by Faun Rice
of its productivity—or else to the earth spirits through their ancestors—the rul-
ing aristocracy mediates the relations to the encompassing realm of natural and
cultural resources, from which it derives material benefits by virtue of its own
foreign identity and marvelous powers. Randall Packard provides a fine example
in his ethnography of the East African Bashu:
Of particular importance to the well-being of the land are the ancestors who
first cleared the land of forest, for in so doing they established an important
bond with the land. Their cooperation, obtained through the invocations of their
descendants, is critical for the performance of any action involving land . . . . The
Bantu view chieftainship, bwami, within the context of [a] wider view of man’s
relation to nature. The chief, mwami w’ambita, is the primary mediator between
the world of the homestead and the world of the bush. Through the mwami,
the mediating role of rainmakers, healers of the land, priests of earth spirits and
ancestors are correlated and the forces of nature domesticated. The mwami is also
ultimately responsible for separating the uncontrolled and dangerous forces of
the bush from the world of the homestead. (1981: 29–30)
Motivated by their respective natures and powers, the native-descended subjects
and their foreign-derived rulers are engaged in distinct and complementary
economic spheres, coordinated largely through the distributive activities of the
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
195
latter as funded largely by the productive activities of the former. Insofar as the
ruling aristocracy “achieves the construction of society after the world has been
transformed by work,” the indigenous people are pretty much the working class
in stranger-kingdoms, particularly in the primary sectors of agriculture, fishing,
and hunting, as well as most craft production (the magical art of blacksmithing
usually excepted). But then, “the clans rule the land”: as the “owners” of the land
by ancestral right, the subjugated working class of the stranger-kingdom have a
monopoly control of the primary means of production. Moreover, as organized
primarily through kin relationships, their production is oriented principally to
their own domestic consumption. But where the indigenous people’s relations
to the land are proprietary and productive, those of the ruling aristocracy are
tributary and extractive. The ruling class appear on the scene of production post
messem, after the harvest, to levy a toll on its output, both in the products and
in manpower they would put to their own uses. Their own uses have to do with
the accumulation, strategic redistribution, and conspicuous consumption of cir-
culating wealth with the aim of enhancing their power by the direct domination
of people—rather than by control of people’s means of existence. They are con-
cerned with exchange and distribution more than production; with riches and
sumptuary values rather than means of subsistence; with the returns of tribute
and trade, and the booty of war rather than agriculture. The mobile wealth of
this sphere—monies, luxury cloth, salt, metals, ivory, cattle, slaves, etc.—is gen-
erally of foreign or wild origins and ensouled with the vital potencies of these
otherworlds, just as are the rulers who manifest such powers by acquiring and
distributing them (Helms 1993; Sahlins 2014). As Beti-Fang people say: “We
made war in order to have wealth, to have wives and slaves.” Here “the very idea
of power . . . involved the acquisition of the magical force of another person
through warfare, that is, through capture” (Guyer 1993: 257). Considering that
the native people receive their harvests by one or another form of spiritual be-
stowal, while the ruling elite appropriate their wealth by one or another form of
predation, then our notion of “production” hardly applies at all to these societies
(see chapter 1).
In any case, it need not be supposed that stranger-kingship as such repre-
sents a “determination by the economic basis.” Not only because the subordinate
class controls the primary means of production, but because, as Southall put it
for Alur, the economic powers of ruling chiefs are insufficient to account for the
concept of their authority. “Nothing more strikingly reveals the binding force
of the concept of chiefship,” he wrote ([1956] 2004: 190), “than the inability
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ON KINGS
of the requisite material basis to confer its real essence.” Besides Alur, there
are stranger-chiefdoms and kingdoms large and not so large where the struc-
tural differentiation between the alien rulers and their autochthonous subjects
is disproportionate to their minimal powers of economic domination and ex-
ploitation. Azande again, as well as Anuak, Lovedu, Shilluk, Tallensi, Nyakyusa,
Moundang: all come to mind as instances of a radical differentiation of the su-
perstructure unsupported by the inequalities of the infrastructure. Still, if Marx
doesn’t quite work here, Georg Simmel’s classic essay on the “The stranger” is
a fair description not only of the dualism of stranger-kingship, but also of the
structural constraints that distinguish the localized native owners, connected in
substance to soil, from the mobile stranger-traders and traffickers operating in
an encompassing sphere:
The stranger is by nature no “owner of the soil”—soil not only in the physi-
cal, but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed, if not in
a point of space, at least in an ideal point of the social environment. Although
in more intimate relations [like marriage with the daughter of the natives], he
may develop all kinds of charm and significance, he is not an “owner of the soil.”
