by Faun Rice
was merely an ideological supposition (on the part of the Congolese people),
a mirage based on a more fundamental difference between the social systems
of the countryside and the town as constituted in the seventeenth century. As
we know, Thornton is not the only student of African societies who, by posit-
ing that stranger-king traditions are functional (cum-superstructural) reflexes of
the real-political or real-economic structures at a given moment, consider that
they have no real-historical value and can thenceforth be ignored. Since these
traditions are time-bound, secondary rationalizations, and not “literally true” so
far as the historian is concerned—it helps if they are called “myths”—they are
supposed to have no real effect on the destiny of the people who continue to
hold and practice them as timeless truths—transhistorical memories of what
has been and will be.
In this matter of the confinement of the stranger-kingship of Kongo to
the dustbin of real history, Thornton offers a quasi-Marxist explanation of the
distinction between Ambundu subjects and Essikongo rulers as a “reflection”
of differences in modes of production: the Ambundu social formation based
on agriculture as organized by relations of kinship, and the Essikongo, based
on tribute, slave labor, and foreign wealth obtained by levies on trade and war.
16. Not to mention the early documents, such as the 1620 H. R. C. and CIII of Paiva,
which situated the founder of the kingdom respectively at Bungo and Bango
(Vungu), north of the river (in Cuvelier 1946).
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
183
“More than just dialect or supposed ethnic origin,” he writes, “. . . this distinc-
tion was a social and economic one, a reflection of the way Kongo’s production
system and social relations were organized in the seventeenth century” (ibid.:
15–16).17 But if stranger-kingship apparently mirrors the relations of produc-
tion, is it not because the image has indeed been reversed: not that the distinc-
tions of stranger-kingship reflect the relations of production, but that produc-
tion is organized by the relations of stranger-kingship? The “ownership” and
control of the means of production in the primary, agricultural sector by the
underlying people is sequitur to the broad cultural distinctions of autochthony
and alterity. It is the opposition between the descendants of first-settlers exis-
tentially connected by ancestry to the spiritual sources of the earth’s fertility, and
the dominating late-comers of foreign derivation and violent disposition ruling
by tributes and foreign wealth acquired by trade, warfare, and so on. Clearly,
the relations of production are structured in the terms and forms of stranger-
kingship as such, but the terms and forms of stranger-kingship are not those of
production as such.
In any event, the distinction between the immigrant Essikongo nobility and
the indigenous Ambundu peoples was structurally pertinent in the old Kongo
kingdom, and it could not be so simply characterized as a difference between
the denizens of the towns and countryside. In the beginning of his long reign
(1506–43), King Afonso styled himself simply as “King of Kongo and Lord of
the Ambundu,” a title that was repeated by his successor King Diego in 1647
(Cuvelier 1946: 339). In later years, Afonso—as also Afonso II in a document
of 1652—while naming all the principalities he claimed to rule (in European
imperial style), added that he was “Sovereign Lord of all the Ambundu” (ibid.).
Very likely the formation of the kingdom itself entailed the process of ethno-
genesis by which these broad identities developed—each of them, and especially
“Ambundu,” including a considerable diversity of groups of different origins.
The province of Nsundi alone “counted ten different tribes” (ibid.: 247).18 The
complementary formation of an Essikongo superstructure, moreover, involved
the spread of the immigrant nobility into countryside settlements as ruling
17. As will be discussed presently, Wyatt MacGaffey takes a similar but more nuanced
position on the determination of Kongo stranger-king traditions by the relations
of production and social reproduction and their nonpertinence as history or for
history.
18. Ravenstein (1901) writes—apparently from the dominant, Essikingo view—that
“ambundu” meant “slaves,” and ”the conquered.”
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ON KINGS
chiefs (cum-tribute collectors) in the provincial and district centers; even as
the lower levels of this hierarchy were expanded by the bestowal of heritable
titles—together with the distinctive bonnets signifying noble status—on local
big-men and clan leaders who were prepared to pay the substantial qualifying
fee. Probably, the question of the ethnicity of the town-dwelling rulers in the
ancient Kongo was similar to what Nadel described for Fulani in Nupeland:
The Fulani conquerors of Nupe, numerically an insignificant minority, were ab-
sorbed completely by the culture of the people whom they had subjugated . . . .
Yet they remain a separate social group, conscious of its alien origin, and still dis-
tinguished by a special tribal name: they call themselves, and are called by their
subjects, goizi, a name which distinguishes these settled, “town Fulanu” from the
nomadic cattle people who are known as bororozi, never Nupe. They are a “rep-
resentative” group in a different sense—the small elite of conquerors and rulers.
