture, as long again as the years of girlhood which were past.
73
frustration and must be morally free to take a lover should her
husband continue to stint her. I’m disinclined to be puzzled about the
sexual gymnastics entailed. I assume the rule is used by a woman only
at need, and the need would be for a pregnancy. So an infertile or
impotent man may be obliged to tolerate his wife taking a lover, but
can do so without losing face, citing the fanciful number seven. But
women do teach that only multiple acts of coition will produce preg-
nancy; and after the loss or weaning of a child, especially where her
situation is aggravated by the husband’s prolonged absence (in 1960
at migrant labour), a woman craving a child might bend other rules
using this one.
I think some of the logic of the extreme case is felt within the
typical marriage, however independently couples may make their
intuitive contracts. But it is also true that in 1960 many established
couples seemed devoted, spent idle hours together without friction,
and had found (Christian) norms of monogamous householding not
just acceptable but quite to their liking. Men were marrying earlier in
1960 than they had done in the old court culture, but as they typically
would spend most of their first decade and a good part of their
second at labour outside Kingaland, the transition to housekeeping
norms was gradual for them. Their perspectives on moral values were
74
affected by the cosmopolitan experience of wage labour. In the bush
culture of 1890, which had not quite disappeared in 1960, the tiny
marital domicile had contained no public space at all—it was a place for
dyadic withdrawal. Informants always mentioned a quaint custom, at
which they would smile: the little doorway required crawling in, and this
a man would always do backward, not for fear of attack but to keep
from exposing himself provocatively. For women, who wore back-
aprons, the problem didn’t appear, but a man ought to care enough to
demonstrate his commitment to marriage. I take the evidence to
show that couples have always found their own balance in sexual
matters, including the degree of their involvement with family and
with peers. The step from pagan to Christian was never a wrenching
one for Kinga, and seemed not to call for a radical change in self-image.
Kinga are partial to lore about themselves as rather special among
their neighbours but prize their adaptability as well.
75
Uncontrolled furies and intense suspicions characterized one of his
communities, a less constrained form of truculence the other. In the
traits which Edgerton finds pronounced and distinctive for Hehe, their
profile stands directly in contrast to Kinga character norms, and I
believe also to Nyakyusa norms, as these are to be judged from
missionary and ethnographic accounts. The general similarity of Kinga
and Nyakyusa erotic orientations, and their contrast to Hehe sexu-
ality, which is notable for an almost compulsive emphasis on self-
control, sexual sin, and concealment, might be thought to call for a
depth-psychological diagnosis. Sexual repression and heightened
aggressiveness are linked, while permissiveness (the provision of
ready and legitimate sexual outlets through peer relations) appears
to leave the capacity for aggressive performance intact but less
powerfully driven.<<[lit]
76
function of the interplay of ego-generated with evolved, institutional
forces. And when an individual’s tentative persona confronts estab-
lished character norms, the latter are likely to dominate. For an
understanding of the Kinga case I think the point would be that the
frequency of such confrontations in the course of everyday sexual
traffic is low. Kinga culture calls for a good deal of formality in social
relationships, but offers flexible, not hardened character norms. It is
particularly through this fact that I would link sex and aggression in
the traditional culture. If Kinga men appear, by comparison with other
Sowetan peoples, to favour a laid-back character, I’d point not to high
frequencies but low hassle in their sex lives.
77
homophilia, the Kinga might be thought to have run the danger of side-
tracking heterosexual relations and the reproductive potential of
their society. But when the evidence is weighed, that fear seems
unfounded. Moral careers without marriage are no more popular with
them than with their neighbours, only that a fulfilling period of bach-
elorhood comes first for both genders. Women effectively have the
right to a pregnancy when they are ready, and the right to make alter-
native arrangements to conceive where husband is absent or unable.
Before the pax and the lethal childhood diseases introduced by Euro-
peans, prolonged and successful nursing of Kinga infants, uninter-
rupted by new pregnancies, appear to have compensated the putative
population loss entailed in delaying a maiden’s marriage.
78
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER SIX
There was more than one way a Kinga man of rank might be
reminded of his insecurity. Legitimacy has psychological depths, it is
not a mere matter of rules but a function of political culture. Kinga
have tales of the exercise of genuine countervailing power when an
unpopular succession was prevented, but the main safeguards
against overweaning power are not specifically political.
The manifest cause for disquiet if you were a prince or local ruler
was the knowledge of a secret rival among near kinsmen. It seems to
have been rare that a prince’s right to rule was not challenged in some
quarter. The commonest cause of irregularity in the line of succession
was a regency, and this is because an effective regent was ruler for
life, not just until the proper heir had reached his majority. There were
no precedents for dethroning a strong ruler, though a weak one might
be persuaded to step down. So long as he were not himself too weak
to hold the throne, a regent’s own heir could soon be entrenched. Still,
memories were long for by-passed lines, not only within the family of a
potential claimant but among men with quiet grievances against the
régime in power.
79
but these are also impractical in politics. This is because, whereas a
man who was seen to take power by witchcraft would be showing he
had the right stuff, a man who resorted to poison would certainly not.
It was standard practice at court that a royal taster try all the
food and drink put before the prince, and only trusted persons had
access to his kitchen. Such precautions, though pressed upon him by
the priestly group, avanyivaha [great men, court élite], could be
brushed aside by a strong young prince inclined to take a personal lead
in warfare: risking his life directly, he would lean less to fantastic
fears. But the same prince, aged a decade and grown soft to the manly
arts through fitting devotion to beer and the needs of his harem,
would find clouds of anxiety and suspicion settling upon him. Deaths
among his offspring would be read as the depradations of a rival.
Secret enemies were forever finding foreign medicines—even the
priests’ best protective potion [ikivyoka] might be ineffective. Loss of
a favourite wife or daughter could be doubly traumatic, suggesting
hidden lines of conflict even within the royal enclosure. Little by little
the princely establishment would become a stockaded sanctuary [ul-
ulindo], the business of government being carried on outside it by the
group of great men.
80
What we have is the mute evidence of stress—unquantified but clearly
not negligible—in the symptoms.
81
East Africa give the experience of such an attack a special story line.
Where formal accusation is made, after divination, the victim’s initial
crisis of self-confidence is narrowed from fear to focussed hostility.
There is acting-out of a search for justice and signs of supernatural
favour. Kinga of all ages shared this worldview before Christian
ideology was brought in, and almost all continued to accept the same
view afterward, at least where they or theirs were under stress. That
princes themselves were not immune to the depradations of witches,
having to fight off malice with malice, told everyone that mundane
achievement was never secure, as even the powerful, the mystically
armed, have their rivals and will finally be brought down.
82
from his own turf (the court) to the priests’ (the sacred grove) where
he faced them alone, quite in the manner of a lone initiate in the bush
school, perhaps even of the accused witch before his inquisition. In
priestly memory, such sessions achieved high seriousness and never
needed repetition. I could learn nothing from the rulers themselves.
83
The operation of a thriving military-ceremonial centre where, in
strict economic terms, only a modest village ought to be must have
put a strain on resources and organizing skills. Each of the courts
seems to have depended on two effective élites, the great men
[avanyivaha] and the royal women [avehe, ing’engele]—the wives,
unmarried sisters, and daughters of the prince. Such women enjoyed
a protective rank vis-à-vis ordinary men. Since the major economic
tasks—food production and processing, brewing, the gathering of fuel
and thatch, and housekeeping—for the court were left to women, the
prima facie evidence is that their organization as a group matched
that of the priestly élite. But if there were any feminist historians
among the Kinga in 1960 I didn’t find them.
What was the influence of the royal women on style and policy at
a Sanga court? To listen to male lore you would think they fulfilled
themselves by tilling the fields, brewing beer, grinding corn, bearing
children, and submitting cheerfully to marriage by royal fiat. In cold
fact this picture probably bears about the same resemblance to
village realities that the scene on a typical Christmas card does to
Christian lifestyles. We know little about women’s power. The virgin
queen Kipole, who ruled the Central realm in early German times and is
said (in current official retrospect) to have poisoned her father to
please her mother and take the throne, remains a shadowy figure
ignored or unrecognized by missionaries, administrators, and princely
genealogists alike. I heard of her only through some lucky questioning.
She was successfully deposed (on a retrospective charge of having
resorted to poison) by the priests when her younger brother had come
of age, but I don’t know what subsequently became of her and her peer-
wives. They would have stayed, I suppose, as harem to the young
prince. Was Kipole’s truly a palace revolution or an ordinary regency?
How many others, quite forgotten now, might such a figure stand for?
As with men, women who were healthy and strong had a good chance
at the good life. But an older or disabled widow unable to grow her own
food could find herself thrown back on a fallible personal network. A
man in similar conditions had, so to speak, his men’s club to support
him. Was the sisterhood in fact its equal? It likely was, judging from
the solidarity of women two generations after Contact. But in the full
bush culture kinship not sisterhood was the widow’s safety net, and
the best net anywhere was self-reliance.
84
of being young and sexually unattached. But for that what must a
human community be willing to pay? I was moved to find Prince
Mwalukisa himself, who had reigned in the Northern realm during
German times, surviving in 1960 as a destitute old man without
manifest tokens of rank. It is true that a more popular ruler might
have fared better, but Mwalukisa by outliving most of his generation
outlived his royal standing as well. I first saw him half naked, only his
loins covered, carrying a great length of firewood on his head, woman-
fashion. He’d survived all his wives and had to care for himself at an age
few men of the West, with all their advantages, ever reach. Historian
Tunginiye in his sixties, having buried two wives and taken a third still
young in her thirties, was keeping up with her in bodily energy and
spirit; but not every September can put on May weather, and my
spritely barefoot scholar wasn’t to live through his own October.
Kinga have no secret formula for extending youth on the physical plane
to match the scheme of values by which they try to live. Some old men
were strikingly young for their years, but none took that for granted.
The strongest counter-theme to respect for rank and seniority is
probably the solid awareness that to be young and free of encumber-
ment is to have a prize great men have lost. Most Kinga men in 1960
clung to the style and demeanour of youth [undume] for at least a
decade longer than the males of other Sowetan cultures. It would be
hard to argue that peer-anchored narcissism could have no bearing on
that.
85
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER SEVEN
86
scape. The metaphor is social space: as we adjust to the constraining
features of natural topography we can adjust to the partitioning of
social space through rank, class, and vertical division. In a society
where everyone treats such features as immutable they never
become problematic. It is unsurprising that Kinga children accept age-
and size ranking among their peers and accommodate to it. Wouldn’t
Kinga adults view the court or colonial plantation scene in about the
same light?
87
behaviour. According to this premise, a person can learn ‘packaged’
behaviour which, lying in wait for its occasion, in its abeyance need
never be unwrapped—and yet may undergo radical change. If you reject
the notion that manifest behaviour is all there is to culture, your
sense for the processes of socialization must allow for deep levels of
learning. More correctly: since talk of ‘levels’ suggests a mechanical
stratification of culture, say simply that the longer an institution has
been around the thicker its textures of meaning will be. To borrow a
musical analogy, socialization normally exposes an individual to the
polyphonic texture of a culture, not just its melodic themes. A boy
comes to know other parts than his own. He learns a good deal about
authority by resenting and resisting it as an intrusion on his peer
world. Eventually he is ready to come to terms with authority in order
to move beyond that world. Through all this time, a vast series of
‘items learnt’ have been put down with others learnt before, and the
melange matured a bit in the deep well of experience.<<[lit]
88
mind) is a primary group without the repressive structure parents,
being giants however indulgent, can’t avoid introducing.
89
stallation of a prince was a rite of passage which set the chosen heir
forever apart from his former comrades, with whom he wouldn’t again
share the barracks life. Once installed, a prince must regularly submit
himself to re-anointment with medicines reserved to his unkuludeva
status, calculated to put a magical wall between him and the conspir-
ing world outside his enclosure.
90
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER EIGHT
91
flourish in expressive fashion for a few days, fired by new-found enthu-
siasms, but are expected to be brief and subside into lasting friend-
ships. I observe a young married man who brings his new friend home.
Whatever the gymnastics entailed, three young persons are seen to
emerge happily refreshed in the morning. Can a triangle, instead of
strangling love, be made to strengthen it?
92
will probably never shake. While it may become fashionable to wear a
“cool” mask into scenes of passion, if the passion were thereby
quenched the mask would have missed its purpose.<<[lit]
I find most credible those critics who search for the roots of
trouble in dominance struggles within the family, in which a child finds
itself reduced to an instrumentality of adult emotional needs. For
their part, adults being frustrated at home turn away for love, but the
bad faith at home only carries over with them into the marketplace-
of-love to which they must turn. Older bourgeois societies than mine
are sometimes pictured as having stabilized that marketplace by the
routinization of prostitution in higher and lower forms—but I think we
are entitled to be skeptical. Current trends are toward a sort of
decontamination of the family through therapy, rationalized divorce,
and serial monogamy; but in spite of prophets foretelling its doom no
successor-institution to family, able to sanction personal responsi-
bility as effectively, has appeared. Kinga living arrangements speak to
us at this point, since the Kinga family minimizes pressure on the egos
of its members, and the auxiliary ‘marketplace’ is for a very large part
of their lives where they live.
93
keep the angry animal distracted but none was brave enough to move
in for the kill. They must send for his full brother. Though it meant a
perilous delay, it was perfectly understood that a full brother would
find the courage required; and so, indeed, the rescue was accom-
plished. As in Western or whatever other culture, this tie is axiomatic
and mutually sanctions maximal claims on loyalty, but the Kinga tie
lacks the depth of emotional meaning which must come from common
socialization within the frame of close family life.
94
TWIN SHADOWS, FIRST FOLIO
Having a marriage
How to find out how long they meant a woman would have
guarded her virginity?
95
children a woman could be expected to bear would be reduced by one.
We have a minimal position here.
96
The testimony I recorded isn’t altogether uniform. At first I was
bewildered by the variety and seeming contradictions. Some women,
agèd in 1960, had married as soon as two years after menarche (which
means under twenty) in communities they called Kinga. Since the
cases are few and the places marginal to Pangwa country (to the
south) the implications for us are not clear and cogent. Though I know
this was not the pattern for all bush communities I could make no
systematic survey. There is no reason to suppose social organization
was any more standard than dialect outside the court culture. One
variant pattern occasionally described was child betrothal. It is
present among some neighbours and was countenanced by Sanga
rulers. It occurred sporadically among ordinary Kinga in 1960. Possibly
it always had. But it was generally mentioned as an odd or alien
custom undertaken by a few men in the interest of speculative advan-
tage. One Kinga man, who had lived more among Bena than Kinga since
adolescence, thought the ideal marriage pattern was the same for
both peoples—the boy should be about five years older, and the young
couple should have tilled fields for both sets of parents for some
years before marrying at the girl’s menarche. It wanted a lot of talk
with his friends before we got things sorted out.
All of this suggests that what system there was in 1960 was
impressionistic at best. We can make sense of the situation by noting
two things:
(a) Actual ages of marriage had not dropped far. The major
change in train was a shift toward domesticity. But the high
bridewealth was delaying marriage effectively, and migrant labour
(before Independence) militated against young couples adopting
‘Christian’ patterns of cohabitation.
97
before 20, and this was felt by some to be a strict rule; but in one
Roman Catholic area girls might marry two or three years earlier. In
both those Christian communities some young men married before 25
and did so because of a strong personal commitment in spite of all
difficulties. What is particularly interesting is that young women were
remaining chaste as they had in the Old Culture. Underlying moral
strategies remained much the same. All indications are that until
British times (effectively, 1926) the amount of the bridewealth was
slight and couldn’t have been a hindrance to a young man otherwise
determined upon a course of marrying his sweetheart. The reason for
her long-preserved virginity lay not in any simple material circum-
stance.
98
ready for marriage ought to be over thirty. Often he would be mtu wa
makama makubwa [Sw: a man past his youth but not yet in old age], agosipe
[K: he has had all his growth, he is in middle age].
A young man got instruction only at the time of marriage—it could be
on the day of marriage itself, and the teachers were not only old men but
women as well, past child-bearing. [But my unmarried assistant was with
me, and we didn’t hear the content of these instructions on that account.]
Instruction for a maiden was more thorough. There would normally be three
sessions before marriage. The first would be in a small group where she was
together with a few other girls who had just reached the menarche. At the
second instruction, about a year later, each girl will be sole pupil at a
gathering to which her mother or guardian will be hostess. Old women and
unwed girls who have completed the course will be there, and even very old
men. Several years later the girl’s mother would usually want to brew beer
again for another private schooling on the same scale, and this would
suffice to prepare the girl for marriage. Later, after marriage and the birth
of her first male child, the girl become woman would be subject for the last
time to schooling. [This would be at the place in the wild where the baby
would be born and sheltered for its first weeks.] On her return home she and
the child would be painted across the forehead with the white clay isyogo.
When menarche has come a girl will be put in isolation for the full month
until her second period is over. She is dressed in rags and mustn’t answer
any boy’s greeting. She can’t leave to till fields or do any work with others. If
she is disobedient she will be starved for two days, for others are feeding
her and she will find no way of getting food alone. Thus she is taught her
dependency. At the school which follows the isolation her older brothers
are asked if she has been dutiful. Unless they will affirm that she has been,
each is given a stick to beat her where she stands naked; and this still
happens today.
The taboos which pertain to ordinary menstruation are these: a
menstruating woman mustn’t feed men. Her husband or her male children
past nursing must eat elsewhere. She should have a menstrual hut or
trench-bed made by the husband. She mustn’t pass behind the backsides
of men and should announce her coming by clapping hands while calling tupau
[K: I’m menstruating]. Though she could feed a dog she mustn’t touch it or
any other animal, even with a stick [evidently a special taboo of the royal
line]. She could till fields without constraint. She must live alone, as each
wife of Mwemutsi does today, in her own menstrual hut [i.e., no other woman
was to use or share her hut or her trench-bed].
Girls lived in larger groups than they do today. Though the pit house
would belong to one girl, many would crowd in, the floor being spread with
mats and covered with girls at night, sleeping naked. Fire was used to bake
the dugout dry and only removed at dusk. The roof might be flat or slightly
peaked, with an entry hatch at one end. Boys might come at night and be
taken in as a group—they didn’t have to come alone, and there was no fear
that any boy would try to force intercourse on a girl, they were guests on
good behaviour.
99
There were three routes to marriage for a girl, only one of which would
begin with night courtship, but that was the most usual. The prince might
award a girl to a man who was ready to leave the barracks life. Sometimes a
girl’s father might engage her on a long-term basis to a boy, by approaching
his father and arranging to “borrow” against the expected bridewealth; or
sometimes the girl’s father might give her to a talented young dancer or
minstrel. [IV 18-19]<<[lit]
These words reflect a life lived out in the place where we talked
in the Central realm, and some information pertains particularly to
local custom.
100
by night to visit with the girls of another community. Men here, in the group
taking part in this conversation, have courted grown women in this manner
in both the East and the West.
After first menstruation a girl is taken by some older women to bathe in
the river, but not at a place where water is drawn. Another day her father
will call the ceremonial gathering, after [his wife’s] fixing beer or [in the wet
season] hard bamboo cider. The men will gather to drink while the women go
off in the bush to teach the girl. The men will dance and make merry—they
may occasionally visit the school to make a contribution but can’t stay to
see and hear the teaching of women. At this school there may be several
girls, but it is a family affair, and this is also true of the schooling of a young
man, which his father may decide to do in similar fashion, so that his son will
be respected as one who knows. Husband and wife together must be
taught when the woman first becomes pregnant—men and women of the
kin group take part, so the couple will know what taboos they must keep for
the child to stay well.
The life of a girl can’t be compared to that of a boy. A boy eats at many
houses, a girl only at one. While a girl may be given bits of food where she has
legitimately come on a visit to kin, she can’t be regularly fed from any
hearth but her own mother’s. A boy should, when his own mother is there,
take food from her hearth in preference to that of her co-wife; but he is free
to get food where he will among other kin of the parental generation and
also from a brother’s wife. He may go off for two weeks without any notice
to visit his pals at the place of his father’s sister, living there in the boys’
house and eating from her. Of old, no boy would dare enter the house where
he came for food, but would beg outside. But a girl wouldn’t beg like a boy:
she is a mother, isn’t she? She provides her own food, she won’t take it from
others.
Sisters would be close. Again and again it would happen that a young girl
would choose to follow her elder sister in marriage, first visiting her sister’s
new community, then becoming lover to the husband and following in
marriage. Everyone considered it happy.
The significance of this is that close kin—siblings—are a person’s best
protection. Within one princely realm you could move about and still have
this protection of family ties, for trouble travels quickly. If your sister were
chased for cause, or if she should leave her husband without cause, and if
there were no other sister there to make peace, the case would soon come
to you, the brother. Brothers will hear the matter out and perhaps make a
peace offering to the wronged husband, so that he will agree to have the
woman back.
Oh, perhaps a woman who had left her man for cause might be allowed to
pass a night or two at the isaka where she had lived before, but her business
is to find some new man and cleave to him. She couldn’t join the maidens’
life—isn’t she a woman now? [III 20-1]
101
Christian differences, his psychological bent, and a long-standing
interest in the process of institutional change he had observed since
his childhood in the last German years. He is accustomed, by habit of
mind and in connection with his work as a magistrate, to sifting
evidence for its meaning. He views the age of marriage as a function of
jural norms and Kinga values.
They married very late as compared with today. A young woman might
attain the age of thirty without having married. As for the young man—for
example, I myself would have no more than two children now [though in fact
he has a grandchild]. You must understand they grew old, as compared with
today. After getting two children you became an elder [ungogolo]. A woman
over 25 could be married, but I suppose you would say that in the old days
they didn’t marry carelessly, as they do now. All the same, if a man had
intercourse with a girl, that very day she would go off with him, the very
hour they put their bodies together they must leave—she couldn’t possibly
return home. Mwiko! [Sw: mystically dangerous].
A grown person was not, let us say, twenty—it was not as today. For
instance today a young person only has to be 18 to have the right to marry,
but in the old days that was tabooed, mwiko. He would be sleeping with the
cattle.
Children after they were weaned, until they were about eight, might
sleep both sexes together in the original kind of Kinga house, ikigwiba, just
like the houses of their parents. A small one would be four or five feet high
[an arched cone], built small to keep in the heat of the fire and body heat.
But a boy of nine or ten would move to a cattle house, to sleep with the
older boys and the animals [cows and especially goats]. The work of the
boys was to guard the animals at night from leopards or thieves, and keep
smoke against the flies. We built our house where the lineage hamlet [ikikolo]
was, and there would always be others not of the lineage who wanted to join
us—we must all agree, otherwise they couldn’t come in. It was felt a lineage
boy couldn’t leave, as the parents would say he had been chased—he had a
right. Still, there was moving and visiting about.
The girls of nine or ten also lived on their own, each little group [Sw:
kikundi] to itself with a hut and their own fire, like the boys. The girls in the
old days, I have heard, dug down so deep [about four feet], a large pit with
the earth thrown up around it and covered with boughs and grass, with a
hatch door. Here we called that house ilisumbu [elsewhere ingumbwe]. Boys
only dug so [about 28”], using sticks for the walls, and that is the way they
slept, uncovered. They didn’t use bamboo as they do today, or smear
mudplaster [to make a tight house]. Or a group of boys might sleep out in a
trench, putting down grass, then a mat, and a mat above them covered with
grass again, the last boy piles on the grass and they save a place for him to
slip in.
Women of the lineage area had charge of the puberty school for the girls,
and its teaching was completely effective. Every girl knew that as soon as
she let a man join her, she must follow him. No woman was ever known, until
recently, to bear a child before marriage. [VI 52-3,56-7]
102
In another Western community less affected by mission
influence I was told by a lively old man that until about eight years of
age children used to be allowed to enter their parents’ houses and
sleep there, but young children would soon learn to prefer their (clas-
sificatory) grandparents ukuku (m.) and upapa (f.). In later childhood
and youth they still could enter the houses of these grandparents,
but otherwise they would be sleeping here and there as they chose,
with friends of their own sex. Most hamlets were a mixture of lineages,
and most lineages were spread all about. Kinship ties were easily
broken. A man or woman had only to fail to assemble with the lineage
at a funeral to be counted as stranger from that time forward. [VI 65]
103
would have built the house counted for little, since a man wouldn’t live
on his own in such a house, belonging as it did to the woman’s life. The
man whose procreative life was at an end moved back to a house whose
openwork walls would not enclose a narrow or private world.
104
long as she is physically able she will persist with her independent
ways, keeping her own house and tilling her own fields as she has
always done. It is rare and only a function of illness that a woman
would become dependent on another person to feed her. If it does
happen, it must be to another woman she turns, for men are not the
economic mainstays of Kinga society. This was as true, as concerns
subsistence, in 1960 as it had been in 1890.
But why do Kinga put it that a son must “move back” when his
father dies—are the sons expected to move away as they mature? In
practice they are, though it needn’t be very far. On the whole, Kinga
adopt the moral strategy characteristic of more nomadic peoples—
moving away from trouble. Reflected here are deep motifs in the
father-son relationship, but also the special logic of late marriage,
since men who married at forty can rarely have lived to see their sons
in turn married and settled down. The father would quite probably die
while all of his sons (and there would not be very many in any case) were
still bachelors and, in Kinga fashion, homeless. But if men marry women
ten to fifteen years their juniors the women can expect to survive into
this grandparental stage of the life-cycle. A woman still fertile and
still wanting children would probably choose a leviratic marriage and
not require a son’s return.
But another side to this is that while women are the real culti-
vators, the main jural claims to land are agnatic rights. A man who fails
to show an interest in his father’s land-claims when they are vacated
will be handicapped later on in pressing claims against rival interests:
as her needs and energies wane the mother’s de facto control of the
land will dwindle away. So the quality of that land can be a major
factor.
105
move away from the maximal-claim ties of family even where they have
a low intensity. The movement Kinga see is not that of sons away from
fathers but of young men to new friends and circumstance.
Women in 1960 were apt to show contempt for the work of men,
even when it was well remunerated, on the ground that it didn’t
produce food. Ebias was a young tailor in the East who said he would
be slow to marry as it would mean cutting back his trade in favour of
cultivating—a wife would harass him, “Go and eat your money if you
can!” This wariness in Ebias derived from his father’s being a busy,
sometimes harassed polygynist, whose wives had demonstrated a
hundred ways of threatening the withdrawal of their sexual and
gastronomic support. The usual division-and-submission among co-
wives has no strong place in Kinga culture, though it is known well
enough. “They’ll lend you money to start a little shop, then quarrel and
demand it back, and you are left in financial ruin. It means nothing to
them!” The line Ebias was drawing between women and men was that
between one party espousing the labour theory of value (and recog-
nizing no labour as valid but that in the fields) and another party with
a market model. While the situation is that of 1960 the pattern is
presumably older: the two sexes foster separate spheres of value,
and translation from one to the other can never be complete. The inde-
pendent spirit of women is certainly old.[V 19-20]
106
learn by attending court cases, that a woman who pressed too hard
with the rhetoric of envy could risk a beating—pushing her man to
exasperation rather than gaining control.
107
a girl is physically of adult strength she will have left off her original
pattern of gardening most days with her mother (something she will
have done daily in later childhood). She will have fields of her own,
serving her mother’s kitchen, and in helping to work her mother’s fields
she will arrange to till together with a friend or two if not with a larger
group of young people.
Can women be said to have property rights in the fields they till,
though they most frequently live where their men have land? Do
women themselves reap the rewards and bear the risks of their
labour? On 1960 data the answer is unambiguous. There was such a
skewing of the men’s work sphere, with migrant labour very common
until later middle age, that comparatively few men were there to eat
the fruit of their fields. This enabled the women in turn to market
some produce for money. But this situation was an outgrowth of
traditional conditions. Men’s ‘ownership’ of land was an adumbration
of their prerogatives in the field of law, not strictly economic domi-
108
nance, since land was never used as a bludgeon. Women were always in
rightful possession of the fields to which they had undisputed access
through their husbands, and women were acknowledged to have
sounder judgement about gardens and crops than men. In her own
right a woman would have fields at home which she had worked as a
bachelor, and she would continue to make full use of them.
When land disputes did arise women were often little concerned.
Men would be presenting the claims on either side and men would be
the arbiters, women’s evidence being restricted to the facts of actual
use—no judgement of land rights could affect a woman’s right to the
crops she had grown, only where she might grow them in another
season. Within the purview of men, women “owned” fields only back at
home; but since women commonly disposed over ‘affinal’ fields no less
authoritatively than ‘agnatic’ fields, the matter of legal ownership
may be said to border on fiction.
109
a sense of their own superiority confirmed. The comparative ignorance
of men in 1960 must have been partly an artifact of their absence
from the local scene during their intellectually formative years, but I
think men’s abstraction from practical detail has a long history. So
far as I can tell, the court-military, political-jural, land-clearing, and
hunting activities of men in 1860 would have occupied about as much
of their time and concern as migrant labour and politics (in the broad
sense) a century later. While there wasn’t much game there was
plenty of scope for defensive hunting, as marauding animals were
everywhere when forest predominated in the highlands; and there is no
evidence that Kinga were less litigious a century ago than now.
Since 1900 there have been three basic changes affecting the
status of women: (a) The advent of a money sphere of the economy, in
which men have the advantage, has given men a new arena comparable
in scope to that of the barracks life before the ceremonial centres
decayed. (b) The incorporation of bridewealth into the new money-
management arena has made the marriage of a daughter a matter of
great political importance to men. (c) Women have begun to marry
somewhat earlier and turn more toward the values of domesticity.
The three changes are obviously not unconnected, and we can expect
that with time a less distinctive culture pattern will evolve. But the
lessons of the free tradition are worth trying to grasp, both for the
110
light they throw on newer versions of the same lifestyle and on
account of broader implications.
In the model kinship society either women or men will enjoy the
advantage of continuity of social space through the transformations
of the life-cycle. In patrilateral societies women generally suffer dislo-
cation and a sort of ‘nuclearization’. That is, they are pulled away from
a world where they are only beginning to enjoy the social scope of an
adult, and pushed into child-bearing among strangers, where they are
pulled inward toward identification with a nuclear family of procrea-
tion. Often their domestic nucleus is part of a compound family and
even openly opposed to the rival nuclei of their co-wives. A woman in
the child-bearing years works and carries for her children and their
father, perceiving a world centred in domesticity. Kinga society in
1860 seems to have allowed its women a generous period of years in
which adulthood was achieved but domesticity—nuclearization—
remained pending. A woman in those years worked for a wider
community than a household. The food she produced was served
through her mother’s kitchen but not narrowly to one group, since the
rights of bachelor men to take food from kin (and friends’ kin) were
extensive, and the productive orientation of society wasn’t coloured
by the usual pattern of economically self-sufficient domestic islands.
By withholding herself from marriage and reproduction she was able to
develop a network orientation to her social world rather than moving
directly from minor member of one domestic island to stranger
member of another. A network orientation in this sense is one which
doesn’t order the world of persons by groupings but individually.
111
By the standards of many other societies she will neglect her child,
sending it off to live with other children and to depend on them for
loving care from the time it is weaned. The system works. Children
grow up with the capacity to care for one another and to live as happily
as children elsewhere. If the child is a girl, she will be emotionally re-
accepted by her mother as a tiny adult: this happens as soon as the
child is old enough and inclined to work beside her mother in the fields—
something she will eagerly learn. When you ask a Kinga man about the
nature of boys and girls he will have little to say in praise of his own
sex. But he will tell you that he wouldn’t fear being widowed if he only
had a daughter of seven years for, indeed, “she can do all that a woman
can do.” We may find this, with our post-Freudian consciousness,
ironic. The Kinga, who are not travelling the same sort of sexual ridge-
path we do, don’t.<<[lit]
112
made subject to a stronger partner—not, that is, in the inner domain
of social experience. Kinga women in the public arena are elaborately
“inferior.” But the outward exhibition of impotence (as so often)
functions as protective coloration, and Kinga women are reasonably
free behind the mimed veils they take on with motherhood. As long as
women have access to strength—to honoured sources of moral
energy which aren’t simply at the pleasure of a man, I expect their
daughters will continue to respond to them, and this identification will
continue to reinforce the solidarity and moral self-containment of
women.
113
TWIN SHADOWS, SECOND FOLIO
114
The same formula, though it ceases to describe surface
behaviour so well in later years, will have detectable relevance through
life. Infancy prepares boys and girls for separate moral careers.
When the mother has been declared clean there will be an assem-
blage of all members of the lineage neighbourhood who are of the
baby’s sex. If the child is a boy, the men will take a small stick or a real
arrow and pass it before his eyes. If he is ready to join his father’s
household the baby should evince a masculine interest in the weapon
shown him, following it knowingly with his eyes. Otherwise the men will
decide he should stay a while longer with his mother in the bush hut
115
ikyale. The men put on episodes of spear-play to frighten the child, and
interpret any promising reaction as a sign of proper masculinity. A girl
isn’t subject to a test but is accepted on the mother’s sponsorship.
Back at the house a mother assumes normal duties forthwith—she
returns to work in the gardens and feeds her older children again, who
will have been going elsewhere.
At the same time it’s clear enough that abortions wouldn’t have
been undertaken in a socially bare, pragmatic mood. We are dealing
with one of the secrets of women iviswalitumbu [little matters that
die in your belly] about which there would have been extensive confer-
encing within the subject’s trusted circles. Medicines, perhaps the
same ones, were often supplied the youngwife by women of her
mother’s circle or by the mother herself, “to prevent the sickness of
the baby if the husband is insisting on intercourse while it is still
nursing.” Here the young wife’s neighbour circle will be holding to an
official line, teaching abstinence, while her people at home, making
allowance for human frailty, unofficially provide her with secret
remedies. This separation of function goes back to the rule excluding
a mother or elder sister from the subject’s gynaecological schooling.
The balancing value is the propriety of a woman’s dedication to a
116
particular baby, as distinct from the espousal of fruitfulness as an
end in itself.
A baby shouldn’t be weaned until well into its fourth year, and
often is weaned later; but only the last child is usually left to “wean
itself” by leaving the breast spontaneously. “The last child knows the
mother well indeed.” If a woman becomes pregnant while still nursing at
night, she will wean in the third month of the new pregnancy, as soon
as she is certain, but just the same she may keep her baby with her at
night until the new one comes. Babyhood ends with a series of
weanings, first from the breast during the day, then from the breast
at night, and at last from the mother’s body contact. Even in the case
of a little girl, who will be living close by, taking the last separation is
not an easy matter for the mother, whose outward status and inner
world transform.
The conscious norm for spacing births was four years or more,
and the norm of abstinence from full intercourse was generally
respected, with its implications of a peculiarly Kinga double standard.
The woman’s attachment to her nursing baby having no counterpart
for the man, he was expected to revert to the company of peers,
comfortable in this open sexual orientation. While the same reversion
was not unheard of among women, particularly in cases where there
was ground to fear an abnormal pregnancy, it wasn’t expected. A
husband wasn’t barred from sleeping with his wife and baby but would
have to revert to the sexual patterns of courtship, finding satisfac-
tion in some way short of intercourse. She, the well-instructed one,
knew she must neither demand nor tolerate full consummation.
117
I learned only a little about the cognitive context of birth from
terminology. There is no foolproof way of probing a foreign vocabulary
in the dark, however helpful a group of native speakers may wish to be.
Wolff (1906), who worked for long years in the Tandala area of the
North, has two entries in his vocabulary, ikyale for the lying-in hut [G:
Wochenhaus] and ilyeve for the parturition hut [Geburtshaus]. The
common term for a lying-in hut in some regions is ikisulutsi, which I
recorded merely as nyumba ya kuzalia [Sw: house for giving birth]. It
was owing to deficiencies in my own cognitive map that I failed to make
the same distinction German does, but there is a clear implication
that when the season forbade giving birth like a wild creature in the
open, the midwives of Tandala would have insisted on a separate hut
for the purpose. Perhaps in other areas, where ikisulutsi is the term in
use, the procedures have never been so strict. I hardly need list the
reasons why local differences are more pronounced for women’s than
men’s worlds.<<[lit]
118
Luvanda put 109 questions, which I had composed and typed for her in
Swahili, to a small group of older women in the Northern realm,
speaking in Kikinga and recording consensual answers in Swahili. Here
and there her own bookish hygienic lore was blended into her answers,
and I have not included that. But on a number of crucial points she was
able to overcome the interventionist bias of her profession, to
represent mine. The result is at least a tentative exploration of the
cognitive map women use in bearing and nursing their infants.
The husband should build the lying-in hut [ikisulutsi] if there is no little
hut nearby which is appropriate and available. It should be out of sight,
within the border of a nearby wood. The husband should stand by at home, if
only so that if the midwives call for a special medicine he can fly to collect it
from the bush or purchase it from a herbal doctor.
Should a woman fail to deliver for some time after the onset of labour, it
is because an invisible rope or chain has been bound round her body beneath
the skin. To break this rope placed by witchcraft, the woman’s attendants
will seek to obtain a special potion from a doctor of good reputation.
Otherwise one of the midwives may have the requisite powers. She will call
for green twigs from a special tree, break them in short lengths, and tie
them with grass to her patient’s hands, wrists, upper arms, and other
limbs. From green reed-grass (of the sort used for ordinary mats) she will
fashion a band to be wrapped about the subject’s body at the chest and
lower abdomen: and into this band are inserted more of the medicinal twigs
at hand’s breadth intervals. Then there is a special smear which is rubbed
from the top of the head over the nose straight to the vulva. At the
setting of the sun the outer ropes should break and the inner ropes are felt
at that moment to loosen and give way so that delivery begins. [This infor-
mation is from the Central realm.]
