‘We have in East Africa’, opined Sir Charles Eliot, Britain’s first high commissioner there, ‘the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa, an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country where we can do as we will.’ Elsewhere it was the same. When British pioneers in 1890 rode into the land which became Southern Rhodesia, they could not believe that ‘natives’ had raised the patterned walls of masonry they found there.
These ideas are among the mysteries of non-African belief that have somehow survived the colonial period. In the case of Southern Rhodesia, as it happens, more than half a century later an ethnologist began asking old men who lived in the rolling grasslands of the Mount Darwin district, north of modern Salisbury, whether they knew anything of the distant past. They hesitated and then they began telling him the history of their people and its kings. They went back to Mutota, the first of their strong rulers, who was ‘still the heart of the nation’ and whose burial ground was the hill of Chitakochangonya. They admitted that ‘we no longer talk about these matters very much, now that the Europeans have taken the place of Mutota’s sons’. But they remarked that there were elders still alive, even in the 1950s, ‘who say that if you listen carefully you can hear the roll of Kagurukute, the great drum of Mutota, at the time of the new moon, as you stand looking down upon the river Dande, beside the lofty grave’. Now Mutota had died in about 1450. The old men were recalling five centuries of statehood.
In truth the history of the Africans is nothing if not the ‘handing on of the torch’ from generation to generation. It is quintessentially concerned with the accumulation of ancestral wisdom, with the demonstration of a tabula piena of ancestral knowledge. For it is the appointed ancestors who have given peoples their identity and guaranteed the onward movement of life. They may be private ancestors or public ancestors, ‘family’ guarantees or ‘national’ guarantees, but in any case their role is crucial. They it is who have drawn up and sealed the beliefs and laws by which men reasonably live.
This statement is of course a simplification. Beliefs and laws were always subject to change, while the ancestors in their own time had themselves been men and, as such, subject to the pressures of everyday life. Yet it is a simplification which gets to the heart of the matter. Leaving aside the religious aspect for a while, I want here to consider the political and social meaning of ancestors, and especially of those ‘founding ancestors’ who, as Africans say, ‘began our life and brought us into the lands where we live’.
If the everyday thought of Early Iron Age peoples lies beyond our grasp, we can at least perceive something of their predicament. It is fairly certain, for example, that the remote ancestors of the Shona-speaking peoples, whose descendants appeared so history-less to the British pioneers of the 1890s, settled in the grasslands between the Zambezi and Limpopo more than a thousand years ago. Very typically for African history, they took shape from a mingling and eventual composition between incoming migrants and peoples already living in the land.
These were the early syntheses of cultures that contain the ‘beginning’ of the story. They must have been many, for the whole of recorded history tells repeatedly the same tale. Historians probing back through oral tradition come again and again upon the evidence for dispersal and migration as these relatively empty lands were gradually settled: dispersal of the Bantu-speaking peoples from a formative homeland that was probably the Congo savanna country; dispersal of the Luo-speaking peoples from a formative homeland in the plains to the west of the southern Nile; dispersal of other Sudanic speakers from this or that ‘initial zone’ of growth and multiplication.
As early populations grew in size, so did their reasons for dispersal. Political disputes, above all for succession to inherited authority, would cause disappointed leaders to look for a land of their own. These founding heroes would shift away with their followers, few or very few, and find their freedom in another country, by conquest if they must and were able, or else by seeking lands not yet occupied. And as the causes of dispersal became more complex and political, so also did the modes and mechanisms of social change.
But consider the predicament of these early groups in the solitudes of ancient Africa. Each is alone, or feels itself to be so. By moving away from its parent community, each has cut or weakened its ancestral lifeline, and suffers a corresponding sense of anxiety and risk. Often the group is very small, perhaps fifty or a hundred men with a few women and children. Generally it will hope to find wives where it is going; but seldom or never does it know where it is going. Having moved, the migrant group becomes separate, distinct, different from any other. Confronted with an unknown country, it must apply its narrow fund of technical knowledge in new material situations. But it must also do this in new non-material situations: in these, too, the group must invent and adapt.
Above all, each group must relieve its sense of anxiety and risk: it must reach an assurance about its new identity, rules of life, customs and beliefs. As Sangree says of the Tiriki in Kenya, its members must be enabled to supply themselves with answers to the questions: ‘Where did I come from? Who cares whether I live or die? Upon whom can I depend for food, land and shelter?’ Only a new ancestral lifeline, a new ‘system of ancestors’ for the group as a whole but also for each evolving segment of the group, can do this. The ordering of a given society into interlocking lineage identities, each with its own forefathers linked in turn to one another, can then supply the necessary ‘sense of affiliation and continuity’.
Ancestral figures in carved basalt, the larger one about 108 cms. high, from Ekoi country in south-eastern Nigeria. Drawn in the bush before its removal to the Jos Museum, the larger is from the lands of the Nnam people. Many such shaped and engraved stones exist in this country, but little is known of their origin.
This constant shaping of new identities and separate systems was a worldwide phenomenon, so that early societies in different continents must often have resembled each other in their underlying concepts. This indeed is what modern research affirms for later societies. Every group has needed to define itself in order to believe in itself. So as to enter a firm claim upon the future, every group has had to give itself a name and heritage. But this has supposed agreement on a common group-origin, even if fictional or deliberately contrived. The children of the United States of America derive from many ancestral origins; but they sit in school beneath the daily sign and symbol of the Stars and Stripes, ever visible and reassuring demonstration of their joint identity and common heritage, and hence their common future. The children of Africa have gone through educational academies of a different kind. Yet the ‘initiation’ courses and ceremonies, seminars and examinations through which they have passed were no less aimed at ensuring joint identity and common heritage as well as common future; and the shrines of the appointed ancestors—the constitutionally crucial ancestors—were there to confirm it.
Constitutionally crucial? Not all ancestors were important, but only those who were recognised as standing in the line of succession back to ‘the power without beginning’. These were the appointed ancestors who channelled that power to living men, and who in so doing provided the means of protecting the present, guaranteeing the future, and generally assuaging the doubts and worries of pioneering groups in the wilderness where they wandered and settled. There is thus no true dividing line between founding ancestors and superior spirit guardians. Back beyond Mutota, the founder of their long dynasty of the Mwanamutapas, the Shona think of their great ancestral spirits, their mhondoro who, as founding heroes, first taught how to smelt iron from the rocks and how to grow millet and sorghum. ‘With this iron the people made hoes, and the mhondoro taught them in dreams to till and plant crops.’ In that dry country it has always been the rains, rare and irregular, which have made the difference between food and famine: above all, then, the mhondoro presided over the giving or withholding of rain, and logically so, for how could the ancestors, in preparing a land for their people, have failed to solve the problem of rain?
It was in these senses that religious needs were
