onkings

by Faun Rice

  (so-called) “mythical” precedents. Indeed, the apparent absence of verification

  in the archival sources has led some modern scholars to deconstruct the people’s

  traditions of stranger-king origins on grounds they never really happened and

  thereby dissolve the basic structure of the society in an acid bath of Western

  positivism.

  In an article on “The origin and early history of the kingdom of Kongo, c.

  1350–1550,” John Thornton (2001) makes the foreign status of the dynasty

  disappear for lack of confirmation in what he considers primary sources. In-

  stead of this “myth,” he prefers to invent his own origin story, according to

  which the Kongo kingdom was an internal political development among an

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  ethnically homogeneous population. It is difficult to say what kind of con-

  firmation Thornton expected for the arrival of the stranger-prince Ntinu

  Wene of Vungu, among a people without writing some six kings before the

  Portuguese arrived. What is most relevant for the course of history and clearly

  documented, however, is that the foundation of the kingdom from across the

  Congo River by Ntinu Wene (aka Lukeni lua Nimi) was the official doctrine

  of Kongo kings of the seventeenth century—and judging by certain chronicles,

  the widely known charter tradition of their rule. The kingdom was established

  by one “Motinu Wene,” youngest son of the king of “Bungo,” according to the

  anonymous author of the Historia do Reino Congo, written in the first quarter

  of the seventeenth century: “In Bungo, there are still kings that communicate

  with the Kings of the Congo, sending gifts to each other. In that way, they rec-

  ognize themselves as kinsmen, descended from one and the same family tree”

  (in Sousa 1999: 509–11). Nevertheless, in writing of the origin of the kingdom,

  Thornton does not recount the Ntinu Wene narrative, except for certain inci-

  dents that are written off as “mythical,” “ideological,” or “cosmological”—which

  is to say, unbelievable. On the same grounds, the Australian Dreamtime, the

  annual visit of the god Lono at the New Year in Hawai‘i, the doings of the

  gods and the ancestors by which Maori know themselves and emplot their

  own deeds—in brief al such foundational traditions, which indeed would be

  hard to prove actual y happened, al these precedents of action and principles of

  structure, could now be omitted from the histories of the peoples in question.

  By conflating a paradigmatic history with a syntagmatic one, thus reducing the

  template of historical action to the issue of whether it was “the literal truth”

  (Thornton 2001: 108), the historian now bases his history of a nonliterate so-

  ciety on whether certain events referring to a remote past can be documented

  from primary sources.

  For too many anthropologists and historians both, an axiomatic opposition

  between “myth” and “historical reality,” although quite the reverse of their es-

  sential identity in the societies concerned, has been an epistemological ground

  of their study. Fictional by the Standard Average European understanding of

  the term, “myth” becomes doubly implausible when it is functionally explained

  away as a mystification of a stratified political order serving as its legitimation—

  for then it could hardly reflect “historical reality,” since it is meant to conceal

  it. In their otherwise valuable survey of sub-Saharan African history, Robert O.

  Collins and James M. Burns (2007: 117) warn that the oral traditions of royal

  courts in Interlacustrine East Africa, insofar as they are often shrouded in myth,

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  147

  given to hagiography, or enlisted in current political interests, would “obscure

  historical reality.” From this it follows that we should discount the historical

  relevance of the ubiquitous stranger-king traditions of the region:

  Virtually all the oral traditions of the kingdoms of the Lake Plateau attribute

  their founding to the arrival of itinerant heroes from far away . . . . African

  dynasties throughout the continent have claimed external origins, justifiably or

  not, to legitimate their claims to authority. Scholars have been somewhat re-

  luctant to accept the necessity to have the appearance of “the great warrior” or

  “hunter-stranger from afar” to explain state formation in Africa. Its very simplic-

  ity obscures what was probably a more complex process, and the story of warrior-

  pastoralists stimulating political centralization is reminiscent of the discredited

  Hamitic myth of John Hanning Speke . . . .

  Like Bunyoro and many other states of the Lake Plateau, the oral tradi-

  tions emphasized the role of northern migrants in the founding of their king-

  doms. Such traditions should be viewed skeptically, however, since they reflect

  the living memories of rulers, not subjects, and are devoted to insuring their

  legitimacy. (2007: 123)

  That the foreign origin of the ruling dynasty would promote its legitimacy

  seems counterintuitive on the face of it, but it becomes all the more so in the

  case of Bunyoro, since the Nilotic founders of the historic dynasty were by their

  own traditions a rude and unsophisticated lot compared to the Bantu rulers of

  the fabled Kitara empire they replaced (Beattie 1971). The same would be true

  of the relatively crude or obscure foreign ancestors of the kings of Kongo, Mossi,

  certain Swahili cities, and a number of other such realms established by upstarts

  from the galactic peripheries. Whether the foreign origins of the kingship are

  lowly or godly, however, we shall see that there are profound structural reasons

  for their existence. In any case, the traditions of stranger-kingship—which are

  much more complex than this formulaic reduction to the advent of a great hunt-

  er or warrior would allow—are typically as well known to the subject peoples as

  they are to the rulers, if in certain contexts either may relate rather self-serving

  versions.3 Yet most regrettably and ironically, the effect of all such reductions

