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  it again and seize it once more.”

  Fathi Ben Haj Yahia, in The New York Times International: August 8, 2015

  We are going to take the marvelous seriously: for we intend to reconstruct the mytho-

  logical universe within which Bantu historical thought has developed.

  Luc de Heusch, The drunken king, or The origin of the state

  The ancient Greeks had good reason to deify Memory. Commenting on cos-

  mogonic myths in Hesiod and Homer, Jean-Pierre Vernant noted that “the

  past thus revealed represents much more than the time prior to the present;

  it is its very source” (2006: 119). The observation has radical implications for

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  historiography, insofar as it stipulates that historical causes in the mode of

  memory have no temporal or physical proximity to their effects; in that respect,

  they are not “historical realities” as commonly understood in normal historical

  science. They are inserted into the situation but they are not of it. On the other

  hand, anthropologists have come upon many institutional forms of a temporal-

  ity that thus embeds the present in the terms of a remembered past, whether

  that past is “mythical” or more proximately ancestral or experiential. Such is the

  historicity of the omnipresent Dreamtime of the totemic ancestors organizing

  the world of Native Australians; of Maori chiefs who recount the deeds of their

  heroic ancestors in the first-person singular and consciously rehearse them in

  their own doings; of the installation rituals in which the king-elect of the Shil-

  luk “becomes Nyikang,” the immigrant founder of the dynasty (see chapter 2,

  this volume); of the positional succession and perpetual kinship relations among

  the chiefs of the Tongan Islands; or of Captain Cook, for example, greeted by

  Hawaiians at Kealakekua in 1779 as an avatar of Lono, the ancient god who

  returns annually at the New Year to fertilize the land. Here history is made

  analogically rather than sequentially—or what are traditions for?

  A collective immortal in the form of tradition, Memory, mother of the

  Muses, indeed has the divine power of ordering human existence by revealing

  “what has been and what will be” (Vernant 2006: 120). Note that insofar as we

  are dealing with “myths” (so-called), as of the Dreamtime, the antecedents of

  events are rendered doubly disengaged from “historical realities”: they are not

  even “true” by our ontological lights, let alone copresent with their effects. All

  the same, as Fred Myers reports in his excellent ethnography of Pintupi: “The

  Dreaming is experienced as the essential foundation to which human beings

  must conform” (1986: 245–46). Realized in the features of the landscape as well

  as current human action, “making first things continuous with last” (ibid.: 53),

  the Dreaming is a transhistorical condition of social action. Pintupi say, “from

  the Dreaming, it becomes real” (ibid.: 49). Myers explains: “The Pintupi see

  themselves as following the Dreaming. As the invisible framework of this

  world, the Dreaming is the cosmic prototype” (ibid.).

  Myers, incidentally, is not the only one who, in writing of Pintupi “ontology,”

  was far in advance of the soi-disant “ontological turn” in anthropology, as intro-

  duced with so much hoopla in the early twenty-first century. Irving Hal owell

  had already published a foundational article, “Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and

  world view,” in 1960. The present essay could be viewed as an extended se-

  quitur to Hal owel ’s essential point that “what we cal myth” is not only for

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  141

  the people concerned “a true account of events in the past,” but a current ac-

  count “of the manner in which their phenomenal field is cultural y constituted

  and cognitively apprehended” (ibid.: 27). Similar observations are features of

  the ethnographic record the world around. As, for example, the New Guinea

  Highlands: “For the Mbowamb myths are the truth, historical facts handed

  down. The forces which they describe and represent are not of the type which

  occur only once but are continuously effective, actual y existing” (Vicedom and

  Tischner 1943–48: 729).

  Perhaps nothing better epitomizes the historiographic problem at issue as

  that what we deem to be “myth,” hence fictional, the peoples concerned hold

  sacred and by that token unquestionably true, “what actually happened.” Yet

  as Maori say, “the problems of other lands are their own”; and for their part

  they are proven masters in making current actualities out of collective memories

  (Johansen 1954). Consider, for example, John White’s (1874) reconstruction of

  a scene from daily life of the Ngapuhi tribe of the North Island. The speaker,

  Rou, a man of some prominence in the community, has lost a son in battle and

  now protests the decision of the tribal chiefs that the enemies recently taken in

  revenge be buried instead of eaten, as even the gods were wont to do. His disa-

  greement with the chiefs thus begins at the origin of the world, with a reference

  to the famous Maori cosmogonic narrative of the Sons of Rangi: a tradition

  which among other precedents includes the origin of cannibalism on the part

  of the god Tu, the ancestor and patron of man as warrior. Tu defeated and ate

  his elder brothers, themselves ancestors of birds, trees, fish, cultivated and wild

  foods, and thereby gained the ability to consume their offspring. “If the gods eat