The historical memory of their alien origin—for it is only this today—buttresses
their detached social position. (1942: 71)
To take stock, then, in Thornton’s notional reconstruction of “historical real-
ity”: Vungu was not the homeland of the kingship, notwithstanding that even
seventeenth-century kings claimed that it was; Mpemba Kazi within Kongo
was where the kingship originated, notwithstanding all tradition and documen-
tation indicating it was the place the immigrant founder Ntinu Wene first con-
quered after crossing the Congo River; Ntinu Wene did not cross the Congo
River, hence we can ignore the merely cosmological significance of that Rubicon
moment and its presence in operative versions of the kingship traditions; any-
how, Ntinu Wene was not the founder of the Kongo kingdom, his father Nimi
a Nzima was; and the dual society of indigenous Ambundu subjects ruled by
a foreign-derived Ashikongo aristocracy was not really a distinction of histori-
cal origins and ethnic identities but an ideological reflex of the socioeconomic
differences between rural peasants and the town elites. In sum, the Kongo state
was not a stranger-kingdom.
But to return to the paradigmatic traditions of stranger-kingship that, “lit-
erally true” or not, are resources of real history: the ultimate integration of the
foreign prince is his marriage to the daughter of the native ruler. This recurrent
episode in narratives of the origins of stranger-kingship amounts to the contract
of the new society, not only by allying its dual components but also by giving
rise to a dynasty that encompasses the totality. The ubiquity of this foundati
onal
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
185
synthesis of foreign rulers and native owners is already evident in preceding
paragraphs. Such unions or their symbolic equivalents are virtually universal
conditions of stranger-kingship formations—around the world as well as in
Africa. What Marjorie Stewart writes of the Borgu kingdoms in this regard
could easily be duplicated from accounts of stranger-kingship origins anywhere:
“It was common practice . . . when a powerful prince arrived in another chief ’s
territory for the incumbent chief to offer his daughter in marriage to the new-
comer to establish bonds of friendship and thereby acknowledge the latter’s
superior political power” (1993: 252).
More than “friendship,” however, the two components of the kingdom are
united by an ancestral and perpetual kinship. The chiefs of the old regime and
their successors are related to the ruling kings as maternal “grandfathers” to their
“grandsons” (Kongo) or “mothers’ brothers” to their “sisters’ sons” (Mossi); or
else more general y, as in Borgu, “the [native] chief of the Earth becomes more
intimately associated with political power and becomes for al the young princes
the very incarnation of their maternal ancestor” (Lombard 1965: 186). Again,
in another mode of generalizing the initial kinship connection, local indigenous
headmen may be related to royals settled in their villages or districts as “wives”
to their chiefly “husbands” (Luba, Tal ensi, Nyakyusa). Note also that the status
of the native chiefs as priests of the stranger-king realm is consistent with their
maternal relation to the kingship insofar as it paral els Edmund Leach’s classic
formulation of the opposition between the “consubstantiality” of the own people
(here, royals) and the “metaphysical influence” of the affines (here, natives). Af-
fines of the kingship by origin, the indigenous priests are everywhere the sacrifi-
cers, the ritual intermediaries with divinity, even in some cases officiating at the
sacrifices to the royal ancestors—though it be on behalf of the king as sacrifier.
On the other hand, by thus integrating the sacred powers of the autoch-
thonous people with the violent potency of his own origins, the ruler himself
becomes something of a divinity. Not only does he encompass the social totality
in his own person, but he is endowed with the powers to create it. At least such
are the attributes of the offspring of the original union. The immigrant prince
himself may disappear, leaving behind a son by a native woman to become the
first ruler and true founder of the kingdom—which he may then expand by
conquest as well as enrich by civilizing gifts. This is the story in the kingships of
Benin, Luba, Lunda, and, by implication, Kongo.
Not to forget that the native peoples have their own reasons for entering
into an alliance with a powerful outsider, and accordingly they may have their
186
ON KINGS
own agency in the matter. Such was the experience more than once of the good
Capuchin Montesarchio during his evangelizing travels around Kongo in the
mid-seventeenth century. At one village in Mbata, he found the chief exces-
sively attentive; for, “He wished at any cost to give me his own daughter for
a wife” (Bouveignes and Cuvelier 1951: 151). A similar incident at the large
principality of Congobella on the upper Congo River—apparently independent
and rarely if ever visited by Europeans—gives some idea why the missionary
was in such great demand: “They said I was a ‘Banchita,’ which is nearly saying
that I was a man returned from the other world” (ibid.: 115). Here again, “The
Congobella king wanted to give me one of his daughters in marriage, and many
others wished to give a daughter or a sister to have descendants of a priest of
the Pope” (ibid.: 116). Some people also expressed a desire to have his relics,
never mind that he was still alive, and they offered him native cloth of the best
quality for locks of his hair (ibid.: 117). A being returned from the otherworld
to whom the native ruler proffers his daughter in marriage: Can one doubt the
“historical reality” of stranger-kingship in the Kongo region, even the possibility
of its peaceful establishment?