  3. See above on the wide knowledge and relevance for social action of the Ndembu

  royal tradition among ordinary villagers. For an example of differing commoner and

  chiefly versions: the Shambala commoners emphasize their voluntary acceptance of

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  of stranger-kingship traditions to speculative political functions is precisely to

  ignore their historical reality, not only as presence but as cause—their own his-

  toricity. For inasmuch as these charter narratives lay down the fundamental

  relations between rulers and ruled, inasmuch as they are constantly rehearsed in

  rituals and continuously practiced economically as well as politically, to dismiss

  them as “mythical” or “ideological” is to efface their profound influence on the

  course of events. Inscribed in memories and practiced as habitus, the tradition

  lives on as a historical force—often for centuries.

  Not to deny that “what actually happened” is important to know. In the

  many actual cases of a stranger-kingship structure without an event, that is, of

  native kings who become strangers rather tha
n strangers who become native

  kings, this is important to know, since here history consists precisely in such

  inventions—however seemingly without material, formal, or efficient cause. In

  this connection, the claim of the rulers of the West African realms of Kanem-

  Bornu, the Hausa Emirates, the Yoruba states, and others that they descended

  from exalted personages of Mecca or Baghdad—or else, as in the instance of

  Borgu kings, that they come from one Kisra, the reputed enemy of Muham-

  mad—reminds us of what is always implied in stranger-king formations: that

  the societies in question exist in larger, hierarchically ordered fields of intercul-

  tural relations. It follows that stranger-kingships are generated neither by inter-

  nal conditions nor by external relations alone, but in a dialogue between them.

  Africa probably deserves the title of the locus classicus of stranger-kingship.

  Of the many hundreds of African kingdoms large and small known to anthro-

  pology and history, it would be hard to find any that are not ruled by a dynasty

  of foreign derivation. Constituted in charter traditions, rehearsed in periodic

  rituals, and practiced in everyday social and economic relations, the dual divi-

  sion of society into indigenous subjects and rulers of external origins is here the

  normal if not the universal form of state. From traditions recorded in European

  travelers’ accounts to the detailed reports of modern ethnographers—notably

  Aidan Southall on the Alur, Ian Cunnison on the Kazembe kingdom of the

  Luapulu, Michel Izard on the Yatenga Mossi, Jacques Lombard and Marjorie

  Stewart on Borgu kingdoms, among many others—sociopolitical formations of

  this description dominate the literature from every quarter of the continent. The

  the chief, given his juridical functions and spiritual powers, while maintaining he

  holds power on their sufferance; while the chiefs emphasize or justify their coercive

  authority (Winans 1962: 77).

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  149

  precolonial states ruled by stranger-kings noted in Lucy Mair’s African king-

  doms (1977; not a long book) include Oyo and other Yoruba kingdoms, Luba,

  Lunda, Kongo, Benin, Zande, Alur, Dahomey, Asante, Borgu, Malawi, Ngoni,

  Ndembu, Nyoro, Ganda, Rwanda, Nyakyusa, Sotho, and a good number more.

  Whole regions of the continent—such as the Lake Plateau just men-

  tioned—have been identified as realms of stranger-kingship (cf. Southall [1956]

  2004: 229). Similarly, Kajsa Ekholm (1978: 121) observes of Central Africa: “In

  fact most of the ideology of Central African societies is marked by a dualism in

  which it is imagined that the population consists of two groups, the conquer-

  ors and the vanquished original inhabitants. The conquerors are ‘men’ and their

  subjects ‘owners.’” What is mostly imagined is the “conquest,” not the dualism of

  alien rulers and native subjects as such, which is not only ethnographically real

  but, according to Luc de Heusch, structurally intelligible. Referring broadly to

  West and Central Africa, de Heusch (1982b: 26–27) makes the critical obser-

  vation that kingship does not develop organically and internally from lineage-

  ordered societies. In effect, he contradicts all those who since classical times

  have supposed the state evolves naturally from the extended family through the

  intermediate form of village or lineage systems. In a golden passage which is key

  to the understanding of stranger-kingship in general, de Heusch writes:

  Everything happens as if the very structure of a lineage-based society is not ca-

  pable of engendering dialectical developments on the political plane without the

  intervention of a new symbolic structure. It is not by chance that so many mythi-

  cal traditions in West Africa as in Central Africa present the founder of the

  kingship as a foreign hunter, the holder of a more efficacious magic. Whatever

  the historical origin of this politico-symbolic institution, mythical diachrony al-

  ways involves an intervention of exterior events, whether or not the sound of

  arms accompanies them. Royalty thus appears as an ideological revolution, the

  instigator of which ancient history does not ignore . . . . The sovereignty, the

  magical source of power, always comes from elsewhere, from a claimed original

  place, exterior to society. (1982b: 26–27)

