Scribd Explore Sign Up | Log In iii Chapter Four Concepts of Sanga Power Kinga-Nyakyusa Expansion 92 History vs.

Genealogy 95 Political Vitality 99 Conditions of Manipulative Power 102 Political Logic: Kinga / Mahanzi Differences 105 Social Control 107 The Ruling Establishments 110 Reassessing Domain & Realm 111 Chapter Five War Patterns: Politics & Ethics War as Structure 115 War in the Social Memory 118 Territories 124 Profits of War 129 Faces of War 133 Heroics 135 Kyelelo of the West 139 Later Adventures of Kyelelo 145 Sham, Bluff, and Sacrament 149 Chapter Six Prince and Priest Bush DoctorCourt Priest 154 Autochthonous LoreImmigrant Authority 161 Localism and Ambience 163 Gardens, Boundaries, and Antidotes 167

Chapter SevenThe Paranoid Prince Managing Social Danger 189 An Exiled God 198 The Would-be-gods 210 Source notes 216 References 229 1 THE FOUR REALMS: CHAPTER ONE POLITICS OF THE COURT AND BUSH Springs of Political Authority Kinga built the kind of polity which can be called a protostate. They institutionalized political authority without really abandoning the structural particularism of the simpler stateless society they would have known in the past. They place that past time some twelve royal generations before their short colonial age began. The kind of political growth they enjoyed is known world-wide among advanced agricultural peoples. Until modern times, it must have happened whenever a well-ordered system of local anarchy began to move toward trans-local politics. A people in the slow transition of a protostate process doesnt hold onto Gemeinschaft intact, but the political machinery of trans-local authority alters the terms of old social contracts. Kinga, under their Sanga chiefs, developed a culturally dual world drawing from two distinguishable repositories of social thought. It is appropriate to contrast the two as the court and bush versions of Kinga culture. Since Kinga chiefship gradually came to be backed by ceremonial religion and a standing priesthood, and since there were two tiers of chieftainship but no hierarchy, every local ruler headed an autonomous polity. The situation justifies calling every local ruler with his own court a lord, and calling a lord who takes tribute from his neighbours a prince. It is a system without room for a king because it boasts no central direction. At first colonial contact there were four princely realms established, which Ill call Central, North, West, and East. The West in particular,

and the East less certainly, were beginning to break up or realign under new schemes of princely leadership. But since the German contact ended autonomy, there remained as the nineteenth century closed only four princely realms. [see source notes] What makes the Kinga case especially worth reporting is not the wealth of detail available but the special insight afforded by the social memory of Kinga elders, which I began to collect shortly before Tanganyikan independence in 1961. This is a case of protostates developing in a segmentary patterneach of the four realms comprised a plurality of lordly domainswithout lineages as building blocks. The key to understanding lineage organization is that it provides a segmentary structure into which 2 each component household fits in its one-and-only place. Achieving the same result in an amity-based society, where men form their alliances without reckoning on kinship, entails a politics of amity which mainline anthropology hasnt a model for. In this book I dont offer such a model but concern myself with the empirical stuff on which it might be based. The well-known segmentary lineage model accounts for the way new households are given each its one-only spot in a comprehensive topological model of political space in what then amounts to a trans-local community. A segmentary amity model (if that is what we need) should do the same. In Twin Shadows I compared Kinga in a set series of reference frames with other peoples described for the Sowetan (for southwestern Tanganyika) region. In Four Realms my focus is still comparative but restricted to political process. I use the Nyakyusa studies of Godfrey and Monica Wilson

again, and again make their Nyakyusa a foil for my efforts to understand the Kinga. I further pursue my theme of the antipolitan ethicthe moral position common to the men of both Kinga and Nyakyusa protostates which allows that a mans gift of loyalty to a ruler is retractable for cause. An earlier, ancestral community, such as would have been in place in the region early in the seventeenth century, would have continued to develop for some generations less politically and culturally than demographically. As late as 1800, if I could have observed it, I expect uKinga would have passed muster as an acephalous microculture (in French and more intuitively, a peuplade ), an autonomous folk community with a distinctive culture of its own. Each local settlement within the larger community, however, would have had its peculiarities, reflecting its own autonomy and self-sufficiency in everyday affairs. The presence of political authority would be more noticeable in some than other local communities, but a segmentary order would be developingmost local settlement areas would be articulated with a central settlement where moots would be held. In 1900, in addition to its handful of protostates, the broad region of Southwestern Tanzania still offered a variety of prepolitical cultural-and-linguistic communities. Best known is the Pangwa. There, command over anothers action was not vested in office but in a particular role-relationship such as a kin tie (parent-child) or a contract (husband-wife). The dominant figure in a local settlement was, or was taken for, the eldest elder. Granting that even a young man under the rules of such political particularism, finding himself the eldest male of his household group, might owe obedience to no one, for the most part ethnographers have found that the path from childhood dependency to marriage is short in acephalous societies, and

