onkings
Page 26
. . . for they are continually contrasting themselves. (1945: 25)
One might add that the Tale priests of the earth, like their counterparts
throughout the continent, are known as the successors of the leaders of the
aboriginal people, which helps explain their own sometimes-appearance as fig-
ures of chiefly authority. Indeed, the priests may represent the aristocracy of
a former stranger-king regime, as in the cognate structures of Mossi states—
whose priestly order notably interested Sir James Frazer (1918: 85–87). Citing
an account of Louis Tauxier, Frazer observed that the Mossi rulers, as strangers
in the land, were not entitled to minister to the local sprits, the divinities of the
bearing earth:
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ON KINGS
It was only the vanquished, the ancient owners of the soil, with which they [the
rulers] continued in good relations, who were qualified for that. Hence the po-
litical head of the aborigines was bound to become a religious chief under the
rule of the Mossi. Thus . . . the king (Moro-Naba) never himself offers the sac-
rifices to Earth at Wagadugu, nor does he allow such sacrifices to be offered by
his minister of religion, the Gande-Naba. He lays the duty on the king of Waga-
dugu (Wagadugu-Naba), the grandson of the aborigines, who as such is viewed
favourably by the local divinities. (Tauxier in Frazer 1918: 86)
Note also Fortes’ observation of the functional complementarity between the
Namoo chiefs and the earth-priest leaders of the indigenous Talis, even as “one
is constantly reminded of the cleavage” between the groups. Here as in many
similar dual regimes, there is an oppositional tension in the relationship be-
tween the native people and their foreign-derived (and -identified) ruler: a ten-
sion that, among other expressions, is often a feature of royal installation rituals.
But as will become apparent in the following discussion, the native and foreign
components of the chiefdom or kingdom are each functionally incomplete with-
out the other: whereas together they make a social, material, and cosmological
totality. Hence their enduring coexistence—on the condition of their difference.
ON THE WAY TO THE KINGDOM
Charter narratives of the advent of the African stranger-hero consistently fea-
ture a number of themes that prefigure fundamental attributes of his future
kingship. Three that are especially pertinent to the old Kongo regime are singled
out here. First, to borrow from Aidan Southall ([1956] 2004) on the Alur, the
topos of the “turbulent prince” or the “troublesome son”: the hero is an ambitious
offspring of the king in his own land, destined to rule by nature but condemned
to exile for some fault or by losing out in a conflict royal with other pretenders
to the kingship. Second, what Luc de Heusch (1958, 1962) called “the exploit”:
the hero commits a crime against kinship and common morality—incest, frat-
ricide, parricide, murder of a close kinsman, adultery with a wife of his father,
etc.—on the journey to his kingdom; perhaps it was the reason for his exile.
Third, the theme Jane Guyer (1993: 257) refers to as “capture”: the hero in the
course of his migration demonstrates his prowess as a great hunter and/or a
great warrior, thus proving his ability to control the vital and mortal powers of
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
153
the wild—and thereby, provided such powers are properly domesticated, dem-
onstrating his capacity to rule people.
The diaspora of turbulent princes is a main source of stranger-king for-
mation. The succession struggles that give rise to it often go beyond fraternal
rivalries, engaging a larger network of interested royal kin and loyal followers.
For besides the force of ascribed rank or customary rules of succession which
in principle disqualify princely candidates who nonetheless may have kingly
ambitions, certain structural conditions function to expand and intensify these
conflicts. In the common case of royal polygyny, many of the sons of the king
who compete to succeed him are paternal half-brothers; and as each is backed
by his own maternal kinsmen, their interpersonal contention becomes a multi-
party conflict among collective factions. As, for example, in Ankole succession
struggles, where, “even in a quite recent epoch, the primary heirs . . . each aided
by their maternal kin, entered into a bloody conflict that lasted several months”
(de Heusch 1966: 28). Or as Marjorie Stewart wrote of the Borgu kingdoms:
“When the throne became vacant and competition for its possession became
intense among the princes, matrilineal relatives of each prince played an im-
portant role” (1993: 92). Hence the well-known interregna of many African
kingdoms, notable for their duration and carnage.
The princes not only menace one another, they may wel be a threat to the
general peace and even the life of the king. “For al those princes aspiring to the
throne,” writes Father Crazzolara of the Shilluk, “the main obstacle is the ruling
Yeth [the king], Therefore they bide expectantly for his demise; and many a spear
has been flung by royal hands in the past against the Yeth” (1951: 134). Azande,
Shil uk, Ganda, Alur, and Borgu kings, among others, dispatched such unruly
sons to peripheral provinces, often to the areas of their maternal kin, where they
became semi-independent stranger-rulers themselves and potentially the found-
ers of autonomous kingdoms. The effect is what Audrey Richards described for
the Interlacustrine region as “multi-kingdom tribes”: “Throughout the whole In-
terlacustrine area,“ she wrote, “the sons who became princes over subdistricts
showed a tendency to assert their independence and even rebel against their fa-
thers, forming separate states in what are called multi-kingdom tribes” (1960: 34).
