alteration within the structure of Konkomba society requires, accordingly, to be fitted into the total structure by appropriate rituals. Otherwise there is bound to be trouble with the authorities—with the spirits of the Earth and their attendant ancestors who guard the ideal balance. Kinsmen who want to shift their homesteads have to be sure of ancestral approval. ‘When a man or group of men wish to move and settle in a stretch of unoccupied bush, they consult a diviner who discovers from them whether it is advisable to move and, if the answer be positive, the location of the shrines, commonly groves of trees, in the new area they propose to occupy. Thus a new relationship is established from the beginning between a group of kinsmen and the territory they occupy’, and between this new group and the rest of Konkomba society. With this, they have ‘connected themselves with their ancestors’ and adjusted their new settlement to the ideal balance. Now they can face life safely on their own.
In any familiar sense of the word this manner of explaining life is not scientific. Although the outcome of practical observation and of trial and error over many years, it is in large part seen as ‘given’ and not open to question. It continues, however, to be very directly concerned with effects which flow from causes: in its farming context, much more often than not with material effects which flow from material causes. This is where descriptions go wrong whenever they suggest that these societies were dominated by a preoccupation with spiritual or mystical effects and causes. It is indeed very doubtful how any farming community could survive if that were the case. The ‘fetish-ridden superstition’ of the Africans is an illusion raised by the difficulty of understanding these beliefs and actions without inquiring into what they actually mean and do.
All the modern evidence shows that these societies were and are minutely aware of their natural and material environment, and insistently concerned with it. Flora, fauna, soil properties, water and mineral resources, climatic regularities: these are the things that have chiefly occupied their attention. All observers who have made lengthy firsthand studies of these peoples are agreed, writes Evans-Pritchard, that ‘they are for the most part interested in practical affairs, which they conduct in an empirical manner, either without the least reference to suprasensible forces, influences, and actions, or in a way in which these have a subordinate and auxiliary role’.
Karimojong cattle classification by hide markings.
The truth appears to be that they have thought and acted on two different but related levels. It is the second level, concerning suprasensible effects and causes, which has proved the stumbling block to seeing them as rational and logical. Without the key to understanding, their beliefs and actions must often seem perversely irrational and ghost-ridden. Between old and new views of the Africans the real difference is that the key is now available in a number of cases sufficient to portray the whole, at least in general outline. This key rests in a comprehension of their moral order.
8
Elaborations I: Age Sets
WHEN DOES A COMMUNITY BECOME A ‘STATE’, OR A ‘TRIBE’ TURN into a ‘nation’? Little can be gained from arguing such matters of nomenclature, much of which is still befogged by old misunderstandings. It is more useful to see how the actual structures evolved, as it were, on the ground.
Anthropologists have drawn a broad working distinction between ‘societies with governments’ and ‘societies without governments’. By this they mean, essentially, distinction between systems which contained a central authority of some recognised sort and others which did not. Thus the aristocratic governments of the Wolof of Senegal or the Yoruba of Nigeria were clearly very different in their structure, and therefore in their mood and ethos, from the egalitarian systems of the Tallensi or Konkomba.
Seen historically, however, the range of Africa’s political systems much more resembles a continuum between extremes. At one end there were societies which stayed close to the ‘ideal formative community’ of founding ancestors during remote times: the community of pioneers consisting of a handful of nuclear families bound together by common experience, and governing themselves, while they settled and slowly grew in numbers, by more or less simple forms of gerontocracy. Developing from this there came structures of kinship whose organisation, as time went by, evolved complex and contrapuntal balances and checks upon the use and abuse of power.
Tallensi self-rule lay towards this end of the continuum. Their government embodied no king or other person with political authority, no executive service, no capital or central place of assembly, but lay in a series of arrangements deploying a pervasive influence at three levels. First, there were guiding precedents for the practical questions of everyday life. Do we hoe today, and if so whose garden? Next, at a level removed somewhat from everyday affairs, Tallensi self-rule took effect in ties within clans and between maximal lineages, imposing and defining wider obligations. Do we exact compensation from those people over there, or owe them any, and if so how much? At a third remove, Tallensi government assured a larger concept of unity and mutual obligation: the concept of a moral order upon which ‘everything’ was immanently built according to a social charter within which all Tallensi, in varying depths of awareness, always dwelt, enabling them at any time to say: This is the country we belong to, and this is why.
At the other end of the continuum there were states with very obvious and puissant forms of central government, having emperors and kings, hierarchies of wealth, executive services, administrative capitals, formidable armies. ‘We entered Kumasi at two o’clock’, a British envoy wrote of the Asante capital in 1817, where ‘upwards of five thousand people, the greater part warriors, met us with awful bursts of martial music . . . an area of nearly a mile in circumference was crowded with magnificence and novelty. The king, his tributaries, and captains, were resplendent in the distance, surrounded by attendants of every description. . . . More than a hundred bands burst out on our arrival . . . at least a hundred large umbrellas or canopies, which could shelter thirty persons, were sprung up and down by the bearers with brilliant effect.’
Yet even in such states as this the old authority of kinship remained of critical influence in deciding what was politically done or not done. With important exceptions to be discussed later, men acquired office by virtue of their positions in the kinship structure, and exercised power by sanctions whose ultimate creation depended not on any royal will, but on ancestral mandate.
After 1720 the kings and chiefs of Asante brought within their power a territory somewhat larger than Ghana. But even later, when men began to be appointed to office by merit, chiefs were seldom allowed to forget that they drew their authority from their representative status. Within the metropolitan part of the empire this status was conferred by ritual acts carrying a legal force because they emerged from the Asante social order. The culmination of these rites was the seating of the new chief upon his seat of office, his akonnua or stool. With that, a double function was fulfilled. The akonnua stood to the chief as a throne to a European king, but it also stood to chiefship as the European crown to kingship: it was a physical thing to be used on appropriate occasions, but also a supreme symbol of constituted authority.
Seated on his akonnua, the chief is considered to be absorbed by his office. ‘Appearing then before his people, he swears fidelity to them and is admonished by his senior councillors to remember, among other things, that he may never act without their advice, and must rule with justice and impartiality. It is impressed on him that he belongs to the whole chiefdom in his capacity of chief, and not to his own lineage.’ He must forget his own position in the kinship structure, must rise above family considerations, and must enlarge his boundaries of thought and judgment to include the whole complex of descent-groups over which he is called to rule. When he fails, those who have elected and installed
