Earth were regarded as the possession of the aboriginal inhabitants, of the ‘Indians’ whose ancestors had first inhabited this land.
The model was obviously subject to much local variation; and the variations became ever more numerous as African lands were filled with the forerunners of their present societies. But essentially it was a model which held good for every situation. It consisted in the framing of a social charter sanctioned by the sense of what was ‘right and natural’, the sense of walking in the ways of life: confirmed and elaborated, as will be seen, by the most purposive ritual, by a wide range of arts, and sometimes by systematic explanations of the universe. Yet all this structure of sanctioned behaviour had its foundations firmly on the ground. And the ground was that of subsistence economy and family life.
6
The Balance with Nature
THE FORMATIVE COMMUNITY OF EARLY IRON AGE TIMES, AT ANY rate before about AD 500, was typologically a small group of related families established in a homeland they had occupied or inherited. Its immediate boundaries might be no more than a few miles wide; beyond them there might or might not be a handful of neighbours. Always, the lands of the unknown stood menacingly near, and into these a man would venture at his risk and peril. A village or a cattle-camp : one or two other villages or cattle-camps whose evening smoke climbed wispily grey in the middle distance to hills of mystery and danger: such was the outline of the world of long ago.
Within the formative community there was food and friendship, shelter from raiders whether animal or human, a sanctioned law and order. But there was more. There was also a psychological security: personal identification within a system both suprasensible and material in its terms of reference, within a society both ‘right and natural’ in that it was ‘godmade’ as well as manmade. Beyond, there stood the void in strong and ever-present contrast. Outside this ancestrally chartered system there lay no possible life, since ‘a man without lineage is a man without citizenship’: without identity, and therefore without allies. Ex ecclesia non est vita; or, as the Kongo put it, a man outside his clan is like ‘a grasshopper which has lost its wings’.
This political unit was, even more, an economic one. Having made their homeland, the cluster of families had to survive in it. They could survive only by a process of trial and error as they grappled with its ecology; with its tsetse or floods of rain, its shallow soil or towering forest trees, its slides of hillside pasture or pockets of arable amid lizard-gleaming humps of rock. This was the saving process of invention and adaptation that rounded out the group’s charter and gave, to those who were fortunate, the sanction of success.
The result was persistently ambiguous. ‘Ideally’, in Gluckman’s words, ‘a tribal situation is stationary . . . [and] any change is an injury to the social fabric.’ It is an ideal that flows from a pattern laid down by the ancestors, the paradigm of a perfect and unmoving social balance. Yet this is itself the product of experiment and innovation, and, as such, has necessarily remained subject to both. Hence an untiring resistance to disturbance or upheaval has gone hand-in-hand with an absorptive flexibility of adaptation. And hence again there has persisted in African thought an often emphatic cohabitation of the opposed principles of Fate and Supernatural Justice—as Fortes suggests, of Oedipus and Job—arising on one hand from the immovable object of ancestral rules which should not normally be changed, and, on the other, from the irresistible forces of unfolding life and human nature which nonetheless do change these rules.
The economic basis was conceived in family terms, in what Middleton and Tait have called ‘a nuclear group’. This is one of those anthropological abstractions which are convenient because they translate the exotic into the familiar, but with little real distortion. The ‘nuclear group’—the basic economic unit—may also be called an ‘extended family’. As observed in many societies which appear to have changed little in their essential structure for a long time, this ‘nuclear group’ or ‘extended family’ consisted usually of a unit of three or four generations from grandparents to grandchildren, and perhaps to greatgrandchildren.
At least in principle, this family was or is a self-supporting unit of producers and consumers ideally capable of supplying all its own requirements but, in practice, able to exist only within a community of similar families who help each other in economic and other group-defensive ways. It is under the domestic rule of a single man (or occasionally woman) who may also be the person who represents it in political councils or politico-religious ceremonies affecting several families. It has the use of a specific piece of land. It owns the produce of this land but not the land itself, which symbolically belongs to the appointed ancestors who hold it from the Spirit of the Earth. Ecology fixes an optimum size for the unit. Whenever it prospers in childbirth, and grows ‘too big’, some of its members have to move elsewhere.
Each such family might be widely separated from its relations in other homesteads or temporary camps. But more often, except in true pastoral societies, homesteads would be close together, or people would live in clusters or hamlets or in large villages or even, as time went by, in farmers’ towns such as those of the Yoruba. Yet however much the community might vary in size or in location of its family units, it provided the ‘chartered’ link between all its members and gave them ideological identity as well as ultimate security. Considered from another angle, people have ordered their affairs inside a ‘jural community’ composed of a varying number of nuclear groups: inside, that is, ‘the widest grouping within which there was a moral obligation and a means ultimately to settle disputes peaceably’. Outside purely family affairs, this was the working organisation available for political action.
So it came about that all property and productive relations had to be conceived in terms of kinship relations, since it was the sum of the family groups, combined in a jural community, that was seen as having devised the saving balance with nature. This meant that political action was necessarily kinship action. But this in turn required that every individual must play an expected social role. To the ecological balance, there corresponded another in the field of human relations—an ideal balance of kinship rights and obligations, occasionally quite simple, often very complex, and nearly always structured in terms of countervailing pressures between different sections of society: between, for the most part, different lineages or groups of lineages.
This ideal balance of kinship relations, seen as essential to the ideal balance with nature that was itself the material guarantee of survival, called for specific patterns of conduct. Individuals might have rights, but they had them only by virtue of the obligations they fulfilled to the community. This explains their logic of regarding legality in terms of individual obligations, and not of individual rights. At least in their jural and moral assumptions, these communities lived at an opposite extreme from the ‘free enterprise individualism’ which supposes that the community has rights only by virtue of the obligations it fulfils to the individual.
Even the ‘simple’ forms of this ideal balance call for an imaginative effort of understanding, though they sometimes fall into fairly regular patterns. The chief complicating factor is that a ‘nuclear cluster’ of related families, enclosing a lineage or descent-line, has seldom formed or forms an isolation community. Its men and women marry the men and women of other ‘nuclear clusters’. This produces an ever changing mobility between each pair of them, and thus between them all. Anthropologists report diverse ways in which such relationships have been expressed, tensions resolved, and the balance held between descent-lines. The Amba of north-western Uganda, for example, are a farming people of about 30,000 souls living between the great Ituri rain forests and the slopes of snow-peaked Ruwenzori. In essence, their system is a simple one. All public affairs are resolved in terms of a balance between descent-lines. Every Amba can expect help from the kinsmen of his own line, but each line (and here I am simplifying) is in principle opposed to every other.
No Amba is allowed to marry within his
