by Faun Rice
to be the embodiment of a divine being: Nyikang. But while he is able to wield
arbitrary and questioned power in principle, his subjects are careful to ensure he
has virtually no opportunity to do so in practice. In Buganda, in contrast, even
members of the kabaka’s family insist he’s in no sense a deity and just a human
being. Yet he still commits outrageous “exploits” that place him beyond mor(t)
al society, still is able to issue commands and order executions with arbitrariness
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
401
and impunity, even, like some Jovian thunder god casting lightning, to stand at
the door of his palace with a rifle and pick off random subjects on the street.27
The two examples, by the way, weren’t chosen entirely at random. The con-
trast between the Shilluk and Ganda kingships has long puzzled outside ob-
servers. Sir James Frazer himself was befuddled by it. His discovery of the Shil-
luk in the 1910s led him to believe most of his boldest hypotheses about the
divine nature of kingship had been spectacularly confirmed; excited, he sent
one of his few students, a certain Reverend Roscoe, to investigate the Ganda—
then quite famous in England owing to testimonies of Speke and Burton—as
a second likely case. The results were endlessly frustrating. True, Roscoe found,
the kabaka was occasionally referred to as a lubaale or “god,” but typically when
he was doing something outrageous that only gods could otherwise get away
with, or directly challenging the gods by raiding their temples and “plundering
their women, cattle, and goats” (Roscoe and Kaggwa in Ray 1991: 49). But the
kabaka was rendered no cult, and even the periodic ritual massacres over which
he presided were never framed in sacrificial terms. What’s more, royal histories
affirmed that those kings who became too audacious in defying the gods were
invariably destroyed (Kenny 1988: 611). Despite heroic efforts to shoehorn the
results into his theoretical model, Frazer found it simply wouldn’t fit. He ended
up so frustrated he briefly came near to abandoning the idea of divine kingship
entirely (Ray 1991: 51–52).
In purely sociological terms, the difference between the two kingdoms is
obvious. The kabaka might have been far more powerful than the Shilluk reth,
but unlike the latter, he also had to contend with an entrenched and jealous
priestly class who had no intention of allowing him into their pantheon. As a
result, he was a divine king in every sense except that of being formally recog-
nized as such. But cases like these only serve to underline the point that, when
it comes to divine kingship, questions of explicit (as opposed to tacit) theology
are at best secondary—and, anyway, are likely to be matters of debate rather
than consensus, even in kingdoms which remain entirely outside the influence
of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or, for that matter, secular republicanism or
Marxism-Leninism.
27. On the debate on the kabaka’s divinity, see Roscoe (1911); Irstam (1944); Gale
(1956); Ingham (1958: 17); Richards (1964); Southwold (1967); Kenny (1988); Ray
(1991: 39–50); Wrigley (1996: 17, 126–28); Claessen (2015: 11).
402
ON KINGS
* * *
Insofar as sovereignty is precisely where the frames ordinarily separating ritual
and politics, human and metahuman, immanent and transcendent, tend to col-
lapse, this is much as one should expect. It is one of the misfortunes of human-
ity, I have suggested, that even the most awful crimes—mass murder foremost
among them—will tend to take on at least a potentially numinous quality, and
can, under the right circumstances at least, be made to seem divine. But just as
most profane acts can be turned to cosmological purposes, so can the elabora-
tion of ritual itself become a political weapon.
Hence my distinction between divine and sacred kingship. Each, one might
say, crosses the same line in an opposite direction.28 Kings will try to turn acts of
arbitrary violence into tokens of divinity; those who wish to control them will
try to impose ever-more elaborate ritual restrictions that recognize them as sa-
cred beings, but, at the same time, make it increasingly difficult for them to im-
pose their will in arbitrary ways. If one conceives the long war between king and
people instead as a strategic game (I know I am multiplying metaphors here,
but I can only beg the reader’s indulgence), we can say that kings will, generally
speaking, attempt to increase their divinity, and the people, to render them more
sacred. From this perspective, many of the classic institutions of divine kingship,
including most of those made famous by Frazer, could be seen as moves, gam-
bits on a conceptual chessboard, with the sovereign attempting to maneuver his
way out of the various forces marshaled to contain him. Even the emergence of
what we call “the state” might be seen as just one possible outcome of this game.
Normally, the sides are not entirely mismatched. But the lopsided cases are
perhaps the most revealing, because they give a sense of what’s ultimately at stake.
Let me divide the remainder of this essay, then, into two sections, one which
describes what things look like when a monarch is definitively checkmated, the
other, the new sorts of problems that arise when a monarch definitively wins.