119
and settling of the mother is accomplished, the women will feed the baby a
little porridge, traditionally uvuletsi [finger millet]. Like its Swahili equiva-
lent ulezi this word means both “child rearing” and “finger millet.” The grain
has mystical status among the Kinga, who say it was the staff of life in the
earliest epoch of man’s life on earth.<<[lit]
Heg’a ~ Take leave. “The mother had been preparing to leave the
community because of bad feeling but the baby came first.”
120
Ndidega ~ I’m surprised. “The child came prematurely.”
Syaka ~ Doubt. “The mother had no confidence the child would live.”
Situlwa ~ Homeless. “The mother had a deformity and must live like a
beggar.”
Mwampaja ~ Bamboo sort. “At the time of delivery the mother was
gazing up at a stand of bamboo.”
Salangwa ~ Ignore. “The mother was in need of help but no one would offer
it.”
121
also a belief that the re-occurrence of twins could be forestalled by
limiting intercourse. But most of the mystically sanctioned precau-
tions affecting pregnancy and delivery can be read as generic precau-
tions not just particularistic messages. The common feature of these
prohibitions is awareness of the vulnerable new life in the womb—they
say that pregnancy is charged with danger, and that socially-given
knowledge about these dangers is required to bring it successfully to
term. Natural danger lends depth to these precautions as sacra-
ments, and they in turn bosom the event in culture.
While some informants (in the Central realm) held a woman would
wear the belt “from five to seven years,” I have taken this as an upper
limit, true for last-children who, being left to wean themselves, may
continue to nurse so long they will vividly recall it in later life—or those
frequent cases where the father is absent. Monica Wilson (1950:115)
gives four or five years as the normal spacing of births in traditional
122
Nyakyusa society, and I would make the same or a higher call for the
Kinga. The reserved status in which a woman was placed by the belt
umwepinyo was precisely defined by the greeting, elaborately deferen-
tial but (as there was no reciprocal part for the man) particularly
distance-making, she must give to a man she might meet on the path.
The baby’s tenure was thus secured for three or four years at least—
a long babyhood by cross-cultural standards, as the one appointed
companion of its mother.
Kinga babies are placid. A baby in the third year, when his mother
has gone to the fields without him, may take to bellowing in the evening
for her return, joining in choir with the kid she has locked in the house
to wean it from its nanny-goat, and both are likely to bellow until their
respective mothers return. They know what they want, and their little
nursemaids are only respecting their judgement by letting them be.
Such events are generally handled in good humour and without anxious
concern—a lusty bellowing betokens good lungs. As a rule, Kinga babies
are easy to have around, being rather passive observers of life and
stolidly engaged in the private business of alimentary getting and
spending. Granting that any effort to judge how hypoactive they are
would be impressionistic, I think they should be placed well toward
that end of a cross-cultural spectrum—I find it hard to imagine there
is a society anywhere whose normal babies would make Kinga babies
seem active by contrast.
123
A child is toilet-trained before weaning, but children of either
sex may not be dry at night when they first move to sleep in a chil-
dren’s house. I take this to indicate a regressive phase for the child,
but in this I may be reading irrelevant values into Kinga experience. The
major explanation may simply be that a mother, having trained herself
to avoid soiling, and letting an older baby sleep apart from her as often
as it will, can afford to ignore enuresis, while in the closer contact of
the children’s house it is an immediate cause for action. Their cure is
as follows:
124
conceive to be the major task in the schooling of a baby for its inde-
pendence at the time of weaning.
125
Because of the separation of children from the nuclear family before
the birth of a sibling, because children are never told that the reason
for separation is the mother’s expectancy, and because children will
usually be looking in a non-possessive context to their peers for
emotional support, sibling rivalry is absent. None of my questions
about favouritism elicited echoes of that peculiar affliction as it is
found among families elsewhere. With the progress of their world in
directions the Kinga don’t control, I suppose rivalry will soon enough
make its appearance; but the solidarity of siblings, especially of the
same sex, is a cornerstone of the traditional culture.
126
they turned eight or nine. A Mahanzi youth explained, “Cat and mouse
can’t live together.” It is a maturing sense of a social difference—cats
in Kingaland are ferile—to which he was referring. What he had in mind
was not Tunginiye’s moralism but the rightness of separate worlds.
127
men. With the colonial pax masculinity became less stressful, and
that prod to moralistic fancy would have receded. By about the mid-
1920s obligatory participation in war or raiding had disappeared. Two-
legged cats and mice, in the absence of identity problems, aren’t
sexually jealous of each other.
128
from amusement) to diffuse feelings that the pattern of life was
breaking down, not necessarily for the better.
No one was prepared to say where it all would lead. Why did these
older girls laugh and fail to expel the pretentious little boys? Young
men were saying the girls would have eventually, because they’d have
seen that their mutual confidences iviswalitumbu were threatened.
Ironically, the term girls were most apt to use then in Malanduku was
the Swahili siri yetu [our secrets], an expression with a lighter, often
teasing connotation. An arrangement which had maintained itself for
generations, probably for centuries, was beginning to lose its self-
correcting character. The reason was not that Malanduku’s ‘system’
was cracking—the new pattern had no less system to it than the old.
The reason for the surface changes was a shifting moral perspective
within the whole community, brought in with the founding of a new
village on new, Christian ideals of co-operation, new ideas about
housing, and a commitment to prosperity through modernization. The
children were beginning to respond.
What the old arrangement did was to put the whole experience
of youth into one of two gender worlds, each with its proper character
values and sanctions. The two worlds were articulated to one another
by personal ties, first of kinship then courtship, but the intimacy and
constancy of such ties was curtailed. Own-sex ties were always more
strongly reinforced. Rigid segregatory taboos weren’t needed,
because the structure was secure. In this respect one might compare
a Kinga marriage to the sort of arranged marriage between important
families which we have known in the West, or an African marriage
arranged by lineage authorities: the press upon the partners is less
than that of the ‘romantic’ marriage, because less depends on their
personal commitments. It is true that Kinga marriages are quite
often ‘romantic’ and founded on intense personal expectations. But
peer groups, wherever solidary network ties are established, here
take the place of families or lineages. Becoming an aspect of the
community’s structure, marriage in the traditional culture has not
been a violation but a subtle reinforcement of the separateness of
men’s and women’s worlds.
TRADITION: Because boys and girls grow up and live in separate worlds
they can eventually combine in marriages which don’t threaten to become
closed units, structurally adrift (i.e., free to form socially inopportune or
129
irregular alliances or factions). DEPARTURE: Growing up in less separate
worlds, dyadic withdrawal of a married couple becomes more likely, and
structural drift becomes a threat. Whole communities convert to denomi-
national Christianity, neighbourhood work groups assume added impor-
tance.
TRADITION: Drawn into the ceremonial and political life of the courts,
men have allowed their nominal lineage ideology to lie fallow, while they even-
tually settle in virilocal, neolocal neighbourhood groupings based on some
kinship and a lot of comradeship. DEPARTURE: Embarrassed by the devitali-
zation of the court centres, and lacking the wherewithal of a lineage-
centred organization, men turn to the adventures and delights of migrancy,
finding a surrogate “barracks” life on the sisal and tea estates.
130
derstandings and produces specious certainty on every hand. But
times do heat up, and when they do changes may come thick and fast.
131
comes to justifying custom—public values. It is the other kind of moral
thought, the kind used in the private pursuit of the good, which expe-
rience can sometimes sharpen.
By ten a girl will know a good deal about gardening and preparing
food, though she will probably not yet have gardens of her own. She’ll
work beside her mother, using a spent hoe especially hafted to match
her strength. She’ll also know the work of the wooden mortar and
pestle, though at ten she will still be too small to be effective in
pounding grain. Kikinga distinguishes by prefix the modest mortar and
pestle for indoor work, ikitule and ikitwangilo, from those devoted to
the heavier tasks, ilitule and untwangilo. Both require real exertion,
though, and lend themselves to rhythmical work—what we usually call
exercise. No doubt a Freudian interpretation can be put upon the work
to further explain why it is exhilarating to young men as well as to
maidens, but the matter becomes simpler when you begin to perceive
the elements of dance in this work. Watch two pretty maidens alter-
nately pounding the same mash to a song and you will want to join
them. The transition for a girl from wee person to a magnetic force in
the community is a gradual one but is complete well before she will be
considered nubile. Menarche is unlikely to come before she is fifteen.
By thirteen if not earlier she will have shifted loyalties to her best
132
friends in the isaka: her rewards will come from them; she will be indus-
trious, emotionally dependent on none but these friends, habitually
exuberant.
There were gentler arts: swimming, panpipes and flutes, and the
interminable games of skill. Some boys became expert with the bow
and arrow. At important centres field combats for teams of boys
were formally organized. The arms were throwing-sticks and shields,
and the typical casualty was a broken shin. As nothing but the football
games at the middle schools recalled the raw side of the old public life
in 1960, I have no field notes on open aggression among boys; but I’ve
no reason to think it wasn’t done in full fury. Tales of fierce corporal
punishment in early Lutheran schools, at which the Germans appar-
ently required attendance (on pain of stiff confiscations of food from
the boy’s father) confirm a picture of ungovernability which a half-
century later was much softened. Wildness doesn’t develop as far as
it might, when a boy is regularly required to start school at ten, or
even eight, and has to become a disciplined ‘townsman’ to survive.
While I can’t know how far a softening of masculinity had changed the
scene by 1960, the reminiscence of old men suggested it was a
matter of degree not kind. Wildness there was in 1960, and even
cattle raiding had not quite disappeared.<<[lit]
Boys get food in two ways which are legitimate, and in various
other ways. The wife of any man the boy calls umamavangu [my older
brother] is subject to joking, badgering, and licensed greed. But the
wife of udada [father, father’s brother] must be “feared”—treated
with a show of respect. She is udyuva [mother]. To her own boys she
must give food without their begging, and they’ll carry it off to share
133
with their friends. Other women called by the same term will be
relatives on the mother’s side (women of her patrilineage) and of her
genealogical generation. They, and women classed with father’s sister
[usongi] or mother’s brother’s wife [udyadya], may withhold food if
they choose. Then the boys “can only sit and talk, then after a while go
on.” They know this food is theirs by a limited demand-right not
inherent privilege.
The ikivaga [boys’ and men’s house] was also a school. Tunginiye
explained how it would be in a settlement affecting the “pure Kinga”
court culture:
Here food was brought by the women, and small boys were taught, “This
is where you are well fed, what will you get by going back to your mother?” In
the company of the ikivaga the wee boy soon learned to despise the baby
who followed after his mother. A child as young as three could be brought
[by his mother] to the ikivaga. He’d be beaten only when he tried to cling to
his mother—so the weaning might be done by older boys and the men, not
the mother herself. The same never happened to a girl—she was to follow
her mother in everything. Boys were taught, “Here is your warmth, here is
your fire, nowhere else.” They were under orders to fetch firewood and bring
134
it here, never to another hearth. Young boys lay at one end of the floor and
youths and men at the other, for this was the house to which a married man
must seek when tabooed from sleeping with his wife. This was the society
of men.
The age difference for couples in the old culture of 1860 must
have been a decade or a little more. This figure is typical for strongly
polygynous societies. But Kinga say many men never married, while
there is no hint that women who were physically capable might fail to
do so, and it was the rare commoner who aspired to taking many wives.
We are left then with the picture of a class society, albeit an open one,
since a man with several healthy young wives will be rich, a man with no
wife poor, and the mass of the population neither rich nor poor. It is
likely that any vigorous, mature man recognized as a Sanga could be
135
moved to set himself up as a man of importance by taking several
wives and beginning to keep a courtyard furnished with beer. He would
have to establish himself at a distance from a recognized court; and
he might well seek or accept the designation as untsagila [lieutenant]
to the ruler of that court, lest he be seen as rival. It was in this way
the class system was open, though the fiction was maintained of
inherited aristocratic privilege.
136
been essential continuities. Tunginiye’s account makes this clear,
while accounting for major changes:<<[lit]
Ingumbwe the girls’ pit-house was for use during the cold months only,
May to August. Other houses weren’t plastered as now, and were cold.
Youths talked of the ingumbwe as delectably warm. The number of girls in a
single house would probably seldom have been over a half-dozen. The floors
would be spread with grasses for lying. A fire was put down in a corner
where the feet of the sleepers were going to be, the grasses being pushed
aside around it. The fire would be small and covered with a greengrass lid to
make lots of smoke “for warmth.” In the evening the fire was removed and
the floor prepared.
In warmer months the isaka was not a pit-house but above ground. Small
girls slept there along with the older ones but were bedded apart. Like the
boys on their side, girls left off sleeping with their parents at an early age,
as soon as they were able to respond to ridicule and the invitation of older
chums. The isaka was a place of stories and songs, riddles and games, the
young ones learning from the elder in the early evenings before sleep.
Suitors only entered after that. The theory was that the young girls slept
right through the courting without learning much about it.
137
among young men—you could visit your friend and court along with him in his
bailiwick. In this manner marriages could be made across princedom borders.
All the great changes which have taken place revolve around bridewealth.
A girl’s father always had the right to dispose. Even after an elopement
that is where the groom’s father must go to set things right. But the
oldest bridewealth in Ukinga was two hoe blades, and they were easy
enough to come by, as the Kinga have always produced a surplus. After the
Germans came, Kinga started trading hoe blades for Sangu cattle. We know
the Germans in 1900 rated Kinga country poor in livestock because they
levied their first tax not in stock but hoe blades. Once trading conditions
were stabilized a man could go with five hoe blades and come back with ten
head of cattle, some of them advanced on a delivery of more blades next
season.
But the pursuit of money and the mixing of money with marriage began
in 1927-9 when men first started going abroad as migrant labourers and
returning with money they couldn’t use in Ukinga. So they turned to buying
cattle from Usangu, though before that cattle had been very scarce. Now it
became understood that cattle could reproduce themselves nicely and
make a man wealthy. Then the fathers of maidens began to see the suitors’
great wealth and to covet it. [I 32ab]
138
his first marriage was established, and that would have been a factor
favouring monogamy. The parallel factor in 1960 was the debt a young
married man would have contracted to his own father and kin in order
to marry. The debt would have to be repaid from earnings at subse-
quent wage work. Though a young man through this arrangement would
be coming to terms with his father’s generation at an earlier age, the
new dispensation granted psychological emancipation with the one
hand while imposing economic bondage with the other.
139
trust reserved for those of the inner domain of moral relationships
which in other societies may be strictly associated with the nuclear
family. Where marriage was expected to come up to this norm, it was
an extension of peer-intimacy values across the new affinal link, and
even though the ideal was perhaps always livelier in myth than actu-
ality, the effect was to set the marriage in a personal as well as a legal
context dwarfing the spontaneous feelings and interests of the
young.
Here are some songs which Aleksi Sanga was able to help me
catch and get written down as we sat one evening in May the better
part of a kilometer down the valley from a spot where a band of young
140
men [avasala] had been joined by a band of maidens [avahînza] for a
party [ulwimbo] of song and dance. The acoustics of such valleys on a
quiet evening are without parallel, and the singers were growing bold,
knowing that their barbs would be felt by particular individuals where
they lay in their huts. Much passed us by. Of the texts we could
salvage, our probabilistic explanations are proferred, though none of
them could have been quite on the mark, since Aleksi had no inside
information from that community.
Song
Ndilond’ udada nivoneka
undisanga
ndilond’ imbudila
valye n’ avanonu
Ndilond’ udada ndapwale
(This is a tease: everyone will know who the finger is pointed at. The
lad is alleged to live by begging things from his rich father.)
141
Song
Ndavulonda avavonu kuNzombe
Lutaga ukalonde avanonu
Song
Ndawit’ ulinonu nd’ ulinonu dyuve
avadala vaswile
unne nandinogwa
uve vindala nd’ ulindala dyuve
Song
Wimile wilola ndandilivago
ndili ’nswambe vani
ndili ’nswambe milongoti
unda veve walye n’ udada
(There is rumour of love between a boy and girl who are too closely
related.)
142
Song
Umuvile unekelitse
ndigonile kitadinda
ndikidwadila ndikidwadila
Song
Nda vidyuva nda vidyuva
uvi kunyima nadyimboga
vatye iposolo dyidumulinye
(A girl whom the lad calls “mother” [udyuva] has been stingy with
food, and he pretends to believe the ties of kinship have been ritually
cut.)
Song
Wiluta ’kusimila
ikyuma kwabenki nakwukile
mutungetsimya n’ umwalivo
ahi-i n’ umwalivo
143
Song
Vavwene ndyivukiye
avene vikwuv’ undalavango
na dyune ndiluta ndikakuve vivi vanyina
umwana vantumbu lya dadadye
Most of the youths and maidens I knew in 1960 (in the Western
subchiefdom) would have said they belonged to a “club” or “society”
through which they organized the social life of courtship. Boys
admitted that the girls were better organized than they, and it
seemed to me the boys’ clubs were little more than a half-hearted
effort to match the girls’. In the days of the larger isaka each slumber
group would have made up a big enough unit for the activities of the
“clubs” as they were in 1960—collective work, outings, and gatherings
for fun. But there seems also in the old culture to have been a lot of
visiting about, and the idea of a “club” may not be recent. The word
umbeta, which Nehemiah rendered as chama in Swahili (‘club’ in English),
has its most concrete reference to a small-animal path, always
conceived as one part of a branching network, like the paths leading to
dens (a word English uses for club-house) or the separate doors in a
hamlet. The related ikibeto means gateway [Sw: mlango], an expression
used to pick out a particular household among several comprising a
community. The underlying metaphor is spatial: residential groupings
in this society are social groupings, and the reverse should be virtually
true. In most or all of the Christian areas in 1960 girls in the adoles-
cent years were much given to forming clubs. They were alliances of
several isaka in a neighbourhood, for recreational purposes. Clubs
would arrange visits on which they would compete, each side trying to
top the other in riddling, tale-telling, and song. It was characteristic
of girls but not of boys that the contest hinged upon wit rather than
mere physical energy. The side which lost was the one which ran out of
invention.
144
Herdboys in 1960, apart from school-organized sports, had a
hockey game they played with a ball of hardwood root, burnt round,
and special sticks. One club would challenge another to inganyo
[hockey], and the game seems only to have ended when an excess of
injuries on one side gave uncheckable power to the other and forced
the weaker team to withdraw. Again I’m not sure how old the custom
was, but note that the masculine wildness of the play contrasts char-
acteristically with the civility of games emanating either from the
mission-based schools or the community’s ‘gregarious maidens’.
Advancing adolescence is, from the boys’ point of view, a process of
attrition starting from an original, uncompromisingly masculine
stance. What gradually wears it away is contact with the gentler sex.
Boys left to their own devices enjoy a good kidnap more than
riddles. The technique is to infiltrate another neighbourhood, set upon
a rival group, and try to carry off its leader, who will then be held until
(say, the next night) he can be rescued by his mates. The stealing of
choice bits of food wherever they can be scrounged is a continual
source of delight. In the old days a specialty of almost every young
boys’ gang was roast meat got from the glade where an old man had
been spied setting up an offering to his ancestors. By 1960 parents
were sanctioning dances for young adolescents in some communities
by preparing beer and food, encouraging each boy to invite a girl in
urbane fashion, but I didn’t get the chance to see how this experiment
worked out. In the traditional kivilila dance, where boys line up opposite
145
to girls, sometimes a boy will put his hands on the shoulders of a girl
he chooses [K: ukwavala] and dance so for a time, though the girl will
not often reciprocate. Here in metaphor is the bridge a man must
undertake to create. Boys say that two of their own kind can “know
each other” but can’t “love each other” [Sw: juana~pendana—K:
manyana~ ganana]. They mean that attachments among boys are
fleeting and sentiments mixed, but the attachment of boy and girl
should be everlasting and the sentiments pure. They sense that girls,
mysteriously, can truly love each other [ukuganana], and sometimes a
boy finds this uncanny. Here is Nehemiah, aged sixteen:
Girls talk in conundrums not just now and then but all the time in their
conversations with boys and other girls, talking about what they are doing,
who their friends are seeing, and the like. A girl will always use a false name
when she is telling gossip, and when she says the most harmless thing
someone who is in the know will understand the double meaning.
Girls must have their own love affairs, just as boys do. I’ve talked with
lots of boys about this: we think they do. A girl herself will say, “Oh yes, we
think of everything but of course we don’t do anything but think.” They hide
behind their riddle-talk. But if you notice, their riddling tales about two girls
can be just like their tales of a boy and girl. Their false names never tell you
the sex of a person, you just have to figure it out. It’s their way of teaching
about sex: an older girl who has experience will help a younger girl in this way.
It is teaching the arts of love.
Ti is a girl who is shameless but popular. You’d scarcely believe what she
can say. She’s clever at joking with words. More than anyone she’ll tell
revealing things about other girls in her riddle talk. And yet when she starts
in this way the other girls won’t reject her but follow along and agree. That
is what makes girls different. How can they have any heart, following as
they do where any girl leads, not disagreeing, not becoming secretly angry
as any boy will do?
Boys never know the affairs of others well, they don’t know how a friend
secretly feels, as girls seem to know. A boy may know that his friend has
stolen a girl—he must be very angry, but you won’t know that he is or even
that he knows. [I 12g]
146
imitating elders. The festival mood in Kinga life is the mainstay of
optimism, openness, and mutual trust without narrow self-cloistering
and dependency.
147
I obtained one autobiographical tale of courting which offers
significant detail. The setting is the Eastern realm in 1962. Bw. Koro’s
tale makes clear the fun a new watch can be, as well as the special part
peer friendships may play in matchmaking. The fine literary style is the
teller’s own, though the English is mine.
A test of friendship
It was Monday evening when Bw. Koro had made a date with a young
woman of Oka hamlet. “This is the day we shall be coming, so don’t fail to
inform your companion that two young men will call, by name Bw. Koro and
Bw. Maji.”
The time came ripe and the gentlemen were dressed in their best, having
put on fresh trousers, shirts, and long-sleeved sweaters each one of them.
Unfortunately until they were across the river they had forgotten to look
at the time to find out exactly when they had left. Having watches, they
reckoned (as it was six minutes to nine at the moment) they must have left
home in Maku village at just ten-minutes-to. They forced their pace, hoping
to find both young women at home and not to be late for their conversation.
Along the way the two young men talked of various things. Bw. Maji put a
question to his ‘older brother’ Koro: “I wonder how long it takes from Maku
to Igumbilo village?” Bw. Koro answered it was a trip of an hour and a half.
Then Maji asked his ‘brother’, “Which do you think is farther, Igumbilo or
Oka?” Bw. Koro had to guess the distances might be about the same. Now
they continued their journey until they came to the river Idete, when Maji
remarked, “Truly I’m amazed to hear that a car has passed this way going to
Oka and back.” But Bw. Koro cut his friend short, “You think you are the only
one who is amazed! Don’t you know everyone in the Eastern realm is amazed
by this. O-o-o. E-e-e!” They continued talking in this manner until they
arrived.
When they got to the young women’s hut Bw. Koro tried knocking at the
door but he wasn’t heard. Bw. Maji said the reason is they’re lying in the
inner room, so we must knock on the wall corresponding to the place they’ll
be sleeping. But his ‘older brother’ wasn’t prepared to listen to that
proposal. Going over to the kitchen he saw a fire with a pot simmering on it,
then he came back. Knocking again on the door he got no response, so he
tried the door and by good luck it opened, and the two young men were able
to enter.
Hearing people talking in the house, the young woman who owned it
awoke rather frightened, saying, “Who is it? Why don’t I understand?”
Hearing this, the young men flashed their torches on the wall and laughed.
Right away she recognized them.
But when they saw she was alone, her friend not there, they weren’t
sure what to say. She went out to the kitchen shelter, where she served
148
food and brought it to the guests. When they uncovered their bowls they
found she had filled them up with pure beans. So they gave thanks [in
Muslim fashion], “Praise the Lord, God is not altogether against us!” At this
joke they had a good laugh and continued the meal. But since their aim in
coming there hadn’t been eating—seeing that they’d finished a good meal
before leaving—they soon told their sister thanks, we are well satisfied. The
girl herself had little to say, so she excused herself and returned the food
that was left to the kitchen.
At that point they got round to asking her where her companion could
be. She answered, “Honestly, I did send word but I don’t know what
happened, perhaps she is away.” Seeing that the odd person would have no
one to sleep with, they went to have a look at the other girl’s house, to find
out what was up. Having made the journey they found the girl’s door
standing open. Flashing their torches inside they found only an empty bed,
her brother’s jacket, and some old blankets. Going outside they frightened
a goat, which ran for cover under the eaves. They returned downcast, with
only the aim of bidding farewell to the girl they’d seen. Bw. Koro said to his
‘brother’, “We should just go home, since you, my friend, are without a girl to
lie with you.” But hearing this speech, Bw. Maji answered his friend, “It
doesn’t matter. Considering that you, my friend, are the one most involved,
we shall arrange for me to sleep by myself. I shall just brave it out in a manly
way.”
Accordingly they knocked on the door and it was opened. Hearing that
they hadn’t found her friend, the girl made a bed for the two men. But when
they explained the arrangement they had in mind, she accepted the altera-
tion of her plan. So Maji went to bed all by himself, the little sisters slept on
the floor, and Bw. Koro and the young woman shared a small bed. This way
these two companions were able to rest and enjoy themselves, though only
to the great sorrow of Bw. Maji, as they disturbed him deeply even though
they never came over where he was lying.
When it was twenty-minutes-past five in the morning they left the girl,
saying, “If there is another time you must both try to be home, for it isn’t
right for one of us to find bliss while the other has nothing.”
When they got home it was ten-past-six, so they reckoned that from
Oka to Maku is a journey of one hour and ten minutes [sic], from which they
were able to conclude that Igumbilo [a major village] is clearly farther away
than Oka from their village of Maku.
149
TWIN SHADOWS: THIRD FOLIO
150
way of handling resentment of dominance would be avoiding confron-
tation. This accords well with the antipolitan ethos I have earlier
noted [pg.82] as a prime characteristic of the political system, and
with the reputation Kinga had with plantation managers in colonial
times as “good [= accommodating] workers.”
151
An ‘involvement’ is a personal relationship which takes on a life
independent of the social prescriptions governing it. Involvements are
‘irrational’ when seen in a motivational frame, and may create,
override, or intensify socially sanctioned ties. In either dominance or
seniority we can expect ‘involvement within the tie’—the rewards of
power and frustrations of impotence give (perhaps unconscious)
affective content to a tie, roughly in proportion to the amount and
quality of the contact. But the intensity and all-importance of
seniority contacts during childhood make the Kinga case special, if we
are looking for the way early socialization can affect the quality of a
social system. It is true a father-son tie must be established on the
moral basis of fear uludwado, and the acceptance of dominance has its
political uses. But equally the patterned bond between full brothers
has to override self-serving motivations.<<[lit]
152
regalia, only a regal bearing. Unlike some other local rulers of the same
official standing, Sangilino wasn’t visibly rich, had no commercial inter-
ests, and wasn’t extravagantly polygynous. He had built up no impres-
sive domestic establishment, only an unassailable position of social
dominance. I found in him the moral values which supported the
prince’s high position in the old culture, and a measure of the political
decline in other realms. Local rulers there may have matched Sangilino
in authority but not in majesty. They failed to inspire the fear which, in
his presence, even an obtuse anthropologist had to know.
153
boy is called undimi, which signifies he is past the herdboy stage, and
known to value nothing so much as his freedom from everyone but
peers. Most often in 1960 these would be his school years. The young
bachelor undume (pl. avalume) discovers other values, calling for fresh
moral strategies.
154
should be followed by a gift to restore good relations. Whether or not
the custom is often honoured in practice, it is a distance-making rite.
How is it that the women themselves, who are fit to teach and
admonish, are not fit to punish?
155
men, the world should know they freely choose to do so: the show of
humility is controlled from within and is not the mask of fear.
Pathfinding
My own sex and the company it put me in during fieldwork may
seem to show through when I take the tie between brothers as
archetype for the seniority pattern, passing by the tie between
sisters. I can’t say one of these sibling ties is more intense or conflict-
free than the other. But it is true that brothers normally are free to
stay together after marriage, while sisters are more often and more
profoundly separated. Whatever the intensity of personal feeling
which may be fostered within the ties, the structural uses of brother
love are the more prominent.
156
In another context, the young wife who must make a start in a
new community will probably find her husband’s “family” a loose and
insubstantial organization. Compared with neighbouring peoples (in
particular, Nyakyusa and Hehe with their big domestic establish-
ments) Kinga commoners live as individualists. Joining a hamlet of a
few scattered households a bride will be lucky to have the ability to
accede in amicable subordination to women already established there.
In the last chapter we glimpsed, in the woman who called her child
Pavusule [Resentment], the possibility of failed adjustment.
157
brother’s bride call each other undambango, a special term which
carries a privileged joking relationship. He can teasingly call her undal-
avango [wife of mine], though the understanding is that sexual
contact is illicit, or must be mediated by the husband. Supposing that
on a visit the bachelor brother shares the couple’s bed, it is said the
husband ought to lie between the other two.
158
made to sit on the ground in a row of his peers—three or four of them
of pubescent age, whom the men would have caught and brought in.
They must sit motionless, arms between straightened legs, facing
each a staff, driven in the ground, which was to be used for beatings.
It is here a boy found past sins visited upon him. A teacher might seize
a boy, turn him over, and cane his buttocks without meeting any
resistance.
Semani, who had been through the school on the receiving end,
professed to find the sudden impotence of the boys uncanny. The rite
is supposed to confer manly wisdom and does include teachings—skill
with bow and arrow in war, geographic knowledge like the names of all
the rivers, the grave danger to the whole land which would befall in the
event men failed to defend their rulers in battle. But the chief motive
force of this school is evidently fear, and the symbolic transformation
to manhood is effected by an ordeal which doesn’t amount to co-
opting the boy into manly society. The telling symbol is the crowing of
a cock supposed to be young enough never to have crowed before. The
boy must hold it where his privates are. Since the cock-potency
belongs to nature not culture, manhood is confirmed by this rite but
can’t be said to be conferred by it—there is no way a cockerel could
feel sacred to a Kinga boy.
159
(the second school), arranged by the girl’s mother. In the circum-
stances of the interview there could have been no mention of the
custom of female circumcision (specifically, the labiotomy), which men
aren’t supposed to know anything about. I think it probable that the
second school, which is given each girl individually and is sponsored by
her own mother, is the crucial initiatory rite in all the Kinga realms. At
the first school, communally sponsored and focussed entirely on
menstruation, the own mother isn’t present. That she is a principal at
the more serious circumcision school may be reckoned evidence of the
intention of the women not to estrange the girl through fear—not to
use dominance to establish the emotional pitch of the episode. The girl
by this time is physically the equal of her mother and a regular
companion, not alienated and dominated as her brother would still be
by their father.
160
house or cooking utensils. To have sexual relations with a male is to
be ruined, whether or not pregnancy follows. Any girl so ruined must
without a moment’s delay follow the man whom she has allowed to
enter her body.
The words used are: ukunangika [to be ruined], ukugenda sivi [to go
wrong], ukugonana [to lie and copulate], ukusunana [to have irregular
sexual intercourse].
The girls weren’t bathed but made wild-looking. They had to lie
back completely with their legs spread so that a teacher could take
their privates and examine [as if to determine the condition of the
hymen, though Kinga has no word for maidenhead as a body-part, and
Janeth doesn’t comprehend the Swahili kizinda in that context].
Everyone is merry with beer except the girls who have no way to
express their feelings. While the people are jovial the event is
serious.
At the close of the teaching some elders began searching
furiously about the ground just outside the dance circle, crawling
about and pawing at the grass. They would keep pulling up turf until
they finally discovered a tiny calabash which one elder uprooted by
taking its carrying lash in her teeth. Then the special fluid in it was
used to cleanse the hands of the teachers, who had pinched and
plucked at the girl’s pubes to emphasize their lessons about purity.
Later, after the start of the parade from this place back to settled
places, something else [which Janeth didn’t see] was discovered
buried some fifteen yards along the path. [JL 1]
The following document is the only one on this subject I have in
my Kinga language transcriptions. The informant is an elderly woman
of the Eastern realm but the wording of the kiKinga original is Soda’s
reconstruction written down after his interview. The brief text
describes the bathing of the girl and gives a refrain which is sung.
161
For the pagans when they initiate a girl they approach singing
from the place where they were, testifying, “Lo, lo, we make a vagina
tempting. Let all who are related flee! Lo, lo, while ye have delayed
unmentionable beings have been feasting (on it). [Hugu, hugu, tudunza
unkundu. Avanyavuku vakimilage! Hugu, hugu, mukelitse galiye agange.]
[GSN 3]
The song makes clear that the reference is to the circumcision
school ikitule. The officiants are not themselves but ‘unmentionable’
spirit beings. The mystical devouring of the girl’s vulva/vagina would
cryptically refer to the removal of her labia minora by the operator’s
knife, which is conceived to render the vagina more suitable
(“tempting” is another licit translation) for intercourse. The purpose
of this school is not to repeat the teachings of the earlier ilimali but
to prepare for and orientate the girl toward heterosexual relations.
For all its ellipses, the text is interesting. What shall we make of
the use in this women’s song of the men’s term unkundu for vagina?
This is the term women privately use in the sense of its Swahili
cognate mkundu [anus], when referring to the anatomy of either sex.
The male informants I consulted were unaware of an ambiguity of
usage as between male and female speech, by which these important
terms were switched, a woman using untsogolo for her vagina while a
man would use it for her anus, and related peoples like the Bena used
it for cock (Sw: jogoo is cognate). An implication of the song is that
women are quite conscious of the ambiguity and see its relation to the
sexual inversion of men, as though a vagina would have to be so
misnamed to be attractive to men. As for the initiate herself, she will
immediately perceive from their oblique diction that the women have
chosen the men—the lot of them—to taunt.
162
This is confirmed by Tunginiye’s account of the circumcision
itself and the teachings about sex relations with men which are the
proper concern of the third school, for which I found only the generic
name uluvungu in use.
Ikitule is the small wooden mortar kept and used in the kitchen.
Women explain that the vagina is the man’s ikitule and must be
prepared for him. The school named ikitule occurs some time after
the ilimali school (some say about a year). It entails excision of the
labia minora, but girls aren’t allowed to talk about it lest the younger
ones be afraid—in fact, girls always come in ignorance of what is
going to happen. They learn in the school that some girls after
bearing a baby would have greatly enlarged labia minora which would
“cut” the sides of a man’s penis, preventing successful intercourse.
Though some girls have larger and some smaller labia, all are circum-
cised. Immediately afterward medicine is applied, and in two or three
days the girl has recovered. At the school she is told, “Now you can
receive a man.”
The knife is an extremely sharp razor made by the smiths. The
women explain there is no danger that the knife would be allowed to
cut the clitoris [uludong’o] as that is a necessary part of the
passage for water. The knife has no work but to remove the labia
(which are only referred to by the metaphorical ikitule).
At the third school uluvungu, which is also a big one, there will be
teaching about marriage, about the very slow opening of the vagina
by gradual steps of penetration. It should take about four safaris
before the man comes to penetrate all the way. In this teaching
there is no talk of bloodshed, only of the constriction of the vagina
and how the penis should be put in with care to pass this constric-
tion.
In these later schools a lot of the teaching is about the lubri-
cating fluids of men and women. A girl learns how they should be used
to ease the gradual forcing of a passage into the vagina. The
lubricant of the man is uluti, which comes before the heavy seed
imbedyu. The lubricant is essential to good sex practice, which entails
slow entry. Uluti has the penetrating power, not imbedyu which is only
the seed. The lubricant goes in first and prepares the pregnancy. A
woman will feel uluti like hot water and must learn to sense this.
There will be a tremor which both man and woman feel. It is a sign for
a woman who doesn’t want a pregnancy to interrupt the coitus. The
man should go outside and wipe himself off. When they resume the
man will be able to pull out again and grasp himself before ejaculation,
casting even the heavy seed outside. When a woman desires the
pregnancy she must see that there is plenty of uluti from the man by
copulating slowly, for it is a powerful medicine. But the great impor-
tance of uluti is in preventing early pregnancy for a nursing mother.
Even the first month after parturition she could get pregnant if she
practises coitus without interrupting the act. But if she has allowed
163
no uluti to penetrate first, then even if the heavy seed imbedyu
enters it will all come out when she goes to urinate.
These are the words they use: ukugeta ikitule cutting away the
labia minora; ukuvunga ikitule making a mortar (of the vagina). A
mother wants the operation for the sake of her daughter, who
otherwise won’t have a good sex life and conceive children of her own.
[III 25]
I’ve gone into details of women’s teaching because of the impor-
tance of understanding the ‘relationships of production’ where the
work is teaching. Cultural values are deeply learned dispositions to
perceive and re-create social situations on familiar patterns. Usually
the relevant learning occurs in direct relationships, working a trans-
formation of consciousness (but often what an outsider would call a
change of heart rather than a change of mind) in the more vulnerable
person. If the relationship of learning is fundamentally humane, the
resulting values will be. If not, not. As long as Kinga act out of humane
wisdom toward their juniors, whatever the institutional business
about which the contacts are organized—be it work, the implementa-
tion of justice, ritual action, a school, or recreation—I expect the
typical result of their socialization to be a humane person. Turning
that around, it seems reasonable to judge the bush school by its
results. As civil, and at the same time autonomous, as young women
generally are throughout Kinga society, it is hard to suppose they’ve
been handled cruelly by their elders. No doubt, much of what I saw in
1960 was the product of Christian churches rather than pagan
schools; but it is mainly Kinga, and especially Kinga women, who must
be credited with the humane character of the churches there. Will
anyone argue that Christianity is everywhere unambiguously humane?
I have not had that impression of them on the continents I have
visited. In any event, the Kinga church councils have taken over local
tradition in their careful, hands-on teaching of maidens but not boys
about sex.
