onkings

by Faun Rice

  Yombe people in which the son who killed his brother at his father’s command

  secured the latter’s chiefly position and others of the family had to obey him.

  It is unlikely that these killings actually occurred; it is more likely they indicate

  that events which never happened can continue to have historic effects. Tradi-

  tions need not have actually happened in order to then actually happen.

  Resuming the journey of the stranger-prince: in the liminal period between

  leaving his own kingdom and establishing another, the hero proves his sacred

  violence is also a creative and beneficent power by controlling the ungoverned

  forces that everywhere pervade the African wild—and threaten to fatally pene-

  trate the settled human communities. As Randall Packard reports for the Bashu

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  of eastern Zaïre, their world is divided between the opposing spheres of the

  regulated human “homestead” and an untamed “bush” ( kisoki) that surrounds

  and perpetually menaces it with “wild animals and plants, dangerous spirits,

  powerful medicines, and climatic elements” (1981: 26). Erratic and/or violent

  in their natural state, these presences are the usual sources of illness, death, and

  dearth in the homestead. So even as elements of the bush are essential for hu-

  man existence—raw materials, foods (especially meat), sunshine and rain—peo-

  ple are in need of protection from many of them. Hence the distinctive figure

  of the hunter-king, who may also or alternatively be a warrior-king, and carry a

  reputation for capture or conquest even had his indigenous subjects voluntarily

  submitted to him (cf. Lombard 1965; Winans 1962). “Sacred violence” is the

  other side of a civilizing mission, as Balandier says of the advent of Ntinu Wene

  in Kongo.

  If his own Vungu people knew Ntinu Wene was a king because he killed

  his aunt, upon which he forsook his homeland for a career of foreign conquests,

  the native Shambala people were moved to make the foreign hunter Mbegha

  their king because he had killed a lion—indeed because he was a lion. Mbegha

  was the disinherited son of the king of Kilinde in the Usambari mountains who

  became a great hunter when forced into the wild. One night he killed a lion that

  was menacing Shambala people—which motivated them to make him king the

  next morning. “The man has killed a lion,” the people exclaimed, “The man is a

  lion” (Winans 1962: 80). Just so, on his way to the kingship, Mbegha lived the

  life of an animal, sheltering in rude camps and caves, and hunting wild pigs—a

  prized food that is also dangerous, whose capture would thus be a felicitous sign

  of kingly powers. Mbegha had occult knowledge of hunting and healing medi-

  cines; and after he fled his native land, he acquired a packet of magic that al-

  lowed him to control the clouds and the rain (thus agricultural fertility), and to

  foretell future events (ibid.). As Steven Feierman observed, however, the hero’s

  life-giving powers were the obverse side of his destructive magic:

  The justification for the king’s right to destroy is that of a rain magician: a ma-

  gician of the fertility of the land must possess and dominate the entire land in

  order to be effective . . . . So if the king is a lion, if he eats the wealth of the whole

  countryside, then the land will be fertile. (1974: 59)

  In everyday conversation in Shambaai one often hears that rain magic, the key to

  fertility, began with Mbegha. His magical powers, which were the powers to kill,

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  159

  and which derived from his wildness, were also the powers to bring fertility to

  Shambaai . . . . When all Shambaai became his possession, he was transformed

  from a killer to one whose power led to an increase of life. (1974: 62)

  As such metahuman powers of life and death come from the outside, so do the

  human rulers who will instantiate them inside. ( Ergo, Frazer cogitates.) And given such cosmic powers, one can see why a foreign identity is an enduring

  attribute of the ruling aristocracy: an ethnic distinction that may well survive

  their cultural assimilation by the aboriginal people—as the recurrent historic

  expression of a paradigmatic “myth.” To follow the argument of Aidan South-

  all ([1956] 2004: 230), another such historical metaphor of a mythical reality

  was the early success of stranger-colonial rule in Africa, based likewise on the

  Europeans’ apparent control of marvelous potencies: in this case as evidenced by

  their extraordinary wealth and terrifying firearms—that is to say, powers of life

  and death. “These things,” writes Southall,

  gave the quality of a unique marvel to their first appearance among any African

  people. To the latter, the newcomers appeared to have a complete mastery over

  the material world, and a degree of control over life and death through their med-

  icines and their firearms which was general y terrifying. Even after the first shock

  wore off, the indelible expression of a mastery of fantastic forces of unknown

  extent remained. This induced many African peoples to submit to the establish-

  ment of European administration with little opposition . . . . ([1956] 2004: 232)

  Only that, when the realities of European rule set in, frustration and resistance

  ensued in proportion to the extent that people’s initial expectations had been

  deceived.