A like effect may follow from the phenomenon that Hildred and Clifford
Geertz (1975) identified as “sinking status” in Balinese royal lineages internal-
ly ranked by seniority of descent—often also found in African aristocracies.4
4. See p. 431, where this diagram is reproduced and discussed by Graeber.
154
ON KINGS
Owing to the growth of the senior line, the collateral kinsmen will be pro-
gressively distanced in status and disqualified for office over time—unless they
can muster the means to take by cunning or force what they can no longer
claim by right. Alternatively, they can move out as would-be kings in search
of a chosen people. It is relevant in this connection that many of the ruling
aristocracy of African states, inasmuch as they are possessed of marvelous pow-
ers by divine gift and entitled to rule by ancestry, have been known to exhibit a
certain libido dominandi. “The vocation of every Mossi,” writes Michel Izard in
reference to the ruling group, “is to exercise power ( naam) and thus to be a chief
( naaba), to command ( so) and thus to have a command ( solem)” (1985: 20). Of
the Shambala of Tanganyika, Edgar Winans (1962: 91) noted: “As all royal clan
members consider themselves rulers, an attitude which is reinforced by most or
all of their subjec
ts, and as only a few hold regular and legitimate chiefship, then
tension in the system gives rise to the expansion of the state.” According to the
robust Kongo tradition, Ntinu Wene’s insatiable desires of rule were likewise
frustrated by his junior status among the sons of the king of Vungu—a modest
realm north of the Congo River—which was what moved him to cross the river
into the territory he would organize as the kingdom of Kongo, In general, the
centrifugal political impetus generated by the turbulent princes is probably the
most important source of stranger-king formation on the continent.
Having broken with their own kinsmen, stranger-heroes such as Ntinu
Wene then dialectical y negate the kinship order they are on their way to
subdue by “exploits” that signify their power to do so. Here are the crimes of
fratricide, parricide, incest, and the like, which break through the limits that,
as Luc de Heusch observed, represent the inability of lineage systems to au-
tonomously transcend their own structure and give rise to a kingly state.5 De
Heusch himself offered pertinent examples taken from the usual practice in
royal instal ation rituals of rehearsing the dominant tradition of the origin of
the kingship. Re-creating in this way the original stranger-hero, the Lunda
king (Mwata Kombana) of a number of Pende groups in Zaïre ritual y unites
with his sister upon acceding to power; and several of his close kinsmen are also
secretly kil ed so that their ghosts may serve him (de Heusch 1982b: 19). In the
more complex case of the Luba king, he reproduces the “shameful legacy” of
5. Credit to E. E. Evans-Pritchard too, who thus understood the imposition of the
rule of the Sanusi brethren over the segmentary lineage order of the Bedouin of
Cyrenaica (1949).
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
155
the founder of an earlier stranger-king regime—who was also the brother of his
maternal ancestress—by uniting with his mothers and sisters at his investiture;
and his own daughters and brothers’ daughters become his wives. In this way,
de Heusch observes, the king combines the incestuous qualities of the ancient
regime with the superior culture of his own; and most importantly, “the Luba
king finds himself projected into a zone of absolute solitude, beyond and above
the profane cultural order” (1982a: 32). The founder-hero of the Nupe, Tsoede,
effectively did the same when he introduced human sacrifice by making his
mother’s brother the first victim (Nadel 1942: 74). In still other traditions, the
crime against kinship had occurred in the turbulent prince’s own homeland and
was the cause of his banishment. The ancestor of Shambala rulers, Mbegha,
was deprived of the kingship in his natal country as a result of a demonstrable
blemish of his person that mystical y kil ed his relations: “because as an infant
he had cut his upper teeth first, his presence was causing his kinsmen to die”
(Feierman 1974: 43). The willingness of the youngest son of the Kerekere “con-
queror” of the Zambezi Val ey to commit “the forbidden act” of incest with his
own sister when his older brothers refused is indeed what made him the heir
to his father’s rule (Lan 1985: 86). Sovereign exceptionalism: Schmitt avant
la lettre.
Just so, when Ntinu Wene killed his pregnant “aunt” because she refused to
pay the proper toll for crossing the Congo River, the crime not only initiated
his departure from Vungu, but defined him as a “king” ( ntinu) and prefigured
his rule of Kongo. The report of this tradition from the Capuchin mission-
ary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi de Montecuccolo (in Kongo in 1664–65) re-
lates that the woman was Ntinu Wene’s father’s sister—a paternal affine in the
BaKongo matrilineal order—and that the deed infuriated his royal father, Nimi
a Nzima, who wished to punish him (Sousa 1999). But this crime against kin-
ship—and perhaps lèse majesté to boot—was the mark of Ntinu Wene’s royal
nature, for the exploit moved his henchmen to proclaim him “king” ( ntinu). In-
deed his following increased rapidly in the aftermath, upon which he led them
across the Congo River, and embarked on a career of conquest and diplomacy
that appended the state of Kongo to the kingly title he had already manifested.
