onkings

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

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  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