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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