the Amba, this people of about half a million souls have lived in villages, but, unlike the Amba, they have tied their villages intimately together. Tallensi clans and lineages have been composed of men living in different villages, the disintegrating force of geographical separation being balanced by the integrating force of kinship. Their social charter has thus had a two-way pattern of pressures. At any given moment, there is in Taleland ‘a system of mutually balancing segments in which are vested the rights and duties through which the structural equilibrium is sustained. This tendency towards an equilibrium is characteristic of every phase of the social structure. . . . Loyalty to the local clan is balanced by a contrary loyalty to a component unit or a neighbouring clan.’
The balance, of course, was imperfect. The ideal was not achieved by Tallensi any more than by others. The very conditions of fixed village settlement in this ecologically hazardous savanna made stability repeatedly difficult. Droughts, swarms of locusts or other pests, the constant need for fission or fusion among village units faced with populations which varied in size according to the fortunes of the day: all such trials were factors of upheaval. Yet the pressures of Tallensi moral order worked steadily for resolution. Quarrels were many, but fights apparently few. And they were few precisely because the Tallensi were much of Lord Acton’s opinion on the corrupting influence of power. They regarded power, and therefore the effort to obtain it, with profound distrust.
Others thought the same. A majority of African societies have been like the Lozi of western Zambia who are ‘apparently terrified of giving away power, even power to protect, for once a man is elevated it is feared he will stand against those he ought to care for’. Even societies with chiefs and kings seldom deprived themselves of the right of deposition, at least up to the nineteenth century; and the founding notion of England’s Magna Carta, that you could justly act against an unjust ruler, was deeply rooted here. Since offensive warfare is nothing if not a violent exercise of power, the Tallensi were against it. They stressed peace and non-provocation ‘as the ideal relationships between neighbours’.
Clasped in their community structure of morally sanctioned checks and balances, the Tallensi thought it sinful to instigate warfare, since warfare could gravely damage their equilibrium. Warfare might be unavoidable now and then, but they deplored it as exchanging a possible immediate gain for a probable later loss. ‘War occurred when members of one clan committed a grave injury (e.g. murder) against members of another, from which theirs was divided by social barriers more powerful than any ties uniting them.’ Within a given grouping, an act of violence could be settled by compensation according to the rules. Outside the grouping, it would call for remedial action beyond the rules. So warfare was not ‘an instrument of policy, but an act of reprisal. Punishment, not conquest, was its purpose. Territorial annexation was incompatible with the social structure’—would upset, that is, the intervillage equilibrium—‘nor could captives or booty be taken. It was a stern taboo to retain any of the foodstuffs or livestock pillaged in war. All had to be destroyed or immediately consumed.’ In other words, to take cattle from neighbours and graze them would call for more land, and thus disturb the pattern of community settlement.
But this concept of community was more than a political device limited to relationships between people living at any given time. Had it been only that, it could scarcely have survived the human appetite for power and privilege. Far more, it was rooted in Tallensi notions about how their society had come into existence, and by what right it could continue to exist. Here we are back to the legitimating relationship between ancestors and living men, and between ancestors and land. What advantaged living men was whatever lay along the grain of ancestral precedent, and this was conceived ideally : as flowing from the ‘bargain’ which the ancestors had struck with the Spirit of the Earth. Unless living men kept to the bargain, the ancestors would not do so either. Then chaos would come.
It is of course doubtful whether Tallensi ever thought of all this in abstract terms of clans and lineages. For them, the kinship structure was self-evident from earliest childhood. But they took good care that people should remember its crucial loyalties. They celebrated annual festivals designed to perpetuate these loyalties, festivals that were both a confirmation of the existing order and a reaffirmation of its supreme validity.
For these and similar constitutional purposes they had two contrapuntal sets of functionaries, chiefs and Earth-priests, neither of whom had any directly political powers. The chiefs were thought of as representing the ancestors who had ‘come into the land’, while the Earth-priests spoke for those already settled there. As with other examples, a compact had been established between the two groups, immigrant and already-settled, so that both should live ‘for ever in amity side by side’. Tallensi therefore ‘believe that the common good of the whole tribe depends on the faithful ritual collaboration of chiefs and Earth-priests, after the fashion, as they put it, of husband and wife. If this breaks down, famine, war, disease or some other catastrophe will descend upon them.’ Again one sees the deliberate emphasis on the ideal dual balance: of men in community, and of men with nature.
It followed that the office was carefully distinguished from the person who occupied it. For the person had power only by virtue of the office, since it was the office alone which conveyed the saving power of conservation. This distinction between the person and the office, the profane and the sacred, defines a central aspect of belief and action. Little can be understood without keeping it in mind. ‘The Zande cult of ancestors is centred round shrines erected in the middle of their courtyards, and offerings are placed in these shrines on ceremonial, and sometimes other, occasions; but when not in ritual use, so to speak, Azande use them as convenient props to rest their spears against, and pay no attention to them whatsoever.’ The casual construction and everyday insignificance of African shrines make repeatedly the same point. What is important is not the contingent object but the immanent power which will be vested in the object on ritual occasions.
Clearly, then, these peoples were not astray in a mystical fog. On the contrary, they had a farmer’s hard-headedness about life and the world. Tallensi ideas of right and wrong derived from their convictions about the constitutional relationships which bound them together; and in this respect they were as logical and realistic as British constitutional lawyers who speak of ‘the Crown’ as the supreme arbiter of British right and wrong. However mystical ‘the Crown’ might sound to an uninstructed Tallensi visitor—he would find that he could easily see the Crown jewels, but never ‘the Crown’—quite a few British natives would be able to tell him that its powers were drawn from precedents subject to logical explanation. The validity of the logic in terms of commonsense behaviour might be questioned, but not the logic itself.
Some near neighbours of the Tallensi, the Konkomba who number about 80,000 and farm a reach of land about seventy miles wide that is ‘alternatively a swamp and a dust bowl’, can be called in here to illustrate the chain of logical legitimation. The Konkomba do not know when they first came to their land, though it was probably in the sixteenth century. They have no consciousness of history as a sequence of experiential cause and effect that goes beyond the naming of ancestors for half a dozen generations. If they live according to a strictly defined pattern of behaviour and belief, this is because the pattern is built into the daily fabric of their lives, and corresponds to a balance conceived by ancestral wisdom in ‘a time that has no time’.
This does not mean that the Konkomba have not innovated or changed. They have done both. But they have done so by modifications of a pattern seen as mandatory in its underlying principles. These principles are governed by their habitat. Like Dinkaland, their country is flooded for several months every year; but the Konkomba use their land differently from the Dinka. They are primarily cultivators, their crops today consisting chiefly of yams, rice, millet and sorghum. These they farm in ways that can admit of few experiments within a pre-industrial economy. Yet the Konkomba do not think of their pattern as being shaped by ecological necessity and the range of available tools. Of course they see both these conditions, not being farmers for nothing, but they see them in terms of a timeless contract between their founding ancestors and the spirits of the Earth. This contract between the living and the dead represents their