  To return to the precolonial marvels, Mbegha was hardly the only African

  king identified with great beasts of the bush. The Dahomey ruling line famously

  descended from a leopard, as did the Igala kings by one well-known history—

  by other, subdominant versions, they were immigrant princes from Jukun or

  Yoruba royalty. All this helps explain why King Joao II of Kongo (r. 1688–post

  1716) was pleased to style himself the one who “tramples the lion in the king-

  dom of his mother” (Thornton 2001: 98). Indeed, the phrase distills the whole

  process of stranger-king formation to its essence: the synthesis of an outsider

  endowed of transcendent powers with the indigenous masters of the bearing

  earth through his union with an esteemed daughter of the latter, thus giving rise

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  to a dynasty that in its paternal and maternal ancestry combines the fundamen-

  tal sources of life—and death.

  ADVENT OF THE STRANGER-KING

  Considering the process of kingdom formation as described in the historical

  traditions of rulers and ruled alike, conquest is too often invoked as the origin of

  sovereign power, the ferocious attributes of the stranger culture-hero notwith-

  standing. In this connection, with the Alur and other African peoples in mind,

  probably conquest has been overrated in Western scholarly traditions since

  Ludwig Gumplowicz (1899) mistakenly assumed that the ubiquity of an ethnic

  distinction between rulers and ruled in Africa and elsewhere was evidence that

  the state must have so originated. But Mbegha the hunter and lion-killer domi-

  nated the Shambala more by gifts of meat than by force; and in any case, the

  native people themselves claim to have initiated the process: “Whether or not it

  is true in an historical sense, nearly all commoners claim
ed that their ancestors

  voluntarily asked for chiefs, and, similarly, chiefs do not claim to rule by right

  of conquest” (Winans 1962: 76). Besides the gifts of meat, Mbegha’s kingship

  owed more to making love than making war, for it was established when various

  villages, competing with each other by seeking a powerful ruler of their own, of-

  fered women to him and took the son born from the alliance for their chief. The

  elements of this process as narrated by Shambala are frequently repeated around

  the continent; the stranger-prince is peacefully accepted by the indigenous peo-

  ple, sometimes even solicited by them from some prestigious foreign king.

  The kingship narrative of the Ekie of southern Zaïre is almost identical to

  the Shambala’s: a great hunter of noble Luba origins kills a leopard menacing

  the main native village; he is invited to settle, given a wife, and their son be-

  comes the first ruler of a united Ekie kingdom (Fairley 1987). Again, from West

  Africa, “Igala myths describing the origin of the kingship and the subsequent

  emergence of the state imply harmony and co-operation in the fusion of indig-

  enous and immigrant elements; the transfer of sovereignty to the royal clan was

  made voluntarily and the indigenous clans were incorporated with their basic

  structure unchanged” (Boston 1968: 198). And East Africa:

  The oral traditions of the Fipa suggest that what happened was a peaceful takeo-

  ver rather than a violent conquest. The newcomers did not dispel the chief of

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  161

  Milansi, the ancient center of authority in Ufipa, but allowed him and his suc-

  cessors to remain in Milansi as chiefs of that village and the country for a few

  miles about, and to be the senior pries of all Ufipa. (Willis in Roberts 1968: 85)

  So were alien dynasties also peacefully founded in great kingdoms such as Benin

  in West Africa or Bunyoro-Kitara in East Africa, among others, as well as in

  lesser realms such as Acholi, Sogo, Bashu, Tallensi, or Alur, among numerous

  others. In some instances, what passes for “conquest” is the usurpation of a pre-

  vious regime, as Audrey Richards remarked for certain Interlacustrine societies.

  It appears that more often than not, according to the broadly accepted tradi-

  tions, the foreign rule was imposed without violence. There may be continuing

  tensions between the native people and their foreign-derived rulers, but usually

  sooner than later, the differences are synthesized in a unified kingdom of ritually

  and otherwise complementary components. So the question becomes: What

  makes the alien dominance legitimate?

  In Aidan Southall’s ethnographic experience, the Alur stranger-chief was

  more revered for his ability to stop war than to raise war, and more to bring or

  withhold rain than to muster punitive force. “Had his position depended on the

  command of force or on personal prowess in war it appears that many units of

  Alur domination of other peoples would never have come into existence, for no

  irresistible force was brought to bear in their establishment” ([1956] 2004: 246).