Reduction to intermediate trade, and often (as though sublimated from it) to
pure finance, gives him the specific character of mobility. If mobility takes place
with a closed group, it embodies that synthesis of nearness and distance which
constitutes the formal position of the stranger. For the fundamentally mobile
person comes in contact, at one time or another, with every individual, but is not
organically connected, through established ties of kinship, loyalty and occupa-
tion, with any single one [—he is encompassing and transcendent]. (Wolff 1950:
403–4, original emphasis)
SERIAL STRANGER-KINGSHIP
I uncovered an increasing number of first occupants and former chiefs, to the point that
it began to appear that there were as many first occupants among the Bashu as there were
New Englanders who claim came over on the Mayflower, and as many chiefs as subjects.
Randall M. Packard, Chiefship and cosmology
Probably the majority of precolonial African states, including Kongo, have
known serial-kingship histories, sometimes involving several successive foreign
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
197
dynasties. For the most part they were nevertheless organized in the classic
binary terms of “native” and “stranger”: that is, by recursively categorizing all
earlier regimes, their rulers and subjects alike, as native “owners” relative to
the
latest foreign dynasts. The historical complexities were systematically recuper-
ated by the master dualism of native owners and foreign rulers—if not without
some residues of contradiction. For insofar as the latest dualism did not cancel
the earlier ones, the effect was a polity structured as a series of encompassing
iterations of the same structural duality.
To this effect, Michel Izard writes of the Yatenga Mossi: “The duality Mossi/
People of the Earth can be interpreted as the last of a series of homologous dis-
tinctions of the type conquerors/autochthons” (1985: 18). The Mossi conquerors
had deposed of the Fulse rulers of the earlier stranger-kingdom centered in Lu-
rum, from which the realm took its name; whereupon the Fulse became “People
of the Earth” or “Sons of the Soil” in the kingdom of their successors. Moreover,
the Fulse leaders took on the functions of “Priests of the Earth” or “Masters of
the Earth” throughout the Mossi realm, those of highest rank becoming the
head priests of the Mossi state—a recurrent pattern in stranger-kingships, as
will be seen. The Fulse rulers of the ancient regime are said to have imposed
themselves on a still earlier population of Dogon, who, as original inhabitants,
were ”Masters of the Earth” relative to their Fulse overlords. This original dual-
ity was for the most part unrecognized by the Mossi, who would reduce both
the old Fulse rulers and their Dogon subjects to the generic identity of native
“Fulse” or “Ninise.” Yet the Dogon did not entirely lose their identity or prestige
as indigenous earth priests in the new Mossi order. In the areas they shared with
Fulse, they still functioned in that capacity relative to the old Fulse nobility, and
as the original occupants of the land, they maintained a reputation for great
spiritual powers throughout the Mossi kingdom.
In his rich works on the Kazembe kingdom in the Luapulu Valley, Ian
Cunnison (1951, 1957, 1959) describes a somewhat more complex history of
successive dynasties similarly folded into the binary opposition of native sub-
jects and foreign rulers. When the latest “conquerors” led by the Lunda hero
Kazembe took over the country, the erstwhile Shilla rulers of Bemba derivation
together with their own original subjects, the Bwilile people of Luba derivation,
collectively became the indigenous “owners” of the land, at least from the king-
dom-wide perspective of Lunda. The Bwilile had displaced the original pygmy
population in the hunting and fishing heartland of Kilwe Island, and they be-
came “owners” when the Bemba under their chief Nkuba took over the country.
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ON KINGS
Indeed, in a process of ethnogenesis typical of stranger-king formations, they
became “Bwilie” under the Bemba occupation, even as the Bemba were now
known as “Shilla.” When the Lunda arrived, the Bemba/Shilla leader, titled
Nkuba by positional succession, was made the “chief wife” of the conqueror,
Kazembe, as well as the paramount “owner” of the kingdom land. However, this
did not erase the earlier historical distinction between Shilla rulers and native
Bwilile owners, which continued to function within the areas occupied by these
peoples. So while Shilla together with Bwilile were owners relative to the Lunda
chiefs, Shilla were chiefs relative to Bwilile owners. The master dualism thus
accommodated a triad of ethnic groups, which, moreover, were broadly distin-
guished in function: the Lunda as rulers, the Shilla as fishers, and the Bwilile
as ritual experts. “The first of the annual ceremonies to ‘unlock the fish’ in many
of the lagoons shows that there are Bwilile about” (Cunnison 1959: 202). But
then the Bwilie’s ritual knowledge had come from their autochthonous pygmy
predecessors. The overall effect is a complex polity constituted by the interplay
of complementary and opposed relations of precedence: complementary in re-
gard to the control of land and people, but opposed in regard to the virtues of
autochthony and alterity. In the event, the rule over society as a whole in serial
stranger-kingdoms passes to the later and greater of the several peoples, while
the ritual authority over the land devolves upon the earlier and lesser of these
peoples. Paradigmatic history.