The conclusion one might reach about men, by the same path of
reasoning followed above, isn’t quite so clear. Violence is not so rare as
to astonish anyone. Though in most communities a cheerful modera-
tion prevails, I could report scenes enough I found Dionysian as against
the Apollonian norm I’d come to expect—to use Ruth Benedict’s once-
familiar diction. But Kinga men generally admire and respect the
women of their country, and their reason is, in effect, the same one I’d
give: Kinga women are unusually sane, reliable, and industrious
persons. They are ‘well brought up’ by the standards of any society
which honours those qualities; and as this is the case in a society
which doesn’t accord the usual role to mothering in early childhood, I’ve
164
thought it a point worth dwelling on. In circumcision, under the pagan
culture, a woman had what a Freudian would recognize as her vaginal
teeth removed. Though Christians have dropped that symbolism,
some churches adopted a regular vaginal inspection (on the Nyakyusa
pattern) as a sort of substitute. Psychologically, the point of the
exercise is to imbue a woman’s heterosexual needs with the kind of
control consistent with a cordial spirit, responsive to ‘feminine’ sanc-
tions. Womanhood in this aligns itself against the sort of sex-antag-
onism to which, as a reading of Philip Slater (1968) on the ancient
Greek family suggests, any society honouring inversion must be prone.
I didn’t sense any danger, in 1960, that the point of the schools was
going to be lost just because some of the older mechanisms were
being abandoned. Women were still putting their heads together and
were inclined to take the side of the angels. When the structural fabric
of a society is left intact, Wertrationalität continues to govern its
main institutions, and the means traditionally chosen for maintaining
them are open to substitution. If that weren’t the case cultures would
indeed be things of shreds and patches.<<[lit]
165
rendered as “hamlet.” The noun-class of ilitsumbe indicates that a
hamlet is conceived as one of a class of matching or mutually equiva-
lent objects. These semantic observations do not take us far, but
some effort seems wanted to reconstruct the notions implicit in the
vocabulary for groups and places of settlement.
The ecology of the soil and its fruitfulness in high hilly regions of
the tropics is a study in itself. As everywhere, the success of a human
population is likely in the longer run to be its undoing. Since a woman’s
gardens are not clustered about her house, she is bound by them only
loosely to place. But firewood may have to be fetched at ever-
increasing distances from her hearth, and this will be a real consider-
ation as she ages. The conditions of viability for a settlement may be
altered through the accumulated consequences of events which, indi-
vidually, pose no critical threat. In the sixty years of colonialism about
half even of the court villages, obvious centres of the population in
1900, had either disappeared or waned almost away. The rate of
decay for less important settlements must have been, discounting
the stabilizing effect of modern roads, chapels, and a few government
installations, much higher.
166
isidyumba [buildings], which doesn’t beg the question of the social
integrity of the settlement. In a place where I’d see one settlement
isidyumba scattered over a hillside, a familiar of the place might point
out two hamlets amatsumbe. Where I saw two he might see one: a
hamlet ilitsumbe has its integrity at the social level of reality. Fresh
breakdowns and new beginnings in the network of social relations
which determines a landscape in Kingaland would continue, I thought
when I left in 1963, to separate the old from the young when those
who were young in my time there would have grown to be the
ancients.<<[lit]
167
all reports were no more compact, bounded, or centred than the same
or replacement settlements were in 1960. Even the stockade of the
prince was in the strict sense eccentrically placed, meant to be
private and not to define a public space. Though this place, the court,
was the centre of a realm, in itself it had no centre. The dance-ground
would be well enough defined but away from dwellings, and these would
be eccentrically grouped, usually hidden away, at various angles off
the main path. Camouflage? I doubt that could have been a major
consideration. In the East, where the German missionaries came upon
a Kinga realm in an unsettled condition of chronic warfare, there were
temporary, ‘fortified’ villages into which the population could be
crowded in disorderly fashion—that was the practical response to
military threat, here as elsewhere in the Sowetan region, not
dispersal. Kinga are not anti-communal but can, I suppose, be called
un-communal, ready to opt out of any association which rankles,
avoiding a pattern of life which entails involuntary intimacies.
168
tricity” of Kinga settlement patterns (particularly in the old culture)
was the difficulty of basing a society decidedly on friendship rather
than the ascribed ties of kinship. Friendship, being freely contracted,
has to be freely terminable and will fade when it can’t be actively
affirmed.<<[lit]
In 1960 about two out of three wives and almost all men in
Igumbilo locality were native to it, though the women were rarely from
the hamlet where they were married. The typical distance a woman
had travelled in marriage was about four kilometers, which meant that
most women were able to maintain several gardens in their natal
community as well as the new gardens in their husband’s hamlet. The
implication of this, since all heavy work is done by the ungovi work party
system, is that a network of co-operative reciprocity spread right
through the Igumbilo locality, involving every woman and most able-
bodied men. The ungovi is an inter-hamlet institution: when the
hostess lives at some distance it is often sufficient for one person to
respond on behalf of the invited ikikolo, to keep reciprocity with her.
Working together in the fields by fellow members of the same ikikolo
occurs by informal arrangement. But co-operation acquires ungovi
status as it crosses ikikolo boundaries and brings together groups of
persons not on everyday terms of familiarity.
169
Of the fourteen hamlets in Igumbilo for which I have reliable data,
only three in 1960 could claim to constitute unmixed descent groups.
One of them, having only a single surviving household, could hardly have
been mixed, and no hamlets with five households or more were “pure”
lineage groups even as judged only by descent name. As these are data
covering 80 households in all, I conclude the correspondence between
ikikolo, objectively given, and hamlet ilitsumbe is inexact.
Here is the record of Iligala hamlet as I was able to get it from the
oldest resident, an enthusiastic man who had spent most of his life
there, with only short tours of migrant labour to earn money for the
British taxes. I began by asking my informant (A) who had been his
mates in the ikivaga before about 1920 when he was married, and how
many households there had been during his early married life. He
shared the ikivaga with three older brothers [avamama], one of whom
had the same father. In giving the family composition I list progeny
alive about 1925, though only the youngest (supposing it was still an
infant) would actually be living in the same house with the parents.
By 1925 all four “brothers” were married and living at Iligala. They
were, in a manner of speaking, the first generation of sabras—
though none of them had been born just there, they’d passed their
youth together. None had a surviving father. The hamlet had been
founded by two men returning after flight southward from the Maji
Maji massacres, when this region like the rest of the realm was laid
waste and almost every family broken.
People of Iligala
The adults in 1925 lived in eight households:
⊗A’s older brother N & wife, 1 son, 3 daughters.
⊗ A’s older brother U & first wife, 1 son, 2 daughters.
⊗ U & second wife, 3 sons, 1 daughter.
⊗ A’s widowed mother.
⊗ A’s late father’s second wife, 2 daughters.
⊗A’s father’s older brother L, a bachelor.
⊗ A’s older brother M, 2 sons.
⊗ A & wife, 1 daughter, 1 son.
170
chartable connection. The agnatic core of Iligala hamlet reduces to
this, where only the solid black lines indicate genealogical kinship:
U M N A
Though only one close agnatic tie corroborates A’s claim that
Iligala is “one hamlet, one lineage,” everyone sees it that way. Like so
many of his compeers in all the realms, the little boy of the second
household has learnt to call the boys of the third “older brothers”
[avamama], without being able to explain how they are linked. The justi-
fication is putative links between their fathers, who have the same
descent name (one of seven found in Igumbilo region) but, having no
common grandfather, could allow their offspring to marry. In the Kinga
case, kinship terminology as such is not a good clue to the legal rela-
tionship between two individuals, only to their social ties.
171
an uxorilocal marriage brings in discontinuity I suppose the direction
of seniority may be decided as a matter of convenience. Kinga have no
word for “kinsman” which isn’t specific and no word for “brother” which
doesn’t indicate the direction of seniority. Cousin terminology isn’t
usable in any non-specific sense. The terms I have rendered “brother”
could thus be said to have double use, and when used in a context
beyond the cousin (the chartable) range might best be translated
simply “kinsman.” That would give us umamavango [my kinsman of
senior line] and ununavango [my kinsman of junior line]. But the young
men I asked about it felt the term had a single not a double use. The
implication is that every residential friendship is semantically associ-
ated with the heavily idealized relationship of actual brothers.
172
Careers: the context of moral effort
If Kinga sometimes manifest ‘achievement motivation’ that is
part of a more general pattern antedating the money economy and
the challenge of meritocratic ethics which belong to the context of
Tanzania today. In the strictest sense, social mobility was part of the
fabric of life in the old culture, depending on young men seeking to the
high life of the princely centres and later expanding the Sanga
influence on the frontiers. And the minstrel who would so delight the
prince or a rich man as to be rewarded at the close of the dance with
a beautiful maiden in marriage? That is the Cinderella-tale which no
man fails to repeat when talking of the old days. There were prin-
cesses aplenty at the courts then, and all of them were to be awarded
in marriage to deserving men of the isivaga barracks houses. But I think
it would be a distortion of Kinga history to suppose that young men
sought to the ceremonial centres out of fairy-tale ‘ambition.’
The dark side of the career ethic is the failure of hopes and
projection of blame on the embittered motives of others. This kind of
projection often ‘works’: it can clear away a person’s own bitterness
even while defining reversal as undeserved failure. Kinga men, espe-
cially, allow themselves a measure of volatility which often risks being
heedlessness, as another person must see it. Like the semi-nomadic
Semai whom Robert Dentan (1968) describes, the Kinga often resolve
unanalysed personal conflicts or flee from misfortune by pulling up
173
stakes, starting anew elsewhere. For cultivators this is not always
easy to manage, and I think older people of either sex have always been
fairly well rooted. But in the three decades prior to 1960 labour
migrancy and the cash it made available lessened younger men’s
dependence on good relations at home, and made moving house in
Ukinga relatively easier. The options women had of leasing gardens
where they lacked owner-access also freed them of extreme depend-
ence on the affinal community they usually would have joined at
marriage, making some moves possible which a different system of
land rights would have foreclosed. Kinga habitually see themselves as
open to the kinds of choice a career ethic calls for, and the possibility
of living in peace and harmony with their neighbours.
174
Cases: How do people cope with adversity?
{1} The widow Anyitse
My husband when he died left me six children. Of these children
three have died and three remain alive. All these children have moved
away from here so I live all alone. The reasons for moving away are
that my daughters married and my son moved south to Upangwa
after seeing that in this country he was always ailing. There in
Upangwa he was put in the R. C. hospital at Madunda, and when he
recovered he had no desire to return to Ukinga as he was attracted
to the life there in Upangwa. There he got permission to build from
the local people, and even was given fields which he is cultivating.
For a long time he continued living there in Upangwa, until at last
he came back here leaving his wife behind. Here he didn’t stay long but
journeyed to Iringa town. There he was seeing a Kinga girl, they
became lovers, and in the end he returned with her to her family and
paid the bridewealth. He just paid it and went on back with her to
Iringa town.
His wife who was left in Upangwa got seriously ill. The news came
to me and I made the journey with my kinswoman. When we found her
she was able to walk and we brought her back here with us and kept
her that year until she was better. The reason my son moved to
Iringa is that he grew to hate it in Upangwa because his children
there [two girls] were only dying. Now he has still another wife in
Iringa town and a son living by each of his wives there.
For a while after my husband and my co-wife died it was her son
who stayed here to look after the cattle and goats, but then he
moved farther east to get them better grazing. He’s calling me to
come and live by him but I don’t want to, I prefer to stay right here
where my husband built for me. The food I live on is all my own produce,
my wealth, but for clothes and some other things for the house I
have help from my children.
175
neighbours. I live here with this big feeling for my children though they
are away from me, all the time I hope they will prosper.
176
The rules of these co-operatives are as follows: You mustn’t be
too slow. By the tenth hour [4 p.m.] you’re supposed to have finished
one square measure [Sw: mraba]. If the work goes well they might do
three or four such squares by eventide, though when it is tough work
the most expected is three. The only thing the host must keep in
supply is bamboo cider—the folk must be able to take off and drink
whenever they are thirsty, there must be enough. They should be able
to keep right on drinking through the night until dawn if they don’t
tire of drinking before that. Even long after they are drunk they can
demand more cider.
177
shillings, remembering that the first day he got a hundred shillings
and a goat.
If the old man has daughters already married, on this day each will
receive one goat. What is left over belongs to the bride’s father, if he
is alive, as his private treasure. About the mother’s brother of the
bride, if when her father married her mother he paid the full
bridewealth then this uncle has no right to a big share, he’ll be given
something out of respect. But on the other hand if the father didn’t
finish paying his bridewealth for the mother, her brother collects full
measure now. The sum which goes to the bride’s father’s sister is
because she is of that same family, the bride could be like her own
child if you reckon by descent lines. For if this woman were to send
her daughter off in marriage somewhere, in case the woman hadn’t
been properly married when the daughter was born then the
bridewealth would go to her brother.
True enough every man who marries off his daughter gets a
bridewealth of quite a lot, but it will be divided among many kinsmen
according as they’ve co-operated over the years in everyday
matters. There are a few just the same who might appropriate the
bridewealth without sharing it out, for there can be a man who never
got his share from his kinsmen when their daughters married, so now
he refuses in his turn. In such a case the two groups separate or
they get to despising one another, refusing to recognize their
kinship. That is when the use of black medicines might begin. They’ll be
grieving that once they had community but one saw fit when he
married off his daughter to cut himself off from us, his kinsmen and
brothers.
178
inspired to new anguish by their comrade’s wailing. Everyone will
spend the night right there, men and women. As soon as it is about
the tenth hour each of the women will depart to tap more cider and
cook food so that when they return in the evening they can bring
food and drink. There is raw food brought in as well, which is cooked on
the spot. The men stay right through to evening. If they are Chris-
tians they sing songs of great joy to banish the sorrow of the
bereaved. And this action of sleeping the night there at the place of
the bereaved is called ukumwitsiga undyitu.
Everyone who attends a funeral will be welcomed and given a share
of food and drink. The rule for sleeping is that the men lie in one place
in their own groups without women, and the women do the same in
another place. The length of time they spend there at the place of
bereavement is two full days and nights. On the third day the guests
disperse leaving the host with his family.
179
many things, “Who will settle the boundaries of my field now?” or,
“Who is going to make baskets, hoes, or bill-hooks and hafts?” It was
a remarkable day of mourning.
The man had a younger brother named Li who inherited many tools
but not the skill of Bw. Ke. Still he knew the boundaries quite well. In
the year 1962 there arose a serious difficulty over fields, as certain
folk of Tu village to the south came up here to appropriate a big
section of fields. Their spokesman was Bw. Mu and he came up
against our Li and was questioned straight away about how he was
going to claim the fields were his. Bw. Mu insisted on saying it was his
property so Bw. Li took the case to the headman. The judgement was
given that Bw. Mu had failed to produce compelling evidence and so
lost his case, while our Bw. Li as spokesman for the people of
Malanduku explained the truth of the matter and called witnesses
so it came out that this area was indeed the property of Malanduku
villagers. To this day Bw. Mu has made himself scarce and the
property remains ours.
180
what they would do to me if I walked into their village? How do I know
they wouldn’t hack me to death with their machetes? Already before
she died the court approved the divorce and ordered her older
brother to repay a part of the bridewealth. I shall have it and have my
child as well, for they wouldn’t care for him properly there. But my
way is to go through the court.
181
yesterday afternoon to visit the sick child but hadn’t stayed. He
went on to drink beer while the little child worsened and died. There
must be compensation payment of ten shillings on the spot, or Bw.
Piku will find himself no kin of this group, who will look upon him as
their enemy.
Bw. Piku in his turn refuses to accept the force of anything which
has been said. He had no way of knowing the child was so ill.
So it goes on. The tempo is slow. The facts, arguments, accusa-
tions, and denials are repeated. The hearing lasts altogether about
two hours, the alignments holding roughly to the format as Obedi
has explained.
Obedi predicts the man will endure in his refusal to accept any
complicity in the child’s death. He won’t pay the fine of ten shillings
even though that is supposed to be justified as simple compensa-
tion to fellow kinsmen for their work in the grave-digging at which Bw.
Piku didn’t assist. So the spokesman will make a written note of the
matter to put in the bottom of his box at home, and they will wait.
When a child of Bw. Piku dies the relatives will stand off, refusing
to help. They will be firm. “You chose to be by yourself.” They will
require at least the sacrifice of a goat [at about thirty shillings] to
atone. Then the man will find himself unable to refuse. They would put
the same terms at his own death if that were the first to strike his
house, but the threat implied here is that one of his own children will
die soon. All of his kinsmen who are here—all who are close to this
branch—are agreed and would hold to the embargo. Only if he has
sufficient kin elsewhere will he be prepared in the end to cut kinship
with these men.
In the case of a child’s funeral the mourning is rather localized.
Obedi reports that only here in Kugwe hamlet area is all work in the
fields tabooed for these two or three days. The closest kin will keep
up the mourning at this house for six days, then it will be done. But
even tomorrow some young people will be going to fields farther
away. They aren’t accountable. Only an elder can be accused as Bw.
Piku has been, and only the elders may accuse. This is the way
sickness and death will turn the people to thinking about personal
loyalty and how you hold someone to it.
182
way they conduct their lives. They are representative but they aren’t
without peers who bear deeper moral scars. Our two accounts of
Kinga reciprocity are equally representative, emphasizing the positive
and relegating the negative to exceptions; yet it is the trouble in the
system that preoccupies a Kinga person often and deeply. For Lukasi,
for example, on the day we talked about bridewealth we had to skirt a
couple of issues I knew were deeply troubling him—we might epitomize
them as an un-neighbourly wife and a black-sheep son. He was
suffering as well from an economic setback, having given himself
through the whole rainy season to the hard work of prospecting for
minerals, with first a few signs of success but ultimately only loss.
Yet he continued to want to look mostly at the bright side of life.
Some clues to the inner dynamics of this optimism emerge from our
snapshots of responses to bereavement, where the will to think well
of others is balanced by a readiness to fix blame on someone who can
be judged an outsider to your grief. Even Soda’s eulogy for Bw. Ke, the
Peacemaker, had to be capped by a reference to hostile outsiders
trying to ‘muscle in’ from a distant part of the local network—they
must not be allowed to make good their claims to land reserved for one
of our own. It is in this way, the people heeding their feelings and
resorting to the moot, that a hamlet recognizes itself. Soda
discovers through reflections on Bw. Ke an inner region of fiduciary
relations defining the boundaries of his beloved village.
How do Kinga cope with adversity? There are bitter people among
them, but what predominates is an un-philosophical cheerfulness like
that of the two widows. Neither Anyanitse or Amalile presents her
own self-reliance in a self-glorifying light and neither feels betrayed by
a son who has moved away, though when one asks about their lives it
is these extensions of self through childbirth they want to talk about.
They aren’t possessive of others or covetous of special loyalties. The
contrast to the classic ‘Jewish Mother’ could hardly be more
complete. Possibly our own urban society, against which we are apt to
judge other peoples, is extreme in its patterning of longterm family
dependencies. As many cases show, Kinga often will go beyond what
they are obliged to do to help another person. Many individuals are
able to care, extending the boundaries of their inner domains to
include a marginal kinsman or a friend as if that person enjoyed the
immediate claims of family.
183
self-reliance makes it easier in older age to accept adversity without
turning righteously upon others for succor, as the beloved child will
turn to its parent or, regressively, the bourgeois husband to a
mistress or a neighbour’s wife. The marital chastity of Kinga women, if
it isn’t absolute, is notable. In context, it bespeaks a healthy ego
structure.
184
itself in a four-dimensional functional web by which it is joined to every
other, and change initiated by pressure at one point will be felt at
many. Chaos theory only spells out what good historians have always
known about the microcosms they study.
How do Kinga delimit the boundaries of the inner domain of the moral
life and determine the intensity of its claims? Let the ‘inner domain’ mean
that social circle wherein if you can’t be your self you have none. At
Malanduku village in 1960 girls in the courting stage were willing to
take strange youths into their houses at night—“only for talking, not
for play”—because these young people were pressing almost reck-
lessly to extend their circles of trust. Later on, making friends would
never again be so easy or proceed so naturally. That is why their elders
counseled caution, knowing that an inner circle is only too easily
stretched to breaking. At the same time the number of people who are
suddenly left alone by death, like the number of maids without swains,
is always many and reminds the more fortunate that the inner circle
can fall away. Christian communities in 1960 had remarkably active
young people’s associations, and parish organization was thriving at
remote places like Malanduku village though virtually unsupported by
outside funds or personnel. There is evidence that the claims of the
inner domain are strong: the marvellous romantic sense of the
courting youth says it clearly, the veiled or open suspicions of witch-
craft projected upon the ‘stranger within’ say it again with even
greater insistence.
185
TWIN SHADOWS, FOURTH FOLIO
The problem of the free society is finding ways to fend off ma-
nipulative controls without dissolving institutional frames in the
process. Animal freedom is not what is wanted. Considered as social
beings, animals are as true to their breed as they are in appearance.
They don’t need institutions. We do. Human institutions are never
perfect but normally do set up spheres of activity within which
everyone agrees to play by one set of rules. Since we don’t talk about
an ‘institution’ until the game has been played the same way for some
generations, it follows that institutions, however imperfect, are
always by pragmatic standards successful. When that ceases to be
the case the institution falls apart. It should be added that a ‘rule’ in
186
this context should be understood as a principle or ethic never limited
to its explicit expression in formal instructions.
187
out by the same mechanisms, since a following had to be kept well
supplied with meat and beer.
188
In this book I explore a criteriological approach, centring in the
idea of moral character. I assume that being of good character may
mean radically different things to individuals within the same
community anywhere. But I further assume that these meanings
aren’t freely assigned by the actors but evolve in and from the moral
life of that community, being uniquely and organically a part of it. I
don’t assume that the demands of the moral life anywhere are easily
met or even easily apprehended. I don’t assume that irrationality is
born of repression and a distortion of man’s nature. It seems to me a
better premise that deeply personal forms of irrationality are largely
synonymous with self-delusion and should be conceived as the normal
by-product of moral failure, a direct expression of the human condi-
tion.
Sanctions
The documents in the next chapter will help a reader to form a
direct sense for Kinga character values—a man or woman’s aims in
llife. The cases portray some of the vagaries of spontaneous behav-
iour. As with every human society, Kinga manners are sanctioned by
authority, by private persons within relationships of reciprocal self-
interest (which I call transactional sanctioning because reciprocity
doesn’t suggest acts like vengeance and forced restitution), and by
the diffuse concern of disinterested persons for the maintenance of
traditional moral standards. The diffuse type of sanction is properly
called, after Durkheim, mechanical in that the motives and even the in-
dividual identity of the sanctioner are all but irrelevant. Public
thought smothers private. I consider now the authoritative, transac-
tional, and mechanical means by which Kinga manners are given form.
189
It was a consequence of the official British policy of Indirect
Rule, as matters actually worked out for the Kinga, that up to the end
of the colonial period the face-to-face exercise of authority in their
communities remained in the hands of local men reckoned to have a
credible right to office. The main authority structures of which we’d
have to take account are: the traditional constitution and its succes-
sive revisions; the Territorial and ultimately the National govern-
ments with their local agencies (courts, medical stations, agricultural
officers); and the Lutheran and R.C. missions and churches. Setting
aside the war years early in this century, “raw” governmental
authority has seldom been used, though it has generally been assumed
to exist as a reserve power of the secular authorities. In the Kinga
polity for the most part, even a ruler with high-handed manners has
been bound to take a consultative route to any decisions of impor-
tance.
190
their best years, had a less secure footing at home, where a woman will
often strike back and but for having missed childhood training in the
fighting arts could easily prove the stronger.
191
domain of social relations and the outer sphere of impersonal institu-
tionalization, as they are distinct contexts for sanctioning another
person’s actions. Transactionalism, so natural a mode of interaction
among intimates, in the outer sphere gives rise to ‘arena’ behaviour,
which (in the absence of effective authority) soon breaks down into
free-for-all. Mechanical sanctions, belonging by their nature to the
outer sphere (what Fortes calls a political-jural-ritual domain) are to
be seen invading the inner sphere under a multitude of forms, from
word taboos and contact avoidances to the sanctioning of a rigid rank
order. But the two spheres, though they interdigitate in various ways,
don’t merge into one.<<[lit]
192
Personal lustrations constitute a way of aligning one’s self with
the angels against filth and useless violence. Every culture knows
themes of this general sort, though their emphases will always be
unique in some respects. But how else is a people civilized except
through the establishment of a world with a semantic structure of
this general kind?
193
not in the force of mechanical sanctions but in the kind of superstruc-
ture which has been built on them.
194
made commendable efforts, sometimes with fine results. I offer se-
lections here, chosen to elicit a range of situations and attitudes
Soda and I thought representative of ordinary lives and everyday con-
tingencies. None of this material evokes a world innocent of colonial
contact: I must again trust the reader’s powers of subtraction.
Some of this only reflects the steady winds of change. But indi-
vidual judgement was no more important in 1960 for Kinga than it had
been a century before. Soda’s contributions help underline the recip-
rocal flow of information between personal experience and culture, the
intelligence of action and the intelligence of reflection. We get a few
privileged glimpses of the kind of private contingency likely to colour
moral decisions in everyday life.
195
Women speak of themselves
I, Tusike
My father was named Kwisa and my mother Tulimi Sanga. My
brother who was first-born died. It was after his death I was born, in
1945 in the hamlet of Wale. Later on my little brother Eli was born, in
the year 1949.
My father had been away at work [at a plantation in Iringa
district] and on his return they secretly gave him poison to drink [K:
unkali], showing they were jealous of his wealth, for he had become
very rich. Now after Papa’s death, Mama too was seized by illness,
affecting her abdomen and her legs as well—it got worse, until she
was quite unable to walk.
There at Wale hamlet we had trouble such as we’d never known.
Mama was ill for a long time, until we had been starving so long we
were near death. [Soda: Their faces were like those of children
already dead.] There were kin of Papa’s lineage thereabouts. But they
were just refusing to take care of us, as if to say please just die and
disappear completely, all of you. [The late husband’s brother by a co-
wife lived there but had refused to take the widow by inheritance as
she was ill.] Mama-my-aunt, Papa’s sister, used to come each week
bringing food to us. At last Mama’s illness got so bad that we
children had grown so weak we were near death. Then my aunt was
moved to bitterness by our plight, she went to the headman
Sangilino to lodge a complaint. He was understanding because he
already knew of our trouble. So Mama [father’s sister] begged
permission to take us and the headman granted it, saying, “Go home
and nourish these children until with God’s grace they are full grown,
then the whole wealth shall be yours, for all here have refused to
acknowledge them as kin.” Mama [father’s sister] came to Wale with
my [adopted] brother Asheri [=Soda]. At that time Mama was in
such condition that she couldn’t walk, so my aunt took her like a child
upon her back all the way to Malanduku village. Mama-my-aunt was
very tired from carrying Mama all that way [six kilometers], but at
Matu hamlet [near Malanduku] another woman named Anili came out
to help and carried Mama to the place where we were to live. When at
last we all arrived at this place...we were to live in peace. Mama-my-
aunt took care of us in the best way you can imagine, until we were
good-looking people again. We were baptized...and our godparents
welcomed us and cared for us thereafter as if we were their very own
children.
After two years Mama’s illness overwhelmed her and she died.
She was buried by my aunt’s husband and neighbours of Malanduku
village. Understand that from the time we left home at Wale until
that day there hadn’t been a soul come to see us, either from
Mama’s side or my late father’s. When the death came Mama-my-
aunt sent word to the headman, “The person I took under my care is
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dead.” The headman sent the reply, “It is you who must bury the
person who has died, for you shall know that she has no kin, only you
[Name] and your husband [Name].” The body was interred, and even
then there was not a single kinsman of Papa or Mama who came to
the funeral, even though my mother still had family.
...Today I am a mature young person, and lo! the kinsmen of Papa
and Mama are all the while wishing they had taken us in, though at
the time my aunt adopted us those people supposed we wouldn’t
survive. They said we were as good as dead. To this day my little
brother Eli is at school, the fees paid by our older [foster] brother.
My work is farming and caring for Mama-my-aunt. Today we have
forgotten we had a mother of our own and we usually just say our
“Mama” is the one we are with.
Last year I cultivated two fields of wheat, one of millet, five
riverbank gardens [K: isilwa], two of maize and two fresh-crop
gardens [K:imigunda] [for pulses, greens, and root crops]. This year
I’m continuing with just the same pattern as last. Clothes, soap, and
all manner of small items are furnished by my older [foster]
brothers...
You see, after my mother died I didn’t suffer intensely, I took it
lightly because even when she was alive we were always cared for by
my aunt, and we went everywhere with her. I got so used to her, when
Mama died it was as though everything went on as usual. As for my
little brother, he understood nothing and it is only these days he is
hearing from people that “once you had a mother of your own.”
[Tusike was recently offered clothes by her paternal kinsmen but
refused, saying, “You want me now that I’m ready to marry but you
deserted me as a child. Who are you to me?” Even the boy Eli was
offered clothes. He dropped them where he stood and walked away.
Tusike and her roommates have so many callers by night that
sometimes Soda is summoned to send them packing. Though the
foster father died when Tusike was still young, his brother helps to
look after the girls, who have built their house near his. At eighteen in
1963 she has scarcely entered the serious stage of courtship.]
Ame: My marriage
From the period of my childhood nothing will ever be known, as
there is no one left who could tell me about that. As to the time of
my youth, my maidenhood, I remained a long time without marrying,
compared to today. My little sister who came after me had long
passed the menarche and had grown to be an adult just like myself,
you couldn’t have said which of us was the older. In those days we had
the custom of sleeping in underground houses [K: ingumbwe]. Down in
these huts we would be a great group all sleeping together. Though it
is true we did continue that way for so long putting off marriage, our
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oneness made it a joyful life, always being so close to each other in
the group.
Down in our underground huts young men were allowed to enter to
pay court to us. As soon as he was inside, the young man would
search out a girl who could like him, and he’d lie close beside her and
chat the whole time the other girls were sleeping. It’s a long time ago
now that I got my boyfriend and we became lovers in that manner.
The whole period of our youth we used to dance and dance. Whenever
there was a school for some girls, all of us would attend in a great
crowd. Once the festivities began no one could quit the company, we
danced on until everyone was so tired they must sleep.
The time for marrying came at last. First there were the prepara-
tions for marriage. In the old days there was no chance the groom
would present a great number of valuables [bridewealth], the way
folk are doing these days. To begin with we got only token presents.
As to how we became lovers, this young man had a sister, and it
was she who befriended me on behalf of her big brother, that I should
marry. After he had continued for a while sending little presents for
his little sister to give me, then he felt free to visit our hut and
become my lover. After the passage of time we were married. My
bridewealth was only three cows. Since then I’ve been living peacefully
with my husband [who works away] and three children [in school].
Singa: My maidenhood
In the time of my youth for years I was physically weak on account
of recurring fevers. But it was also a most hospitable, busy exist-
ence, for my father took in a great many young people, raising them
all until they were full grown living right there and ready to marry. My
father was a most generous man, and many people were cared for by
him.
In those days I was very fond of banding together with comrades
to work in the fields. Festivities like the dance kivilila we used to hold
as often as we could, and in those times even after we’d retired to
bed we could keep up the partying all night long without tiring. Other
times there would be drumming, and that was a favourite as well. It
was a happy life—we had great fun in bed all the girls lying together.
These were the parties we called amakongo, which is just to say
calling a meeting for people to have a good time together.
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Later still he began to take calves, until finally he was eating the
grown cattle. Then he took to eating human beings.
As was our custom, Kinga in those days as now tilled fields both
far and near. One day I made a safari with my comrades [women of
Malanduku village] to work fields in the vicinity of Uka, there a way to
the southeast. When we had done all we could we found there was
still a field left to till, so we decided to spend the night together
right in the fields, so that in the early morning we might just finish up
and be done.
A pleasant sleep had come upon us when I felt something rasping
my feet. I kicked out as hard as I could but the leopard seized my calf
in a ferocious bite, chewing and ripping the flesh, enough to make
himself a meal. The moment I raised the alarm my comrades came
awake and began to make a great din. We had to leave and spend the
rest of that night at Uka hamlet. In the morning I was carried home
to Malanduku village, for I hadn’t the strength now to walk.
On my arrival they began working on me with a bellows from a
forge such as they use to make a bushknife or a spear. This is the way
they managed to clean out all the leopard’s fur from the wound, by
blowing. They had no faith I’d recover, as the wound was so large, but
by the grace of God I did and I’ve led a peaceful life to this day. Since
my husband died I’m cared for by my children. I can keep a few fields
but mostly I’m cared for by the youngsters, and they keep me well.
Doni’s career
My mother died eight years ago, and we were left, myself and four
siblings, to a hard life of getting our own meals. When my mother died
I had a grown sister, though, and she became like a mother to the
little ones left behind. God came to our aid and we managed to
scrape along until I [was able to work away, and after some years]
was ready to marry. At that time I returned to Kingaland to look for
a girl, and as it turned out I was lucky enough to find a maiden of Uka
hamlet... Our relationship went on for some time, more than a year.
This girlfriend suited me just beautifully, always making me welcome.
When I’d visit she would prepare delicious food and something to
drink. I was delighted with my fiancée. I used to make the journey by
night to visit my girl, always all by myself. Her place was a good
distance away, about six kilometers from Malanduku village.
At the time of marriage last year I got no help from anyone but
managed by my own efforts to pay a bridewealth of seven hundred
shillings, two cows, eleven goats, two blankets, and six cotton robes.
My father was around but he had no fortune, not a penny, and I had
to rely on my own abilities. The property I borrowed for the
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bridewealth was only one of the cows and three of the goats, the
rest was my own. As I am without anyone who will step forward and
offer to pay it, I know the whole thing is up to me.
After going to register the bridewealth at Ukwama court I came
to realize that the only thing left was the wedding itself. I had to
think and think about it, then on the spot I decided to go and carry
off my sweetheart, doing without the formalities. When I got to her
place I had to put a lot of pressure on her but at last she accepted
me. We ran away together to my house that very evening and have
been living together in peace ever since.
I look on my life today as heaven compared to the life of my earlier
years when I was so alone. We get on well with my in-laws. ... We’re
self-reliant and look after the little ones. Though my mother died and
left them behind I can say I’ve taken good care of them. My father is
still around but he lacks personal ability, he is a man who will just live
any way he can.
The fields I’m tilling to feed these little ones are mainly borrowed
from others, only a few are from my father’s side. Even before I got
married I’d started making a big effort at gardening so as to have no
trouble getting food when I married. Going to claim my wife I could
bring her here and show her crops already standing in the fields.
As we began working together, hoeing gardens of our own, I used
to tell her, “Your companion is a person without near ones to rely
upon, a loner [Sw: mkiwa], one who has no mother to help us, so we
just have to help ourselves and depend on each other for getting all
these jobs done.” And this is what my good wife liked to hear me say.
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In the morning my aunt was so afraid I’d be devoured by that
leopard that she took me back home to my own parents, where I lived
after that. The times were hard. When I grew up to be a youth able to
be of some use, my father told me to come along with him, we had to
go after food [Sw: hemera] as there was famine in the land. The place
we went to buy food was Igominyi village [some forty kilometers
distant]. But when we got to Mgiwi river it was in flood. Papa said
he’d carry me on his back, for he was an expert swimmer and is to
this day. But I wouldn’t hear of it. I crawled over on a bridge made of a
single tree-trunk. By good fortune, God was with me and I made it
across while my father swam underneath. When we arrived [at
Igominyi] we had no money but Papa was an expert in patching basins.
Luckily we were able that way to buy maize and peas and we carried
the food back home successfully.
Yesa, herdboy
Where I’m supposed to come from is in the Mawemba country in
the hills to the east of Malanduku village. [This is a bush-culture
region outside Kingaland proper as defined by colonial-period bound-
aries.] My own clear memories begin when I was around six and had
the job of herding for my father, together with my older brother. He
was so much bigger he could take the herds far into the open
country. But there came a time when he began to extend his herding
even farther away, being gone several days, and he was caught by a
leopard and eaten together with his companion... When my father
saw all this he began to think I too would be taken by a leopard, as I
was only small. Though he kept trying to have me herd nearby, he saw
I was maltreated, being beaten by people whenever the animals would
get away and start feeding in their gardens. I’d run to chase the
animals out of there, up would come the owner of the field, and of
course he’d nab me and beat me. I remember one person who caught
me with a stick across the ear all the way to my nose. I was badly
hurt. Seeing that, at last Papa decided just to sell all the cows and
the goats, and I was sent off to work.
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kinsmen were against my schooling I dug in hard. They refused me
food, trying to starve me into quitting school.
After completing the seventh [penultimate] year I could apply at
the court for remission of fees. This was a lot of trouble since the
court was seventy kilometers away and I could get no food at home.
But I had a friend who was kind to me, he gave me food early in the
morning as I started my journey. It was later things got really diffi-
cult. The day I left the court to get on my way home I was suffering
such hunger I didn’t know which way to turn. I kept on until I came to a
field where someone had planted beans, and I began plucking the
leaves and chewing them. I kept on until I came to a house and I
needed a place to sleep, but the owner raised the alarm and chased
me away...
After I was married and God blessed us with a little baby, my life
entered a new phase. People love me now because they see I have
steady work and no problems of any kind. Even those who used to be
so set against my schooling today are ashamed and like me a lot,
calling me their son, even though back then they despised me.
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A puzzle for Madeni’s son
My life during childhood was one of problems, as when I was born
my mother was having hard times. They even gave me a name
meaning “misery” —Kikwoma. Mama had just two children, one by her
first husband [Name]. When he died she married Madeni...who begot
me. After some years my father died a suicide, and the story about
his strangling himself was that my mother was supposed to have
taken an axe and the grindstone. But so far as is known she actually
took only the axe, not the stone.