  Speaking of Africa generally, Jan Vansina (1992: 61) observes that “elite migra-

  tion” is a favored theme of traditions of state formation. Coming alone or with

  a few followers, the dynastic founder is a foreigner, often a hunter; and though

  the numbers of the newcomers are small, the sociopolitical consequences of

  their advent are “spectacular.” In the same vein, while noting the analogous

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  pattern of kingdom origins among the Mossi and related West African peoples,

  Dominique Zahan (1961: 6n) writes: “The traditions of African states on both

  sides of the equator practically without exception speak of the two social com-

  ponents: the aboriginal and the foreign or the invader. Nearly always they thus

  explain the origin of the state among these peoples.”

  In an extended essay on “The internal African frontier,” Igor Kopytoff

  (1989: 60), recounting “the standard myth of the founding of most African

  polities,” tells of the founders leaving their place of origin, entering a frontier,

  confronting the local population, “and instituting a new political order that

  was the origin of the society currently in being.” In what is effectively a notice

  of the residual sovereignty marking the native people’s status in these socie-

  ties, Kopytoff observes that from their perspective, “the polity had issued out

  of the acceptance by the subjects of the ruler, and it continued to exist because

  of it. The rulers were intruders, outsiders, aliens, late comers” (ibid.). This also

  implies that stranger-king formations are basical y contractual—for al the

  usual talk of conquest. A few pages on, Kopytoff observes that the alien rulers

  institute a new political era by taking on the local trappings and symbols of

  legitimacy. Hence “the crucial point in Africa” is that by way of the “compact”

  entailed in his ritual incorporation, the stranger-king is legitimated by the

  indigenous people. “In the constitutional perspective of the subjects,” Kopy-

  toff writes, “the people existed before the rulership existed since they were

  the grantors of authority; this was congruent with the subjects’ paradigmatic

  myth of their precedence” (ibid.: 64–65). Consider, then, that the structure is

  inherently temporal as wel as hierarchical, and that the encompassment of the

  native people in the rule of the stranger is effected through the encompass-

  ment of the stranger by the native people—al of which wil be il ustrated

  shortly. For now notice that in Kopytoff ’s own wording this history was made

  paradigmatically.

  Recent research thus confirms what Lucy Mair (1977: 1) wrote on this ac-

  count decades ago: “As the prehistory of Africa is reconstructed, it seems often

  possible to trace the imposition of chiefly authority by outsiders on ‘tribes with-

  out rulers
.’” Even tribes which are sometimes supposed to be without rulers,

  such as Tallensi—so classified and described by Meyer Fortes in the influential

  tome African political systems (1940)—turn out to in fact have them: in this case

  in the persons of immigrant Namoo chiefs from the Mamprusi kingdom peace-

  fully settled upon the native Tale, who by ancestral right remain the “owners”

  of Taleland. As late as the mid-twentieth century, the Namoo chiefs were still

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  151

  appointed by a representative of the Mamprusi king. What Fortes had encoun-

  tered was a marginal chiefdom in a regional galaxy of interdependent polities

  in northern Nigeria, including the substantial kingdoms of Dagomba and the

  Mossi, all of whom traced common descent to Mamprusi ancestors. Perhaps the

  peripheral position of the Tallensi accounts for their rather basic dual system

  in which the ethnically distinguished Namoo of aristocratic external origins—

  their main ancestor in most tellings was a disenfranchised and exiled son of a

  Mamprusi king—effectively divided power with important Tale lineage leaders

  presiding over the productivity of the land as Priests of the Earth. In Fortes’ de-

  scription, this “fundamental cleavage” in Tale society, headed respectively by the

  chiefs ( naam) and the earth priests ( tenda’ana), reads like an elementary form of

  African stranger-kingship:

  The complementary functions of chiefship and tenda’ana-ship are rooted di-

  rectly in social structures but as also validated by myths of origin and backed

  by the most powerful religious sanctions of the ancestor cult and the cult of

  the Earth. The Namoos are believed to be descendants of immigrant Mamprusi

  who fled from [the capital] Mamprugu many generations ago. Hence, they claim

  remote kinship with the ruling aristocracy of Mampurugu. Their chiefship is

  derived from that of the Paramount Chief of the Mamprusi, and this is the ulti-

  mate sanction of its politico-religious status in Tale society. The Talis and other

  clans that have the tenda’ana-ship claim to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the

  country, and the ritual sanctions of their office are derived from the Earth cult.

  ([1949] 1969: 3–4).

  One is constantly reminded of the cleavage between Namoos and non-Namoos