four age groups, each consisting of a generation reckoned as about twenty-five years. These have ‘always’ succeeded each other in time, and are named respectively after the zebra, mountains, the gazelle and the lion. But at any given moment only two of these generation sets are recognised as being in active existence: a senior one, which is closed to recruitment, and a junior one which is still acquiring its full complement of men. Each of these Karimojong generation sets consists in turn of five serially recruited age-groups with different statuses and obligations.
As a whole, the active male population of the Karimojong, reckoned as lying between about ten years old and sixty, are thus divided into two sorts of people, ‘those in authority and those in obedience, the leaders and the led’, and then again subdivided into groups with varying rights and duties. What this really means needs to be looked at in the light of Karimojong realities. A large part of any man’s life is passed in isolated cattle camps far from home, in driving cattle from one reach of pastures to another, or in small home-hamlets scattered through the bush. It is age set training which gives these people their structure of behaviour. Only this can overcome the social isolation of long and difficult seasons when a man may never see more than a dozen or so of his neighbours. Otherwise ‘there is often no tie of kinship or neighbourhood or even [descent-line] section between the groups of herders who meet, mingle for a while, and then disperse to reform in other fortuitous combinations’, as they shift with their beasts across the land.
This extreme disaggregation, ever renewed with every season, means that each small group is at the mercy of internal quarrels brought about by rivalry for scarce pasture and water, or of raids by similarly hard-pressed neighbours along the borders of Karimoja. ‘It is here that age-set affiliation has its greatest utility, for it immediately allocates to any individual in any collection of persons, however transient, a niche in a universal ranking system. Every individual has, accordingly, a pattern of response already roughly created, and needing only application to the context in which he finds himself. . . . Provided only that a man is both Karimojong and adult then he can be automatically grouped and ranked by age, whatever his company or whatever the circumstances. By these means, any aggregate of Karimojong in any place at any time can be structured to take common action.’
But it is the ‘third level’ of awareness which makes this system work by providing the guides and sanctions of a universally accepted moral order. Like other ‘stateless societies’, the Karimojong have no police force or body of men with physical authority to act against offenders. Their age group training would go for little, either in emergencies or the common run of daily life, were it not for moral assumptions—the psychosocial formation—on which it rests and which frame and fortify its rules.
Ultimately, it is the elders who guard and impose these rules. ‘Whether individually or collectively, Karimojong consider obedience and respect for elders to bring good fortune through their beneficence; and equally, disobedience and disrespect to bring individual punishment and suffering, or collective calamity.’ The attributed ability of elders ‘to intercede with deity on the community’s (or individual’s) behalf, or to refuse to do so in time of need, or positively to curse, provides a graduated range of supernatural sanctions with which to back their decisions’.
Cursing by elders is the major punitive sanction, applied in varying degrees of doom, just as good behaviour is rewarded by appropriate blessings. Mild cursing may cause barrenness in wives or cattle, failure of crops, early death. More serious forms of curse, collectively expressed, may drastically generalise such woes. Offending Karimojong are, it appears, deeply and immediately concerned to avert the wrath of retribution. They must plead or pray for remission in words which Dyson-Hudson, who records them, found were no less binding for being stylised in form:
Offender: Father, father, let me be. Help me. Leave me alone. I will not do these things again, truly. I will not repeat them.
Elder: Very well. Have you believed?
Offender: I have.
Elder: Do you still argue?
Offender: No, I have believed.
The moral basis is repeatedly emphasised by the meaning which Karimojong attach to this pleading before elders. Every form of pleading takes place within the structure of Karimojong belief, and ‘connotes someone struggling with a force greater than himself that may only be removed at its behest rather than his own’. So an offender’s remission depends upon forgiveness by the powers that underpin society. But this comes only when the forces of good are enabled by appropriate individual action and voluntary acceptance to overcome the forces of evil. Then the offender can not only be relieved of further accusation but can also shed his own sense of guilt—and in this pattern of consciousness, as we shall see, there lies much of the value of traditional psychotherapy, especially in cases of mental depression.
Other forms of ‘separation by age’ suggest a resolution of specific problems, as with the Nyakyusa. They carry separation to an extreme. They divide their male population not only socially into age sets which cut across descent-line loyalties, but geographically into age villages as well. In its actual place of dwelling each male generation is physically separated from others, so that ‘the local unit consists not of a group of kinsmen . . . but of a group of age-mates with their wives and young children’. Boys beyond infancy must form generation villages in the same way as men.
Why should the Nyakyusa do this? For themselves it is ‘right and natural’ and requires no validation other than in terms of what is ‘right and natural’, a circular explanation which gets us nowhere. But Monica Wilson, who has studied their system of life, suggests that Nyakyusa patterns of sexual morality may lie at its base. She notes that Nyakyusa have no ceremonies to mark the threshold of maturity and circumscribe behaviour: ‘Therefore any young man past puberty is a potential mate for a woman of his own age.’ This might not matter very much if it were not that Nyakyusa men customarily marry late while girls marry early, with the result that there are ‘many bachelors and very few girls available to them’, a shortage rendered the more acute by Nyakyusa attitudes which favour a man’s marrying as many wives as he can afford. Moreover, Nyakusa social rules also suppose the inheritance of a father’s widow by his son, except for his own mother or her kinswomen. ‘So it is scarcely surprising that the seduction of the young wives of an aging father is a common theme for scandal, and that a father’s jealous fears are matched by those of his son.’ Out of all this, Wilson argues, there has come a social anxiety about incest between step-son and step-mother on the one hand, and between father-in-law and daughter-in-law on the other; and Nyakyusa accordingly separate sons from fathers by making them live in different villages.
But with active males thus divided, physically and emotionally, how does Nyakyusa society hold together? The answer lies in a range of values likewise inherent to the system. Nyakyusa have evolved a compensatory mechanism by stressing what they call ukwangela, ‘the enjoyment of good company and, by extension, the mutual aid and sympathy which spring from personal friendship’. This ‘implies urbane manners and a friendliness which expresses itself in eating and drinking together; not only merry conversation, but also discussion between equals which the Nyakyusa regard as the principal form of education’, an attitude which modern educationists, one feels, may incidentally well approve. They place, it seems, a tremendous emphasis on the good fellowship of ukwangela within a given village and across the whole network of kinship relations.
These attitudes are more than platonic. Like other Africans—like all predominantly rural peoples?—Nyakyusa are down-to-earth about the frailties of human nature. They may think that a man should have ukwangela out of sheer good will. But they do not count upon it. They expect him to have it out of self-interest, failure to have it being the path to ruin by witchcraft. It is fear of this retribution by witchcraft that ‘compels generosity and conformity with public opinion in the village and thus creates a sense of mutual dependence between neighbours’, while by the same token ‘the