Papa took her to court to accuse her, but Mama still admitted
only she had taken the axe, not the stone, and now Papa grew very
angry. But my older brother told him, “You, Father, if you suspect this
Mama, only go and search inside her house.” So my brother accompa-
nied Papa to search for the axe and stone, looking everywhere. They
found the axe which Mama had taken, and nothing more. My father
grew depressed. Before nightfall he was dead of strangling and was
lying in his grave.
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abusing him she’ll say, “Get out of my house, you never built it!” The
man’s life is wretched though he has no less than fourteen children.
The women must look after all their needs. His last wife died leaving
four to the care of her sister. But when the sister was going to move
to her husband [away at plantation work] she took off with these
four children and Captain Nengo had to take out after them. When he
caught up with them it was agreed they should return and be under
the care of his remaining wives.
Only two years ago another child tried to hang himself and had to
be saved by one of the wives. He was only six but he’d done something
wrong to his mother and she was abusing him severely. He was so
downcast he took a rope into the goat-shed, tied all the knots he
knew, and threw the rope over a pole. He pushed his head through one
end and his toe through the other, kicking down hard with his toe to
tighten the noose. Just in time he was saved by his mother’s co-wife,
who untangled him. All the while his own mother was there but
wouldn’t stop him. Even when she saw her companion releasing the
child she spoke against her, “Let him die if he wants to have his way.
It’s not my fault. I never put him up to this, but if that’s what he
thinks he has to do, well let him die.” Of course, the co-wife couldn’t
heed such words but took the child down and brought him into her
own house.
It may seem strange that such a little boy would do such a thing,
only six years old, but people speculate he must have been copying
his mother. She tried a little before that to hang herself and was
only saved by good fortune when her little daughter heard a strange
snorting sound from the mother’s hut. The girl screamed, “My
mother’s dying!” Right away people came out and cut the rope so the
woman recovered. All the time Captain Nengo was there and he said,
“Just leave her to die, she’s only drunk and wants to play with death.”
That’s why people suppose the little one was copying his mother
when he tried to hang himself.
Today there was a fight between Captain Nengo and Nanasi, the
old village pagans. The reason for the fight was that Captain Nengo
was demanding Nanasi should bring him “the old man’s chicken”
according to Kinga custom. After a man is released from regular
taxes because of old age, then each year he ought to send a goat, or
a chicken at least, to the headman. It’s true Nanasi pays no tax, and
that’s why he was asked to pay up a chicken. The party was on its
way from Ukwama to collect the taxes here. When he got wind of all
this Nanasi was enraged and he began to abuse Captain Nengo in a
loud voice, saying his belly was bloated, it was his mother’s belly, he
was a barbarian and a fool. Captain Nengo came right back, saying,
“Beware, you rogue, you’ve said too much now, you’re finished—just a
few days and you’ll be saying goodbye to this world!” Nanasi replied,
“If I die it’ll be by witchcraft you have from your mother, for sure!”
Bw. Fipo, the good Christian, tried to restrain Nanasi, but the
latter wouldn’t listen to counsel, and Fipo was powerless. Nanasi was
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raising a din, threatening to pound that good man to a mash with his
fists. The whole thing was taken as high comedy by the folk gathering
here for the funeral of Yase’s mother, which began today. The village
was teeming with people, some crying, some trying to comfort the
bereaved, and others much amused.
Manly sport
Around two o’clock on Thursday afternoon Bw. Soda had been
working, doing his rounds of the village. When he came back from work
he went into his hut and there was served lunch. On finishing his meal
he heard the din of people and dogs on the chase. Behold, as it
turned out this was Bw. Lukasi and Bw. Yoel Ndelwa hunting a gazelle.
When he got outside to investigate the first thing Soda saw was
the big antelope itself with the dogs in chase. Searching with his
eyes to make sure there were people hunting as well, he discovered
the pack of runners following after. Bw. Soda Ndelwa at once ducked
back into his hut, grabbed his spear and his hunting club, and ran off
to join the hunt.
The gazelle was amazingly fleet. They chased him past the old
Kidingili [hamlet] site, where he switched back alongside the Kidingili
of today. The youth was quickly exhausted from running so hard, as it
had been a long while since he’d had the chance to get so much
exercise. There at Kidingili the animal tried to trick them, hiding itself
completely in the bush. But the hunters knew their work and scoured
the bush until the animal reappeared.
Now Bw. Soda happened to be standing in a secluded spot, and
the moment he saw the gazelle coming by the young man took after
it. All at once it turned, passing right by Bw. Soda’s position. With all
his might Bw. Soda struck the creature with his club. The gazelle
came close to falling but suddenly was up and running again. This
time Bw. Soda didn’t tire but chased after the gazelle with all his
force, piercing the creature’s flank. There and then the hunt was over.
The animal fell to the ground and expired.
Easter parade
It was Saturday evening when Joel, Johasi, and Lukasi with some
of the village boys and girls were dancing to drums, starting at about
eight o’clock. It is a time-honoured custom of the Kinga, whenever
there’s a holiday, such as a wedding feast, or at Christmas or Easter
for the case of the Christians, or if someone is bereaved and they
want to offer consolation. The people will start drum-dancing or
singing. Or for pagans they may start dancing with ankle bells.
The reason for this celebration was the resurrection of Bw.
Jesus. So they left their own village, which is known by the name of
Malanduku or Kilangali, and passed along eastward. Before departing
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they warned the littlest children who wouldn’t be able to keep up,
“You mustn’t come, as you don’t want to get hurt and never get
home again!” Hearing this, the children turned back—all, at least, but
one. At a little distance behind there was one little boy named
Abraham who was following the dancers, under the spell of the drum.
But when they all got to the river his father caught sight of the little
boy and took him straight home to bed.
By that time the dancers had crossed the river and were nearing
the village of Unyengwa. There they passed on by and then twisted
back to the hamlet of Ikovo, where they just got dancing so hard it
was around four in the morning before they took their leave. Then
they danced on their way and descended to the hamlet of Ukange
where they kept it up until dawn. Then they got bamboo cider and
food, and indeed they drank and ate until they could take no more.
Now they bade farewell to their hosts in that village by dancing
there a short while longer, then they took leave to start the journey
home. Arriving there they discovered there were only a few minutes
to go before worship service would begin, so they quit the dancing
then and there, going to wash up and prepare for church.
Now it was the turn of the little children who had been left behind
the previous day. After church, they began their own dance, going
round and round the village, and they kept it up until ten at night.
Finally they entered the house of Grandmother Tumwumilile, where
they listened to the radio which the teacher Fula had left with her,
and then at last the children went to sleep, and the grown-ups who
had remained gave up as well and went home.
Insecurity
I found no reason to suppose Kinga ever had been slaves to
custom. It is hard to judge the rigidity or flexibility of a culture from
the ethnographic literature, but my impression is that Kinga, if they
vary from the median in this, are among the more flexible folk of
Eastern Bantu civilization. A small population by comparative stand-
ards, their language still varies so considerably from place to place
that local identities are never in doubt as between experienced male
speakers. The linguistic variety is paralleled by variations of custom of
which Kinga themselves are often not especially aware, making general
propositions difficult either for 1960 or for the pre-Contact culture.
At the same time, Kinga men were habitual roamers—the war pattern
hardly inhibited their travels—and loved to blend in wherever they
found themselves. Isn’t linguistic flexibility some sort of ‘solvent’ for
social rigidities? I think it often is.
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vary surprisingly from one individual to another even in the same com-
munity, and especially with respect to domestic usages—what might
be called homely items. This follows from two features of the culture:
(a) that marriages are usually made at a distance—usually at the
fringe of the world a youth has been able to map for himself in his
growing up; and (b) that gossip, with the nosy, conformist mentality
which gives rise to it, is weakly developed. Kinga leave others to them-
selves not in everything but in many things. There is no runaway per-
missiveness—the system of sanctions is a success not a failure.
Eccentricity is noticed: the foibles of others are the mainstay of
Kinga lyric art. But when noticed it is as likely to be appreciated as dis-
approved. There is little sense that an odd person must be seen to be
corrigible. Very often, eccentricity is valued over conformity in this
moral universe.
207
able years. If they survive, the vulnerability they felt is likely to stay
with them. Even trusting in the generosity of others, if too often dis-
confirmed, can become a lost art.
208
TWIN SHADOWS, FIFTH FOLIO
209
ing glass did not do was to bring a reader toward an understanding of
the way cultures come to differ. Here are her words on that:
The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a certain segment
of the great arc of potential human purposes and motivation…The great
arc along which all the possible human behaviours are distributed is far too
immense and too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize…Selec-
tion is the first requirement. Without selection no culture could even
achieve intelligibility… (Benedict 1934: Ch. 7 [1959: 207])
Is it likely that collectivities anywhere choose their values? Mod-
eration and excess, reason and passion—her themes—are universally
familiar states of the human psyche, and correlatives. To have excess
one must have boundaries to cross; to know the need for boundaries
is to know the attractions of excess. Choosing moderation is putting
up walls against one’s self. Choosing excess is riding through walls.
People everywhere do both of these things in pursuit of their moral
strategies. But it makes little sense in reference to human history to
use the metaphor of (personal) choice. Cybernetic processes are
formally stochastic—if you want to predict an outcome you have to
know everything the Omniscient knows, and logic prevents the Omnis-
cient from making either a prediction or a choice. As stage-setting for
a dramatic plea for sensitivity to other cultures, no matter how small
or how hard-featured, this 1934 diction of Benedict is not perfidious
anthropology, but as history it is bunk.
210
which were not submerged by a sea of other mortals’ choices. In the
final section of this book I try to show that ‘close comparison within a
region’ can be used to explore the way moral choice does affect
culture history. In concluding this section I want to show that it
offers an escape from the fixedly nomothetic methodology of the ex-
perimental sciences in explaining human behaviour.
211
tigeful accomplishment of office, popularity, or magnificence. The ‘big
man’ syndrome is lacking.
Obedi was the third young bachelor among my friends. His more
mature criticism was oblique, bubbling out of his satirical caricatures.
It was sharp enough not to cause offense. Obedi was ten years out of
middle school and had got himself a profession. He seemed to have a
political future as well. Not a fox, perhaps, but a polished pragmatist.
These three youths I can only describe as having different ‘personali-
ties’. They perceive their world differently, as if from different
perches on the great tree of human knowledge Benedict seems to
have had in mind. It seems to me that ‘personality’ ought to be kept,
as a label, for distinguishing the differences among individuals within
any given culture. Differences among cultures have many dimensions,
and here we are concerned with only one, which is usually labeled
‘values’.
In this broken and hilly country, how stable are character values
over the generations? The grandparents of my young informants lived
in armed camps and kept their independence from larger neighbour
peoples by a combined reputation for witchcraft and fierce dedication
to combat. Only one place, the old capital of Ukwama (Central realm),
seemed to be in tune with this reputation in 1960. Ukwama had pretty
well kept Christianity at bay. I met there what seemed to me manifest
excess—hard drinking, abusive language, threats and perceptions of
witchcraft. Nowhere else had I found women sexually bold. Perhaps a
good European would have concluded that here was the very ‘pagan
Kinga culture’ from which Christianity and enlightened colonialism had
converted all but this stubborn core. I didn’t and don’t draw that con-
clusion, but I did at once begin to question my assumptions about the
Kinga ethos. Were these people of the kind who grant a longterm
advantage to the Apollonians among them? Could they not, in circum-
stances I had yet to observe, abruptly tilt the field the other way? The
original German perceptions don’t bear that out, nor does the style
Kinga have given their Christian communities suggest it. How much
faith must I put in my personal perceptions of Ukwama? Tunginiye,
dancing at 60 like an elf not a demon, had once dwelt in Ukwama and,
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returning there, sensed little of the shift of ethos which affected me.
He had old friends to rely on. And isn’t friendship essentially Apolloni-
an?
Ukwama and the other major courts may always have been
Dionysian radiators in an otherwise Apollonian space. Human sacrifice,
cruel forms of animal immolation, a torture-ordeal, and summary
execution for witchcraft are all reported from the court centres. The
courts were institutionally dedicated to war and rapine. If rivalry for
office, distinction, and power had any real existence it must have been
at the courts. What more need be said? I found in 1960 that several
young, educated officials from other Kinga communities, stationed on
assignment as strangers in Ukwama, experienced hostility and stress
there which they couldn’t handle. The sort of discontinuity they
reported amounted to an assault upon their personal moral perspec-
tives. The effect in two quite different cases was to produce a severe,
self-defeating reaction and end the man’s administrative career. This
can be weighed against Tunginiye’s own success in an administrative
position there, and my own sense that most of the Dionysian vibra-
tions I received came from a few strongly hostile individuals. Even if,
apart from a couple of stumbles, I’d done little to put their backs up, I
was Mzungu—alien white—and these were the men whose scope would
have been grander by far if we Wazungu had stayed home in Ulaya, the
European world. Ukwama was the place to expect sour grapes.
I don’t think the Kinga courts in the old culture were continually
bathed in Apollonian sunshine. But their obvious attractions to youth
had to be consistent with amity and order in the barracks life, and
with a style of wit and performing art which, making light of man’s
most serious concerns, didn’t hesitate to puncture egos. The longest
period of license, a month’s revelry, occurred at the death of a prince:
when you consider the amount of work required to supply men with
beer and victuals for a month away from the fields, and the debt of
work which must subsequently be paid off, it is hard to doubt the ra-
213
tionality of the basic productive organization presided over by a
prince and his court. What is doubly obvious is that the burden of
rational moderation fell disproportionately on the heads of women.
214
What tempers nature in any historical case is not so much the
culture of rules—the regular routines which do make life a bit predict-
able—as the private commitment of individuals to pursuing their own
most-valued ends within the context of a culture of public thought—
values. Character values, since they are pervasive, are prior to rules in
respect of any particular institution, though they are derivative of
rules when you take the round of institutions comprising the culture.
This position lacks the charming simplicity of C. R. Hallpike’s:
Values must be taken as ‘given’, in the sense that one cannot go behind
them and ask, for example, why the Konso should place such emphasis on
peace, or virility. The Konso just do, and there is no more to be said
(1972:17).
I suppose that if the author had been willing to say more he might
have argued that history has given the Konso their value system, and
history is thoroughly accidental. But if this is not historicism raised
to the point of annihilating the possibility of a social science, then it
is only a dodge which shouldn’t be taken seriously. I think the stability
of character values owes much to the fact that no single new institu-
tion can seriously challenge them. I go farther: I think if we couldn’t
assume such stability we’d have no use for the concept of culture. If
we can’t hope to state in principle the conditions under which
character values will change in a predictable manner, a science of
culture isn’t possible.
Did the pax germanica come to the Kinga as the lifting of a mantle
of repression? A reasonable argument to that effect could be
mounted in the case of the Hehe, who had made many slaves through
capture and seem to have been developing an hierarchic social system.
An argument could be made in the case of the Ndendeuli, dispersed and
subjugated by Ngoni invaders, though it took the Ndendeuli several
decades to convince colonial authorities they deserved rulers of their
own ethnic kind. But in Kingaland the kind of slavery and the kind of
subjugation exercised by the Sanga were fairly popular.
One ethnic group, the Wanji, was made subject to Kinga adminis-
tration by the British (for administrative convenience) and chronically
objected to that; but they’d earlier been freed from another (Sangu)
hegemony by the Germans, and been thankful. Another ethnic group,
the Magoma, were neither clearly inside or outside the Sanga frontier
at Contact, being vulnerable by reason of their small population to
Sangu raids and beginning to need a protective alliance with their de-
veloping Sanga neighbours. Throughout the colonial period the
Magoma waged an only half-successful war of words in favour of full
administrative independence from the Kinga, who were not at a loss
215
for words in reply. A third ethnic group, the Mahanzi, had become
deeply committed to protective alliance with one Sanga prince
against another, and took the transition to colonialism with equanim-
ity as relief from the threat of war, about which they had no romantic
illusions. A small people on the shores of Lake Malawi, the Kisi, having
(presumably) lost their own language and any traditions of political
self-rule, continued after the pax to accept a division between Kinga
and Nyakyusa overlords without recorded protest—they were a
people preferring to mind their own business, the manufacture and
sale of pottery. Finally, the Mawemba communities on the Sangas’
eastern frontier, owing no one allegiance, managed to get themselves
switched from Kinga to Bena administration during British times; but
their grievance was only logistical. On the whole, traditional Sanga
rulers remained popular with the Kinga and acceptable to their
European overlords. Kinga rulers made an easy transition to indirect
rule and, after the Maji Maji and the 1914 wars, seldom required disci-
pline except for inaction—collecting too little tax.
Does the very success of the Sanga regime argue for its ration-
ality? It may be rash to make the idea of reason carry such a burden.
Compare the Aztecs of Mexico. Their success tells us they were well
organized, not that they were given to moderation. But the Kinga
under their Sanga rulers did expand and prosper on the basis of their
own agricultural product, for whatever meat the raids brought in very
likely did no more than compensate for the loss of a well-fed man or
two on the caper. Their success implies a steady and varied round of
activities, economic, domestic, and political, which served to promote
prosperity; and the same argument suggests that the political
religion of the Sangas was astutely designed as well (Park 1966).
Though comparing Kinga and Aztec is an ethnographic absurdity, soci-
ologically the comparison is apt enough: the difference which immedi-
ately appears is in the economy of slaughter on the side of the Kinga,
who sacrificed only the rare lad, kin to no one at court but caught in
the “wild,” and seem to have arranged their battles to get the most
heroism at the least expense of blood. Both cultures feature spec-
tacular theocratic tendencies, a predatory politics, and the collective
organization of labour—but each of these institutions is approached
in a characteristic manner. If Aztec culture defines a ‘Dionysian’ skew,
the right word for Kinga public thought may after all be ‘Apollonian’.
One way to put it would be that the difference between the two
‘cultures of rules’ is less significant than the difference between the
‘expressive cultures’ or ‘styles’ of the two peoples.
216
Character and psyche
Character is the self seen in a mirror of public morality. The
psyche is the self-perceiving self, monitor of character. Both terms
are wanted for a sensitive analysis of moral strategies in the context
of an unfamiliar culture, if only to insure us against the illusion that an
unreflective, ‘traditional’ mind reigns everywhere except in our own
armchairs. Moral strategies as creatures of the psyche are as private
as moralities are public. In the end, it is by pursuing a successful moral
strategy that ego keeps strength, and without ego strength, of
course, no one copes.
217
The communication of this character value begins almost with the
baby’s first breath. A woman may be in no haste to put a child on its
own, though her enjoyment of the baby can be seen to diminish as its
own independence grows. Fathers generally are concerned, if they are
not away from home, to have the small child weaned and out of the
house. Men who have taken up the new Christian style of domesticity
report they’re bothered by children not yet ready to fetch and carry,
preferring migrant labour to sharing house with a small child. It is as if
men were saying women alone could love a baby, though under the
bluster I suppose there is resentment of that all-excluding love which
besets a Kinga wife with each new infant.
218
nique. A child’s character is not her responsibility. Once a girl is
weaned she is morally on her own until she is ready for the companion-
ate, sibling-like bond with her mother, in which moral tuition remains
remarkably inexplicit. Once a boy is weaned, the extent of moral
contact between the two will be up to him as much as to her. Even a
motherless boy, once living and eating with his peers, is not dependent
on adoption. Since a woman’s children won’t live with her they won’t be
caught in the kind of emotional lock we call dependency, and if they
have a warm relationship it won’t be possessive. Pursuing a posses-
sive strategy gets the baby nowhere. For a woman to shift from the
favoured pattern of dyadic withdrawal (mother and infant as an item
to themselves) to an ego-incorporative involvement with it would turn
both of them toward a style of domesticity which would find no
resonance in the old culture, though it might eventually do in Christian
Malanduku village.
Can a woman nurse a child well into its fourth year without culti-
vating emotional dependency? The Kinga evidence suggests she can.
Well before the child’s third year it is usually ‘daytime weaned’ to the
care of older children and has ceased to expect nursing until its
mother returns from the fields toward evening. Its final year or two of
infancy is therefore one of overlap with the pattern of child life:
playing with peers during the day, regressing to infantile ways in the
evening. Gradually the mother’s own pattern of moral self-sufficiency,
and perhaps her concomitant avoidance of deep commitment to
others, is established as the underlying moral strategy of her
children. It will serve them well as they establish their characters with
peers.
The picture I’ve been giving of the visible psyche of the very young
child is quite compatible with standard theories that try to account
for the private world of the young as a thing engendered by the private
world of the parent(s) through directly causal events which are part
of the parenting pattern. I am more inclined to take the evidence of
language: it is something acquired from the child’s immediate environ-
ment; the elements do derive from the examples of others in that en-
vironment; and a very strong tendency is evident in the child toward
systematization. The difference in what we might call the acquisition
of a ‘private culture’ is that the environmental clues are far less
precise, may be contradictory when more than one parenter is
entailed, and include only clumsy sanctions on the way the child’s
psyche is systematizing. Siblings often mature with virtually identical
linguistic palettes, and but seldom with nicely cloned psyches. Just as
219
through language new expertise or new persuasions may be acquired in
sequels to childhood, so it is with private worlds.
But we’ve seen that the little republics of boys and girls aren’t
self-sustaining and may not be the kind of groups which come to an in-
dividual’s aid when family fails. Probably the psyches which take the
most stress in childhood belong to such individuals as Dugu, Doni, or
Yesa, who on a parent’s death find no equivalent sponsorship.
Probably the least stress falls on those who have the security of sup-
portive parents and, especially, competent older siblings of the same
sex. Probably also there is little direct correlation between psychic
stress in childhood or adolescence and achievement in the realm of
character, since the Kinga emphasis on self-reliance seems, on the
whole, to be successful. So Dugu, as he feels, turned stress into
challenge and achievement. Doni is proud to be mkiwa, friendless, but
he means only to boast he has had no family to help him. To be without
peer friendship would be quite another thing. So Doni tells us that the
amity in close family ties is of a special and irreplaceable kind. Yesa (in
a fuller account than I have reproduced) reflects on the bewilderment
of boyhood dreams and the loss of a herdsman’s freedoms in the bush
culture with only moderate regret: he was able to fulfil himself as a
wage worker and return as a person worthy of respect. Our handful of
examples proves nothing (nor could) but serves like a handful of
snapshots to put a discussion of character on the fittingly broken
ground of the Kinga world.
220
The prevailing pattern of courtship is informed by the same
character values. Romantic attachments should be delicious not an-
guished. There is little indulgence in passionate love or dyadic with-
drawal—the best courting is done in company with your friend. The
long engagements and an unhurried attitude toward marriage reflect
the prevalence of self-sufficiency. The gradual dropping of the
marriage age in the British years, muted as it was by the inflation of
bridewealths, reflected a new level of commitment on the part of
young men and women to the values of domesticity, garnished by
market goods and opportunities for salaried employment at home;
but Doni’s honeymoon ideals of simple dyadic self-sufficiency will give
way to the building out of new peer networks through the ungovi, and a
more traditional pattern of life. Kinga young men and women are more
than idly attracted to one another at the phase of serious courtship,
feeling the need of love-objects and responding exuberantly to being
made such an object by another. One’s own-sex peers, with whom one
shares comfort by night and phatic communion by day, are on the
whole not (in a more than physical sense) lovers and evoke little pos-
sessiveness, while the impetus to courtship probably derives from a
need for permanence as well as for the substance of the householder.
Time and aging gradually affect the resonance of a world to a psyche’s
inner promptings.
But these new projects aren’t goals toward which one must
hurry. Courtship normally continues much longer, and on a rather more
hit-or-miss basis, before engagement is sealed than our autobiogra-
phers were inclined to remember. Kinga lads move very gently toward
a lover’s consummation. Pretty soon after marriage they begin to
think about getting away to find work again. Close cohabitation proves
unexpectedly stressful, though they are inclined (as most of us are)
to look away from that in giving an account of themselves. Both
partners have been accustomed to the luxury of plural relationships
and the easy possibility of turning to other others.
221
ditional in many if not all Kinga communities in 1960, is not a
breakdown of marriage but the passing on to a post-marital
standing—and an expression of the meaning of a Kinga marriage as a
tie without ego-incorporation or endlessly deepening interpersonal
dependencies.
An older man finds the company of the ikivaga most suitable, for
it is there his conversation lies. His business with his wife, except for
the meals she sends him and his occasional errands on her behalf, is
finished. There was the engaging old man in Malanduku village had built
his thus-estranged wife an admirable house in a pleasant hamlet a
kilometer away from his own haunts. It was certainly a good man’s
project, a kindness. But we hardly need ask why she wouldn’t move
there, leaving her gender friends. The self-explanaatory reason she
could give her husband was simple, though oddly unforeseen: it was her
major duty as a woman to feed him—she had no young children for
whom to cook or to send on errands. Had she moved, either she must
carry his food a kilometer down hill, up dale every evening. Or she must
leave it to him to come begging—not a tidy arrangement. So the new
house remained empty, yet I saw no hint of bitterness between the
two. The two genders are two solitudes, and when the mutual
curiosity of courtship years is past, everyone accepts that.
222
ship after a fight, but whatever the steps the surface is not left
scarred: reconciliation not estrangement is the normal result. The lad,
the maiden, and the old polygynist have in common the ability to take
a role quite seriously, yet slip away from full identity with it. The lad
does it puckishly, the maidens do it festively, the litigious old man
pragmatically. They are displaying three versions of a common quality.
223
Still, we’ve seen that occasionally women do borrow tricks from their
husband’s repertoire and turn them back on him.
224
deep transformation takes place, and pain-with-glory looks good to
him. Even what happens on the sentient level in a stick fight will be
massively affected by his state of arousal as he approaches it, so
that wounds (which a few years ago or hence might break his mettle)
in the heat of this fray have no effect.
225
ships. Adults bear the public responsibility for their private lives: for
the quality of life especially in the inner domain which children feel they
have no responsibility for and no power to change. A major transfor-
mation takes place in the psyche. Consider the two failed suicides, of
Captain Nengo’s wife and her son: no one found it strange that an
adult’s character failures would weigh so heavily, yet no one believed a
child’s could. The game of character which children play ‘for fun’ is
played by adults for keeps.
226
how external the sanctioning of her character is. A woman has no
choice but to accept the package of marriage with its demands and
aspirations, its world of chance rewards and failures, intact.<<[lit]
The shift for males from undimi [bush youth, herd or scout] to
undume [established bachelor] traditionally occurred long before the
lad had begun to think of marriage. In 1900 it would have been associ-
ated with the move from bush to court and the barracks life, with its
greater visibility and discipline. Court youths affected the red-clay
ringlets of the dandy, taking pride in their appearance and talents.
They began to view fighting in terms of form and skill not only victory,
sublimating the capriciousness of youth to become the effective
cattle-raiders around whose well-lucked exploits the great victory
celebrations of the court would be centred. The new style demanded
good manners, cleanliness, and a pleasing demeanour: the “shy,
friendly, trusting” Kinga of the earliest German reports.
For maidens there is courtship in which they play host and their
norms prevail. Rowdy youths in 1960 must be expelled by a girl’s
father or elder brother, but in the old culture the isaka itself was often
so augustly established as to have the necessary authority. Duty for
the maiden is focused on her garden work, invested with a sense of fun
and accomplishment which is rather generous—she produces far more
than her own keep and in fact works for the young men of the
community who are her “sons.” This is to say, if you look at the psyche/
character dimension of her motivation, she gains moral stature by her
accomplishment. If you look at the ego/role dimension, it is that she
finds herself attracted to the unselfish persona she sees modeled in
other maidens of the isaka. Because she can only embrace the role of
maiden along with most of its rationale of character values, she’ll be
sensitive to her mother’s approval and take cheer from the good
humour of her peers.
227
her own. Is this the course she would rationally plot for herself in life,
if somehow her ego were untrammeled by introjected values? When
we’re committed to living with the friends we already have, they
control so massive a share of the rewards and punishments in our
world that we’d have to be mad to go altogether against them. But
this rational aspect of moral strategy is normally only a default
condition to which we fall back in moments of confusion or self-doubt.
Ordinarily we are engrossed, as in a magnificent fiction, in the drama
of our roles.
228
Zabroni’s brother, Tengeneza—ironically, the Swahili name he’d chosen
for himself means ‘fix, put right’. Young men commonly court in
company and rely on one another’s support in sanctioning the choice
of a partner and interpreting ambiguous events or love messages. In
good measure the style of a (domesticated) bachelor male is
patterned on the style of a bachelor woman, who made the adjust-
ment earlier in life. Admiration for women helps to draw youths away
from the bush and bush values long before they are ready to marry.
Settled communal living with full membership status in the ikivaga
begins almost a decade after the corresponding transition for girls,
for whom it comes with the springtime of sex. Until pubescence at
about twelve, a girl though a junior member of the isaka remains more
strongly attached to family than peers, being too sleepy to stay
awake at night for activities in which she is accorded no part. Then
there is erotic arousal in relations with peers and she becomes a
senior isaka member, beginning a self-contained life with friends there
which will only slowly open into courtship toward the end of the second
decade or, as with Ame, even much later.
However the transition was made, for most Kinga men the
change of heart was assisted by a growing appreciation of women—
229
their style and the character values behind it. The final adjustment
must always have entailed a juggling of values, freedom and domestic-
ity, goats and girls. The wild period of youth is an explicit rebellion
against the complex of values informing the established community,
but a period which implies its own eventual reversal. Perhaps
adulthood in any society must comprehend a certain polarity in moral
values, ensuring some flexibility. Opposite principles don’t always
emerge in contradiction but may be complementary. As Kinga women
cultivate both self-reliance and co-operation, Kinga men must adapt
to war and peace, the agonistic activities of the bush and the
comradely evenings of the ikivaga alternating. The principle of economy
applies: the wild stage isn’t wasted but prepares the man for military
and political obligations in adulthood, though without subjecting him
to discipline, which is only effectively provided in the final stage of so-
cialization to adult standing.
A question of style
Most of the time most of us individually (and our communities
collectively) are dependent on role motivation for personal stability
and predictability. Certain forms of amnesia leave psyche and
character intact, blanking out the roles: ego strength is normal, it
seems, but finds itself in a vacuum. In the common language of today’s
urban-industrial societies my “identity” derives from my roles, my
“status” from my role set, the node I occupy in a structure of role-re-
lationships. Even if, in the conditions of the folk society, we can
assume a fair degree of stability in observable behaviour at the level
‘core personality’ refers to, the same inner motivational profile would
support a wide range of styles and role systems. This means that
‘character’ even in the simplest societies cannot supply a sufficiently
230
narrowed set of values to serve as a basis for structured social life.
An assembly of good fellows with no clues about roles and rules can’t
be expected to get much work done.
231
numbering them because they do not naturally fall into types. There
are no ‘generic’ styles although many are surely distinctive. Even to
give a name to a style, we have to be wary of stereotypes: on closer
examination, Benedict’s two ‘Dionysian’ cultures may both have
chosen some sort of ‘excess’ but they haven’t much in common
because of it. The safest starting point may be to assume ‘one
culture, one style’ and proceed to compare several which are much
alike, learning about them from their differences.
232
taining the new persona. Bw. Ke like Soda must have had high aspira-
tions in his youth and a controlled hunger for public approval. His
career was a dramatic success, as Soda judges; but as with any
drama, outcome depends on uncontrollable events. What else Bw. Ke
might have been—what he was to some other, closer observer than
Soda—we don’t know: witch? manipulator? poor provider? Beauty of
character is in the eye of the beholder. But what keeps the pursuit of
character lively, and the morale of a community high, is that beholders
do find beauty around them, confirming a private ideal and seeming to
move them from what they are toward what they would be.
When the lord of the bush, the tough survivor of the avadimi, the
tousled and unkempt herdboy of the hills, begins to hear talk of a
maiden’s breast as a pillow of bliss on which to rest a weary head he’s
begun a long surrender. It will lead at last to a sort of style conversion.
This is not just a matter of regressive mental mechanisms: with the
conversion he opens himself to the character values the maiden has
presented. By offering her breast and not her crotch she activates
his sense of need not his drive to mastery: she pulls the thorn from
the wild creature’s paw and becomes, in a moment controlled by
fantasy, his mistress. In the morning he may feel he has embarked on
a new career. Of course it won’t happen just from his falling for a girl.
He and his friends are coming of age. The next style in the cycle is no
longer off-putting to them. But each one will have to discover and
invent his own way forward, as a style is no mere badge or mantle.
Better see it as a radical shift of frame, not a disconfirmation of an
older self but a project aiming at confirmation of a new.
233
of the ego that a person becomes committed to a scheme of values he
will not be willing to set aside for new. This is the subject of much
learned science, and one into which we all have a certain insight. I would
stress only the relativity of commitment: not all converts will find a
role equally congenial. Some packages will be broken up and some roles
prove defeating.
But the more general experience is certainly role tension: that is,
the pulling of one role against another and ego’s realization of their in-
congruity. Sometimes the strategy adopted will be simply to split
between them, but that only rarely works out. I suppose role tension
accounts for much of the goodness of fit—such as it may be—between
psyches and chosen careers. Tension continues to be an experience of
life even in the most conventional settings. Isn’t the orgiastic mood of
the maiden’s initiators proof enough of the tensions, normally re-
pressed, in the woman’s role which they have undertaken to adver-
tise?
Once a youth had won his place at court he’d quickly take on a
court-centred view of the world, and in the measure he succeeded in
establishing his character there he’d be personally confirmed in this
worldview. We phrase it that he has acquired a new persona, or
committed himself to new values, or undergone personality change—
maybe just turned over a new leaf, depending on our impressions of the
case and the wisdom we accept about human nature. But if we follow
his later career as an outpost apostle of the court and its values we
see him thrust into a situation where he must either abandon the
style of the court or set himself up as a role model to the rustics
around him. We are dealing with a career strategy in which the aristo-
cratic model first exercises tension upon the person of the bush-bred
recruit—and later the adoptive aristocrat, now personally committed
to new character values and a courtly style, exercises a similar
tension on the styles and inner aspirations of others.
The life cycle does not turn of itself. Each style conversion
entailed has its own semantic engine in the growing person. Without
the continuous role tension this implies, Angst would be less. The
characteristic uncertainty of human social life, and the individuality
which is its expression, would fall away. Is it really credible that the
Sanga political movement would have brought less tension—less dis-
content, less violence, less fear of witches—than bush culture knew?
The protostate build-up must have brought in not just complexity but
intensity of social awareness: in a word, drama. Each person in his or
her own way has to convert the potentialities of a role into an ego-
supportive pattern of life, and as the scope of choice in a human career
234
increases, so do the tensions affecting the pursuit of private reward.
Role tension in this context is a basic mechanism for the stabilization
of personal motives even while, with the increasing sophistication of
adulthood, these are sinking deeper beneath the observable surface of
behaviour.
There were few cowards among Kinga men in the old culture
because a boy without a taste for boldness would have little chance of
surviving the years in the bush. He’d find few rewards, more likely dev-
astating punishment, in ordinary gang activities. If (say) boys up to
ten were exposed to intensive schooling in the tamer arts of kitchen
and garden, as their sisters are, the wilder life of the bush would be
harder to take. What may sometimes seem a relationship between an
immovable personality and an irresistible role is thus to be seen in
broader perspective as a more dynamic and dialectical tension. The
conversion experience of embracing a new role becomes with time, as
most conversions do, a hard job of work in accommodating the inner
self to new motives; and the job is the harder, the greater the moral
distance which has to be travelled in the process.
235
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER ONE
A moral universe
For women the series of bush schools didn’t serve to mark off
youth from childhood or maturity from youth. Properly speaking,
these schools weren’t rites of passage. Even the vulvar labiotomy,
which I’d have expected to carry the burden of severance from things
past, seems to have been conceived as no more than a preparatory or
admonitory step, much as the Culwicks (1935:344-6) portray it for
the riverine Bena. A Kinga girl received this attention much later, in
respect to years and psychosexual development, than the Bena girl
did; and the Kinga maiden would continue her erotic life with peers as
before, clitoris intact, its crucial value confirmed by doctrine. In these
matters the sisterhood had the say and men stood firmly aside. The
sharpest turning-point in a maiden’s life would be that perfectly
236
secular event which rendered her vulnerable to pregnancy and forced
her to turn away forever from the isaka and its collective life. This first
full act of coitus would hardly have been undertaken blindly. When a
maiden gave herself to her chosen man she was not a child or adoles-
cent but socially as mature and experienced a person as her suitor.
Women, controlling the schools, determined the nubility of a maiden
and seem not normally to have hurried matters. Though a lordly local
ruler was entitled to assume the powers of matchmaker, there were
effective countervailing restraints on arbitrary acts, and the
autonomy of the women’s schools was safe from meddling. Besides, it
wasn’t in the interest of the prince to marry off either his men or his
maidens at an early age.<<[lit]
237
At first blush it is quaint to hear that a Kinga maiden should hold
to a plighted troth for seven years—it sounds for all the world like the
maiden in the English folksong, waiting for her sailor with a pure love
undiminished. But if we translate the dreamy idealization into real
terms we may see the absent lover as a tangible convenience for the
Kinga maiden (if not for the English?), serving to exalt the idea of
marriage while in fact allowing the girl to continue labouring at home,
bosomed by her peers. When marriage did come the change was more
profound for the woman, but she may also have been better prepared.
In that respect even the climacteric (though a ‘change of life’ in the
fullest sense for a woman) was a boundary softened by circumstance.
Perhaps the simplest formula for describing the Kinga life cycle
is just this: Each developmental plateau is granted maximal duration. The
security of infancy, prolonged as it usually is into the fourth year of
life, is cherished at a deep level of affective awareness. Some of the
feeling-tones of the infant’s forgotten fight against separation from
its mother are such as to be revived and relived in subsequent stages
238
of life. Technically the mother of a three-year-old is only part of its life
support system, since she so often leaves it in the care of its undelaji
[sibling nursemaid] while she goes off to the fields, but morally the
mother remains the source of life. The Freudians are probably right in
teaching that there is no more replete erotic relationship known to
the human condition than that of the pampered (or even the sorely
tried) infant who always eventually gets what it wants from its
mother. The Kinga case is special in that a woman’s libido is unambigu-
ously fastened on her nursing baby for three or four years, and this
within a system which effectively rules out not only the father but
siblings too as rivals for mother love. It doesn’t seem to me unreason-
able to expect such an infant to show a regressive potential later in
life, a clinging to the status quo for reassurance, especially in dyadic
relations of intimacy. But at least that potential is not magnified by
an interloping sibling.