well policed by neighbours. Authority may stop at the limits of the family group, but no one is really expected to pursue his or her career 3 from any vantage point outside of family membership. By the time they must deal with each other as adults of the same sex, parent and child in daily interaction generally make do with the softer sanctions of reciprocity, and authority comes to be scarcely detectable. Father and son, elder and younger brother may have to settle their disputes as strangers do, depending on special institutions of peer-dealt justice. But the essential feature of acephalous social structure is that the socializing groups are domestic units or compounds recognizing mutual dependence and agreed to hanging onto it in face of trouble. Where close-kin groups are robust enough to handle disputes over land, property, and marriage rights, a society without any formal superstructure may achieve a considerable size and density. Sometimes, as probably was the case with Pangwa, the eldest elder pops up when a local spokesperson is needed. But pop-up leadership with continued success on the score of growth and demographic density leads either to division (the hiving off and migration of lineage or clan segments) or politicization. In the long run for kinship societies there must always be a rather nervous blend of the fight-or-flight alternatives. This leads eventually to the co-optation of the kinship order to oligarchic political management on behalf of a trans-local community. So, at least, goes one scenario most of us credit.But the major transition is so gradual, through the elaboration of existing institutions for managing conflict; through slow change or episodic explosions of warlike activity; through plague and pestilence and setbacks of every sort, that the brightest observer who had lived

through most of it would still be hard put to say how such things happen. For Kinga, most of the tales are about warfare, about the relative poverty of their ancestors, about witches, and about mythical men of magical powers. Among Western scholars ancient Jewry is justly famed for hanging onto its historical narratives; but the accounts at least from Moses onward are of a literate people. The past an ethnographer can getall I might have got with twice the time and diligence in the fieldcant come close to history. What I can do is reconstruct precolonial realities from the information of elders who knew them in their youths.It is an unlikely scenario for a proto-stat e to suppress any of the institutions of social control to which it is heir from prepolitical times. Politicians find it more prudent to develop existing custom and turn it to new uses. So dispute settlement moves from self-help actions by kin groups to mediation by court authority but does so by insensible steps. To illustrate, a hut-burning occurred in the Western 4 realm during my fieldwork. It was an act of self-help by an injured party from a neighbouring political domain, and was considered to settle accounts. The matter was never brought to court, having been resolved within the rules of the game in the bush culture: the local ruler at the time had more to lose by getting the incident into the colonial record books than by letting it pass unsanctioned. But the occurrence itself discloses the rather special pattern of history which marks Sowetan history. It is easiest to understand when it is considered as a temporal series of structural overlays. Rather than the new way of doing things replacing the old, you get an accumulation of law. An injured party can revert to an older scheme when the current institutions of government are inefficient or inaccessible. In this case, too, we have the evidence that the overlay pattern is as old as the institution of the royal courts among Kinga. The direct

approach to redressing a tortself-help, the transactional sanctionhad to be one of the earliest ruling courts targets in its takeover of the jural system. That it nonetheless persevered perhaps twelve generations later should not surprise. Traditional institutions for conflict resolution used by the Kinga and their regional neighbours were moots, courts, and ordeals. After sixty years of colonial rule, the jural proceedings I observed among the Nyiha (far neighbours of the Kinga, with a still strongly particularistic bush culture) preserved the atmosphere of the moot, where Bena, Hehe, and Kinga magistrates ran their courts in an authoritarian fashion superficially closer to that of a colonial magistrates hearing. But the history of these three peoples shows that the German and British models came on scene too late to be decisive. The difference in style between moot and court was a tangible sign of a difference, deeply rooted in precolonial times, between the regions two sorts of political community. Kinga in colonial times (as always before) would not have seen their courts exercising authority in a style calculated to erode the substance of justice rendered. In their hearings the final decisions were backed by the authority of high office, but always rendered in a manner dramatizing a consensus of peers, so capturing its legitimacy. To be tried in open court describes the Kinga court case exactly: the facts being quickly established, most of the talk you will hear is from the public, assigning judgement. When the tide of opinion falls back, the judgement is ready in the hands of the ruler. In this way, the kind of authority a traditional chiefly figure could exercise was set apart as an extraordinary instrument, different in kind to the ordinary authority exercised within a household. It was a power, like Leave a Comment You must be logged in to leave a comment. Submit Characters: 400

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