28. Just to be absolutely clear, let me provide an example of what I’m speaking of in
each case. An example of profane acts turned to cosmological purposes might be a
situation where a ruler kills his brothers and marries his sister as an act of simple
political expedience, but where it nonetheless contributes to the sense that a king is
a metahuman being. Or where a coup d’état becomes a ritual sacrifice. An example
of ritual becoming a political weapon might be one where a principle that the king’s
blood must never be spilled might not prevent assassination (he can always be
strangled), but has significant effects on his ability to lead his troops in war.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
403
When kings lose: The tyranny of abstraction
All these antique fancies clustered, all these cobwebs of the brain were spun about the
path of the old king, the human god, who enmeshed in them like a fly in the toils of a
spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of custom.
Sir James Frazer, The golden bough
Thus also the taboo ceremonial of kings is nominally an expression of the highest ven-
eration and a means of guarding them; actually it is the punishment for their elevation,
the revenge which their subjects take upon them.
Sigmund Freud, Totem and taboo
Often enough it is difficult to draw the line between political and sacral king-murders.
Sture Lagencrantz, The sacred king in Africa
We have already seen one vivid example of hobbled kings in the Shilluk reths,
who, foiled in their periodic efforts to create an administrative apparatus, ended
up largely at the mercy of their wives and local village chiefs, surrounded by
“royal executioners” whose ultimate task was to kill them. Since the Shilluk
represent the closest approxima
tion yet documented for what might be termed
Frazerian sacred kingship, it suggests the latter might itself be the form (or at
least one form) checkmate might take.
I will refer to this as “adverse sacralization”—the imposition of ritual restric-
tions on a ruler as a way to control, contain, or reduce his political power.
It might be useful to examine the defining features of African sacred king-
ship (Irstam 1944; Lagercrantz 1944, 1950; de Heusch 1981, 1982a, 1997), to
see how many fit this model. It began with Sture Lagercrantz outlining a fairly
simple list of common features—taboos on mobility, regicide, and incest—but
has since been expanded to something that might be summarized as follows:
1. The king is a sacred monster, exterior to society, often seen as a powerful witch
or sorcerer, a wielder of terrible transgressive power. This power expresses
itself through a fundamental break with kinship morality, either
a. some form of incest (typically brother–sister marriage, real or symbolic),
or
b. some act of cannibalism (real or symbolic).
404
ON KINGS
2. The king’s health and vitality is bound up with the health, prosperity, and fertility
of the kingdom (droughts and natural disasters being considered signs of the
king’s sin or infirmity); this leads to:
3. The king is bound by multiple taboos: for example, he is forbidden to cross
water, see large bodies of water, or even in a few cases touch water; these
restrictions always include severe limits on mobility that culminate in com-
plete seclusion.
4. The king cannot die a natural death: some kings are sacrificed after fixed terms
of four or seven years; even if they are not, if injured, in failing health or
strength, or in a state of ritual impurity, or if some disaster (failure in war,
plagues, etc.) demonstrates fading powers that endanger the kingdom, the
king may be required to commit suicide or, more often, be secretly put to
death.
Most of these seem to be just local versions of more general principles of king-
ship already discussed. The first is the particular form which the principle of
sovereignty, or divine kingship, takes in this particular tradition. The second,
the idea that sovereign power is directly linked with the health, fertility, and
prosperity of the population, exists almost everywhere where there is a king or
king-like figure; Frazer compiled endless examples, and the connection can be
observed from China to the court of Charlemagne (Oakley 2006: 93). Even in
the United States, one of the best indexes of whether a sitting president will
be reelected is the number and intensity of tornados during his term of office
(Healy, Malhotra, and Mo 2010; Healy and Malhotra 2013). The third is sacred
kingship itself. By which logic, the fourth, the actual killing of the king, is, as
Frazer also hinted, simply the culmination of his adverse sacralization.
The latter would be consonant with the Shilluk material as well, where kings
become transcendent at the moment when popular hatred becomes the most
intense.
René Girard, of course, provides a psychoanalytic analysis of why rancor and
sacralization coincide: the community projects its internal hatreds onto a single
figure who is first reviled and destroyed, then, in an abrupt reversal, comes to
be an object of adoration in implicit recognition of his or her role, as scapegoat,
in creating social unity. (Christ is his primary example.) Much of the recent
debate on king-killing has indeed turned on the scapegoat principle: to what
extent is the king seen as taking on the sins and transgressions of his people, and
somehow disposing of them, either through purification rituals, or through his
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
405
own seclusion or death (Simonse 1992, 2005; de Heusch 1997, 2005b; Quigley
2000; Scubla 2002, 2003, 2005). The critical question has become: Could it
be said that the “exploits” or transgressions that establish the king as beyond
morality also make him a potential scapegoat in waiting, so that, when things
go well, he can be as a transcendent being, but when they do not, he becomes
once again a simple criminal, and the legitimate object of rebellion, challenge,
or sacrifice? Some such dynamic does often appear to be at play. But again, it’s
just as possible to see scapegoating simply as an inevitable consequence of the
fact that kings are always both sacred figures embodying their people’s unity,
and politicians. One can just as easily say, “this is just how hardball politics will
necessarily work itself out under a regime of divine kingship,” than to see in it
any dark hidden secret of the human soul.