239
and motherhood. Nothing of the sort is true for Kinga girls. Their
mature body shape and youthful strength generally come years
before menarche, and thoughts of marriage again much later. From
Monica Wilson’s frequent use of “puberty” as a synonym for first men-
struation, I infer that the same delay doesn’t characterize a
Nyakyusa girl’s development; and as it happens she, like the Bena girl,
looks forward with open enthusiasm to menarche and marriage as
virtually to a single event. Since menarche and marriage happen for
the Nyakyusa girl at the end of her fifteenth year after some five
years of preparatory sex experience with her fiancé, we may conclude
she moves directly, if gradually, from childhood to adulthood without
an intervening period of moral liberation corresponding to our term
“youth” [Sw: ujana]. From observation alone I’d have to say that, for
intensity of experience and a sense of charity toward the world, youth
is the peak period of a Kinga woman’s life cycle: can the bachelor
woman herself doubt it? I should think she was personally motivated
to prolong her peer life if only on that ground. What is certain is that
the equation, menarche = marriage which so colours woman’s life
elsewhere in the region is not in the Kinga maiden’s prospect as she
comes of age.<<[lit]
240
warlike rationale of the age village for bachelor men was obsolete but
still talked-up. In spite of the pax, old men were taking more and
younger wives under the Germans and British than in the days when
youths were truly fierce. In perspective it seems to me that young
men acceded in the rampant polygyny of their fathers (70% of married
women in Selya had co-wives in 1934) because the system had made
young men easy to handle. Brothers, who might have had countervail-
ing power in combination, weren’t put together in the same age village.
The peer group ideology of the youths’ age village gave it a strong bias
toward self-sufficiency even in matters of sex. Clandestine adven-
tures were available in quantity with the ill-served young wives of
aging chiefs and headmen. More legitimately, sublimated energy could
be poured into dancing up a storm and talking up a raid on the cattle
of a neighbouring chiefdom. The sheer display of truculence at a
funeral or “war dance,” with the flaring up of private fights and
symbolic combat with invisible enemies seems in the 1930s to have
served some of the safety-valve functions formerly served by
external wars.<<[lit]
241
as laid down by anatomy. Do Kinga actually cross sex lines? Though I
never heard of a female priest, I did hear much of the woman diviner
Hikadiseku who made her name in the early British period. There was
Kipole, the reigning queen in the initial German period: though Kinga
men have treated her as anomalous and read her out of their political
history, she took power and wives.
In mapping the realms and domains for the historical record I’ve
found it feasible to treat the interface of two realms as a ‘boundary’
in the territorial sense, but this imposes my own map-oriented
thinking on what Kinga see quite differently. Wherever nature hasn’t
interposed uninhabitable terrain the boundary fades out, and
wherever Sanga-style warriors weren’t opposed by an equivalent kind
the very concept of boundary fails to apply. In court (=centre) to bush
(=periphery) relations there are only degrees of hegemony and influ-
242
ence. A model made to fit the Kinga orientation to political space
would show court centres radiating their influence directly and
through satellite centres within an indefinite surround. Battles aren’t
very decisive about boundaries when the two sides always have widely
discrepant tales as to which side won. Tribute isn’t clearly decisive
about loyalties when a local ruler is free to send a few animals north in
June and a few more south in September—or delay sending any at all
in a test of relative strength. The freedom men had to relocate and
recombine constituted a real countervailing power, and since new
loyalties could shift the boundary of any weak ruler’s jurisdiction
without fighting, popular mobility left any boundary indefinite in time
if not in space.
243
final age of localism. In a somewhat analogous modern context, North
American sociologists have spoken of a “new frontier” for structural
rather than territorial expansion. Most Kinga continued for the most
part to live under the Sanga régime in small, scattered hamlets. Our
term family is reasonably descriptive for that hamlet life at least in
the busy agricultural season. But their moral order was polarized and
transformed by the courts.<<[lit]
A phenomenology of values?
In the next seven short chapters I try to clarify, through further
selective comparisons within the Sowetan region, what was distinc-
tive in Kinga moral strategies. The series of topics retrieves and
extends the seven dimensions or phases of culture discussed in Part
One, Chapters Two through Eight. In an empirical study of values you
don't begin by naming and defining but observing. The phenomena won't
be found in thin air but clinging to the ground of social forms. By
focusing on individual moral strategies I bring ‘values’ into range. What
moral states does a person of either gender admire and seek to
realize? Who and what will he or she pity, shun, deplore, avoid? To find
out, I look at a people’s institutions as a semiotic mazeway and ask
how individuals read and respond to the signs.
244
as to dignity. In the end, after you have studied her oeuvre on the
culture, and especially the last book (1977), you are in an excellent
position to answer questions about Nyakyusa ‘values’—but not, I
think, to say how many there are.
The Kinga solution was the court centre, akin in many ways to
the ‘ceremonial centre’ as best known and understood in pre-
Columbian Middle America. We’ve seen that a Kinga court system had
to be mounted on top of its “antipolitan” foundation, setting up
boundaries and fixed territories within which the universalistic
sanctions of a political authority could be depended on to keep order.
A fairly simple premise underlies the treatment which follows: the
several “court” peoples have in common the task of managing a trans-
local politics on similar cultural bases. Their institutions in each case
display quite different architecture. A major variable reflecting and to
245
some degree accounting for the differences is the particular value
complex informing each of the political architectures of the region.
246
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TWO
247
construct Proto-Sowetan. It can serve as a heuristic device, if we
assume that the local cultures of 1900 or 1960 are variations on or
from a theme—that when we compare them we are comparing cultures
historically related, genetic cousins and not strangers.
248
neighbours. In effect, the group which forms your work party will be
friends and friends-of-friends; but you will approach the task of
enlisting the group through those you can best count on—those who
consider themselves more closely related to you than to someone
else who is recruiting help the same day. The idiom of recruitment is
that of kinship, but the effective structure of local relations has to be
built up in terms of actual relationships of reciprocity in co-operative
work. A person’s moral reputation for reliability is crucial.<<[lit]
249
Bena and creates a notable dominance gradient as between rich men
and poor; the Culwicks suggest that most work parties are joined in a
mercenary spirit, for the beer offered by a rich man, while only the oc-
casional party is organized on the basis of mutuality. The popularity of
adulterous affairs also distinguishes the Bena case: how shall one
predicate a major institution on friendship among men who can’t trust
each other?<<[lit]
250
as he is sure of his follower-guests. Public expressions of distrust in
such situations are routine, representing the competitive demands
men can put on a plural leadership. Complaints are part of the system,
serving the underlying fiduciary structure without substantially
threatening it.
Sowetan and more generally Bantu social norms don’t allow for
competing leadership positions within a single community, though
there is bound to be covert competition for position within the formal
structure of offices. The rise of a new position of leadership in the
Kinga system entailed the rise of a new jurisdiction: the contrast to
Oceania is complete. Among Ndendeuli or Kinga the concession of rank,
as granting the right to rule by fiat rather than persuasion, amounts
to a recognition of ethnic stratification. Implying not class but caste
differences, it is a countervailing thrust meant to protect the
political culture of the subject community. None of the Sowetan
peoples were internally organized as aristocracies, but Ndendeuli ac-
commodated to Ngoni hegemony this way, Safwa to Sangu, and Kinga
to the Europeans—in reaction to conquest, preferring political excom-
munication to loyalty.
We see best the position of the local ruler in the Kinga moot
(under the pax a semi-official court) where in the role of judge he sits
opposite the defendant but takes no part in the arguments. These
must be led by spokesmen from among the elders sitting on either
hand of the judge. For a ruler to enter the lists and argue would not
only lower him but would shatter the expectations associated with
his rank. This was badly understood by the British, who felt a salaried
ruler ought to be active in the court’s prosecution of a case. During my
fieldwork I came to realize only gradually that a chief or subchief whom
the District Officer had described in a monthly report as lazy and too
fond of drink was probably deserving of praise instead. He would have
been doing his best to preserve the authority of his role by staying
out of the political arena.
251
him . At the local and face-to-face level in both of these societies men
insist on mutuality. Sangilino, the most impressive Kinga local ruler in
1960, had excellent relations with subjects, having no need to hide
behind his office as he strode about to hear news and settle doubts.
But he knew how to judge and could take on a majesty when aroused
which I can only compare to a meteorological phenomenon.<<[lit]
252
communities so differentially affected by schools, churches, roads,
taxes, and acculturation, that I soon abandoned efforts to get a quick
and representative sample of the settlement pattern. But in areas I
did sample (Eastern and Western realms, away from roadnets), the
hamlet size, excluding sole households, was larger: mode, median, and
mean indicate a hamlet of four or five households.
253
The Kinga incest rule taboos only heterosexual connection
between (bilateral) descendants of a common great-grandparent, but
it is understood by children of a given hamlet that they are one kin
ikikolo and, calling each other by sibling terms, can’t become hetero-
sexually involved. In several samples from the Eastern realm, my most
‘pagan’ samples, I have only a single case of marriage within the larger
named neighbourhood. The scope of such neighbourhoods is normally
about a score of hamlets, and these would comprise the home country
of the young men who had grown up there. They’d expect to make their
own settlements within this home country, bringing in wives from
outside. It is perhaps in this context we can best see how in ordinary
life Kinga men may be more secure in their wider network relations
than Ndendeuli (as matters were in the 1950s) and need less support
from their common agnatic/cognatic kinship ideology.
The net balance of friendship and kinship may be about the same
for Kinga and Nyakyusa, but for quite different reasons. Incest and
exogamic taboos coincide for each of the two peoples and are identi-
cal, but Nyakyusa stress inheritance of cattle and wives from brother
to brother, and covet wealth and wives so much that close agnatic
ties have great political importance. Nyakyusa rituals are designed to
exhibit orders of seniority and preference within lineages. No such
rituals could exist among Kinga, for no such lineage structures exist.
The structure of the Kinga householder’s world is epitomized in the
three shrine trees at which he will propitiate the shades: one for male
ancestors of his agnatic line, one for deceased women born to that
line, and one for children of either sex who have died away from it. The
children are asked to pass the supplicant’s greetings along to all the
shade-children in their respective peer groups.<<[lit]
254
Setting kinship aside to favour amity as the foundation of social
ties among neighbours puts the whole arrangement on a basis of
short-term trust. Kinga and Ndendeuli handle this problem by letting
amity ties simulate kinship. They pretend they have lifelong trust, and
sometimes they do. The Nyakyusa use another strategy, laying heavy
sanctions on peer amity among the men of a village. So far as I know
they are the only Sowetan people who, in a region generally featuring
an antipolitan ethic, actually use a form of ostracism. Of course, the
procedure is (as elsewhere in the region) first to accuse a person not
of offending friendship but of planning or insinuating witchcraft. But in
this case the only resolution may be exile from the village. It should
not surprise us that issues of distrust should arise in a village built on
the premise of lifelong friendship among age-peers. It is not surprising
that Kinga men, as they grow into elderhood, find trust growiing
scarcer. If every human society must make some systematic use of
both kinship and friendship, each must find its own way of articulating
the two principles of binding association and learn to live with the con-
sequences.
255
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER THREE
256
It is characteristic of Kinga that they should have told German
missionaries their people had left an earlier homeland (to the east)
under pressure from stronger tribes. Though some informants had
prouder explanations, this example of ethnic self-deprecation was
freely offered. Fülleborn reports (with all the quaint presumption of
his own ethnic group) about the Hehe:
The aristocratic, proud and self-assured demeanour of the Wahehe is
praised by all who come to know them. “He possesses more than the usual
black man’s intelligence, as is readily apparent from his impressive appear-
ance; he shows loyalty, gratefulness and attention to those who are physi-
cally and mentally superior to him; he has excellent powers of
discrimination,” so Adams characterizes the Hehe, “in praise of which he
cannot often enough repeat himself.” Bravery, tenacious endurance and the
loyalty of the self-sacrificing vassal are qualities these uncouth high-
landers have often enough demonstrated, as their history shows, so that
no honest opponent can deny them his esteem (1906: 202-3).
The depth of character the Europeans, yet to face the 1914 war,
so greatly admire is a quality purchased at a price. Reichard’s opening
gambit, after some desperate remarks on the terrain and climate, is
to call the Hehe as “harsh and disagreeable” in character as the land
they inhabited (Ibid.: 240). It’s a hard judgement and one some
Europeans of the time would have been quick to turn back on the
German. But I think we glimpse some ethical and psychological
realities behind, which illuminate Hehe history and are continuous with
257
those Edgerton by less informal (as less direct) means was able to
establish four generations later.
258
The slaughter belt, as we should term it, extended from
Sanguland eastward and southward through Hehe-Benaland, into the
country south of the Bena which Ngoni had found ill-defended and
decided to make their own. The belt as a whole described a broad outer
crescent around the northern and eastern bounds of the Livingstone
mountains, always about fifty kilometers from the lakeshore. Within
the comparatively safe inner zone or crescent so formed the Kinga and
Nyakyusa-Ngonde proto-states stood above the rest. These were
various Nyakyusa-speaking groups, the Kisi, Mahanzi, Magoma,
Mawemba, and some Pangwa communities, all showing a more or less
open pattern of settlement which we may suppose predates the rise
of Ngoni-style raiding and the ivory-and-slave trade.
259
ivory trade whose routes were nearby, and about which each of those
peoples would have been richly informed. Monica Wilson (1958)
discusses the western segment of our region as a “corridor” for
north-south movements, as though there had been chronic movement
of that sort funneled up or down the Rift Valley by the presence of the
two great lakes, Malawi and Tanganyika. But the evidence could be
read in an almost opposite way. Migratory drift can easily account for
all the prehistoric human and bovine movement from Eastern to
Southern Bantu lands, and entails only an insensible social osmosis
quite unlike the militaristic movements we know from other Bantu and
Bantu-Sudanic regions in the nineteenth century. The “corridor”
before the rise of chiefly politics can even be conceived as a typical
backwater, a haven of marginal peoples doing things each in its own
way, out of the mainstream and purposely so: self-selected refu-
gees.<<[lit]
260
to one who will welcome new support. The surest way for a chief to find
ruin in such a system is to risk disaster in war. Understanding that, we
can understand how Nyakyusa and Kinga can be so warlike (seen in the
frame of institution and ideology) yet be so unaggressive ethically and
personally. Their rulers depend on the institution of war, but the
better established they become, the greater their interest in main-
taining limits on the scale of slaughter. The pattern becomes that of
Merensky’s “small, scarcely bloody feuds” though it may entail an
impressive display of fighting potential.
Within the inner crescent the Kinga are a special case, most like
the Nyakyusa. Where Nyakyusa have made explicit the class distinc-
tion between chiefly (royal) and commoner villages, and have brought
all settlement into the village pattern, Kinga stratification is implicit.
In part they have adopted a ‘closed’ pattern, since court culture
supplied the authority required to gather a domain together around a
fortifiable place; and this authority is the mainstay of a military
establishment which has maintained their independence while their
Wanji and Pangwa neighbours have been overrun. But in part the Kinga,
through their bush culture, have retained the older, open pattern of
peaceful settlement near wooded areas where, in case of trouble, men,
women, and children will scatter not gather for safety in the bush.
With the pax, Kinga didn’t abandon their court culture or the bush
pattern, but the two levels tended to integrate around new activities:
migrant labour and the spreading Christian worship, a tax-and-law
oriented administration, and the various enterprises which came to
be associated with gradual westernization.
261
conquest. In any event, the unconverted Nyiha, with whom we are here
concerned, remain a disunited people with a pattern of local rulership
(headmanship) like that of the Pangwa or Wanji but unconquered. It’s
reasonable to think this may be owing to their being more aggressive
personally.<<[lit]
262
function of the way experience combines in action with culturally-given
values. Culture can furnish the values but not the action. Disorganiza-
tion such as Slater convincingly describes isn’t a facet of a value
system but a pathological condition of it. An anthropologist inquiring
about that system from reasonably cheerful informants will learn
little about acts of desperation and bad faith. Conversely, inquiries in
communities where ‘things have fallen apart’ won’t elicit convincing
pictures of truth, beauty, and goodness. But if this point be granted,
what of aggressiveness?
263
Christian churches, missions, and schools; and migrant labour. In 1890
the corresponding institutions would have been the schools of martial
arts and the ceremonialism of court culture. Material well-being
(according to prevailing standards) was a positive facet of Kinga life
at both times. Does this account for the morale? The active and
prolonged realization of moral and material values on a collective scale
is virtually synonymous with high morale. But food and possessions,
like moral values, are the objects of action. The subjects are persons.
Where Gartrell writes that Nyiha showed “in certain situations,
openness to other Nyiha” I should have to write that Kinga showed, in
a wide range of situations, true regard for other Kinga. Where Slater
found it morally shattering to live among the Nyiha I found, on more
occasions among Kinga than I could count, deep comfort and reassur-
ance as to the dignity of man. Where Slater fled from the field for
sanity’s sake I dreamt for years of getting back. Yet there was
Ukwama, among Kinga communities the most ‘conservative’ I knew (in
the same sense that Slater’s chosen field location was a ‘conserva-
tive’ group), where I wasn’t comfortable and probably never could have
been.
264
setting. They refused, and he backed down. Then the father became for a
moment big. He swore at the onlookers over his shoulder: “You Wakinga are
the spoilers around here. Beer is ruinous. You are all drunk and ruinous.” The
main onlooker was a drunken youth. He stayed put. The son dragged him a
few feet by his trousers. They exchanged insults. At length the local peace
officer was called and successfully ordered the young man and some of the
wives away.
Later the son had a fight with the chief wife, who had borne only girls. He
was instigator, reminding her of her failing just to hurt her. She had fixed us
some rather fine potatoes with onion relish, and had become involved in
some pushing with other women when the son intervened. The two now set
to hitting each other with open hand. They were pulled apart, and the officer
called for a rope to tie up the son—at which the latter became docile and
returned to a chair, fondling his own small and scabied son just as he had
been doing from time to time before. He showed a powerful sweetness in his
handling of the boy, as though it had been his son who had been hit by the
‘mother’. The officer also called for a rope to tie up the woman, the chief
wife of the Paramount. He ordered her down on her knees. She refused. At
last they left off without further violence, but throughout there had been a
great mixing and yelling of men and women taking sides. [IV 47]
I knew the community had been a great centre, the Alpha of its
world, in 1890. Probably the burden of stress created by the Sanga
system tended to focus there then, but certainly morale was high, at
the other pole of a long oscillation from the court village I saw. Super-
ficially the community made peace with the pax but at an ethical level
it didn’t. I found the conservative core of the community living out a
senescence of noisy, messy, drunken desperation. It isn’t that I’m so
naive I’d try to give such a characterization absolute credit, and it is
true I was able to pursue sober historical inquiries with some of the
elders, including even a few with evil reputations. But as a relativistic
statement about the moral difference between this and other Kinga
communities I knew, there’s nothing misleading in what I’ve said. Kinga
culture was fully recognizable in this version. Had it been the only
version I’d a chance to see I’d have been in the same fix, I suppose, that
Slater was. In this chapter I explore implications for the study of
cultures in a regional context, and for comprehending the limits of
culture as explanation.
265
dental aberrations in the unbroken sagas of a fixed number of ethnic
communities each with a separate tradition of its own. Yet a cool look
at the evidence suggests that today’s labels (Sangu, Hehe, Bena)
refer to what likely would have been about fifty fairly autonomous
political communities in 1840. The violence entailed in these amalga-
mations has not been dealt with adequately by historians, though the
needed evidence is or has been available enough in our time. The
political reasons for this hardly need to be elaborated. What is
important is to recognize that rose-coloured glasses are as inappro-
priate for the scholar of African as of any other histories, and accord-
ingly set about making sense of the actual record. There is an interplay
between traumatic events and character values. No human
community anywhere is, by virtue of an observer’s or its own rose-
coloured values, immune from brutalization. To think otherwise about
culture is just thinking badly.
266
fortune to find another branch of the Ik who hadn’t been pushed to the
wall and were enjoying high morale, I think it likely he’d have seen the Ik
he has given to us as only what I saw at Ukwama, a version of the viable
culture with some crucial signs changed. That a healthy version of Ik
culture does exist in spite of the troubles in their region has been
confirmed by later fieldwork (Heine 1985).
Once we grant that cultures run deep in mind and long in time the
problems of relativism begin to shrink. It is not acceptable to call the
culture responsible for cruelty, bigotry, and callousness. All these, and
charity as well, are realized in action. Culture gives action some of its
colour but not its impassioned substance. Whatever the majority of
any particular generation are doing, there are ethical resources in
every culture which will sanction an alternative. A culture is not all the
behaviour which frequently recurs in a community, but the shared
ideas, sentiments, and imagery which lie behind the social interaction
accepted as normative there. Suicide, meanness, and masturbation
recur in Kinga communities in response to knowable circumstance, but
can’t be described as Kinga institutions. I suppose every culture has
its underground, a place of fearful fantasy which prefigures what may
happen when things really begin to go wrong.
Does Hehe culture carry a heavy neurotic load from the decades
of looting and slaughter before Mkwawa’s final defeat by the
Germans? The hypothesis seems to me probable enough to justify
special study. The laid-back Bena described by the Culwicks (1935)
had their part in that turbulent history, but it was not the demiurgic
part the Hehe played. Bena never set out to make themselves rich in
cattle by devastating their neighbours, and local leaders among the
267
Bena seem to have been content with a segmentary structure of
power—like the Kinga, Bena without asking received at European
hands a nominal political unity none of their leaders had dreamt of
before the pax. There is at least some reason to think Bena communi-
ties and their neighbours to the north, who were to be welded
together militarily as Hehe, were starting from about the same
cultural baseline in 1840. If so, the differences in character values and
style which ethnographers found between the two ethnic groups a
century later may be largely traceable to differently coloured experi-
ence with war in what I have called the slaughter belt in the half-
century 1840-1890. But it is also more than likely that there were as
many local cultural styles as there were local peoples in what we have
come to call Bena and Hehe territory. As a refugee goup, the Riverine
Bena on which I must depend as my example are not necessarily repre-
sentative for other Bena chiefdoms in the 1930s. Bena never were
united under a strongman as Hehe were during two crucial periods of
their history after 1840.
Hehe were longer, more deeply, and more politically involved than
any Bena communities were. Fear and aggression can generate a play
of human passions on the grandest scale. Much may come together in
war, but much will fall apart. If we are looking for a likely engine of
culture change we may not need to look farther. For the men who
became Hehe warriors, there were decades of forced dislocation and
amalgamation with strangers. For their captive women the same
stresses could only have been worse. Far too many local and personal
continuities must have failed in a lifetime of yearly calls to war, in the
collective pursuit of territorial dominance and personal wealth, to
have allowed a simple synthesis of the local cultures which had to be
absorbed. At the level of language and ethnic identity the amalgama-
tion was complete in half a century. At the level of cognition where
character values are sorted out, I suppose completion—the achieve-
ment of a deep and abiding basis for self confidence—would be out of
the question. This is achieved, I think, by an inner process of invention
which is focused on finding successful moral strategies, and an
outward process of communicating expressive styles which allow a
person to feel at home with neighbours. The two processes neces-
sarily work together: you don’t pursue happiness with much success
where you are contiinually misunderstood in your most spontaneous
actions.
268
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER FOUR
269
eventually will provide interested scholars with a sufficient base—but
there isn’t one now. This is a region in which traditional arts quickly
declined under European rule (Park 1974b), and the descriptions I’m
aware of from early German years are insufficient for any but an
impressionistic survey. For example, it’s not clear that any firm
stylistic distinctions in graphic or plastic art can be predicated of
peoples in the region on the basis of published materials. With respect
to the ‘applied’ art of ironworking the problem is simply that the Kinga
stand so nearly aloneùand I know of no complete collections.
270
Before departure for the field, war games were held by the Hehe, Sangu,
and Bena. The practice was to storm away at each other, either in long
ranks or in columns with war-cries ringing out, brandishing spears or
perhaps also beating a rhythm with the ramrod on a muzzle-loader. Liebert
tells of such “single, pair, and group battles and dances as would have done
any ballet company proud,” which he saw on a visit to Kiwanga. At these war
games the preference is for dressing up in the finest and most colourful
cloths available; it makes a rather unwarlike impression, in any event
according to our notions, that this includes a predilection for putting up
parasols.
Also in peaceful circumstances the Hehe and Sangu, like all the neigh-
bouring peoples, are great friends of the dance.
As to the dance of the Hehe I cite from my diary the following sketch: “In
honour of Sultan Kiwanga, their new chief, the subjugated Hehe today
arranged a festive dance. The men and women danced separately, although
to be sure now and again a woman did join in the men’s dance; naturally with
the obligatory infant on her back, to whom however the trampling and
clamour seemed to warrant only indifference.”
The men stepped into the dance, one tight behind the other, forming a
circle, and continued circling slowly, everyone stamping his feet with all his
strength, a few making wild springs in the air, and the whole company
singing a monotonous he, he, he, he; now and then one man would run to the
centre and sing a few words directed to Sultan Kiwanga. The whole made a
quite wild and uncivilized impression and was hidden in a thick cloud of dust.
Much more conventional was the women’s dance, in which incidentally no
men took part. The women arrived in a close crowd singing, and marched out
to dance clapping hands, splitting then into independent groups. The ring
dance resembles the men’s in that, tight behind one another, the women
slowly move round in a circle with a tripping step, but the chaotic leapings in
air are missing, and the stamping as well. The whole choir also sang, with co-
ordinated handclapping, monotonous songs with various rhythms. The
subject-matter of the songs throughout consisted of ‘Bwana Sakrani’
(Commander Prince), of Kiwanga, and of the subjugation of the Hehe: ‘People
have come from far away to conquer our country’ or: ‘We’d like to show him
off (Kiwanga), so where is he?’ and others of that sort. The text was first
improvised by a song-leader stepping into the centre of the ring and then
repeated by the chorus. Also now and then one woman or another would run
into the centre, only soon to step back into the ring without having done
anything special; so there gradually came to be more women inside the ring,
a place the wives of Kiwanga were also fond of taking, if they were partici-
pating in the dance, something the Sultan evidently encouraged. Now and
again the ring would stop, everyone turning toward the centre and, so to
speak, dancing ‘in place’, accompanying their song with rhythmic body move-
ments.
Apart from these simple turns there were some rather more compli-
cated: for example, dancing in two concentric circles around the song-
leader or the ring wheeling into a spiral as in a ‘Polonaise’.
271
Musical instruments were missing, perhaps because in wartime there
would be none at hand.
Adams describes the dances of Sangu women and lads in quite similar
terms. The wives of Sultan Merere, who performed a dance in our honour on
another occasion in their best finery, were each carrying a staff in the hand:
these women, incidentally, evidenced an endurance in dancing which, if
possible, is even greater than that of any European woman fond of the
dance.
It is true that at these dances the only musical instruments employed
are drums, although the Hehe (like the Bena and Sangu) also possess
guitar-like stringed instruments and flutes, for they are as fond of music
as any Africans.
Glauning informs us of the wholly characteristic fact that Mkwawa
himself when he became a fugitive took a musical instrument with him, and
Arning and Adams mention professional folk- and court singers, on festive
occasions by the evening fire praising the high deeds of ancestors. I myself
saw a blind minstrel at the court of Merere. (Fülleborn 1906: 234-5)
272
Sometimes on the first day, and usually on the last two or three days of
a burial, there is dancing as well as wailing. Dancing begins late in the
morning to the accompaniment of three or four drums, in the swept
courtyard of the dead man’s homestead; gradually it attracts more and
more dancers, more and more of the attention of the onlookers, until the
wailing is confined to the chief women mourners inside the hut, and the
dance is the most conspicuous part of the proceedings. It is led by young
men dressed in a special costume of ankle-bells and cloth skirts and, tradi-
tionally, bedaubed with red and white clay. All hold spears and leap wildly
about, stamping down the soft earth of the grave as they dance. There is
little common movement, each dances alone as if fighting a single combat.
Among the men some of the women move about, singly or in twos and
threes, calling the war-cry and swinging their hips in a kind of rhythmical
walk. Under a tropical sun in a damp heat, with the thermometer often over
90o F. in the shade, they dance for hours. In the dust and noise and excite-
ment there are no very apparent signs of grief; and yet if you ask the
onlookers what it is all about they reply: ‘They are mourning the dead.’
(Monica Wilson 1957: 23-4)
The dancing which the Culwicks describe for the riverine Bena
could be said to combine the form of the Hehe dance with the spirit of
the Kinga or Nyakyusa. As to form, all the ‘tribal’ or ‘public’ dances
described for the Bena are ring dances, and all but one—a grossly
farcical display—of those usually performed in connection with girls’
initiations. The exception follows the dominant Kinga pattern of
blocking men and women opposite each other on the dance ground; but
in their dances the Bena don’t seek to compress the participants into
a massed, circling train or linked ring—Hehe style—from which the indi-
vidual only leaps or licks out momentarily to express emotion. Bena
dancing is more conservative of form than Nyakyusa, comparing to
Kinga in giving the planning and leading of the occasion to a few
dancers and musicians, who will bring drums, bells, and rasps, and wear
fancy head-dresses and colobus armlets to shake. For Bena as for
273
Kinga, individuals of either sex display their dancing by taking the
centre-ground for a short while, then retiring in favour of others.
Nyakyusa, at least on the more serious occasions, seem for the most
part to abandon form in favour of the expression of feeling, so that a
dance becomes a crowd of soloists.<<[lit]
274
Slater describes late-colonial pagan Nyiha informal dancing when beer
|Sw: pombe| is flowing:
The pombe is an arena not only for drink but for dance. The styles are
curious in that they created, it seemed to me, a self-centered together-
ness. Like the pombe itself, the dance expressed the sociability of a rela-
tively antisocial group. Not all dance styles occur at every pombe.
Sometimes only soloists perform. Occasionally, single dancers just
gravitate to the same spot and form little circles or a moving line. But it is
loosely co-ordinated. There are no virtuosos, although a few men took great
leaps for my camera. (Slater 1976: 93)
Safwa in the same year were paying a good deal more attention
to regalia and made a clear separation between soloist-pro-tem and
chorus, though the funeral dancing I saw was less formally articulated
as a ring dance than that Alan Harwood pictures (1970: Pl. IIA).
275
Bena; in a Kinga community it is unthinkable. Nyakyusa, giving leash to
formal anarchy to express intense emotional involvement on the part
of individuals, represent a further step away from patterns of
hierarchy and conformism.
When all the styles we’ve seen are arrayed, the Nyakyusa offer
the only unambiguously ‘Dionysian’ display; but these are the
moments in that society when what is normally underground comes to
the surface. It is a ‘world turned upside down’ just as war itself always
tries to be. Nyakyusa ‘ceremonial anarchy’ ought to be understood in
the context of the mutual sanctioning of collectivist values so char-
acteristic of the age village, and the liberation from those sanctions
which will be experienced when strange youths find themselves
gathered on high occasion in a village of their fathers’ generation. But
further: how could a dance master in this society express, formally and
in an integrative spirit, the relation between kinship and residential
collectivities?
276
throne were as dangerous to the ruler as to his subjects. The role of
the Kinga prince in relation to dance and the other arts under free
tradition was that of patron. The vigour, energy, and creativity of his
people reflected the rightness of his rule, the efficacy of his medi-
cines, and the virility of his person. For while these virtues on the
practical level could be tested only on the field of battle, in the
fertility of the gardens, and in the prosperity of the ikivaga, these
were all places which, like the dance, the ritually withdrawn prince
could not enter.
277
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER FIVE
278
such as sexual style, another person’s unfamiliar behaviour is easily
perceived as ‘unnatural’—that is, the other is taken not as different
by choice but deviant by nature.
But how safe is the ‘normal’ path in the best of times? It is in the
nature of human sexuality to overflow channels. If the ‘normal path’ is
to be securely entrenched, the motivation it prescribes must have
psychic verisimilitude. Sometimes this is achieved in tortuous ways.
The normal behaviour for each gender must make a near approach to
the dynamics of personal motivation characteristic for the culture.
But where heterosexuality is prescribed without mutuality between
the sexes, an elaborate gender symbolism will be contrived to prevent
psychic crossover. The prescribed role-motives are ‘naturalized’—
rooted in the mystical/mythical natures of man and woman. To be
found ‘womanish’ is anathema for the normal man, ‘mannish’ preten-
sions are discredited in woman.
279
By the same token, we could expect that where an exploitative
sexual style is prescribed for men it will be larded with fears about
unclean women and impotence, sacralization of mothers and sisters
to set them apart from the target population of women, and father-
in-law avoidance to do the same for a son’s wives. The most successful
polygynists of the Sowetan region, the Nyakyusa, exemplify this
pattern of ‘naturalizing’ a skewed system of marital privilege.
280
All these points, expressed through case analysis and stated
more diplomatically than I have done, constitute the thematic
material of the book (1977) in which Monica Wilson argues that
Nyakyusa society has always been run for the benefit of men and
elders: that is, at extraordinary social cost to women and young
people. One may speculate that the increase in polygyny (and the
disappearance of nubile maidens) in Nyakyusaland under the pax
reflects the diminished social and self importance of young men
without arms: that it’s been easier for the old men to keep them on
deferred sexual expectation as well as to lock up their (potential)
lusty girl friends in marriage. Native informants, ignoring the logical
circularity, blame the ‘undersupply’ of women on an ‘oversupply’ of
cattle chasing them. I expect the main part of what we see has a
socio-economic explanation—class dynamics. In an age of affluence,
the common man aspires to what had been the rich man’s prerogative:
every polygynist now must be a rampant one. But through the same
colonial period, subject to much the same external influence, the Kinga
remained modally monogamous, confirmed in their ambisexuality and
the pleasures of an extended youth for both genders.
In both societies under the pax, sons were expected to bank with
their fathers a major part of all earnings at migrant labour. But in the
Nyakyusa case the money was directly appropriated and regularly
used to get the old man (only rarely the son) a new wife (Monica Wilson
1977: 87). A Nyakyusa son would typically have to wait for inheritance
(after the death of the father and father’s last full brother) to get
value back for his labour. Even then he would have the share due him as
one of many sons, in a particular standing among brothers and half-
brothers, with no relation to individual input.<<[lit]
281
In Kingaland the money remained the son’s own and inheritance a
minor concern. The influx of money from abroad led to a gradual but
implacable inflation of bridewealths. Though the money now passed
from one old man to another, as in Nyakyusaland, it was the son who
acquired the wife. A son, having borrowed at least as much again as
he’d banked by the time of his marriage, would continue working for
years to pay off debts and purchase the furnishings of the good life
before settling down. Through those years the hard work of his wife in
the fields redounded to his and her benefit. I found no sense among
Kinga young men that this routine was imposed on them by their
elders as a class. Granted there were some young Turks in 1960
prepared to rebel against the inflation of bridewealths, they only
blamed the girl’s fathers for private greed—they didn’t think of
blaming a whole generation. In our discussions I had no sense of deeply
ambivalent father-son relations behind the rebellion. (It soon fizzled.)
282
merger was far from producing an integral, common culture. Here is
Edgerton writing of the Hehe:
...Not that they are to be confused with the Puritans; but, compared to
the other tribes of this study, they are notable in their emphasis upon the
control of sexual desire, and upon sexual sin and concealment. Both sexes
repeatedly said that men and women must learn to control their desires
for sexual intercourse, yet both sexes admitted to having strong desires...
Proper Hehe conceal their sexual enjoyment; it is not something to be
reveled in, as members of other tribes often do (Edgerton 1971: 112-3).
283
Ukinga are distinct. Magoma has always had its own law, completely
its own, and it is as valid today as it ever was.” The scorn was for what
he considered an abuse of the system, the introduction of pre-adoles-
cent girls to coital relations. He averred the practice was against
Magoma’s own customary norms and that there had been genuine
efforts at reform, “but they have always failed. That is Magoma!” We
are left to imagine what the intrepidly heterosexual Magoma think of
Kinga morals—I gathered no testimony on that score.
284
neat boundaries and, within them, uniform practice. But there are
(1960) and long have been “mixed” communities on each of the
supposed boundaries, and no one has ever thought them abomina-
tions. Uniformity is not a salient characteristic of any of these (arbi-
trarily) named cultures. But with those reservations I’ll try to give a
picture as explicit as my information allows. Starting from Nyakyus-
aland one may follow a roughly spatial gradient eastward through
Magoma and Mahanzi to Kinga, already discussed. (But since Wanji
social life has been systematically studied, if not yet published, by the
anthropologist William Garland, I forgo presenting the cursory infor-
mation I have.)
285
that they should be lively and would last about a week; they weren’t
expected to culminate in marriage, differing in this from Nyakyusa
custom at least in the 1930s. In respect of the treatment of
menstruation and various other details of the handling of youth, it
wouldn’t be misleading to call the Magoma a “bush culture” to the
chiefly “court culture” of Selya, though I know too little of their
common history (and particularly of the difference made by the
coming of Fungo military rulers to Magoma from Sanguland, in the
nineteenth century) to do more than suggest this as a line of study.
Magoma, as seasonal transhumants up and down the escarpment, had
always been in contact with the Nyakyusa, while contacts with the
Kinga had been tentative before the Europeans came.