Also relevant to Kongo, when one important stranger-kingdom replaces an-
other of similar magnitude, the earlier realm leaves certain residual marks on
the organization of its successor. For insofar as the quondam rulers are now the
dominant owners and priest-chiefs of the new order—the way the Shilla un-
der Nkuba became the primary owners under the Lunda kingship of Kazembe
while remaining secondary rulers, as it were, of the enduring older regime —the
subject population is more broadly and centrally organized than the congeries
of small-scale, autonomous communities that make up the indigenous stratum
of an elementary stranger-kingdom. Serial stranger-kingship structures do vary,
depending on more or less contingent conditions: whether the immigrant rul-
ers come with their own native subjects, like the Ambonu complement of the
Avongara rulers of Azande kingdoms or the Bakabilo priests of the Bemba,
for example; or whether the latest dynasty is centered in the same capital as
the ancient one, as in the successive dynastic occupations of Mbanza Kongo or
the West African kingdom of Bussa in Borgu (Nigeria). For that matter, Borgu
itself, as a multikingdom region of six major principalities, rather resembles the
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
199
regional configuration of polities referenced in the narratives of Ntinu Wene’s
advent (Lombard 1965; Stewart 1993). A brief aperçu of the Bussa kingdom
offers further clues to the Kongo.
The Borgu peoples are collectively known as “Bariba,” itself apparently a
generic term for the various Voltaic speakers who comprised the principal na-
tive chiefs of the earth in the latest precolonial regimes. Together with Yoruba,
Mandingo, and other custodians of the earth, the Bariba are said to have arrived
in Borgu as hunters and to have once ruled in various areas. The historic kings
who displaced them were descendants of the legendary Kisra, the enemy of the
prophet in Arabia, who himself (or else his son) led the mounted warrior aris-
tocracy known as Wasangari (or Wangara) westward into Borgu from Bornu.
The Wasangari kings first settled at Bussa, whence certain of their descendants
dispersed to found their own domains—among which Bussa remains superior
for its antiquity, although surpassed in size and power by others, particularly
Nikki. The complex hierarchy at Bussa of priestly owners-cum-former rulers is
indicative of the process by which the recursive deployment of these identities
in serial stranger-kingdoms generates native officials of wide authority in the
state, the latest owners especially exercising temporal functions as well as acting
as major priests of the realm. As Marjorie Stewart explained:
Even in an earlier era the same processes had been unfolding. Before the arrival
of the Kisra rulers, the priests of the earth or owners of the land,
when they
belonged to a group coming from elsewhere, also acquired a greater degree of
political power and control over a larger territory than had previously been the
case of earlier priests. (1993: 127)
The most important officials at Bussa were the kingmakers, who, apart from the
addition of the Imam in recent years, consisted of the custodians of the land
and priests of the earth, whose ancestors ruled over the area in pre-Kisra times.
(1993: 176)
Since these prominent priest-chiefs ministered to the divine dead rulers effec-
tively in the same way they ministered to the sacred living king, there is in fact
little point in differentiating their temporal from their spiritual functions. The
four greatest priests and owners of the earth at Bussa had various duties and
privileges in relation to the kingship: they acted as counselors to the ruler; elec-
tors and installers of his heir; stewards of the king’s household; keepers of the
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ON KINGS
royal regalia; officiants at royal sacrifices; and, not least, they were in charge of
what may be called the “second installation,” the royal funerary rites, whereupon
they repeated their earthly role as priests in relation to the entombed kings.
Of these native custodians, “the principal chief of the earth at Bussa” was the
Bakarabunde—whose title appropriately translates as “The Old Man Who Was
There”—with powers such as to evoke notices of him as the “prime minister”
of the kingdom. Mandingo by origin, his ancestors were the previous rulers of
Bussa, the ones who gave Kisra permission to settle and thereupon assumed
the status of native owners. The priest-chiefs subordinate to the Bakarabunde
evidently represent several successive ethnic regimes, and whereas they appear
to be ranked according to how recently they arrived, they are notably associ-
ated with the cults of the earliest gods, particularly the pre-Kisra great god
Lashi. Thus. second to the Bakaraburde was the head priest of the earth, the
Badaburde, who, besides being in charge of the burial of the king, offered the
sacrifices in times of general crises to Lashi. Likewise, for the third of these
priest-chiefs, the Beresoni: described as the priest to the owners of the land, in
a sense priest to the priests, he officiates at an ancient shrine of Lashi and other