  Moreover, Southall was prepared to generalize the phenomenon: “The achieve-

  ment of the Alur, in building up a new society out of diverse ethnic elements

  submitting to Luo domination, seems to represent a type of largely peaceful

  development which has been important elsewhere in the region, and which has

  so far received little attention in African studies” (ibid.: 234). Or as he wrote in

  another context:

  It is very hard in this secular age, even in imagination, to conceive of one ethnic

  group submitting and accepting subordination to another without some kind of

  coercive force or solid material inducement, simply under the impact of belief

  in more potent supernatural power. But such occurences evidently did occur in

  many parts of the world, over and again, even if forceful conquest was more

  common. (1988: 55)

  There is no doubt that the currency of arguments in the human sciences pitting

  “society against the state,” with their emphasis on the “weapons of the weak”

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  wielded against draconian state power, has empirical as well as moral warrant,

  but it is not always or often pertinent to the kind of state formation at issue

  here. In regard to the too common scholarly claim that stranger-king narratives

  are fundamentally “ideological,” having been perpetrated by the ruling class

  to legitimate their dominance, it should not be overlooked that agency in the

  matter also comes from the native subjects. In the same way as the Israelites

  petitioned Samuel for “a king like the other nations,” the indigenous peoples

  may well have their own good reasons for acquiring a ruler. “It appears,” writes

  Southall, “that many groups entered the Alur system to escape from factors op-

  erating within, not outside, their own societies” ([1956] 2004: 234). The spread

  of Alur lineages that occurred in almost every generation owing to the hiving off

  of the paramount’s sons was not only attributable to their ambitions; it was also

  significantly abetted by “the fact that the chief ’s sons were a desirable element

  in any preexisting settlement” (ibid.: 54). Accordingly, Alur have traditions and

  rituals of chiefly installation which are rather the opposite of a foreign conquest:

  it is the native Lendu or Madi communities who sometimes literally and oft-

  times ceremonially “kidnap” the son of an Alur ruler—to have a chief like other

  native groups (ibid.: 182ff.).

  Yet if the agency in stranger-king formation may well come from inside the

  indigenous community, it necessarily involves an engagement in a larger politi-

  cal field composed of more and less powerful societies. The peoples concerned

  have been well aware of these gradients of power and sophistication—can we

  not say, these differences of “civilization”?—and they importantly influence

  movements of persons, groups, and cultural forms between the differences. No-

  tions of cultural evolution were not the first invented by nineteenth-century

  anthropologists.

  Virtually by definition, certainly as a rule, stranger-kingdoms were situated

  in regional, hierarchically ordered fields of interacting societies: core–periph-

  ery configurations such as Stanley Tambiah (1976, 1985, 1987) described for

  Southeast Asia as “galactic polities.” Here is an almost ideal-typical description,

  very much like the regional Southeast Asian galactic orders, in this case regard-

  ing the Goba kingdoms of the Zambezi:

  Even petty Goba kings had appointees serving as palace guards, warriors, officials,

  and henchmen who bolstered their power at the center. They also had territorial

  subchiefs similar to those in East African Interlacustrine kingdoms. . . . These

  subchiefs exercised essentially the same kinds of power that the king formally

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  163

  exercised over the entire territory, and each maintaned a more modest version

  of the king’s staff. . . . The kingdom’s sovereignty was relative, altenating [ sic]

  through a series of zones of declining central power. There was
so little control

  over the peripheries that some of them, in practice, joined other power chains

  that linked them one and sometimes several neighboring kingdoms. (Lancaster

  1989: 108)

  Just so, the galactic polity comprises a number of kingdoms and chiefdoms in

  varying degrees of subjugation to a dominant central state, the administrative,

  tributary, and cultural reach of which generally declines in proportion to dis-

  tance from the capital. The peripheral realms often continue to function un-

  der their traditional rulers, provided they maintain their tributary obligations.

  Southall (1988) described the like as a “segmentary state,” adding that the ex-

  alted magical status of the central ruler typically extends further than his actual

  authority. This is also to say that marginal societies, being thus dominated cul-

  turally before they are in fact, are in significant measure attracted to the center.

  Reporting on the satellite Pabir sultanate of the Bornu “empire” (in present-

  day northeastern Nigeria), Ronald Cohen (1976, 1981)offers an exemplary de-

  scription of the intercultural transactions in galactic polities, including the for-

  mation of stranger-kingships and chiefdoms in the outlying sectors. The central

  Bornu kingdom of Kanuri-speaking people was founded in the late fifteenth/

  early sixteenth century amidst great turmoil, forcing the local peoples to adapt

  to or otherwise flee from the developing predatory state. In the event, a ring of

  highly organized secondary kingdoms were formed along the southern edge

  of Bornu, including the Bura-speaking realm studied by Cohen. Here an im-

  migrant ruling aristocracy from Bornu was established among the local Bura

  peasantry. As the tradition goes,

  A smal group of migrants under Yamta-ra-wal a, the hero-founder of the royal

  clan who came from the Borno [Bornu] capital where he had failed in the

  succession to the throne [ sic]. These adventurers subdued many of the locals,

  married Bura women, and settled down. They are said to have learned the local

  language and customs, but retained their own methods of warfare, the con-

  cept of political centrism, and a sense of superiority to the local population.

  These, then, according to legend were the original Pabir, and from them stems

  that peculiar variant [polity] that resembles the more complex cultures to the