The Mahanzi child, like the Magoma or Kinga, begins peer life in
the fourth year, “because we don’t want one kid around while we’re
begetting another.” The little one will join other children of the neigh-
bourhood, of both sexes, who will be keeping their own house jointly;
but the eldest of these children will be only eight or nine, since at that
age they will be getting sophisticated about sex. “Cat and mouse can’t
live together” was the Mahanzi saying. Usually a children’s house will
have half a dozen residents. Should there get to be many more than
that there may be quarreling. Then someone will offer them another
286
house, so the group may split in favour of compatibility. A boy’s next
residence will be the ikivaga belonging (usually) to the petty ruler of
the hamlet. There the young boys always have a mat to themselves,
collectively, as Berlin Missionary Nauhaus learned on his first visit:
As I lay down to sleep, eight adolescent youths disposed themselves at
the other end of the hut to take their night’s rest, whilst between them
and me were standing half a dozen goats. You can imagine what a lovely
smell this dispensed all night. I didn’t want to estrange the folk, else they
would most assuredly have had to seek out other quarters for themselves
and their goats. Next morning one of my bearers expressed his surprise
that they hadn’t left the hut all to me. The answer was, “We saw that all
your fellows had left the place, so we thought, well, we can’t leave the
master all alone” (BMB 1897: 197-8).
287
manage the isaka with a disciplinary hand. Girls’ houses in Mahanzi
tradition were communal not private, though small and sometimes
shared even with wee girls “who wanted to leave their mothers” but
had neither a mixed children’s house nor a grandmother nearby. The
house would be built by the “fathers” of its occupants and roofed and
daubed by the “mothers,” who thus retained a proprietary interest.
Boys who visited must do so on the girls’ terms and often were sent
packing for sauciness: “Go lie with your mother!”
More like the Magoma girls’ house was the Mahanzi ingumbwe
[pit-house]. This structure is often mentioned in ethnographic
notices as a ‘Kinga specialty’, but I believe it was most popular in the
Mahanzi-influenced Western realm. (This was the house discouraged
as primitive by the Germans.) It was a roomy underground dutch oven
which made an ideal retreat for a frosty night, and here underage
children were not allowed (it was “bad for their health” ) but serious
courtship might be. Still, technical chastity remained the rule.
Regularly before menarche and monthly after each menstruation a
Mahanzi girl must submit to “inspection” by her “mothers” in a sort of
running initiation school which could earn her a most unceremonious
set of welts about the crotch. The ladies would pinch to draw blood if
they found a girl had let a boy go too far: “Stop this! Never again! Do
you want to have a child at your father’s house?” They’d force a
confession from her and a compact to mend her ways. But the
affective colouring of the “school” seems to have been positive in spite
of the occasional pinch. A girl’s “mothers” knew her heart and could
help arrange marriage with her true love, ideally only a year or so after
menarche. These notes comprise the elders’ (1960) retrospect on
tradition, though by that year Kinga~Mahanzi differences were disap-
pearing.
288
reaches menarche and must be delivered, most often by force and over
the outraged resistance of her mother. Tales of child betrothal have a
place in highland folklore like that of the bogeyman in ours. The custom
seems nonetheless to have been protected by contract law, though
only in the face of moral feelings which practically limited it to deals
between two particularly insensitive men.
289
were arranged between virgin youths and maidens as soon as they
were thought ready. About the difficulties such a system would
generate (preventing a following pregnancy for the six years of
nursing, patterning polygyny and early marriage of men, and controlling
arousal among boys sleeping together for warmth) there is unfortu-
nately nothing to be learnt in the good Father’s book. There seems to
be an element of realism missing, though we may take it that certain
Pangwa like to picture their past in terms their ethnographer would
approve. If the bush Kinga of long ago did impose such a régime upon
themselves they must have welcomed the Sanga reforms with open
arms. From my own cross-border information I’d not expected to hear
of doctrinaire heterosexualism among any immediate neighbours of
the Kinga, even the nearer Bena communities. I should none the less
expect the Kinga of court tradition to remain a unique case for their
idealization of Platonic love (sex not left out) between men.<<[lit]
290
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER SIX
291
This particular predatory pattern stands in contrast to the
pattern of Bemba and Yao to the south of the Sowetan region or the
Nyamwezi to the north, whose wars had become instruments of the
coastal slave trade. The Sowetan pattern seems to be an adaptation
of the scenario introduced to the region by Ngoni hordes in the 1840s.
Whatever political consolidation may have been achieved before that
time among proto-Hehe peoples, the idea of expanding a tribe through
capture was new. At the time of the pax the Ngoni had only latterly
found a country and settled down to being overlords, keeping as
subject peoples the remnants of defeated enemies, including notably
the population now known as Ndendeuli. Since the Tanzanian people
called Ngoni today belong linguistically to the Sowetan region, the
conversion of ‘slave’ to Ngoni ‘citizenship’ clearly went quickly while
the horde was on the move. The status of subject peoples in a settled
Ngoni polity is distinct, paralleled in the region only by the Wanji and
Safwa subjects of the Sangu.<<[lit]
292
An escalating pattern of intra-regional warfare was aimed at aggres-
sive political expansion and consolidation. Only on the western
marches were there polities quite settled back down to the sedentary
acquisition of wealth: the Ngonde to the south and Fipa to the north.
Except (perhaps) for the Kyungu of uNgonde, Sowetan ‘sultans’ even
to Merere and Mkwawa were set apart rather by protocols of
deference than by a sumptuous lifestyle. In the absence of structural
economic differentiation, class is a useful concept here here only in its
generic sense. So Ndendeuli or Pangwa, qua subject peoples of the
Ngoni in Tanganyika, may be seen as a subject (but not servile) ‘class’.
293
The best regional analogue may be the exchange entailed in a marriage:
under the form of exchange, two men are affirming an alliance. As to
‘slavery’ itself what distinguishes the Ngonde situation from the
Nyakyusa is the suspension of kinship ties and rights in the former
case; but Godfrey Wilson shows us that they could be reasserted,
where the conflict was internal to the Ngonde polity, if the affected
lineage had survived. This kind of slavery bears a family resemblance to
the institution of hostage-taking, meant to force payment of an
outstanding debt.
All the same, Monica Wilson was right to assert the free
condition of Nyakyusa women even while documenting the abridgment
of their rights on account of gender. The crucial distinction is the one
Sir Henry Maine called a shift from status to contract in the evolution
of law. Where the main guarantor of your civil rights is an organized
lineage, a rupture of kinship ties, whether by war or natural accident,
may reveal you as a creature of the ‘contracts’ or special, reciprocal
arrangements you can make on an individual basis. For a woman, the
main opportunity in Sowetan culture was marriage; for a child, filiation
by adoption; for a man, if the institution was known, service. Each
arrangement is asymmetrical—the castaway is in no position to
demand a full return on service—and results in a standing relationship
of inequality. In some cultural contexts the ‘contractual’ status will
be temporary; but it may also become institutionalized. The ‘contract’
then becomes a relationship of dominance and submission.
294
certainly augmented by the role motives of the seasoned warrior, who
expected such benefit from his female slaves that he was inspired to
battle in the hope of winning more. What is clear is that none of these
peoples had developed the institution of slavery to the point where
they could have handled a strong infusion of adult male captives: the
pattern was extreme cruelty in the field and in sacking settlements,
extending murder even to immature males. Logically we must ask if
women, had they not been a politically castrated class throughout the
region, would have fared any better than their men in defeat.
Supposing that as furious a war pattern might have developed over
the rape of cattle and corn, captured women being thought more
trouble than their worth, I take it they’d have been slaughtered like
men. What is certain is this: whenever Sowetan men escalated
warfare to slaughter, women had no rational choice but to behave as
non-combatants, and by so doing dramatically to confirm their relega-
tion to ‘inferior’ status in the regional scheme of things. The rather
high status of Kinga women must owe much to their location well away
from the region’s outer-crescent ‘slaughter belt’.
295
In discussing legal privilege in the same document (Item 71),
Priebusch holds that slaves are equally entitled with others to enter
an action, the same being true for women. Though “one cannot speak
of a nobility,” there are persons distinguished in war or otherwise who
are called Avatambule, a word meaning “privileged persons.” They are
honoured as individuals, but their families have no share in this. Even
rulers (other than the paramount chief) may be taken to law by their
subjects, such cases being heard by the Paramount.
296
nations have been outlined earlier. The Bena and Hehe are classified by
Murdock (1981) as possessed of hereditary slavery and a “dual” class
system—that is, an hereditary aristocracy which is significantly priv-
ileged as over against a larger commonalty. Had data been available on
Sangu they would probably have fallen with Bena and Hehe on both
scores. Safwa, Nyakyusa, and Ngonde are classed as possessed of
institutionalized, non-hereditary slavery, but only the Ngonde among
these three is regarded as having an aristocracy with hereditary priv-
ilege. With the Nyakyusa, whose aristocratic statuses are only weakly
hereditary, Kinga, Wanji, and Pangwa would be classed on Murdock’s
criteria as lacking stratification. In general, the ethos of the outer
crescent favours stronger status distinctions, whether in relation to
caste or class, while that of the inner crescent favours weaker or at
least impermanent distinctions.<<[lit]
297
may be weak precisely because it is achieved by other means. The
concomitant importance of female puberty rites has obverse signifi-
cance: the need for sanctioning female solidarity is perceived to be
greater. The background facts are the dispersal of women in marriage,
on the one hand, and politicized community among men, on the other.
Here, ritual sanctions (the case of the women) may be seen as an
oblique equivalent to the direct political sanction of mutual loyalty
(the case of the men). Yet turning to the outer crescent, what are we
to think of a female sodality which insists on cutting off a young
person’s erectile organ as a condition to her assumption of adult
sexual privilege? Considered as a message from Hehe women to their
juniors concerning the condition of their kind, the rite seems cruel
however honest.
298
segments of the group) would be fighting among themselves. One
source of stability was accordingly the solidarity of necessity. But
the major source was the liberating status of manhood in each of
these societies, which brought it about that the local community
constituted a league of free citizens. The distinction we make
between volunteers and draftees, or patriots and mercenaries,
suggests something of what I mean concerning the status of the
competent male adult among the Kinga, Bena, or Nyakyusa (and, to
the best of my knowledge, among the other peoples of the region as
well). The Ndendeuli under Ngoni hegemony lost their sense of enjoying
the fullest dignity of manhood, and would not be content until they
had won back independence under the British. What unimpaired adult
status meant for males in the traditional cultures of the Sowetan
region becomes clear when you ask what men lost who were captured
and sold off as slaves. Something else appears, I believe, when you ask
how much women stood to lose in the same circumstance.<<[lit]
299
which affords him his peculiar status, with all the advantages and
disadvantages entailed, is not evidence of blindness. If there is a child
at the back of my mind there is a rational skeptic guarding the front.
The governing questions are: What do I gain by staying? What if I exit?
I have argued that the Kinga system works better, over the long
cycle of a full life, for most women than for most men, since it is
typically women who achieve the greater self-sufficiency: at the level
of ego they are ultimately the stronger sex. But it is equally true that
men are the artists, though the same difference is not apparent
300
among children. Men remain the adventurers, the dreamers, the
lawyers of court and beer pot during the better years of their lives.
They enjoy a less dutiful, less confined, more liberated lifestyle for as
long as their egos stay strong. How shall I then say that men are the
dominant sex in Kinga society, or yet say they are not? The equation
is too simple to fit the facts. If for any of the Sowetan cultures one
gender is to be called dominant it is doubtless the male—at least as
concerns structural surfaces. But when that has been granted, there
is not an end of the matter. Rainbows are not scalar.
301
Gender and its rules
There is no mortification of the male sex organs in the Sowetan
region. A minor exception may be the Pangwa, who perform a token
sort of nicking on the genitals of all children in the spirit of health care.
Females are most severely mutilated by Hehe, least by Nyakyusa.
Where Hehe excise the clitoris to ensure fertility, Bena and Kinga
excise the labia minora to prepare a girl for better copulation. While
there is a common premise that nature is not enough, the ends to
which culture must intervene are put differently. Hehe and Bena tradi-
tionally patterned early marriage for girls. Rev. Priebusch in the Frage-
bogen (Item 14) gives the age for Bena girls as 10 to 12 “that is, while
still children and even younger.”
Nigmann gives the same information for the Hehe, adding that
the seduction of little girls, being no offense, is frequently resorted to
as a refuge from the difficulties adultery might bring. In both cases
the girl’s initiation ought to anticipate puberty, and Brown & Hutt
believed a girl must be initiated to be eligible for seduction—but as
they also believed Hehe women excised a girl’s hymen and, after
showing it to her, buried it under a fruit-bearing tree, we are perhaps
permitted to doubt their information on female matters. Bena women
throw a girl’s labia into the river, evidently as items without value). The
attention of Nyakyusa elders to an immature girl’s equipment is only
conservative and status-conscious: the hymen should remain intact
until marriage in order to guarantee the girl’s prestige and standing,
and make good the full bridewealth. But the cult of virginity in this
case is no cult of chastity, since a virgin can have a busy-enough sex
life.<<[lit]
302
productive work. Women welcomed their man’s return from a campaign
with new wives to share the work, presumably at the bottom of the
domestic hierarchy. By the 1930s, though Hehe values were still
organized around polygyny, practice had succumbed to the realities of
the pax: roughly one taxpayer in four was a bachelor still looking for
cattle; as many, for the most part falling in the final phases of the
normal life cycle, had set up polygynous households; while nearly half
were living in forced monogamy, though girls were still fully married
before menarche.<<[lit]
Against all these cases, the Kinga pattern (as it had become
late in the pax) of courtship in one’s early or mid twenties seems
strangely ‘Western’, though it was hardly that in origin; and the
tradition of court culture—extended stages of male- and female soli-
darity before the consideration of marriage—sets that case apart.
Though the discrepancy in age may have been a decade or more in the
typical Sanga-sponsored marriage, the partners were of an age to
consider themselves peers in worldly experience and competence.
Formal constraints
Affinal avoidances bear directly on relations between the sexes,
since the burden of the taboo, falling on one sex, marks it. For
Nyakyusa it is the young woman, for Bena the young man who will
practise avoidance toward the parent-in-law of opposite sex. But the
constraint, which is life-long for Nyakyusa, is usually soon terminated
by a Bena mother-in-law with an hospitable invitation and a food
exchange. For Hehe, parents-in-law on both sides are categorically
worthy of “ceremonious respect” for the life of a marriage. For Kinga,
this symmetrical rule is reduced to the expectation of mutually
respectful behaviour.<<[lit]
303
course is wanted for achieving a new pregnancy, and with the utmost
directness in the long years between, when women seem to require no
services more personal than economic help.
The same key scarcely applies to the Bena case, where both
sexes manifestly need a running series of fresh intrigues to keep up
spirits, and otherwise have their eyes and ears cocked sideways for
tokens of prestige and bits of gossip. Bena marriages are notably
brittle, Kinga the opposite; but the two cultures have in common the
expectation that a couple will decide such matters for itself, without
reliance on the intervention of kin groups. So, for example, a Kinga man
may let the case of a runaway wife go unsettled for years before insti-
tuting court action to have the bridewealth returned; and it is his
responsibility as the old husband to get it from the new—the kin
groups as such take no formal action, as no corporate group stands to
gain or lose. In spite of the high bridewealths of the post-1945 period,
and the involvement of kin groups in getting and receiving them,
marriage remained a contract between individuals.
304
granted,” often led to divorce, but might easily be settled by the
payment of a cow. The chief sanction upon the woman was mechanical:
the mystical fear of harming her child would lead her to confess
adultery whenever she considered that her husband was not the
father of a child about to be delivered.
The Nyakyusa may be the only people in the world who positively
prescribe intercourse (without penetration) for prepubescent girls,
all the while making a fetish of female virginity. A girl’s virginity at
marriage evidently is to be taken as a sign of the father’s punishing
authority (see especially Nsyani’s testimony in Monica Wilson 1977:
116). A similarly narrow distinction seems to be made in the case of
adultery. You preserve the formalities of obedience and submission to
your current husband while secretly acting out a fantasy of more egal-
itarian and voluntaristic union with a man you accept as lover—only at
best to go to him eventually as a wife wearing only the old mantle of
submission. The adulterous union, like the prepubescent one, is stolen
from reality.
305
Where a Nyakyusa wife’s adultery may be read as a protest
against neglect, Kinga women claim the right to legitimate adulterous
union when their husbands fail them in the marriage bed; yet the Kinga
woman generally seeks recognition in her world through her own
achievements as a gardener and reproducer, not by identity with her
husband, and in this way she enjoys an autonomy which puts her above
such chronic attitudes of protest.
306
Property
Women in each of the four cultures are allocated land sufficient
to their agricultural needs, and generally allowed to dispose of its
product as their own. Rarely do women come to own cattle or (unless
in childhood) have responsibility for their care. Rarely does the
question of home ownership arise: in the context of Sowetan culture
it is not an issue. The question of ownership of tools and furnishings
may arise, but seldom as an important focus of conflicting interests.
Clothes and luxury items have become important since traditional
times, and attitudes toward them have been formed by the national
culture not the separate traditions. But given that clothing in a tradi-
tional community may be exiguous, chattels are few, land is allocated
according to need, and housing is universally provided by the husband
and maintained by a woman’s own efforts, what is the relevance of
property to questions of sex and status?
307
Since Kinga women have an even stronger practical standing
than the Bena, in spite of a jurisdictional ‘ownership’ of land by men, it
is evident that Nyakyusa represent the exception in this sample of
Sowetan cultures. A Kinga woman has her “own” fields in her natal
community, allocated to her as she came of age to do adult work, and
continues to cultivate them after marriage: a husband can have no
disposition over the fruits of these fields though he does have (in legal
theory) in the case of fields allocated to her through his citizenship
rights in the community of their residence. Since the hardest work in
the agricultural cycle is accomplished through the work parties imigovi
which men or women equally may initiate, the legal dominion of men
over the land is little more than a nominal claim. Again, goats belong to
the man’s sphere; but the best herd of goats hardly dignifies a man as
wealthy in the eyes of his neighbours. In traditional times a commoner
would not often keep more than a head or two of cattle; and the two
commoner byres I saw in 1960 only played mischief with their owners’
reputations in a society prepared to set rulers apart but otherwise
committed to habits of egalitarian reciprocity.
308
bore a stronger family resemblance to Bena or Kinga than outsiders
would suppose.<<[lit]
309
the segmentary structure of the society, enjoying their privileges
neither on a state-wide basis (the case of the Zande Avongara) nor
through the extra-territorial mechanism of clientage (the Tutsi-Hutu
case).
310
It is a matter of conjecture how far an original ethnography of
the Hehe, Bena, or Nyakyusa might find those cultures governed by
the same court~bush dual-culture principle I have found appropriate
to the Kinga case, but secondary analysis aligns Hehe, Bena, and Kinga
as one group against Nyakyusa-Ngonde peoples as another. The
crucial differentiating principle is recruitment to office through
‘schools’ in the former group and hereditary ‘election’ in the latter. At
the Hehe court (as known particularly for the period before Mkwawa)
there were the vigendo, at the Bena the Wenyekongo , and at the Kinga
the Avanyakivaga. Young males were recruited on the mixed basis of
birth and promised ability, serving the needs of the court during an
extended period of intensive socialization to its culture, until at
maturity they were deployed as leaders and colonizers to far places
where their continued loyalty to court interests was predictable.
<<[lit]
311
actual sons of a ruler, and can accordingly have realistic expectations
of assuming that office or one of the two it will spawn through the
Coming Out ritual, are “royal”—in short, there are no royals but
princes.
312
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER SEVEN
313
usually rate as the signs of freedom from repressive institutions. The
Swahili words for freedom uhuru and ungwana both refer explicitly to
the contrast slave/free, as though subtler dimensions of the human
condition must wait for the evolution of a merely academic language.
But what we can’t assess directly needn’t elude us in this case.
Freedoms of speech, movement, and career choice can be judged if not
measured on evidence, and they invite cross-cultural comparison.
So it was too with the Kinga priest, not to mention the role-
driven paranoia of a prince. I find that, as with the Nyakyusa, the most
exuberant egotism of Kinga culture is that of warrior youths, whose
314
whole capital was in their healthy bodies. But whereas young
Nyakyusa were supposed to refrain from regular sex relations in order
to have the strength of passion for battle, Kinga by contrast seem
rank Apollonians. Peer sex, evolving as it did from sleeping in herdboy
heaps before puberty over a smoky pen full of goats, should be without
passion or lasting, possessive ego involvement. Heterosexual
relations during the long bachelor period had the quality of fiction.
Concretely, the culture-contrast is between young men for whom
sexual needs are generated which (free satisfaction being reserved
for elders) demand displaced expression—and young men for whom a
non-possessive and largely casual sexual realization is made easy,
while sexuality in the less volatile form (imaginatively) identified with
the tie of marriage is held in reserve.
315
Colonialism, whatever the evils one may choose to lay upon it,
ushered in a period of comparative freedom from the petty tyrannies
of local group and place which derived from the uncertainties and even
obvious dangers of opting out. Brown and Hutt offer, in illustration of
the limits of Hehe patriarchal power, the statement that “a father
can refuse a suitor for his daughter’s hand, but he cannot force an
unwanted suitor upon her.” But elsewhere Brown admits some inform-
ants told him that in traditional times a suitor had no need of the
girl’s consent in marriage, as her father “disposed of her as he would,”
and concludes the girl probably “had less freedom of choice than now.”
<<[lit]
316
lying problem of compatibility, and movements of residence are
frequent. But Gulliver is able to picture such movements as rationally
motivated:
In brief, a household head decided to move his residence if he considered
that in his present community he was not obtaining, nor likely to obtain, the
security and reliability of cooperation that he required; and if he considered
that he could obtain more advantageous conditions elsewhere (1971: 340).
317
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER EIGHT
318
be a “wide network of social relations” connecting the individual human
beings or persons comprising a society. But he was not slow to
perceive that while the “concrete reality” of any given social structure
did link particular human beings to one another, science must interest
itself only in regularly recurring phenomena—as he reasoned, in the
social forms which may be abstracted from concrete observations of
(say) a specific kin relationship like ‘mother’s brother/sister’s son’.
This led him to treat social structure in the way most since then have
done—as a pattern of role-relationships which may be neatly
abstracted from the smells and passions of that “certain number of
individual human beings in a certain natural environment” with which he
and we began. It is to re-incorporate the sensual, emotional presence
of persons in a discussion of the regular-and-recurrent in human rela-
tionships that a student of society turns to involvements.
319
If all the ideas of this founding father of our science were strung
on a line running from the field to the sequestered armchair, this
slightly developed notion would be the farthest out. It says analytical
frames close to common sense are possible along with the more usual
kind. True, a person changes as he or she moves from one role-relation-
ship to another. Yet the person also remains recognizably the same. A
consistent social personality can be inferred, quite apart from what
is owed to a particular genetic destiny.
320
image to its matrix, not to reify it as a ‘thing in itself’. What I take
from the story of Radcliffe-Brown’s curious retreat from reality is
that we can’t do without portraiture, however clumsy and difficult
that holistic approach to knowledge may prove to be. Will anyone hold
that families simply hold together and thrive when the several
members have learned their roles properly, and fall apart when the
lessons failed? No more with any human institution.
321
Nyakyusa
The Nyakyusa settlement is an ‘age village’ only from the
viewpoint of the male. A girl will stay with her mother until she marries
to the village of an older man and his peers, whose wives will vary from
about the men’s own age down to hers; eventually her co-wives may
include girls younger than her own first-born. But a bride is obliged to
keep a rule, avoidance of her father-in-law, which engraves upon her
mind the line of segregation which, from boyhood, her husband has
respected—the boundary which sets apart father and son. It is that
pattern of segregation which makes possible the ethical emphasis of
Nyakyusa on equality (fraternity, friendship) in spite of undiminished
commitment to agnatic values. It is because a man’s wives can have no
share in the deeper ethic of the age village that their readiness to
keep its boundaries must be forced, through the mechanical observ-
ance of taboo. Among a bride’s peers will likely be wives of her father-
in-law; but her avoidance cuts across the alliance she might form with
them: her world is cramped and ill-formed by the standards of men. If
Nyakyusa women act out, through adulterous affairs, half-conscious
motives tending to annihilate the particularistic ethics of marriage in
favour of the open ethos of mutuality, they are evidently rejecting
Nyakyusa rules in favour of Nyakyusa principles.
322
bachelor period for males was as stormy when their business was war
as a generation later; and it is hard to believe Nyakyusa men would not
have developed a measure of hidden resentment toward women by the
time of their first marriage.
323
The Nyakyusa case suggests that the pattern of personal
involvements typical of a given human community will reflect a mind
characteristically stamped by its culture but denied in the surface
meanings of its institutions. The pattern of adultery smells of
youthful rebellion against the iron rule of elders, but equally smells of
woman’s rebellion against male domination. The two anti-structural
themes find a common vehicle. Assessing the culture as one favouring
men over women, elders over youth, Monica Wilson’s retrospective For
Men and Elders (1977) details the dissatisfactions of the two classes
disfavoured. The pattern of adulterous involvements in an otherwise
well-ordered society is prime evidence for an observer who would
study the emotional consequences of what we may call, with only a
measure of irony, friendly repression.
Kinga
The love of brothers in Kingaland is not realized as a love
between equals. The elder-younger relationship carries much of the
emotional burden of father-son bonds elsewhere. When a man did not
risk becoming a father before his young manhood was over he had small
chance of seeing even his eldest son into adulthood; the younger sons
became, as it were, the emotional inheritance of the eldest. But the
character of the tie was special, going beyond the intensified loyalty
expected of all close kin, since brothers were supposed to be lovers.
What was unthinkable between father and son, sexual intimacy, was
idealized between elder and younger brother. In Western bourgeois
culture the nearest analogue would perhaps be the idealization of
romantic love between husband and wife in a system of early-arranged
marriage. But Kinga did not expect all brothers to live together, or
even that a pair who were emotionally close should stay together
where either would thereby lose autonomy. Where the co-residence of
brothers does occur the result is nothing like an extended family—an
elder who assumed authority in daily affairs would soon drive his
brother to shift away. Involvement within the tie, though it seem to
strengthen it, may in fact create a perishable thing, like a fine
structure in glass left unannealed.
324
generous love but the heart does not find it the scene is still played
out, if without conviction. There is nothing for the good citizen to do
but adopt a strategy of patience. Confrontation is wrong.
325
as they, truculence at a Bena dance seems to be better controlled,
and fornication less aggressive if no less popular. What is most
singular about Kinga women, comparing them to Nyakyusa or to Bena-
Hehe, is their unguarded chastity.
Bena
In the Sowetan region as it is so far described in the literature
the nearest approach to free love is in the realm of the riverine Bena.
Here is a typical text:
The Wabena quite frankly regard sexual pleasures as the normal hobby
of every normal man and woman, though in polite conversation they
maintain a conventional standard which might leave the stranger with an
impression of chaste women and faithful husbands (Culwick & Culwick 1935:
361).
And does near-free love make blithe spirits of them all? Bena
society traditionally was tri-stratified, with a distinct ruling group
set apart from the commoners in rank and ceremony, and with a
sizable slave caste. Like the Hehe, Bena chiefs kept a royal class of
slaves at the capital, the wakumaguru, who seem to have had a
bodyguard function and to have acted as official executioners . Death
or mutilation could be meted out by the chief as punishment for crime,
and the poison ordeal imposed upon an accused witch. Even under the
Germans Bena native authorities succeeded in seeing their ‘witches’
hanged.<<[lit]
326
Nonetheless, a generation after the pax the Culwicks describe
an easy-going society with most of the signs of sound mental health.
Bena militarism appears to have been strongly individualistic at the
motivational level rather than repressive. In the realms of sex and
expressive culture indications abound of a tolerant, empathetic
people. At a girl’s initiation the predominant mood is fun not fear.
About childbirth, women are advised to be relaxed and self-contained,
prepared for an ordeal but not an overwhelming one. When a young
mother dies, other women long past childbearing (but not past meno-
pause) are often able to induce lactation and save the baby. For the
health of a young baby (as if to say parental quarrels endanger it)
several months after delivery a couple should ceremonially compro-
mise the post-partum taboo. Abstention from sex is regarded as a
virtue but one kept in reserve, to be used only as a collective response
to crisis, as for controlling an epidemic threatening the whole society.
Co-wives on the whole are friendly and value one another’s company. A
woman showing ill-treatment or neglect is able to initiate a divorce
with impunity. In general, dancing is frequently indulged in for fun alone,
as well as for ritual ends; moral reciprocity is pervasive; and on both
individual and institutional levels the society has proved itself quickly
adaptable to new circumstance.<<[lit]
Hehe
When we consider the evidence of Bena openness we are almost
obliged to register the Hehe as a polar opposite. Where marriage for
the Bena is an arrangement of convenience, Hehe marriage is a hard
contract, frequently giving rise to litigation, entered as “a necessary
condition to a satisfactory and dignified life” and protected by “a
mass of rules governing social contacts.” If we can trust the impres-
sions of the separate observers of the two cultures, where Bena
327
women like polygyny because they enjoy the company of other women,
Hehe women have the same preference because they like to have junior
women to help with the work. Against Bena informality and easy spon-
taneity we must place Hehe formality and compulsory exchanges of
politeness with familiars:
Even the most superficial observation of Hehe interaction was suffi-
cient to call into question the sincerity of these polite, deferential encoun-
ters. The Hehe themselves readily admitted that they were insincere, and
said that these expressions of concern and caution in their everyday
relations with each other were essential to avoid serious affront or insult.
The Hehe...lived in continual dread of affront, either given or received
(Edgerton 1971: 94).
Where Bena men preferred to look the other way when they
risked learning something of a wife’s amours, the Hehe husband was
consumed with suspicion, so that a wife dared not converse with
another man even on the most public occasions. Where Bena conspired
to ignore open secrets in favour of smooth social relations, Hehe at
least in the farming areas Edgerton studied (and their social organi-
zation, their ‘culture of rules’, is largely comparable to that of the
Culwicks’ Bena) hide each from each behind a veil of secrecy which
seems to be inviolable even in private.<<[lit]
Can we escape wondering how far the signal (but seemingly ahis-
torical) political solidarity of the Hehe is a reflex to their masculinity
problems in forming ordinary ties of amity at the level of interpersonal
relations? I part company with Radcliffe-Brown and take issue with
the well-known views of Emile Durkheim in suggesting that a psycho-
logically sterile description of the social institutions of any of these
peoples would be profoundly incomplete at the level of explanation.
328
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER NINE
A polymorphous culture?
Cultural regions in the folk world show a tendency to correspond
spatially with ecological regions. That is to be expected, since folk
groups are usually foragers or cultivators working closely with nature;
but if nature can set a boundary it can’t build a culture. One ecospace
may support several cultures, either layered or separated by political
boundaries. Dualism takes many forms, and is often found within what
the ethnographer deems to be a culturally single community, not a
composite or mix. One of the tasks I undertake in a later chapter is
placing the court/bush dualism of the Sanga system in comparative
perspective. But a common history (whether by reason of common
origin or prolonged intercourse in situ) is the decisive factor in
producing what family resemblance we find among a region’s
component peoples. The extent of such resemblances wanted to
justify serious talk of a single regional culture is obviously a matter for
judgement.
329
I opt for the latter. I think it’s clear that the principles of
cultural coherence on a regional and inter-communal level have to be
distinct from those we assume in our community studies. But for
reasons which will appear I don’t think we should try to comprehend a
regional culture either as a mosaic (a harmonious structure of inde-
pendent entities) or as some kind of polymorphous historical growth
revealing its true nature in the range of its incarnations. In this final
part of my study of Kinga and Sowetan culture and its history, I
assume that the general relationship between region and community
will have to be sought with an eye out for subtleties. One is not the
whole, the other the part; one is not the system, the other a
subsystem. We do better to entertain such a mathematical analogy
as that of matrix to element; or Sussure’s linguistic paradigm, parole
and langue, which sets actual patterns of speech in a particular
community against a background of the full resources an historically
given language offers. But analogy can only help us toward the under-
standing wanted. I venture to say that every local culture implies a
regional, either living or recently died away: unless there is somewhere
a Shangri-la. The implications of this for culture history seem to me
immense.
330
mind such studies as Abram Kardiner 1939, Cora Du Bois 1944,
Gregory Bateson 1958, and Margaret Mead 1968, 1970—assumed
the cultures they studied were integral wholes. Kardiner even went so
far as, in effect, to derive the institutions of the external domain (his
“secondary institutions”) from those of the internal domain (his
“primary”). I never thought much of the argument, as it seemed to me
the author’s psychoanalytic bias had led him to ignore the problem of
causal circularity which has to be addressed in any model of cultural
transformations. How does one decide which domain, the intimate or
the public, might deserve to be called ‘primary’? Better, I think, to see
them as cohabiting a cramped space, continuing an endless dialectic.
The deepstuff and the institutional routine each keeps its own
dynamic, though neither can simply go its own way. Without denying
there are many ways of cutting a conundrum, I find the assumption of
a seamless fabric in culture unacceptable. The idea that “personality”
might be treated as a culture in microcosm, with “culture” to be read
reciprocally as a modal ‘personality type’ in macrocosm, was wildly
wrong even for the typical island cultures where, in good measure, the
generative work was done.
From early masters like Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber, or from
comparativists like Fred Eggan, we long ago learned how much of any
culture is likely to be shared with peoples historically related.
331
Kroeber’s “cultural and natural areas” were mainly conceived as having
each a climactic centre of intensity, at any given time one richer in
things, arts, and institutional elaborations than the others. But a
regional culture was a ‘culture whole’ not a mosaic:
We mean a regionally individualized type or specific growth of culture
when we say “culture area,” much as a historian may use “the Eighteenth
Century” as a short way of referring to the culture that was characteristic
of eighteenth-century Europe. It would be well if there were a brief technical
term for the naturally individualized growths of culture with which histor-
ical anthropology is more and more dealing. But...the general thought of our
day is not yet sufficiently concerned. (1947: 2)
332
interpersonal dependency; and (iii) that within the broader semiotic
sphere (what I have pictured as a regional ‘forest of symbols’) a
plurality of such ‘deep’ cultures will normally exist, corresponding with
the actual boundaries of persisting intimate contact—the
component endogamous populations. Intimacy here refers to
prolonged relationships of mutual emotional dependency—face-to-
face interaction of the kind which deeply tests and forms the
character of participants.<<[lit]
If it is not rules but ties of trust which are the nexus of human
intimacy; and if, on the other hand, rules are the basis of all trust in
relations with strangers, the dynamics of deep culture and routine will
always evince separate principles. But if so, where then is ‘depth’? In
sorting out persons, a fair clue might be ‘individuality’, since we easily
see crowd behaviour and peer conformism as marks of superficiality.
Among families or among culturally distinct communities a compa-
rable clue might be ‘style’—that is, pattern singularity. These words
are not always used to carry such a load of meaning but I think for
present analytical purposes they can. Thus what all or most Eastern
Bantu cultures have in common is their ‘civilization’; this divides into
‘regional cultures’ comparable in scale to the Sowetan; and this in turn
333
comprises local ‘cultures’. When strangers of unrelated civilization
happen to meet, the mutual intelligibility of their behaviour is not
negligible but can be conceived as ‘quantum one’. When they have their
civilization in common we have ‘quantum two’. Within a regional culture
there will be some confidence as to the rules they should follow to
avoid misunderstanding—‘quantum three’. Within a local culture, spon-
taneous interaction is usually cued without significant error. But this
‘quantum four’ refers to arena behaviour not intimacy. For successful
cuing in the emotional interaction of intimate relations you will want
all the intelligibility human nature allows. Few of us, I think, rate better
than a ‘quantum six’. But the strain toward intelligibility is the force
which generates style and the refinement of communication at all
these levels.
334
domestic sphere of a neighbouring people will occur at a rate slow
enough to let the host group call the shots where it comes to what is
and what is not to be tolerated on the plane of intimate relations. We
know the situation in a special form from our own recent past or from
other peasant traditions where the young spouse imported to an
extended family is put through a second prolonged schooling in morals
and manners, even reduced to a childlike condition, for the purpose of
“deep” resocialization. Contacts with strangers are easier in the
external sphere. Rules are explicit; deeper moral and motivational
differences can be kept under cloak. The two contextually sensitive
meanings for the english word ‘intercourse’, social and sexual, suggest
something of the difference I refer to—the two senses are so seldom
really confused. The sharing of accessible routines is easier, and
easier to maintain, over greater social distances than the sharing of
that morally ‘deeper’ stuff which evokes the level of mutual trust
wanted for durable relations of intimacy. The semiotics of social
context knows no deeper divide than this. It becomes pretty obvious,
when you look at culture this way, that the kind of stabilization which
works in the external domain is not the kind wanted for steadying
intimate relations. We move from ‘learning’ into ‘ego’ psychology here.
335
sort in the management of those close or intimate personal relations
which bestow on another a significant leverage on one’s own ego. But
if these two modalities of intercourse stand in contrast as ideal
types, there is no indication they don’t mix in practice. Echoes of the
pragmatic may be discovered in the bedroom, fear and anger may be
Ego’s response to a stranger. Politics, social control, and religion are
probably nowhere affect-free. Stylistically, the ‘hard’ institutions of
a regional culture are certain to be drawn into and locally reflect the
separate value spheres, the ‘soft’ cultures of each component
community. The Kinga prince has a different part to play than the
Nyakyusa; the uses and abuses of witchcraft rhetoric are not the
same among Hehe, Bena, or Kinga; ancestor propitiation is a separate
proposition—which says a different thing to the sociological
observer—in each of these different countries. But to see the differ-
ences you must look closely. Each of these institutions will sound
much the same throughout the region, in the answers an interviewer
can expect to questions. The soft parts of a culture will only lightly
affect local discourse on the rules. No more does practice dictate
concept than the reverse. Sometimes it is as though the essence of
what is Kinga must be what is least apparent to Kinga themselves.