  each other,” Rou says, “and they were brothers . . . why am I not allowed to eat

  those who killed my child?” He concludes by citing another well-known tradi-

  tion, this on the divine origin of witchcraft, which explains how evil came into

  the hearts of men, including his own; and finally two proverbs which likewise

  justify his personal project of cannibal revenge (ibid.: 185–93). Given this kind

  of historicity, we can understand the perplexing problems of governmentality

  confronting Sir George Grey as Governor of the New Zealand colony in the

  mid-nineteenth century. Sir George soon discovered that he could not negotiate

  critical issues of war and peace without a knowledge of Maori mythology and

  poetry. “To my surprise,” he wrote, “I found these chiefs in their speeches to me

  or in their letters frequently quoted, in explanation of their views and intentions,

  fragments of ancient poems and proverbs, or made allusions which rested on an

  ancient system of mythology; and . . . it was clear that the most important parts

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  of their communications were embodied in these figurative forms (1956: n.p.).1

  “The Maori,” as Prytz Johansen put it, “find themselves in history” (1954: 163;

  cf. Sahlins 1985: 54ff.).

  As Valerio Valeri (2015) observed and demonstrated at length in the con-

  nection with the ascension of the great Kamehameha to royal power in Hawai‘i,

  the past here functions paradigmatically as well as syntagmatically. And, one

  might add, consciously so—although it may otherwise transpire in the unre-

  marked way traditions are realized in the normal course of cultural practice.

  The event at issue was a usurpatio
n of the Hawai‘i kingship by Kamehameha,

  who as a cadet brother of the royal heir had been entrusted with the war god

  as his legacy from the late king. Everything thus happened in the same way

  as the succession struggle of the great chief Umi-a-Liloa some generations

  previously, a well-known tradition that effectively served as the charter of the

  kingship. And it was again repeated in historic times, if with a different result,

  when Kamehameha’s son and heir, King Liholiho, defeated the challenge of his

  younger brother, Kekuaokalani, who had inherited the war god and revolted

  against the ruler’s turn to Christianity. The different outcome in this last itera-

  tion underscores Valeri’s reminder that analogy is not identity, but always entails

  some difference: in particular, the contingent circumstances of the conjuncture,

  which are not foreseen in the paradigmatic precedent, but represent the syntag-

  matic dimension of what actually happened. Nor is the selection of historical

  antecedents in such cases given or predetermined, considering the complexities

  of tradition and the opportunities for the play of choice and interest. What

  remains, however, is that the course of events will unfold in cultural terms that

  are preposed to the current situation. Indeed, if anthropologists on the whole

  have been more sensitive than other human scientists to paradigmatic histories,

  it is because the appropriation of current events by already-existing traditions

  is, after all, what they have long known as the work of culture. Culture is what

  happens when something happened.

  Another, similar instance of the deployment of dynastic traditions to cur-

  rent situations, this one close to the narrative of Kongo kingship which will

  be the focus of this essay, is provided by Victor Turner’s (1957) comments

  on the Luba origins of the Lunda kingship among Central African Ndembu

  and other peoples. This classic stranger-king formation was the subject of a

  1. Sir George found that his translators rarely if ever could explain the historical

  allusions, probably because they were British, or if Maori, not of relevant tribes.

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  143

  wel -known structural analysis by Luc de Heusch (1982b). In the essential

  incidents, a Lunda king, Yala Mwaku, unseemly drunk, is insulted and badly

  beaten by two of his sons, and then nursed back to health by his daughter,

  Lweji Ankonde. In gratitude, he passes on to Lweji the pal adium of the king-

  dom—the royal bracelet made of human genitalia that maintains the fertility

  of the realm—thus making her his successor and dispossessing his sons. Lweji

  later meets and marries a handsome young hunter, Chibinda, who turns out to

  be the youngest son of a great Luba chief; and when she gives him the bracelet

  because she must go into seclusion during menstruation, he becomes king of

  the Lunda. Chagrined, Lweti’s brothers leave to found their own kingdoms,

  and their descendants spread Lunda rule far and wide among many other peo-

  ples, including the indigenous Ndembu population. But the events did not end

  there. Turner writes:

  Life, after all, is as much an imitation of art as the reverse. Those who, as children

  in Ndembu society, have listened to innumerable stories about Yala Mwaku and

  Lweji Ankonde know all about inaugural motifs. . . . When these same Ndembu,

  now full-grown, wish to provoke a breach or claim that some party has crucially

  disturbed the placid social order, they have a frame available to “inaugurate” a

  social drama. . . . The story itself still makes important points about family rela-

  tionships, about the stresses between sex and age roles . . . so the story does feed

  back into the social process, providing it with a rhetoric, a mode of emplotment,

  and a meaning. Some genres, particularly the epic, serve as paradigms which

  inform the action of important political leaders . . . giving them style, direction,

  and sometimes compelling them subliminally to follow in major public crises a

  certain course of action, thus emplotting their lives. (1957: 153)

