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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

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  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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  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

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  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

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  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

 

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