336
seem to do, needing no meeting of minds. Within the Eastern Bantu
stream, at least, contacts are lively and based on a good acquaint-
ance with neighbours. In most ethnographic regions it would be
prudent to suppose that every ‘bamboo curtain’ is permeable, and
neighbouring peoples always harbour some individuals who can claim a
native’s understanding of the cross-border culture. In those circum-
stances the many aspects of culture which merit description as
‘routine usages’ not embedded in a ‘deep pattern’ will readily be
comprehended in cross-cultural contacts; and with respect to these
traits, we should not expect within the region a high index of cultural
divergence over time.
337
office among Bena and Hehe is ‘chief’, while Kinga and Nyakyusa rulers
are quite appropriately called ‘princes’—their charisma depends more
heavily on ritual. This shift on the map of cultural affinities reflects,
as we shall see, the way deepstuff tends to sort out the four peoples.
Another major divide, unexpected on the basis of political and
linguistic affinities at least, is that between Hehe and Bena: Hehe
strongly privatize women, Bena do not. Bena and Kinga are similar in
this, though contrasting in their sexual orientations and the actual
practice of female chastity in dealings with men. Nyakyusa, most like
the Kinga in sexual orientation, are nonetheless unlike in their
treatment of women. Nyakyusa girls are “liberated” before marriage,
but subject to a rigid discipline afterward. Kinga girls are chaste (in
the usual sense) throughout a long bachelorhood, after which they are
self-disciplined members of a sisterhood of local women. The cultural
affinities one might expect from the distribution of kin terms, and
from the kinship systems as such, are hard to assess; but Hehe-Bena
clearly form a group to which we may attach the Kinga on the ground
of general similarity, with Nyakyusa again the outsider. But at least
one terminological tie respecting same-sex parallel cousins links Kinga
to Nyakyusa. This is readily associated with the fact that Kinga and
Nyakyusa domestic arrangements are of a kind aberrant for the
region—in fact, for the African world. But the exact significance of the
terminological borrowing is elusive.
338
tion of males. What it comes to, though, is a repressive privatization
of women on the one hand, collecting them in the village of the elders,
and the toleration of a fugitive, devalued bisexuality on the other
hand. In the youth villages, the few who are allowed wives are expected
to share. This results in a moral strategy for males which features a
prolonged period of ambivalence in young adulthood; the elders say, it
makes them better warriors. When the youths do at last take over (in
the unique “coming out” ceremony described by Monica Wilson), they
put their sexual ambivalence behind them but perpetuate the inter-
generational divide, getting theirs back by collecting cattle and
women as their fathers had. Kinga moral strategies are quite differ-
ently structured: the main divide is between the men’s world and the
women’s. Within each sphere, same-sex intimacy is free of repressive
rules or privatizing competition. Heterosexuality is associated with
marriage and procreation; ego-involvement in the marital relationship
is relaxed.
339
to a discussion of the Kinga, seen in a more nearly global anthropolog-
ical perspective. Close comparison within the Sowetan region has
served the purpose of portrayal within the seven selected frames of
Parts One and Three. I turn now to the more general problem of reading
the drama of Kinga life with some of the analytical keys found in the
ethnographic literature from other parts of the world.
340
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TEN
Noticing style
People become Kinga by using their heads. In this book I have been
exploring the way Sowetan people, especially Kinga, have used their
intelligence in meeting the exigencies of everyday life. I have used a
method of controlled comparison within the region to bring more defi-
nition to my sketches of Kinga culture. By showing what they might
have been, what they nearly were but never did become, I have thought
to present a reader not with a single portrait but a series done from
different angles. Most of us judge others in everyday intercourse by
the ways they resemble or differ-from contemporaries in about the
same walk of life. In some ways we can know them better from doing
that than someone does who stands too close, or trusts instant
intuition.
341
Any good field study should provide some approximate answers,
and a Conventional Wisdom has evolved within the discipline of anthro-
pology for proceeding with the data of direct observation. We have
some theoretical models which are meant to apply generally. No one
supposes they offer perfect illumination, but they do seem to offer
refinements on common sense. On that basis I might have framed my
earliest expectations in this fashion:
342
much explanation. Kinga have simply created a non-standard culture—
the models may fit the general case better. But the questions do
point to three problematic features of Kinga culture which merit
discussion against a wider ethnographic background than the
Sowetan region. Exceptional cases can have general significance.
343
Kinga is a severe shortage of intelligence on the side of the ancients—
a position which rather strains credulity.<<[lit]
344
values their divergence is absolute. To vary the terms of discourse, we
wonder why two unconnected communities, having independently
developed what seem to be the ‘same’ institutions, have sanctioned
incompatible moral ideologies. There is the old (but still essentially
unreformed) convention in psychological anthropology that we must
look into the typical or modal personality of a human community to
explain the peculiarities of its culture. Those prolific Harvard sociolo-
gists, Sorokin (1947) and Parsons (1957), may have agreed on nothing
else. I’ll call this position configuration theory—it is one I’ve sniped at
before without naming. I oppose it with the position I call style theory.
Style theory denies certain fundamental premises usually hidden in
the concept of personality, understanding the relation between an
actor and an environing culture in dialectical terms.
345
The redintegrative ego process here presupposed renders
personal fate undetermined and undeterminable. Ego has to deal with
a stochastic not a trajective career line. The major internal source of
stability is a family of weak forces corresponding to the observation
that things more often than not turn out as expected, and expecta-
tions are usually extrapolations of past experience. Weak forces,
always operating in the same direction, are not to be discounted over
the long run, as homologies in the rise and decline of civilizations
show—analogies are plentiful in physics, climatology, oceanography,
medicine, organic evolution, linguistics, or institutional economics.
But weak forces are also responsible for a great amount of sudden
change. Just as a tornado is a creature of concatenated weak forces,
the most fateful electoral swings in the history of modern democra-
cies have been owing to popular surges of the kind chaos theory is
better suited than analytical science to explain.
346
commoners, non-Spartiate Laconians who lived in their own, self-
governing villages.
Other Greek states were ruled by a peaceful aristocratic regime. But
that was not enough for Sparta. She had conquered the Messenians, and
for centuries was compelled to hold them down by force. She could do so
only by developing the whole Spartiate citizen body into an armed and
trained master-class, free from the necessity of working for a living. This
development doubtless started during the wars of the seventh century,
and may well have been encouraged by the struggles of the demos...to
extend their political rights (Jaeger 1945: 85).
347
The most telling contrast between Kinga and Spartan cultures
is probably the antipolitanism of the one and the iron patriotism of
the other. These are in each case features of the ethos of the people
but features rooted in the political/military institutions established
by a regional ‘culture of rules’.
This tale talks to the point. When Ujazi fell from grace it was not
because he was twisted. He was thrown into an institutional frame
without being (re)socialized to the moral strategies appropriate to it.
A fine scholar, after completing his school exams creditably he had
been taken into an internship in administration just as colonialism was
taking its final bows. In his mid-twenties he was appointed to the
most responsible salaried administrative position in uKinga and took
to the job with a lot of zeal and some good ideas. After only five
months Ujazi was dismissed and briefly jailed for peculating. While he
was later assisting me in the preparation of some language
documents we had an opportunity to discuss the experience. To put it
simply, he had adopted ‘old-style’ career strategies in a ‘new style’
role or office. There is a complex, multi-layered (‘laminated’) motiva-
tional package associated with any social role. Nadel (1957) may treat
his ‘role attributes’ as amounting to hardly more than a ‘job descrip-
348
tion’—Ujazi was doubtless better instructed than any of his prede-
cessors had been in the duties of a chief under the newly independent
government of Tanganyika. When a quick, strong Kinga bush youth took
a role as apprentice warrior at a royal court he learned efficiency at
numerous instrumental tasks. Exercising his intelligence, he acquired
the motivational complex associated with war and barracks living,
Sanga style. It was a school of hard knocks. The best men coming out
of that school became the big men (avanyivaha) of a Sanga court. That
kind of learning is what was wanting in the preparation of Ujazi as a
‘modern chief’. Institutions only work when there is a whole person in
each of the roles entailed. The whole person gets there by pursuing, on
a well rooted basis of self-concern, adaptive moral strategies in the
appropriate social maze. Good fit between person and role is hard won.
349
to attract young men to its barracks, and the formality of the trial-
court is part of the show by which men make sure women won’t be at
ease there. Funeral manners are certainly special, but the business of
finding out who your friends are is important after a death, and it does
get done at a Kinga funeral. I find it hard to say in such context that
the institution, taken whole, should fall this way or that. Expressive
and instrumental dimensions are subtly infused in the action. It isn’t
always possible to find the analytical catalyst to precipitate them.
350
of a simple action has taken place. A simple model of situated action
ignores the dialectic steering the actor’s moral career.
Did not Soda and his friends by the gentleness of their assault
guarantee their own failure—and if so, was it not in another sense
their victory? By their rhetoric they induced their girlfriends to
perceive marriage as choice between father and lover, something it
never had been. Choosing between maiden love and marital love, bach-
elorhood and motherhood, timeless youth and the measured aging of
the mature life phase—the traditional structuring of woman’s
career—was lightly but radically challenged. And didn’t these progres-
sive young men by including maidens in a ‘political’ movement step
cleanly out of the traditional frame segregating male and female
roles? At different moments and in different terms Soda and his
‘young radicals’ were aware of all these equations and, no doubt,
countless others. Which is the equation that accounts for what they
did? or what, in the end, they failed to do?
351
baby-tending chores. Ordinary ‘personality’ theory can’t really do
justice to such ordinary facts. The case of the Kinga may be unusual
but in this respect is hardly unparalleled in world ethnography.
I’ve argued for the presupposition (of style theory) that a redin-
tegrative ego process characterizes the whole of the life cycle of a
normal person and entails a continuous burden of forming and
reforming the self. Let me concentrate on the ‘personality changes’
(as standard theory might see the matter) which occur for men and
women at marriage in the traditional setting of Sanga court culture.
A man at marriage would have spent his whole youth (as much as
twenty-five years) enjoying a homophilic relationship with peers in
which possessiveness was always sacrificed to the maintenance of a
balanced pattern of poly-dyadic network relations. Responsibility was
understood within an institutionally sanctioned frame of discipline
and collective decisions. His deepest concerns have been those of a
barracked soldier who must shine with individual glory and thrive on
the sentiments of political loyalty. How could one worse prepare a man
for the next stage of his life, where he is to be a lusty begetter of
children; a farmer necessarily in competition with neighbours over
scarce means; and for the first time a man of property in the form of
herds, houses, and granaries for the loss of which he must bear the full
brunt of economic ruin and moral bafflement?
352
in relation to the bush Kinga they had settled among. The new men
might show every sign of self-confidence, even (as one gathers from
anecdote) to hubris.
353
strictly. Sentient motivation has been well studied by laboratory methods,
and the assumption that common principles would hold right across the
vertebrate universe has been justified by experimental results. The same
work has confirmed a generalizing science of human behaviour, as human
subjects can be recruited to laboratory games on about the same level as
rats, and because individual inscrutability evaporates for either species
with the controlled replication of behavioural events. Children can respond
to praise as rats to pellets. But from the fact that punishment and reward
carry an explanatory burden for both species alike, we may gather that the
behaviouristic study of sentient motivation has not, in elaborating common
sense, overturned it. To say that a rat is rewarded by a pellet or punished
by shock is tantamount to saying the cat wants milk or is afraid of the
dog—anthropomorphism is only a little less explicit in the locutions of
science, and the justification of the term motive really rests on empathy
with a fellow sentient being. Mice and men are assumed to share a common
condition. No doubt it is our duty to be sceptical and resist the explicit
terms of empathy, but the hypothesis which would justify it is not discon-
firmed by meticulous observation of human and rodent behaviour.
354
tions that personal motivation provides a bridge from the sentient life, in
which the ego is always partly but never wholly submerged, to the institu-
tional. People are rarely content to pursue satisfaction as their raw senses
define it, they pursue those states of being they identify with the good
life—a conception which has meaning only in the light of a particular value-
system and which cannot be passively learned. We see a familiar institution
in a fresh way when we first see it in the context of a typical biography.
A pertinent parallel
I found a suggestive parallel to this three-level scheme in the
philosopher Karl Popper’s intellectual autobiography (1976). He was
always much concerned with body-mind problems, and resisted
monistic theories of reality. The final three sections of Unended Quest
deal with his struggle to fit what some of us would simply call ‘culture’
on a firm metaphysical basis. He offers three worlds: of things, of
subjectivity, and of “facts partly produced by the human mind” (pg.
194). This last is his ‘world 3’ and though it starts with insistence on
the reality of our human intellectual heritage, such as the calculus or
the syllogism, it grows to include (by clear implication) human institu-
tions, codes of law, works of art, and the like. World 3 is thus a world
of emergent reality, a cultural reality which is not seen with the same
eyes everywhere but is not, all the same, scientifically deniable.
Popper discusses the problem thoroughly in his collection of fugitive
articles (1972) on objective knowlege.
355
Switching from a social-psychological to a metaphysical frame
draws attention to the critical difference between the propriate
self—which is ‘real’ only by the premises of world 2, which does not
deny the ‘reality’ of subjective thought—and the persona, which
emerges only in social interaction, as ego selectively reacts to others
either in agreement or self-differentiation. I want to cite a few bits of
his final paragraphs, suggesting they be read with an ear to their
pertinence in social science as well as the theory of knowledge.
One way of life may be incompatible with another way of life in almost
the same sense in which a theory may be logically incompatible with
another. These incompatibilities are there, objectively, even if we are
unaware of them. And so our purposes and our aims, like our theories, may
compete, and may be critically compared and discussed.
Yet the subjective approach, especially the subjective theory of knowl-
edge, treats world 3 objects—even those in the narrower sense, such as
problems, theories, and critical arguments—as if they were mere utter-
ances or expressions of the knowing subject. This approach is closely
similar to the expressionist theory of art. Generally, it regards a man’s
work only or mainly as the expression of his inner state; and it looks upon
self-expression as an aim.
I am trying to replace this view of the relation of a man to his work by a
very different one. Admitting that world 3 originates with us, I stress its
considerable autonomy, and its immeasurable repercussions on us. Our
minds, our selves, cannot exist without it: they are anchored in world 3.…
The expressionist view is that our talents, our gifts, and perhaps our
upbringing, and thus “our whole personality”, determine what we do.…
In opposition to this I suggest that everything depends upon the give-
and-take between ourselves and our task, our work, our problems, our world
3; upon the repercussion upon us of this world; upon feedback, which can be
amplified by our criticism of what we have done. …(Popper 1976: 195-96)
356
There is reaction, recognition, and iteration as the infant discovers
the possibility of managing sentience. Since the most effective moves
will normally entail some sort of communication with its mother, the
secondary dialectic soon follows, as the propriate self is brought into
social relationships with pets, toys, peers, and surrogate parents.
Ego at this stage will doubtless find toy animals easier to get on with
than real peers or new giants, however well-meaning. But even with
toys the propriate self will find it is in stochastic interplay with the
outside world, and vulnerable. A rather lurid version of the primary
dialectic at this stage can be had by reading through some of Freud’s
cases, and an indulgently unclish version of the secondary dialectic in
early childhood can be found in such non-Freudian authors as George
Herbert Mead and Jean Piaget. Since my main interest here is in
getting some understanding of the way individual minds feed on and
affect the growth of a cultural style, I take the matter of early devel-
opment no farther. The double dialectic as I picture it is one of the
seminal universals in human life. In the presence of language, it
accounts for the striking elaboration of role relationships and struc-
tures in human societies, as compared with other primates whose
interpersonal relations carry only minimal semiotic content, and
whose sentient adventures must remain forever untold.
Like me, Soda tuned his persona to the company he was keeping.
You don’t have a persona without having significant others, kith and
kin, interaction on an intensely semiotic plane. You won’t manage such
interaction successfully without taking on and taking in the ambient
role motives of the company you keep. But doing this is not simply
‘adjusting’ to a social environment. Looking to our own satisfactions,
sentient and social, has to preoccupy us in the long run. It is through a
double dialectic, tending at once to sentient values and projected
achievements, we pursue our moral careers. It is through coping with
the constant give and take of everyday life that we manage to keep a
sane purchase on the world, and the world in turn makes us its own—
not our propriate selves, which remain a reality sui generis (cf. Popper’s
world 2), but our personae, our self-made yet always socially realized
selves, creatures of world 3.
357
whatever moral strategies she can master, a new poly-dyadic network
among new peers. The fun and freedom of her bachelor youth will have
to fade away, though with good fortune she will not have to lose the
strong sense for autonomy she has gained. Her own domestic
situation is new to her; certain usages and common judgements in the
adopting community will strike her as novel if not improper; she will
find herself ‘misunderstood’—actions of hers taken at a value she did
not expect. She will find her new peers subjecting her to resocializa-
tion. Out of all this she will have to build, on the right hand, a new
persona, a self she can willingly present to others; and on the left
hand, a new propriate self. This will be the self which proposes, puts
into practice, and refines the moral strategies she will pursue as her
key to success in a new career. Strictly, these will be major adapta-
tions of the old selves she developed in her bachelor life. As she
realizes that the old persona is indeed socially dead (as she visits her
former isaka mates and finds the facework strange-making) her task
of building a new one will be given a lift. We must suppose she will find
at least some aspects of the self she lost are well lost—existential
freedom is not unremittingly dreadful.<<[lit]
358
instantly reinforce or curb a line of action, change its colour and style
or redirect its objectives.
All this may only say in abstract language what has already been
made explicit or implied in earlier chapters. But if we take the logic of
this analysis we are in position to see that a fresh erotic adjustment
is going to succeed or fail, as the case may be, not in relation to its
continuity or discontinuity with a woman’s earlier modes of sexual
expression so much as with her ability as a person to cope with her
new, all-involving social situation. Once a pregnancy is established she
will begin to feel the benefits of validating support from her new
community of women. At parturition the validation is made explicit in
ritual. Before long she will herself be one of the local ‘circumcisers’ of
maidens, putting a clear boundary between her new self and that of
her own maiden years. Ordinarily, a full transition is eventually made
and the new person begins to feel well and well-adjusted in the new
place.
359
Resocialization is as important to the viability of a ‘culture of
rules’ as is socialization itself, the induction of the child to person-
hood. It is also quite as imprecise as the first socialization in its
determination of the individual character which will result. Seen, as
here, in a social-psychological frame, the move from maidenhood to
womanhood in Kinga culture is a private ordeal which most candidates
must manage reasonably well—else the culture of rules which governs
the adult life of the women could not hold. Seen in the frame of culture
the same transformation is a point of close contact between the
deepstuff of Kinga life and its culture of rules or routines. This public
culture depends on the predictable success of women and men
pursuing their moral strategies into the married estate.
360
nuity, would have predicted otherwise. But if you suppose the problem
is not so much one of changing ingrained habit as of finding validation
for current aspirations, women have the better of this style-shift in
adult life. Is it because the solidarity of womenfolk is here reinforced
by cult? or because a woman’s libido is quiescently structured by her
concern for a series of infants and her close bond to a daughter? I
should think: for all the reasons I have tried to touch upon, and more.
<<[lit]
Only the ideal untsagila, the pioneer who gains a following and
comes to be recognized as a new local ruler with several healthy wives
and a court of his own, has unambiguous support for his shift to a
heterosexual adjustment. More usually, men find themselves contin-
uing an old and comfortable sexual adjustment in uncertain balance
with a new and perhaps intractable one. The non-possessive ethic of
the men’s house minimizes the burden of personal demands, in the
erotic and more generally in the expressive sphere, upon a friend.
For Kinga men the culture of rules calls for a change of estate
more drastic even than that facing the maidens they will marry, and at
an even later stage of adult life than theirs. The Sanga system
depends as utterly on a man’s taking well to marriage as on his
bachelor service at court. What makes the success of his transforma-
tion predictable is a massive compromise with respect to the extent
of his commitment to the new domesticity. A woman leaves her isaka
and never, by the rules, looks back. But men keep their ties to the
barracks life. Their husbandly duties are many but do not require
leaving behind an old life with all its social and sentient rewards.
361
Resocialization: rationality and style
Is a man’s role ‘instrumental’ and a woman’s ‘expressive’ in Kinga
culture? A small case could be made for the reverse, since women do
more steady work than men, dealing with the production of staples
where men (as hunters, raiders, migrant workers) turn to adventuring
after luxuries. But the question is misconceived. Instrumental action
has the form of rationality, expressive action normally does not. But
men and women everywhere through ordinary, everyday actions
pursue private moral strategies which deeply inform but do not lie on
the surface of their lives. Let a young man seek glory by raiding
Nyakyusa cattle, let an older man seek respect by attending the
wordy debates at court. If both forgo other moral values in the pursuit
of these goals, we seem to be dealing with a rational assessment of
means and ends in any case. The moral of La Fontaine is not the only
reading one could give to La Cigale et la Fourmi. A fabulist of another
age, rejecting the formidable style of the Ant, would give us another
tale. Are we dealing with rationality or style values?
The time women spend in their fields is often spent by older men
around a beerpot. Kinga men don’t often get ‘fighting drunk’—I heard of
it but never saw or heard it. Men can usually trust each other to
respect them when their guards are down. There are no Kinga alco-
holics (though some would say there are few of the older men who are
not). There is not the compulsion to drink which you may find where
men are desperate for expressive acts of support and seek them from
buddies in beer. Conversation at beer is pursued as an end in itself, the
moral equivalent of the newspaper a middleclass Londoner requires
every day. The Londoner knows if he fails to keep a paper or even to
keep the right one he’ll be at a disadvantage, slight but real enough, in
362
getting on with the practical business of the day. It is the same with
Kinga and the beerpot.
More often than not, men and women get into standard situa-
tions with their eyes open, pursuing longer-term moral advantage: the
backdrop to (opportunistic) situational action is a moral strategy, a
policy, a characteristic style of participation which—if we could read
the clues—expresses the full complexity and intelligence of a person’s
moral career. The simplest ‘opportunistic’ act may deserve a descrip-
tion which counts no corner of the culture irrelevant and no ante-
cedent episode quite lost.
363
The infatuation of a bush youth for a prestigeful style (ochred
ringlets, daringly filed teeth, swagger of the court guards) gave birth
to a long-term moral strategy of pursuing the good life at court. The
glamour then became central to a bachelor’s existence for a decade or
more. At length a new aspiration for greater maturity and autonomy
as an individual began to form and attach itself to the style of the
untsagila, the married man representing the culture of the court and
its power among lesser men farther down the valley. Such, so far as we
now can reconstruct it, was the subjective career of many a Kinga
male a century ago. A minority became commoner rulers of note. Style
values by their nature deal in epitomes not in probabilities.
364
which individuals find they want to adjust their moral strategies. It is
because resocialization in the cases we have considered occurs in
adulthood that it allows us a window into the inner dialectic which is
the source of depth and of lamination in everyday human behaviour,
wherever culture has developed to the point of exhibiting a distinctive
‘style’. Style in the meaning taken here is always woven of expressive
and instrumental threads in subtle mixes and patterns. Style grows
most abundantly in the inner domains of the social life, where every
instrumental act carries an excess burden of expressive meaning, and
even the simplest things can’t be done without revealing something of
the actor’s propriate self.
365
especially of the kinds we label ritual, ceremonial, or solemn and
symbolic. The meanings attached give these acts a special charm to
motivate popular participation. The structures comprising the
psyche, persona, and propriate self have their sources of stability in a
‘generic’ relationship to culture—a term wanting some discussion.
Whereas the ego is spatio-temporally local, confined to a focussed
here-and-now, the self is comprised of semiotic resources whose
context is a fabric of meanings situated ‘generically’ in time and
space. Ordinarily we refer to this fabric of meanings as a culture; but
Kinga are not limited to understanding their fellow ethnics, and
Western culture has developed specialized institutions (history,
anthropology) for extending its scope beyond the traditional bounds
of experience. Cult symbolism is ‘good to think with’ and can be
conceived by the ethnographer as “giving access to the mechanism of
thought” (Levi-Strauss 1963: 104). Specifically, the Kinga cults
afford a set of mechanisms for self-stabilizing thought. Women, older
men, and members of the court have their religions to think with.
Children and wild youths have different needs and are left largely
without religion. The familiar notion that religion must everywhere be
in the service of ‘social solidarity’ need not be wholly rejected, but
would have to be applied here to at least three different congrega-
tions. What interests me more is the way religious observances can
serve to frame a person’s world—which is almost to say, to generate
social structures.
The ancestor cult does little directly for women, though it helps
a man relate to women in a society which lends a special problematic
to that. For Kinga there is no vigorous lineage frame, dominating the
organization of social life, wanting symbolic reinforcement in the
ancestor cult and validation in the massings of branched-out lineage
representatives at a feast of solidarity (and segmentary differenti-
ation). That classic picture of the African patrilineal ancestor religion
doesn’t apply. A man’s offering to ancestors places him in a network
not a corporate relation to others. The feast is shared by whoever is
present. The ghosts of children are asked to communicate greetings
to all their ghostly peers; and this is to say a man is not encouraged
to take possessive pride in his own children but to emphasize the open
networks of childhood and his own sympathetic relation to them,
deriving as much from remembrance of his own early life with peers
who died young, as his experience with fatherhood seen from either
end.
366
A presupposition of the ancestors’ interest in ego is that ego identi-
fies with a patriline in the Kinga sense of the term. This means the
ancestor cult is a male elder’s institution and reflects the worldview
of men who have worked that transformation in their being which
makes the idea of a patriline relevant, generating a personal concern
‘downward’ along a line of descent. For the consistent ‘bush’ dweller
(say, a smith) this transformation occurs only gradually, as it does
for most people living in a sedentary world. But for the ‘court’ recruit
the change of persona and propriate orientation after leaving the
barracks life will have happened at a forced pace and will for that
reason have to be the more consciously purposeful.
367
identity ceases to be with his peers so much as with an ancestral line
extending into the past beyond his birth and into the future beyond
his death. It is a line which, until middle age, has had little significance
for him or for the way he was socially perceived by significant others.
Now with a house and a place of his own, depending after years of the
collective life on his own land and produce, he must know he is his own
man. He must be living with others likewise perceived. He may usefully
turn to the long forgotten ancestors and an onward-branching model
of descent to validate such a perception.
I know little of the inner dialectic which might lead a man to turn
to his ancestors in crisis, but I reckon the rewards of the collective life
in the ikivaga must wear thin for some from a decade of seeing them-
selves supplanted by younger (foolhardy) and bolder recruits. In their
sleeping patterns these recruits will have begun to avoid the older
crowd, as of an ascending generation. Family ties are weak for Kinga in
the structural sense but not necessarily at the level of sentiment. An
ancestral cult, when the real parents have long been dead, could evoke
a brightening mood of filial piety for which little direct expression had
been found when they were alive. That wives of the agnatic ancestors
are mentioned in the offering formula reflects the closer sentimental
ties a lad has to mother, the less certain relationship of son to father.
368
up there herself. Only the odd pair will have grown up together in the
isaka of some neighbouring place. They’ve developed neighbourly
networks of co-operation in the fields, to which their social identities
are tied. The imigowi work parties are at once voluntary and obligatory,
co-operative and competitive, since reciprocity is the rule, and a
wanted partner is not always free. A woman already well established
will have so many reciprocal commitments she hardly can add another
to please a newcomer. The friendships expressed by women who fall in
together on the path to work each morning are at once spontaneous
and planned: if it is to be a close relationship, fields must be chosen
which adjoin, and the days for working them set aside. Many such plans
are made privately under four eyes.
369
because the restructuring of the self in such circumstance is dialec-
tical that a dramatization by value-reversal is effective: ego surren-
ders to what-I-am-not, bedevils what-I-am-no-more, and catches in
the aftermath of the drama what-I-now-must-be.
The political cult of the men celebrates the reliance of the land—
as in mythic times Lwembe would have walked it—upon the Sanga
godling’s goodwill. By demonstrating through public drama the power
of the Sanga court system (mutual hostilities suspended for the
season) to intercede with cosmic forces, the cult builds the power of
priests who conduct its elaborate ceremonies. The priests represent
the presence of ‘bush’ or autochthonous learning in the power system
of the courts, and their dramatic cooling of Lwembe’s anger embodies
the dialectic of bush and court. Commoner hoes cool the royal
godling’s anger. The anger of Lwembe is the danger at the centre of a
Sanga world. The High Prince at Ukwama figures in myth as a faithless
elder brother. The ritual danger which reigns while smith and priest
prepare the required piacular rites represents the majesty of the
court, refracted and magnified. The whole institution, if seen as the
court’s response to unrest (mystical grievances reported from the
bush) and as a pledge of service from centre to periphery, encapsu-
lates the constitution of the Sanga segmentary state.<<[lit]
But from the viewpoint of the Kinga life-cycle this is a men’s cult
and it particularly applies to the dignification of the princely court as
ceremonial centre. As a disciplined and ‘collectivized’ procedure it
stands opposite the unruly cult of women, representing the need for
compliance, compromise, and heed. These are informing values of the
court culture: of isaka and the great royal isivaga, houses of maidens
and men at arms, where the bachelor stage of life is so prolonged. The
values of the men’s cult apply particularly to the self-transformation
a youth must make when he comes in from the wild life of the hills to
apprentice himself as warrior. The taboo of warfare through the weeks
dedicated to pacifying Lwembe’s just wrath falls as a discipline
directly on such a youth, and the myth of the wild boy god’s extrava-
gant powers speaks directly to the socially dangerous imagination of
the young. For Kinga, there is no religion for boys in their ‘wild’ time,
only magic and random lore. The taming of Lwembe’s magic is retold in
the myth underlying the royal cult, re-enacted in the procession to his
shrine and the thorny intercession there by a regional conclave of
priests, always bearing lessons that culture must override nature,
polity override passion. These are lessons which can help to deepen
ego’s mastery of the role-requirements of barracks life, and facilitate
his appropriation of the role motivation he first puts on as mask.
370
Gordon Allport found that rigid personalities came from
something like ‘arrested development’ in early socialization, while with
‘normal’ socialization the personality should remain flexible. Deeply
irrational psyches can’t be held responsible for all of religion unless we
assume the ‘normal’ is all but unattainable. Sociological theories of
religion are generally of a functional or semiotic variety, and carry the
implication that normally responsible minds are mainstays of
ritualism as of the main secular institutions. Robert W. White (1948)
suggests normality depends on a sort of psychic housekeeping which
he calls protective organization. If people are to understand each
other (if White and his many fellow thinkers are right) they should
defend their propriate identities in established, not wholly inscrutable
ways. Religions can help lay down rules. Carl Rogers found personal
stress associated with reliance on facing life with false fronts,
masks, badly assimilated roles (personae)—so losing a sense of
(propriate) self through hiding it distrustfully. Religion very often
projects an image of human vulnerability which can naturalize some of
our more particularistic concerns with the self. In small ways such
notions can throw light on the way Kinga religions work. But they do
not seem to add up to a model of religion as an encrypted chart of the
deep Kinga mind. Better say that the cults, in touch with the moral
careers of men and women as they are, have been able to shape and
solemnize certain key features of the social structure—bending and
turning Sowetan rules, as bequeathed by a generic regional culture, to
the celebration of a quite specifically Kinga style of life.<<[lit]
371
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER ELEVEN
Reading a style
Doing fieldwork with Kinga confirmed a suspicion from my
student days that microcultures would vary in much the way national
cultures do with respect to inherent stability. Some African cultures
seem to be as pertinaciously conservative as ancient Egypt, others
as naturally flexible as Sumer or as inherently divisive and variable as
Greece. Kinga seem to be a people prone to change. I’d be hard put
(supposing I wanted) to describe a ‘modal personality’ without differ-
entiating by gender and age, and these are just the easiest catego-
ries to choose. I’ve argued that Kinga of either gender are required to
make themselves over in adulthood, and that sort of thing makes for
obvious personal differences. The custom of allowing individuals to
change personal names at will, the popularity of pseudonyms and
secret names, and the importance of ambisexuality in forming the
social identity all constitute evidence that Kinga themselves are
aware of an existential freedom which standard social theory fails to
recognize. When a single culture is shared as a mode of life by many
distinct social types there will be strains toward change even when
external sources are not evident. When it occurs, change may consti-
tute increased variability or consolidation, qualitative innovation of
surprising kinds, or simply growth or decline. Nevertheless I think
openness to diversity and a broad spectrum of moral strategies is in
itself no certain harbinger of change.
372
world for confirmation of its worth, the other is groping for an
unexposed self, safe from capricious sanction, which can continue as
an inner source of ego strength and moral confidence. Longterm
results are never easily predicted, and even the governing moral values
may lose much of their transparency for ego when standing moral
strategies begin to fail. I’ve argued that, owing to the doubly
stochastic process of normal adjustment to life-situations, there is
no simple relationship between outward behaviour and (Aristotle’s)
states of the soul—between surface mood and deep psyche, persona
and propriate self. An observer never knows the person behind the
mask on direct evidence. There lies the importance of recognizing
style.
373
between styles and values. What makes a style attractive or
repulsive to me can be called its meaning; or we can say a certain style
bespeaks a certain value, as a well-wrought label might bespeak fine
marmalade or lend fresh charm to camomile tea. But below the
surface of style and the observable uniformities to which it refers,
there is in any particular culture far less uniformity. This follows from
the way the persona masks the propriate self from others. If we can
imagine a society with pocket electronic mind-readers we can imagine
a society without the kind of existential freedom which today we take
for granted. (What would happen to the incidence of paranoia, I can’t
say.) But if, to turn the matter around, everyone did try to achieve
total hypocrisy just for a day our social machinery could surely grind
to a halt. The requirement of a fiduciary nexus makes society
dependent on a reasonably high style-to-value correspondence. We’ve
remarked that one of the mechanisms through which correspondence
is maintained by Kinga is religion. Satire is another and the court of
law, however cumbersome, is a third. Gossip is not the major
mechanism it is in other cultures, but peer friendships promote the
kind of conversation which may be all-important.
374
level does not in itself create depth of character; but where this is
combined with a communicative and, on the whole, dispassionate
spirit of civility one might expect the equation to hold.
375
Style dualisms in three classic studies
Tepoztlán
When Oscar Lewis reviewed his data on social stratification in
the small Mexican village of Tepoztlán, he rejected what Robert
Redfield had written on the subject a generation earlier. One lesson of
any restudy seems to be that there will be objective change: “You
never step on the same Bushman twice.” Another lesson is that our
schools won’t stamp out the same anthropologist twice—observers
will differ. But the main lesson I draw from comparing Lewis and
Redfield on stratification in Tepoztlán is that we can all too easily talk
by one another.<<[lit]
What was most deeply wrong was the assumption that persona
and person are the same. Technically this is reification or misplaced
concreteness. Where everyone has a Hitler haircut no one is Hitler. The
idea of el correcto is the kind of abstraction from reality which alters
reality. To align yourself with a patron in the way you dress doesn’t
instantly bestow all the patron’s qualities upon you. Probably when
Redfield was there (1926) only a man who dressed correcto was
making a deliberate choice, while dressing tonto was the default style.
I say this because, in historical perspective, the correcto style was
the newer and suggested identity with the ‘urban’ or ‘colonizing’
elements then affecting the Mexican peasantry. Still, the idea that
style makes the man is less than a half truth. Notice the positivistic
376
bias in the way we are explaining people. The prime presupposition is
you are whatever you have stylistically become—the way you’ll
respond to a new situation is in principle predictable as a function of
what you seem to have learned to be. What this leaves out is the
tentativeness in what we are, the endless revocability of becoming,
the seductiveness of the world.
377
Redfield’s study was done a short generation after the 1910-12
revolution, which saw Tepoztlán abandoned. Some (tontos) took to
the hills, some (correctos) to the towns (Redfield 1930: 207-9). They
returned confirmed in their difference, tontos holding to the one folk
culture and correctos bi-culturally combining it with what they could
of the metropolitan Mexican lifestyle. Fifteen years after their return
the two communities (call them ‘conservative and progressive’ or
‘traditional and acculturated’ or even analogically ‘indio and ladino’)
remained fairly distinct, though after another generation they would
be more mixed. Still, Lewis had no trouble tagging individuals to match
them with local records (1951: 431). The two styles were still there,
and individuals seem to have elected one or the other consistent with
their own moral strategies. Can it have baffled the anthropologist
that you can’t read those strategies from the stereotypical style of
a man’s shoes and pants? Tepoztlán through the whole of the
twentieth century has been balanced between alternative schemes of
value:
folk ~ urban
tonto ~ correcto
indigenous ~ cosmopolitan
local ~ national
indio ~ ladino
spiritual ~ material
traditional ~ modern
iglesia ~ mercado
santos ~ veteranos
apartados ~ politicos
378
Highland Burma
The best-known case of lifestyle choice in a ‘traditional’ society
is Sir Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma, published in
1954. For all the freshness of the book then and now, it was a product
of the time when a single anthropologist on a single trip to the field
was expected to return with a definitive description of a culture. It
was also a time of paradigmatic thinking in British social anthro-
pology. Leach found two systems of politics among Kachin and decided
they must be the two faces of Kachin social structure. Communities
could be organized by gumsa (hierarchic) or gumlao (republican) princi-
ples. Thus it came to be said in high professional circles that Kachin
society represented the case of a social structure in “oscillating equi-
librium.” It was one of the more grotesque conclusions anthropolo-
gists have reached, unappealing to any mind not possessed by the
‘structural functional’ paradigm of the 1950s. The reasoning was as
follows:
(a) Assume you can’t have ‘structure’ without ‘equilibrium’—
(b) Only further grant that Kachin society boasts two social structures
conforming to polar-opposed models—
(c) Then it must be possible to have an ‘equilibrium’ which embraces an
oscillation between two fixed poles.
379
which men may gravitate in a given situation, or simply two political
styles which they may sometimes briefly vacillate between, the
observer has found himself asking which set of rules is the real one.