  In the many instances of successive foreign dynasties in the same society, or se-

  rial stranger-kingship, where the advent of the later regime is clearly emplotted

  on a legendary original, the overall “course of action” takes the form of a histori-

  cal metaphor of a mythical reality. For where the ancient regime is known by

  oral tradition and its recent successor is fully historical and archival, it would

  indeed appear that life imitates art. The West African realm of ancient memory

  established by the conquering hero Tsoede in the country of his Nupe maternal

  kin was essentially duplicated by the nineteenth-century Fulani conquest, as

  ruled by one Masaba—whose maternal kin, among whom he was raised, were

  likewise Nupe. The ethnographer S. F. Nadel explains:

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  In the tradition of Tsoede, that “mythical charter” of the Nupe kingdom, the

  essence of the Nupe state is already clearly expressed, structured, almost sancti-

  fied, by that paramount authority that attaches to prehistoric events: it outlines

  a system of political domination, growing by conquest and expansion, and gov-

  erned by a group detached in origin and status from the rest of the population

  . . . . The twofold process of expansion over alien groups and cultures, combined

  with cultural assimilation and absorption, is reflected in both, in the ideological

  history of the Tsoede myth as well as the “real” history of the Fulani kingdom.

  In one there is Tsoede, who conquers Nupe with the help of alien magic, who

  brings into Nupe the insignia of alien rulership and culture, but who, himself half

  Nupe by [maternal] descent, creates a new, independent, and united Nupe. On

  the other, there is this remarkable piece of empire-policy when Masaba claims

  succession to the Nupe throne on the grounds of his being half-Nupe by birth

  and full Nupe by education. (1942: 87)

  The Nupe, as Nadel says, are a historically minded people: “The highest, con-

  stantly invoked authority for things existing is, to the Nupe, the account of

  things past” (ibid.: 72). But then the common distinction Nadel draws between

  “ideology” and “real history” would have no value for Nupe, inasmuch as the

  “ideological”-cum-“mythical” status of the Tsoede tradition is, on exactly that

  basis, “real history”—proven source of what has been and what will be. Hence

  the credibility, too, of the observation commonly attributed to Mark Twain:

  “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

  AFRICAN STRANGER-KINGDOMS

  Stranger-kingdoms the likes of Lunda, Ndembu, and Nupe in Africa comprise

  the dominant form of premodern state the world around, on every continent.2

  They have developed in a great variety of environments and in combination with

  a considerable range of economic regimes: commercial, piratical, agricultural

  (both rainfall and hydraulic), slave-raiding, cattle-raising, and most commonly

  some form of mixed economy. These are distinctively dual societies: divided in

  privileges, powers, and functions between rulers who are foreign by origin and

  identity
—perpetually so, as the condition of the possibility of their authority—

  2. See summary accounts in Sahlins (1981b, 2008, 2010, 2011a, 2014).

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  145

  and the underlying indigenous people—who are characteristically the “owners”

  of the land and the ritual masters of its fertility. Not that the phenomenon is

  exclusively associated with kingship, let alone Africa, as it is also known among

  a number of tribal chiefdoms. “The chiefs come from overseas,” a Fijian from

  the Lau Islands told A. M. Hocart (1929: 27), “it is so in all countries in Fiji.”

  The same could be said for the Trobriand Islands and Tikopia, sites of classi-

  cal ethnographic studies by Bronislaw Malinowski (1948) and Raymond Firth

  (1971), respectively. Stranger-kingship has also played significantly in famous

  colonial encounters: besides Captain Cook in Hawai‘i and among others, there

  was James Brooke, “the White Rajah of Sarawak,” whom local Iban considered

  the son or lover of their primordial goddess Keling; and Cortés, greeted by

  Moctezuma as Quetzalcoatl, the returning king and culture hero of the legend-

  ary Toltec city of Tollan. While the veracity and supposed historical effects of

  Moctezuma’s purported identification of Cortés with Quetzalcoatl have been

  contested by a number of scholars, the Mexica king’s own claim of descent from

  Quetzalcoatl and the Toltecs—by contrast to the common Mexica traditions of

  a “barbarian” Chichimec origin—does not come in for much notice (see chapter

  4, this volume). Nor was Moctezuma unusual in this respect. Stranger-kings

  were the rule in Mesoamerican and Andean city-states and empires, including

  the classic and postclassic Maya, as well as the Inka and other South American

  states. Moreover, as is true of the phenomenon elsewhere, at least some of these

  kingdoms, the Mexica included, have constituted their historic order on the

  repetition of legendary events that never happened.

  In several earlier publications, I have discussed stranger-kingdoms in their

  planetary extent and general characteristics; here the focus will be on the African

  forms, particularly the old Kongo kingdom of the sixteenth and seventeenth

  centuries, as these offer especially useful examples of histories that follow from