(Note that by tradition the conquest was not the origin of Wene’s kingship but
rather the other way around: his kingship was a precondition of his martial
success.) Reflecting on this narrative, Georges Balandier underscored the same
break with tribal society and the same manifestation of the power to create a
new and greater order that Luc de Heusch had perceived:
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ON KINGS
By killing his “kin,” Ntinu Wene acquires the state of solitude necessary for the
domination of men and the consecration of power . . . . The defiance of the
fundamental principles of society is the mark of an exceptional being . . . . He
has denied the ancient order; he has acquired an autonomy which can only be
explained by the possession of extraordinary powers. . . . It is on the basis of these
powers that he will construct outside the prevailing form a new society subject to
his law only. (Balandier 1968: 37, emphasis in the original)
Instructive, you could say, is the contrast between the take of the anthropolo-
gists Balandier and de Heusch on such feats of royal exceptionalism and the
interpretation of the Ntinu Wene episode by the historian John Thornton.
Thornton finds the charter traditions of the Kongo kingship as a rule defective
because of “the difficult problem of linking the secondary elements of tradi-
tion, like the narrative origin story, to documented reality” (2001: 96). This is
like saying that for lack of any link to documented reality, we should have to
eliminate the crucifixion of Jesus, let alone his resurrection, from an account of
the nature and history of Christianity. Ironically, the particular fault Thornton
finds with Kongo narratives, namely that they are only “interpretive histories”
incorporating “secondary explanatory narrative,” is a good description of how he
provides alternative interpretations that purportedly reveal the historical reali-
ties by means of his own native commonsense explanations. The effect is rather
to substitute ethnocentric banalities for ethnographic realities.
Although with regard to Ntinu Wene’s murderous exploit, Cavazzi had
commented that the BaKongo admired such bloodthirstiness, Thornton coun-
tered by a feckless analogy to the well-known story of the most Christian Kon-
go king Afonso (r. 1506–1543), who had his idolatrous mother buried alive “for
the sake of the faith.” Despite repeated remonstration by the king, she refused
to part with a traditional amulet. In what amounts to a “secondary explanatory
narrative” with the added defect of substituting his own commonsensical motive
for a deed infused with Kongo meanings of kinship horror and royal violence,
Thornton opines that both kingly exploits were legitimating signs of a “ruler
who upholds the law”—which is rather the opposite of what they were doing.
In any case, neither sto
ry could be true, he concludes, and the Ntinu Wene
tradition in particular “is a tale we must not take too seriously, given its ideologi-
cal significance” (ibid.: 109). Not take too seriously? Historiographic positivism
would thus doubly distance itself from a historical anthropology: for in inviting
us to commit the ethnological cardinal sin of not taking something too seriously
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
157
because the people concerned do so take it, Thornton thereupon assigns what
they take seriously to the louche status of “ideology.” In the end, the truth value
of the tradition for BaKongo having been ignored, so also is its effectiveness as
a paradigmatic tradition thereafter neglected.
In any case, there is evidence early and late that exploits of kinship-killing
are distinctive marks of Kongo kingship. Beside the stories of such deaths in
royal installation rituals, Msgr. Cuvelier (1946: 288–89) tells of a certain clan
device (other than the one vaunting King Afonso’s pious murder) that claims:
“Nlaza Ntotela [King Nlaza] killed his mother ( ngudi) in the public square of
Mbanza Kongo [the capital], without anyone questioning him for it.” “This is
a device,” Cuvelier adds, “adopted by certain clans that reigned in Kongo.” Nor
were BaKongo kings the only rulers in the region who were renowned for so
disposing of their mothers. Tired of his mother’s foretelling that a rival would
usurp his power, Nkongolo, first divine king of the Luba, “dug a ditch with his
own hands and buried his mother alive in it” (de Heusch 1962: 17). Indeed,
according to the master ethnographer Wyatt MacGaffey, the ability to kill a
near kinsman still signified chiefliness for Congolese people in the twentieth
century:
Ideal y the chief is a benevolent despot whose authentic relation to the ances-
tors is assured by some ordeal or test, such as a successful hunt for a particular
kind of animal, or some other demonstration of the power to kil . Modern in-
formants said, “If we choose someone to be chief, we would require him to kill
one of his nephews. If he could not, we would have to find someone else to be
chief.” (1986: 176)
MacGaffey cites some legendary incidents in point, including one from the