There seems to be a rather ‘British’ premise at work, that rules go
very deep indeed.<<[lit]
Kachin, like Kinga or the folk of Ulaya, may vacillate (find it hard
to choose) in some situations, but there is no need to suppose that
puzzled individuals or whole communities ‘oscillate’ according to
vaguely conceived ‘laws of equilibrium’ inherent in the nature of certain
social systems. It happens that Kachins are a polyglot and in origins
poly-ethnic assemblage of highlanders with many lifestyle alterna-
tives. Nominally they are agricultural, but the circulation of trade
goods (legitimate and otherwise) is important, alliances are to be
made by exploiting a wide range of marital contracts, and many
Kachins are always ready to relocate, seeking opportunities to get
ahead in life. Among the many turns a highlander may learn in his
competitive pursuit of the good life are some which entail tinkering
with his persona, accommodating through a shift of style. Unlike the
postcolonial Tepoztecan, the polyglot population called Kachin has a
deep history of thriving on personal enterprise. Marriage, residence,
380
and loyalty all are counters to be played in the pursuit of a successful
career. If there is no way forward through ingratiation with power
(gumsa) the more open lifestyle alternative (gumlao) may beckon.
Kachin have their court and bush cultures, as so many peoples do.
<<[lit]
Trobriand islanders
The source of the idea of equilibrium, of social structure as an
organic system, was the tight-little-island model of the ‘savage
society’ best exemplified in Bronislaw Malinowski’s publications of the
1920s and 1930s on the Trobriand islanders of Papua New Guinea
(Southwestern Melanesia). What remains hidden in Malinowski’s
island culture becomes boldly obvious in highland Burma. A culture is
not a frame people have to live within, it is a rich set of ideas (rather
more than will fit on a desktop) about what is worth having, doing, and
being. Kachins, by reason of their long and interesting history at a
crossroads of trade and brigandry, have accumulated more disparate
ideas (more obvious style alternatives) than the Trobrianders. But
does that make a difference in kind between highland and island
cultures? Do Trobrianders live in the ‘fixed frame’ of an ‘organic equilib-
rium structure’? No more than Kachins live in an oscillating one: we
have the benefit again of restudy. It will be worth our laying this ghost,
as it has haunted anthropology too long.
381
which tend to pervade our thinking about the way society works. The
matter comes out so clearly in the case of the Trobriand restudy as
to make it worth pursuing. The principle to be vindicated is that every
adult man and woman has been deeply motivated by experience; that
the relevant social experience normally occurs within situationally
patterned role relationships; and that the ‘social structure’ they will
know has taken its framing substance from the role motives incorpo-
rated through a lifetime of situated action. The main technical point
to understand is that ‘situated action’ has to be conceived as ego-
involving. Where your course is foregone before you encounter a
situation (like getting on an escalator) there is no stochastic interac-
tion and no ego-involved learning. My point of view here is the dead
opposite to that of William Graham Sumner (1906), who supposed the
social maze (of a ‘traditional’ society) was iron-clad with no
stochastic dimension. Obviously, individual moral strategies in such a
society would be so confined as to have no significance as generators
of the culture.
Weiner’s restudy shows that the yams of the ‘harvest gift’ (and
the many other similar prestations a couple receives of patrilineal kin)
are not given or taken as food for the family which receives them but
stored by the couple for use in ceremonial exchange. A woman owns
the yams of the ‘harvest gift’ even while they are growing in the garden
her brother has made for her—if a brother has decided to make such a
garden. But the motive which will prompt him is not matrilineal obliga-
382
tion, it is political (social) ambition. Here is my one-two-three
summary of the relevant facts as Annette Weiner gives them:
(1) A brother does little more than token work for the growing
family of his sister until after a decade or more her husband is
becoming politically big as a potential friend-and-ally. A husband of no
importance may go through life without having a yam house built for
him. He can’t do it for himself. The foundation of a man’s political
career is the interest taken by his wife’s brother.
(2) During the initial period of the family, the new husband has
most of his outside help (yams for ceremonial exchange) from his own
father—not a ‘kinsman’ at all. Most of the actual food for family and
children is provided by the husband’s own taro gardens. His own yam
gardening will be on a reduced scale because he will be working for his
father—as a return obligation for nurturance in childhood. Yams are a
feast food grown for others. They are the currency of alliance across
clan lines.
383
use in forging alliances. He took the style for the inner personality and
attributed their behaviour to the inherent vanity of Trobriand males.
In Malinowski’s own world, vanity is not acceptable as a cloak for
ambition. The moral strategies which may carry an ambitious Trobri-
ander along the paths of success can work in their culture but probably
would fail in another. The architecture of their social maze is coeval
with Trobriand style. Yet again there really are two culture patterns
to deal with: a culture of ambition, power, and magnificence on the one
hand, and on the other a more laid-back plebeianism of the sort we
have seen so fully realized in films and in much of Malinowski’s prose.
384
But the larger lesson is one about style and intelligibility: even
the ‘diagrammatic’ scheme of rules for the pursuit of a masculine
career in the Trobriands, after it has finally been worked out, is hardly
comprehensible to an outsider who has not learned to read Trobriand
style. I recall a lecture at Cambridge where Leach himself covered a
chalkboard with diagrams in perhaps eight colours in an effort to
explain the complexities of an Australian kinship system. After losing
all of us along the way, the Professor himself got lost and painfully
erased the whole. Without knowing the culture, without the needed
clues to its intelligibility as a moral universe, how on earth will any of
us succeed in explaining the technical complexities of any great civili-
zation?
Moral strategies
Style theory as I represent it holds that significant moral alter-
natives are present in all human cultures, created or communicated
principally through style. In village Mexico men are deeply concerned
with making a living. George Foster (1965) has shown that the
poorest peasants (tontos) are jealous of any sign that one of their
fellows wants to put himself ahead of them. Electing a townsman
(correcto) style, by getting you out of the circle of envy, may get you
out of what looks like a closed circle of poverty. Another strategy is
bearing the financial burden of ritual service on a feast day: a man
trades off economic security for honour in a transaction which the
(secular-materialist) stranger finds hard to fathom. The institutions
of Tepoztlán are built from and for the realization of choice in the
pursuit of alternative moral strategies, which are conceived in light of
popular ideas about right and wrong, the fine and the mean, grace and
disgrace.
385
Trobriand lifestyle has no use for tontos and correctos. Styles
which attract a Trobriander are quite other. Display, dalliance, extrav-
agance of expression are favoured features of Trobriand manners as
Malinowski described them and as we see them in films. But the same
culture also patterns extremes of formal respect (fear) toward
ranking chiefs and toward sexuality in relations with matrilineal kin.
The two styles are contrary alternatives but equally structural, and
neither is the face of Trobriand deep personality. The social system is
energized by the dialectic these two opposite styles generate.
Trobriand culture can’t work without both.
Except for the wild period of youth for men, the styles of court
and bush were never incompatible. Bush women came in small parties,
finely arrayed, with festive beerpots, to the court on feast days.
Countrymen took their beer with courtiers touring the domain to hear
cases and settle tax accounts. Everyone was accustomed to work
386
with the hoe, every man to the multiple uses of bush-hook and spear.
The two styles, bush and court, remained viable alternatives in 1960.
Most men knew them both, but a few lived their lives through at
court, and a few in the hills or in hidden valleys. There were currents of
change among men and women, among school-educated youth, in cash-
crop agriculture, and particularly in government. A longer study would
have discovered more complexity. By standards anthropology
properly should set for itself, restudies are overdue as I write. I don’t
expect anyone to show off a monolithic Kinga culture, as I think there
never was one and I suppose the nationalist policy of assimilation will
hold. Thirty or fifty years of change even under the conditions of a free
tradition may be enough to make a culture almost unrecognizable at
first glance. It is only gradually one perceives it as a new version of a
world one has known before. That kind of recognition by family resem-
blance should be possible for the Kinga lifestyle even a generation or
two from now, long after fresh reconstructive work on the old culture
has finally lost feasibility. The deepstuff will change according to its
own inner workings, and the culture of rules of the region will be drawn
into a global stream of events along, perhaps, with all the Eastern
Bantu communities known to this century’s ethnography. I have tried
to suggest in the way I have reported and elaborated on my field
observations that change has always been the rule for the Kinga and
would have been continuing today if the European intrusion had still
not taken place.
387
canists I had studied or worked with at Cambridge, my own curiosities
were taking me off the recommended path. It was partly that I had
come to ‘British social anthropology’ by a different route than most,
having done graduate work in behavioural and social sciences before a
doctorate in anthropology at Chicago. The mid-century psychology I
still prefer had distinctively humanistic pretensions. But more
important than my broader-than-most ‘training’ was an interest in
human history which had led me to look for fieldwork which could touch
hands with the full sweep of pre-urban civilization from Africa’s
simpler to its most intricate forms. Of course, I had neither the
omniscience or the logistical autonomy just to ‘choose’ a people for
study who would provide me the window I wanted on the past and on
the processes of political development which can lead to state forma-
tion. When I did finally get to pack my family on a ship bound for East
Africa, I had no notion how lucky my lot would be. That Kinga them-
selves would be so open to choice and keen on the observation of
differences was something I hadn’t expected on the basis of the
ethnographic literature then available. It is good news that a more
humanistic bent has since developed in the profession. I regret that
its time only came after the serious scientific thrust of anthropology
had virtually ceased to find financial and institutional backing in my
parts of ‘world 3’. For me, the only properly scientific attitude to take
toward the study of a civilization is humanistic. One has to be
prepared to forswear certainty. Diagrammatic thinking comes easier
but can be less than helpful when its dangers are not respected.
388
TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TWELVE
Twin shadows
389
arrangements for human intimacy are more balanced than theirs.
Perhaps we should take heed of Kinga manners in a formal greeting: it
is done with both arms separately extended to clasp the other’s, left
to right and right to left, held through many repetitions of proper
phrases, and only gradually released.
For reasons given earlier, the concern of this book has not been
with personality differences among Kinga or with cataloguing Kinga
values. The range of personal differences among individuals compares
with the range you would find anywhere, as I hope some of my specimen
portraits and anecdotes from Malanduku have suggested. Enumer-
ating Kinga ethical beliefs is a project I simply chose to finesse. Of all
the features of culture prone to reification, ‘values’ are second only to
‘mores’. My purpose has been to focus on pragmatic aspects of
character formation in a social system sufficiently unlike most
others to challenge the conventional wisdom. I’ve wanted to explore
the moral career options Kinga were accorded in the days of their free
tradition, and the way they chose among them. It has been important
to show that scope for choice and individual responsibility for career
adjustment are generic to the microcultures just as they are to more
complex social environments. If you assume that the choices we make
make us, you are halfway to understanding the importance of style.
You get the other half of the way when you see that our style as a
medium of communication is never simply our own but is that aspect
of our persona which is always being shared. I can still be cheered up
today by remembering a little Kinga maid telling her favorite tale or
her older sister singing her way home from gardening.
390
round to thinking more about what the people of an exotic community
may have in common than about personal differences. It is a legitimate
scientific question how far and in what respects—ultimately, for what
reasons—Kinga persons growing up within the tradition come to differ
from one another. As an anthropologist, I only know that they do. I find
it easy enough to suppose that the reasons in Kingaland are much like
the reasons for individual differences wherever they have been profes-
sionally studied. But as an anthropologist, this is not one of my
problems. I content myself with these simplilfying assumptions:
The main burden of ego psychology is to explain how individuals exploit
the latitude allowed by the roles they are cast for.
The observation of social behaviour without adequate understanding of
the way social roles package motivation can only lead to confusion.
The observation of social behaviour without adequate understanding of
the presence of sentience in every human act can only be confusing.
The ethical values evoked by any culture are best discovered through
study of the moral strategies pursued by representative men and women in
pursuit of life’s rewards.
391
giving it a political advantage over its neighbours. I have in mind not
expansion by subjugation, like that of ancient Sparta, but by a process
of annexation, some forms of which (other than the Sanga) have been
identified in examples used earlier. Most of the African protostates
we know show evidence that a technique of annexation which once
begins to work will be refined and repeated until, like a spider’s fine
web, a whole cluster of local communities has been brought in to the
sort of open alliance we call a segmentary polity.
392
marriages of their sons; and we are further told, at least anecdotally,
that the age village itself is now a thing of the past. It is replaced, of
course, by a re-emphasis of kinship as the basis of personal alliances
and by nuclearization—the money economy favours the interests of
the young and educated men over their elders, breaking the exagger-
ated pattern of ever-bigger polygynous families which had developed
under the pax. Seen in retrospect, we will have to reassess the
Nyakyusa value system which, for Monica Wilson writing about the
1930s, centred in ‘the breath of men’ and tolerated a ready accusa-
tion of witchcraft (tantamount to ostracism) against any unpopular
behaviour in a village mate. This was a value system linked to an
extreme adaptation of the regional culture of rules regarding resi-
dence; the adaptation itself was associated with an expansive
political system in which warlike cattle-raiding played a crucial part.
Boys were segregated from women before puberty and maintained in
bachelor status during young adulthood: contact with women, it was
said, would make cowards of the men a chiefdom needed to protect its
own cattle and bring in others by raiding. As long as the young men
were taking cattle this way, they were independent of their elders for
marriage cattle. But this broke down when cattle raiding was
outlawed by the new European rulers. A similar transparency
attaches to the Sanga barrack system for extending bachelorhood,
though in the case of Kinga the bachelor warriors were honoured
guests of the prince, and young women could also enjoy a bachelor
phase, since older men generally took little interest in multiple
marriages. We would have to say in both these cases that the
deepstuff of the culture was integrally adapted to political ends. Iron-
ically, a culture of amity was serving a culture of war.
393
path, whatever occurs off that path is evidently extra-processual.
Though they favour plural marriage, the prevailing ethos of volun-
tarism suggests their communities usually find a balance between the
demands of youth and those of age. The male-female population ratios
are low, allowing for a good many spare women, and Bena tolerance of
private infidelities presumably serves to further comfort the younger
men for whom there actually are no brides available. For the Hehe, on
the other hand, neither infidelity of any kind or homosexual relations
are psychologically tolerable. Without a better understanding of the
deepstuff in that community and the way the Hehe style has been
maintained in this century, I can only suppose that their nineteenth-
century adventure in empire building by way of rape and plunder gave
men a taste for dominating great herds and households—an ego-
involved taste which men managed to transmit down the generations
in spite of a radically changing political and economic situation. Yet
the culture of rules governing responsibilities and rights of men and
women in marriage, and the guarantees of protection by a woman’s
natal kin group, read very much like those of Kinga and Bena law.
Kinga sexuality had certainly held true to style until the time my
fieldwork and Edgerton’s study of the Hehe (on which I must rely) were
done. Most of the men knew that some of their regional neighbours
were prepared to condemn out of hand a freedom Kinga take as a
natural right. Particularly at the migrant labour sites in 1960, where
the selection of associates was daily forced on them, the choice was
acutely conscious. But the tenacity of sexual postures can hardly be
surprising. It may be true a sexual orientation which isn’t affirmed
doesn’t exist, but Freud has taught us it may be affirmed in darkly
displaced ways. We see the dark side of peer love for Kinga in their
witchcraft fears, so often focussed on intimates. Suspicions arise as
“rational” fears for the most part, provoked by sudden illness or
private catastrophe. We see the same dark side, if not the same
malevolent power, in the myth of male potency which puts a man
forever in sexual debt to his wife in spite of the endless holidays from
coition which, in the name of children, she herself imposes on the
marriage. The double lives of men or women, like parallel lines, may
never really cross. Gender is a universal form of style dualism in
culture. For Nyakyusa, special and rigid constraints on the freedom of
married women in the presence of men serve to keep the lines apart;
for Hehe, men and women shall not dine together; for Kinga before the
softening brought by the missions it was the women themselves who
by binding so together held their lives apart from the mens’, and even
the missions have not greatly changed that.
394
Flight is a favoured metaphor for human freedom. Intelligence
gives us wings: from the time we leave infancy behind if we are clever
we are creatures of the air. One day is tranquil, another turbulent.
Culture, that coherent mixture of meanings which allows our intelli-
gence to rest on substance, is for us what air is to the bird, a trans-
parent medium without which wings—our powers of speech and
judgement—would be no better suited to flight than a seal’s flippers.
Our freedom, far from opposing custom, exists in the medium a deep
scheme of meanings will create.
395
younger wife may lose his power to beget before the sixth or seventh
decade. For him, at least, Kinga have made a deep retreat available
from sexual impasse, finding a socially stabilizing strategy as well as
a face-saving one. It is the moral equivalent of the Nyakyusa elder’s
resort to using the generative powers of his son, except that for
Kinga the privilege goes to the wife to choose. The bargain is freely
made—the categorical doesn’t bind the personal relationship. We can
perhaps distinguish here the bargain made licit by lore (a default
procedure for handling a fairly predictable breakdown in the system)
from the lighter air of tradition we call ethos or belief.
396
clitoris intact at the maiden’s adulthood ceremony. It occurs well
after menarche and long after pubescence.
397
It is not that as adults Kinga do not expect to have families; it
is that they still must have their friends. A long-term aim of all their
moral strategies is the cultivation of a network which will endure the
assaults of time and wicked turns of fortune. Loss, feared loss, or
alienation of a friend is traumatic. Yet passion, prone to turn, could
never be the conscious rationale of a man’s or a woman’s dealing with
a peer. Friendship in the regional culture of rules is a creature of the
left hand, supposed to follow not to command. For men, there was
never any doubt in our discussions that kinship was the commanding
tie. Everyone consciously conceived the rules so. For women that
commanding tie was marriage. But we have seen that both genders
were deeply concerned with the quiet inversion of the moral laws they
had erected.
398
TWIN SHADOWS: SOURCE NOTES
Introductions
1-2 The prime source for Eggan’s version of ‘the comparative method’ is
his 1954 article. The historical background to his thinking is informatively
elaborated in his 1955 chapter—see References.
7 For the Corridor region see Monica Wilson (1958). For the SW
Tanzania [Sowetan] region and its prehistory, so far as I know it, see Nurse
& Park (1988), Nurse (1988), Park (1988). Each of these publications
is contributory rather than definitive. Further scholarship will
doubtless improve on them.
Chapter One
34 The early missionary was prefacing his Grammar for a home reader-
ship: (Wolff 1905:viii).
Chapter Two
399
standing, can self-replicate with minimal reliance on leadership—it is rela-
tively accident proof, but depends on the comparative occupational unifor-
mity of pre-industrial society for political effectiveness. Kinship is to
politics in the polarization of social loyalties what ritualism is to moralism
in the polarization of ideological allegiance. The crowning weakness of
political systems is dependence on ‘leadership’. That is the basis of their
well-known instability. The use of a sturdier kinship logic in building a mixed-
political system can help to stabilize it, partly because leadership status
becomes nominal whenever the incumbent is weak. The same game is played,
though, by Kinga priests in case their local ruler is weak.
47 The fact that Kinga and Wanji were ‘enemies’ doesn’t in itself say
Wanji were regarded as ‘non-Kinga’ before Contact. Kinga realms fought
each other, raiding herds. It was a major mechanism in the Sanga expansion.
Where the colonization process is gradual there can be no single test of
ethnic difference, and it’s clear that Sanga court-colonization if started
had not got far before (about 1860?) the Wanji had been swept into the
lowland Sangu camp by the more massive and insistent expansionist wars
in the region’s outer crescent. I don’t know if Wanji tell tales of raiding Kinga
cattle as Kinga do of Wanji—Kinga denied the tables were ever turned. In
any event the herds involved above the escarpment were small by compar-
ison to Nyakyusa or Sangu. Above, only western Wanjiland is well suited to
cattle, and remained for that reason so long under Plains Sangu military
domination. In 1960 (as in testimony to the British in 1926) the Sanga
royals all claimed Wanji were Kinga, though language, history and popular
stereotypes belied that. My special interest here relates to a past time
when the broad labels Wanji and Kinga, in a world without hard borders,
wouldn’t have had hard political meaning.
51-2 For clarity: this doesn’t translate into Leach’s terms (1964: xiii),
though Kinship and residential Community are doubtless important “verbal
categories” for Nyakyusa and affect the “structure” of their lives. The
trouble is that the rituals of Kinship and Community can’t easily be taken as
belonging to a “system of ideas” which imposes its structure on the
“system on the ground.” What you see is rather political
theatre-in-the-round seizing the public mind in order to introject ideas. If
Leach can justly be accused of idealism it is not for denying us a lot of
unwished-for structure at the empirical level but for denying us unwished-
400
for confusion at the level of ideas. His “system of ideas” should be seen to
decay into chaos as readily as his admittedly confused “system on the
ground.” Ritual in its various manifestations is the semiotic aspect of the
endless dialectic by which entropy is checked and institutional forms
refreshed in any human society. What best distinguishes the ritual an
ethnographer sees in the field from that he finds around home is the
measure of coherence and universality.
Chapter Three
57-8 See Monica Wilson (1959) and S. R. Charsley (1969: 75-93) for
their different interpretations of the Coming Out ceremony. For the
ethnographer’s account of truculence at funerals see Monica Wilson (1957:
24-7).
58 Compare the special structural frame with which war was staged
with the ‘escapade’ frame of rustling. Cattle raids were by stealth and
never intended to break down into violence—they were analogous to
burglary not armed robbery. Women like cattle might be taken in war when
borders were overrun, but should never be subject to violence. For the
Germans’ early contacts with Kinga: (BMB 1897: 497). For the struc-
tural import of Nuer pugnacity: Southall (1976).
Chapter Four
401
71 For Coopersmith’s unsurprising findings: (1967: 249-50). As for
Sartre, I mean only to suggest he knew his dramatic fictions—his art
if not his ‘poetry’—brought us closer to his meaning than all his
didactic inventions.
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
402
Source Notes: The Folios
First Folio
111-112 The cited German source is as above. Had the Western courts
adopted Nyakyusa manners toward century’s end? I think it more likely
Fülleborn was simply unaware how far fertililty was a woman’s project in
this rather special culture, and only a duty for men. This German’s local
reference would have been the Western realm, and his observations at
second hand. Nyakyusa influence and the presence of their women espe-
cially around the mission station, could have affected his assessment of
local Kinga manners. At any rate, I picked up no hint of special father-in-law
avoidance and none of fully ‘crouching’ as Nyakyusa women still did in 1960
on meeting a man on the path. In other Kinga realms, the show of obeisance
around a royal court was said to have been the other way around, a man
yielding the path to a royal wife or maiden. As for men of the Western realm,
by 1960 they were in advance of others in taking to agriculture for the
market, in place of poorly paid plantation labour. Several young women there
were similarly ahead in maintaining (through continued membership in the
Lutheran church sodalities) the conspicuous mantle of youthful indepen-
dence in association with peers.
Second Folio
118 Anthropologists born after me may wish to know that the dry copy
machine was not available in 1960. I managed to make a copy of Wolff’s
Grammatik much later. The first copier I saw was in Kampala after my field-
403
work, a machine (supplied by the Ford Foundation to help set up a library for
Uganda) taking up a good-sized room. I’ve already noted that the portable
reel-to-reel tape recorder was available, though not in a ‘field-proof’ model. I
had managed, in any event, only a wee supply of batteries and tapes.
119-20 For ‘trilling’ Janeth has used vigelegele, the Swahili term, for the
women’s ululations. The Kinga term ikilulu denotes the ululation of women in
danger but I’m unable to confirm it applies like the Swahili word to the
triumph over danger as well. Needless to say, the two forms of ululation,
expressing opposite emotions, have no middle ground and are never
confused.
133 I got wind of just two raids during my seven months in the Western
realm. As far as I knew there were no other parts of Kingaland from which
raiding would have been feasible then, though the Independent Tanzanian
government felt it must crack down after 1963. As a pink visitor I was ill-
informed about these and other sensitive matters and not encouraged to
push questions.
Third Folio
152 Involvements have been discussed above (pg. 82, Notes).
164-5 Benedict’s model for her Patterns was Nietsche. But the nine-
teenth-century distinction can be rendered less visionary. Start with the
premise of a normal, bell-curve distribution as between passion and reason
(frenzy and formality, the spontaneous and the deliberate) in collective
styles of self-expression. Then to characterize the distribution of expres-
sive styles for a chosen culture you may only need to add a just measure of
skew toward one pole or the other, or in some more appropriate manner
reshape the bell curve.
166 For what is known from documentary evidence of the Maji Maji
uprising of 1905: (Iliffe 1979: 168-202).
404
166-7 But in fact I don’t know what future there may be for the kind of
local autonomy and responsiveness to milieu which I knew, and which had
been the essence of the Kinga free tradition even in the thick of the Sanga
ascendancy. Tanzania’s famous, grandly mislucked Villagization programme,
imposed in the seventies, was designed to submerge that kind of freedom,
which was seen as the handmaid of ethnic separatism, the great bugaboo
of new African nations. Which of the nation’s 112 officially recognized
peoples were thought big and solidary enough to threaten the new State
was never clear.
Fourth Folio
191-2 The full rationale for this division of social structures into
‘internal’ and ‘external’ domains was set out by Meyer Fortes in a book
which amply displayed its applicability: (1958).
Fifth Folio
214 Sources for the citations from Hübner: (BMB 1897:225) and
(BMB 1900:25).
405
a ‘general spirit of voluntarism’ I refer to a community which minimizes role
strain—the standard burdens are fit to be carried lightly. I found this the
quality of life for Kinga women even after marriage. Monica Wilson (1977)
found it otherwise for Nyakyusa women.
231 The source for Kroeber’s comment on the origins of style: (1963:
68).
Chapter One
239-40 For Bena girls: Culwick. (1935:343) For Nyakyusa girls’ devel-
opment: Monica Wilson (1977:113).
246 For the pattern model of explanation see Kaplan (1964). The Flying
Armchair was the pilot (print) version of Hard Cases. Currently the final
version is available only in electronic (pdf) form.
Chapter Two
406
Hehe-Bena-Kinga-Pangwa ancestral communities would have fallen on the
one side, Nyakyusa-related ancestral communities on the other. See Nurse
& Park (1988).
249-50 For Ndendeuli, Pangwa, and Bena work groups based in amity:
Gulliver (1971: 304n), Stirnimann (1976: 91), Culwick (1935: 252-3). In
each case the ‘same’ regional institution is nicely adapted to the local
culture. For Nyakyusa: Monica Wilson (1951: 50-1).
Chapter Three
256 The citation from Edgerton: (1971a: 111-12).
257 For Kinga self-deprecation: Fülleborn (1906: 442). For the citation
of Giraud: Reichard (1892: 242-4). For Reichard’s own view: the same (p.
240].
258 For the paper-quarrels: Marcia Wright (1971: 61-3). For her further
notes on Nyakyusa battle-readiness in 1886 and later during missionary
contacts: same source, pp.39, 47.
407
the more prosperous communities of both the inner and outer crescents,
to the point that separate identities and traditions of origin were lost. The
total population of the whole region, court and bush cultures included, can
be (very roughly) estimated at a million. This is justified on the premise
(reasonable if tenuous) that population figures by the middle of the
twentieth century had rebounded to pre-colonial levels after an initial,
massive mortality from (European) contagious diseases. I further suppose
less than half the pre-colonial population would have been living under the
localist régimes of a bush culture in 1900. Supposing we could confirm this
estimate, our sense for the context and demography of protostate
politics throughout the region would be much improved. Then we might come
to see the Sangu and Hehe stories as informed by a spirit of ‘conquest’,
triggered by rigorous encounters with contact phenomena. Especially the
Hehe, I think, quite fully absorbed the local bush communities, propelling a
hitherto localist population with a vastly scattered geographic spread into
a life suddenly sanctioned by militant authority. In this view, the less
exposed communities, Kinga and Nyakyusa, continued operating with a
court-bush balance supporting a more gradual growth of ‘statelike’ institu-
tions. The metaphor of the ‘political archipelago’ is particularly apt just
there, as the two political arenas within which Kinga and Nyakyusa princes
operated were mutually buffered.
260 For the somewhat hoary tale of the spread of ntemi chiefship:
Roland Oliver (1963: 191-9). His discussion wants further detailed assess-
ment against local migratory traditions, linguistic clues, and archaeology.
A keen sense for the political process associated with the later periods of
migratory settlement in western Tanganyika needs developing. The
question is not so much ‘how did chiefship spread?’ as how it operated in
respect to (a) the intensification of agriculture which accompanied the
increased production and distribution of effective hoes and associated iron
tools; and (b) the maintenance of order as hunting gave way to herding, the
protection of stock, and fighting —defensive and predatory.
261-2 The kind of expansion I predicate for the Sowetan political archi-
pelago is more like franchising a new political model than conquest. Marcia
Wright (1971: 24) appears to have in mind ethnic expansion by dint of arms.
Neither of these type-concepts could be expected to correspond in detail
to the historical reallity, which is always more complex (compound) than our
models of it. My sense for the rightness of ‘my model’ is certainly owing to
my perception of parallels between Kinga politics and their neighbours’. For
me, I prefer to say ‘the Sanga system was expanding’ than to say ‘the Kinga
were expanding’. The latter phrase strikes me as misled and amply
misleading for any of the communities under study.
408
report. What needs to be said is that all human communities have darker
and lighter phases over time, and morale varies with locale. No human
culture breeds only happy young families and adults devoted to good deeds.
There are mites in both eyes of any beholder. But the important lesson may
just be that we should train those eyes not on the light or the dark but
both, in the simple interest of probity.
Chapter Four
270 But to avoid being misled in the following long citation it’s
important to note that Kiwanga, the ‘Sultan’ Fülleborn himself saw being
installed over the Hehe, was Bena and would have had his own courtly
following with him—I sort this out later on.
273-4 For Bena dance observed in the thirties: Cullwick (1935: 401-12).
For the 1932 occasion: the same, pg. 408.
274 For placing General Liebert: John Iliffe (1979: 113). The citations of
Liebert and Elton on participation in the dance by Hehe and Sangu chief-
tains: Fülleborn (1906: 215).
Chapter Five
280 For Monica Wilson on peer friendships among girls and the premise
of gender inequality in uNyakyusa: (1977: 115-16, 135).
283 But have in mind that only men are fined for adultery, and payment
is to the aggrieved husband, who will have to pay off his wife, according to
their private bargain. She wants her share ‘on the spot’ to forestall
welching. It would take just four of these sexual safaris to net a thousand
shillings.
409
285 Source for the termination of the isaka in favour of much earlier
marriage for girls: Monica Wilson (1977: 116).
Chapter Six
293 For the condition of Ngonde and Fipa at and after colonial contact:
Kalinga (1985) and Willis (1981). For Monica Wilson on Ngonde-Nyakyusa
constitutional differences: (1977:10).
294 For slavery and the cheapening of life among the Bemba: Jan
Vansina (1966: 243-4). Bemba were the dominant (and dominating) people
of northeastern Zambia, well known to the Nyakyusa-speaking Ngonde of
Malawi. For an introduction see Audrey Richards (1951).
297 Murdock (1981) remains the most reliable single source for cross-
cultural data, owing to a careful methodology and a prodigious input of
labour. As with any global source, the specialist confronting the Atlas will
have complaints. Mine have been sidestepped here. A slightly altered set of
categories might have provided a different grouping, and correction for the
time of observations of each society would have required subtler tech-
niques, but the same ‘inner vs. outer’ differentiation would remain.
298 For the Bena Wenyekongo see Culwick & Culwick ( 1935: 154).
410
299 Ironically, the mightier European colonial power did not, having
settled for a rigid cultural gap between the ‘political’ Ngoni and the ‘apolit-
ical’ Ndendeuli, significantly impair the self-conceived civil status of
Ndendeuli when formally placing them under Ngoni rulers in the period of
indirect rule. It left the subject people to despise Ngoni arrogance, freely
utter contempt for authority, and live by their own egalitarian rules.
Sometimes benign neglect is the fitting attitude for a government to
strike toward a people it is baffled by. The close-hand feel of Kinga social life
in 1960 was, despite their own Sanga courts and colonial over-rule, more
like the feel of Ndendeuli life than Hehe. The difference is the way men sort
out spontaneously on the basis of amity.
302 Source for Nigmann: (1908: 50-1). Brown & Hutt (1935: 184-6).
Bena information: Culwick & Culwick (1935: 344).
302-3 Bena marriage age: Culwick & Culwick (1935: 193). Nigmann on
inflated polygyny: (1908: 59). Hehe in the 1930s: Brown & Hutt (1935:
107, 263-4).
306 Citations from Brown & Hutt: (1935: 112, 115) & from the Culwicks:
(1935: 377, 415).
Monica Wilson on court cases & the focus on marriage cattle: (1977: 52
& 166). On Nyakyusa mild and harmless character: Fülleborn (1906: 307).
307 Monica Wilson’s rare case: (1977: 139). That in contrast Hehe
women freely own cattle: Brown & Hutt (1935: 143).
311 For the barracks schools of Hehe & Bena which compare with Kinga
avanyakivaga : Brown & Hutt (1935: 35-6) & Culwicks (1935: 153 ff.).
411
Chapter Seven
316 The statement of a Hehe girl’s limited freedom in marrying: Brown &
Hutt (1935: 85). For the qualification see Brown (1934: 29n). For the
freedom of nomadism: (1935: 79). For Ndendeuli political attitudes:
Gulliver (1971: 245, 247, 249).
Chapter Eight
319 I wrote elsewhere: “It is the very recurrent involvements that most
endanger the social structure, which provoke fresh forms and evoke
renewed vitality” (1974a: 292). Radcliffe-Brown eventually decided to leave
‘psychology’ out of his ‘natural science of society’. It is hard to see how he
could have made serious use of his ‘social personality’ since he did not
subscribe to a ‘conceptualist’ view of human action, in the sense of Henry
Murray (1938: 8). For those who do, motivation is a central concern, and
many think holistically of personality as a system of motives idiosyncrati-
cally shaped in the individual by social experience. My more complex model, in
which personal is layered interactively between sentient and role motivation,
was first outlined in an essay on the motivational interpretation of institu-
tions (Park 1972).
326 On Bena court slaves & miscarriages: Culwick & Culwick (1935:
135 & 313). On witch hangings in German times: Raum (1965: 183).
327-8 Hehe references are to Brown & Hutt (1935: 105) and Edgerton
(1971: 94-5).
Chapter Nine
332-3 For the reader who senses a relevance here to Erving Goffman’s
Frame Analysis (1974), a few further distinctions can be made. A ‘culture of
intimacy’ provides for any community, from the scale of a domestic group
to that of a nation, a default ‘structure of experience’. For populations
within a modern nation-state the ‘culture’ implied is obviously as dilute as
the ‘intimacy’ achieved within the community of reference. But Goffman’s
‘primary framework for guided doings’ would be a frame without which a
person’s social world would be unintelligible. A ‘culture of intimacy’ normally
offers a user-friendly laminated package: you find yourself adjusting
language and gesture from ‘fully licensed’ to ‘fully constrained’ depending on
the scene and scenario; clashes of interest, differences of class or regional
background, gender mix, and other such matters are always consider-
ations. But even at the ‘fully constrained’ level of interaction, we’ll be quick
to notice the true stranger who does not ‘read us’ well and whose inten-
tions we cannot comfortably read. At that point, our ‘culture of intimacy’
412
offers no guidance at all, and we must grope for a more suitable frame.
Bringing a ‘true stranger’ into your household can put a strain on it, and
introduce new potentialities. The spread of Sanga court culture through
the Livingstone Mountain communities must have entailed endless indi-
vidual crises and a wholesale restructuring of experience.
Chapter Ten
349 For Geertz on Ryle see note to Chapter Seven of Part One.
371 Gordon Allport (1955; 1960: 265); Carl Rogers (1961: 109).
Chapter Eleven
383 The source for this summation: Weiner (1988: 91-6, 120-22).
For the importance of thick description in anthropology I believe we
should look beyond Geertz (1973) and the problem of divining action,
to implications for the subjective ‘definition of the situation’ by the
actor. Frame analysis, and Goffman’s ideas about laminated settings
for social action, throw fresh and different light on the same matter. I
have elsewhere argued the importance of frame analysis for the
ethnographic comprehension of religion (Park 1990b). The more
general implication of the premise of multiply ‘laminated’ action
413
states is that a reliable formulation of the motivational basis for
explaining an ordinary human act will seldom be either simple or
complete. The phenomenology of moral blame seems to turn about
this point, and the virtual impossibility of ‘objectifying’ moral strate-
gies is a further implication. In the background, of course, there is
Sartre’s ‘bad faith’.
Chapter Twelve
392 Today, even the Hehe suitor negotiates first with his intended for
her consent, then with her two parents; polygyny is much admired, but men
with more than two wives were already rare in 1930; most divorces are
initiated by women; and so on (see Brown and Hutt 1935: 97-115 and refer-
ences). So far as I can judge, the legitimacy of rules making pawns of women
has always and everywhere been challenged in the regional culture. As is
clearlly the case for Nyakyusa women, sisterhood and elopement from
marriage can put a positive sign on what is otherwise fruitless dissent.
What we have to admit is that unproblematic legitimacy disappears from
the world wherever translocal politics has taken hold. To that please add:
legitimacy everywhere presents itself in shades of grey.
Archival sources
District and Provincial Books for the region were examined on scene, and
studied as available elsewhere on microfilm. The main use I made of these
and other Boma records was for background understanding of the British
period. (But for the present volume this period was not my concern.) In
general, the Boma records are superficial with respect to the history of the
region before 1900, but useful in corroborating much later interview
materials on a particular subject such as the name of a ‘headman’ or ‘chief’
at a given spot in a given time frame. Published mission documents are
more valuable as reflecting the daily scene in (especially) quite early years,
but they are not usually so robust that one would want to hang one’s
analysis of the culture on the scene as missionaries perceived it. They were
engaged in understanding principally as a means to remodeling.
414
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