In the official tradition, the Kongo hero Ntinu Wene was himself the off-
spring of a union between the king, Nimi a Nzima, from Vungu across the
Zaïre, and a sister of the Mbata ruler Nsaku Lau. It may be that Nimi had
already threatened a decentralized galactic system from its margins and in the
usual stranger-king pattern married an indigenous princess.19 Hilton (1985) has
argued this incursion actually happened; and as we know, Thornton (2001) takes
the argument beyond its logical and empirical extreme to the conclusion that
Nimi was of endogenous BaKongo stock and he rather than his son Ntinu
Wene was the real founder and first king of Kongo. In this connection, both
Hilton and Thornton stress the economic basis of Kongo kingship origins, espe-
cially its development at the intersection of long-distance trade routes, although
neither (so far as I know) has addressed the dissenting scholarly opinions.
19. Alternatively, the Mbata ruler may have accorded the subordinate Vungu ruler a
junior sister or daughter as a secondary wife of the latter. This would actually be
consistent with the subdominant version of the tradition of Ntinu Wene’s crossing
of the Zaïre, wherein he takes on the ambition to become a conquering king
when his mother, who had refused to pay the toll, was insultingly asked, “Who
do you think you are, the mother of the king?” It would also be consistent with
the recurrent motif to the effect that Ntinu Wene had no chance to succeed to the
Vungu kingship.
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
187
Early on, David Birmingham (1975: 544–55) asserted there is no indication
that Kongo before the Portuguese owed its wealth to monetary sources or any
marketable product; it was essentially a prosperous farming regime, working
through a tributary and redistributive political economy. Likewise, Luc de Heu-
sch questions whether “the ‘economist’ hypothesis of Anne Hilton could not be
reversed. Would it not be the very existence of the Kongo kingdom that struc-
tured the commercial development?” (2000: 69).
In any case, if Ntinu Wene’s father was the original king of Kongo, one
would have to draw a distinction between what actually happened and what
became the historical reality. For inasmuch as the Congolese people have made
their own history in tradition and in action, they have privileged the offspring
of the foreign king and the native woman, Ntinu Wene, as the primary agent,
founding hero, and original king of the historic dynasty. There is a difference
between a happening and a historical event, rather on the order of the differ-
ence between fact and value, which is to say that nothing happens except as it
is meaningfully appropriated and disseminated. Hence Wene, of mixed foreign
and domestic descent, is the effective founder of the kingdom. As Balandier
observes,
by this synthesis of the foreign warrior with the sacred ancestral pow-
ers of the autochthonous people, the Kongo kingship derives “the means of
converting into durable superiority what was merely vulnerable coercion, trans-
forming into a permanent order what was merely a disorder favorable to in-
novation” (1968: 38).
THE DUAL SOCIETY
In a chapter on “Religion as a political system,” Wyatt MacGaffey reviews an
ethnographic report by Nestor van Everbroeck (1961) on the Bolia people liv-
ing in the vicinity of LacMai Ndomba (former Lake Leopold II, Democratic
Republic of the Congo), of whom MacGaffey says, “their ideology and social
structure . . . are closely comparable to the BaKongo” (1986: 182). In Mac-
Gaffey’s summary:
The legendary first occupants of Bolia territory were the Nsese, forest dwellers
and cannibals . . . . Every Bolia village has a political chief and an owner of the
soil. These positions belong to clans described in the legends as invaders and
autochthons respectively . . . . Traditions relating to occupation and ownership
188
ON KINGS
of land resemble those of Kongo and are evidently political rather than historical
material . . . . The political chief has the power of life and death and is responsible
(with a committee of three assistants, as in the classical Kongo government) for
justice, foreign relations, and war. The owner of the soil is responsible for the
growth and well-being of the village. (1986: 182)
More than the resemblances to “classical Kongo government,” however, the
Bolia ethnography is classical stranger-kingship. Immigrant chiefs from the
northeast, the Bolia took over the villages of the indigenous “owners of the
soil,” forming a series of chiefdoms in each of which the ruler was the collective
“husband” of his native-subject “wives.” For example: the charter tradition of
the most important chiefdom in the area of the Sengele people, one of several
indigenous groups, is quintessential stranger-king stuff (Van Everbroeck 1961:
31ff.). The advent of the arrogant Bolia hero Kengulu was initially conflictual
but in the end peaceful. Kengulu appears as a hunter accompanied by his war-
riors who trail a wounded wild pig to its death in the forest near the Sengele