One thing seems clear: there is simply no systematic relation between sov-
ereignty, scapegoating, regicide, and ascriptions of divinity. In the Equatorian
societies described by Simonse (2005), rainmakers were often killed during
droughts by outraged mobs, after a long game of bluff and maneuver. They were
clearly scapegoated, but they were in no sense gods. Many weren’t even kings.
At the other extreme, in South Africa, the Luvale “rain-queen” was very much
considered a divine being in human form. She had to be physically perfect, and
she was considered impervious to human woes and ailments; she never became
ill and could not die of natural causes; she was therefore expected to, and appar-
ently did, discreetly end her own life by taking poison after roughly sixty years
on the throne (Krige and Krige 1943: 165–67).29 Still,
ritual suicide is not conceived to have any relation to the welfare of the country.
People do not say the country will suffer if the physical powers of the queen
fail. But ritual suicide does elevate the queen to a divinity; only by her act, not
because of susceptibility to the weaknesses of man, can she die. (Krige and Krige
1943: 167)
29. “Among the Lovedu, tradition decrees that the queen shall have no physical defect
and must poison herself, not when she is old, but at the end of the fourth initiation
( vudiga) of her reign” (ibid.: 166), but in fact this was when she was old, since vudiga
were “held by the whole tribe every twelve to fifteen years,” though “an interval
of twenty years is not considered extraordinary” (ibid.: 114)—so a period of four
vudiga was minimally forty-eight years and maximally eighty. In fact, at the time
the Kriges were writing, there had only been three queens in the last hundred and
forty years (ibid.: 165).
406
ON KINGS
The Luvale rain-queen, then, was in no sense a scapegoat. Neither, however,
did she wield anything in the way of sovereign power. Among the Rukuba of
Nigeria, the king’s sanctity is preserved when, every fourteen years, any impurity
affecting him is passed on to an old man who is expelled from the community
and lives as a beggar for seven years, then dies (Muller 1980; 1990: 59). That
king actually governs. Among the Ewe of Togo, the “king” does not govern at
all, but is himself reduced to a scapegoat; banished to a forest on accession, there
he must remain, celibate, perfor
ming rainmaking rituals, until after seven years
he is put to death—or earlier, in the event of bad harvests. He is only referred
to as a god (if a bad god) after his death (de Surgey 1990). Similar cases can be
endlessly elaborated.
If the relation between these elements is indeed contingent, the particular
configuration they take in any given case can only have been the outcome of the
particular play of historical forces. That is, it is an effect of the politics that lie
behind it. This is what I mean by the politics of kingship. The Rukuba king has
maneuvered himself himself into a fairly strong position; the Ewe king, if one
can even cal him that, has fal en victim to almost complete adverse sacralization.
Let us turn, then, to one of the most famous examples of African divine king-
ship, that of the Jukun of Nigeria, to get a sense of how this might come about.
* * *
According to the standard history, the Jukun as a people are said to have reached
the Benue River valley around ad 950, and their ruling lineage still claim to be
migrants from Egypt or Mecca (Meek 1931: 22; Stevens 1975: 186). What’s
sometimes referred to as the “Jukun Empire,” based in the city of Kwarara-
fa, peaked in the seventeenth century, after which its military expansion was
checked by the stubborn resistance, among others, of the egalitarian Tiv to the
south. By the nineteenth century, the kingdom also came under intense pressure
from attacks by jihadis from the north, who sacked their capital and forced them
to relocate (Abraham 1933: 10; Apata 1998: 79–81).
Their transformation, during this period, was so profound that many have
begun to question whether the Jukun were ever a military empire at al (Afigo
2005: 70–73), but the likeliest interpretation of the evidence is that the Jukun
were at first the center of a classic galactic polity, but one whose rulers, once their
military ambitions were foiled, gradual y came to redefine themselves less as alien
warriors and more as the ritual leaders of a people who claimed autochthonous
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
407
status as the original owners of the land (Isichei 1997: 235; Afigo 2005: 72).30
In the process, the king’s role was likewise transformed: he was largely confined
