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village of Ngongo. Pleased by the location, Kengulu brings his people there to

  clear the forest for a settlement. As is often recounted in such charter narratives,

  the contact with the native population is made through a female relative of the

  native leader, in this case the wife of Yanganga, the “possessor of the land” of

  Ngongo and its environs. Hearing of the strangers through his wife, Yanganga

  confronts Kengulu with the demand of a thigh of the wild pig as his due as

  “possessor of the land.” Kengulu refuses, and the native Yanganga not only backs

  down in light of the number of Kengulu’s warriors, but returns the next day with

  a welcoming gift of a packet of vegetables, a chicken, and the shoulder of a wild

  pig (the chiefly portion?). Moreover, a few days later, having killed a leopard and

  desiring to remain on good terms, Yanganga sends a shoulder to Kengulu, who,

  standing on his chiefly dignity demands also the skin, teeth, claws, and thigh of

  the beast. Enraged, Yanganga, as the “legitimate owner of the soil,” declares he

  would not submit to the domination of the strangers. Kengulu thereupon enters

  Ngongo with his warriors and demands damages. When the villagers advise ap-

  peasing the stranger-chief, Yangenga departs with his family, leaving only two

  sons at the village. In his absence, however, the victory of Kengulu soon turns

  to dust: the earth becomes sterile, and day after day fishing fails and the hunt-

  ers return empty-handed. His advisors tell Kengulu he has acted badly toward

  Yanganga, and “for our life to return to normal, there is only one remedy: solicit

  the intervention of the owners of the soil.” Upon the chief ’s request Yanganga’s

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  189

  sons seek him out and ask him to return. Arriving at the village, Yanganga, first

  remonstrates with strangers for stealing his domain, and then agrees to restore

  its vitality—but only on three conditions: first, that Kengulu and his descend-

  ants shall give Yanganga and his descendants the thigh of every animal killed

  on his territory; second that each newly installed chief shall pay the owners a fee

  of four hundred pieces of the indigenous money; and finally that the strangers

  shall agree to give up their name and adopt the customs and identity of the na-

  tive Sengele—particularly that they shall no longer mark their children with the

  Bolia tattoo, and they shall cease eating snakes and instead adopt the Sengele

  diet of frogs, cicadas, and winged ants. In the sequel, although life returned to

  normal when Kengulu agreed to these terms, some time later three of his sister’s

  sons died shortly upon acceding to the paramount chieftainship. The fourth and

  youngest, suspecting Yanganga was the cause of his brothers’ deaths and in order

  to avoid his own, demanded six wives from the native Sengele and had eleven

  children by them. One day, on assembling the notables of the Bolia and Sengele,

  he told them he could now die in peace, since Yanganga could no longer kill off

  his descendants: for his children, if Bolia by their father, were Sengele by their

  mother. He commanded the descendants of each of his six sons to take the

  chieftainship in turn. Such is the origin of the six clans that now succeed each

  other in power.

  The story is ideal-typical down to the assimilation of the strangers by the

  native people, thus producing a cultural unity marked by the enduring tra-

  dition of an ethnic difference. But since such narratives among BaKongo as

  well as BaSengele “are evidently political not historical material,” MacGaffey

  would dismiss the stranger-kingship thus described, not necessarily as untrue,

  but as historically irrelevant. The arguments differ from those of Thornton but

  they come to a similar banishment of stranger-kingship to a historical limbo

  of something like false consciousness; or more precisely their resolution to a

  redundant expression in discourse of other realities, even if disguised. For Mac-

  Gaffey, what is substantially and logically at issue in the Bolia case is political:

  it is not historical content and should not be considered as such, but a useful or

  interested way that the people talk politics. Not that MacGaffey, as an excep-

  tional ethnographer, is unaware of the enduring temporality, hence continuing

  historical effects, of charter traditions. He certainly recognizes this historicity,

  although he does not theorize it, and particularly in the matter of stranger-

  kingship, he effectively dismisses it. In the matter of the origin traditions of

  Kongo clans, however, MacGaffey writes:

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  Because the narratives and related representations discussed so far refer to the

  “past” history of the clans, it may be thought that the way of thinking they em-

  body belongs to “the past” in the European sense, to tradition rather than to the

  present. Kongo conceptions of relations between European[s] and Africa show

  the same structure in contemporary thought and action, however, and discon-

  certingly incorporate elements of “the past,” that is, of events that European

  thought considers over and done with. (1986: 61–62)

  Add BaKongo to the peoples who find themselves in history. There will be occa-

  sion to again consider MacGaffey’s position in these matters in the concluding

  section of this essay. Suffice here to notice that since the foreign origin of the

  Kongo dynasty has no existential standing of its own, the complex of relation-

  ships that are structurally entailed in stranger-kingship get lost to the cultural

  order at the same time they are denied historical force. Although MacGaffey

  (n.d.) freely allows that stranger-kingships could possibly have happened, he is

  at some pains to doubt it. He cites the ubiquity of stranger-king origin legends

  in Central Africa, and the fact that the Kongo version of the conflicts among

  royals that lead to the founding of the dynasty are the matrilineal inverse of the

  patrilineal Luba version, as if these were loose tales that easily diffused around.

  Aside from the fact that being commonplace is not necessarily evidence of trivi-

  ality, structural transformations of this kind among interacting societies—the

  dialectic processes usually described as “symmetrical inversions” or “comple-

  mentary schismogenesis”—are well-known modes of cultural production.20

  In any event, what MacGaffey writes in another context about the re-

  semblances of Kongo and Luba stranger-king traditions and rituals suggests

  that considerably more is at stake than a complementary contrast in dynas-

  tic politics—although again, “these stories are not historical but sociological”

  (2003: 11). This discussion is focused on the Rubicon moment, the crossing of

  the river by the founding hero, initiating a new sociopolitical order. MacGaffey

  is primarily comparing Kongo clan traditions of such crossings to Luba royal

  traditions, thus little things to big things, but all the same the new order intro-

  duced in either case is culturally total and spiritually empowered:

  Stories on the grand scale describe transitions, often across a river, leading to

  the settlement of a new country. These stories are not historical but soc
iological,

  20. See Bateson (1935, 1958) and Lévi-Strauss (1995).

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  191

  sketching an ideally ordered society . . . . All this closely resembles, though not

  on an epic scale, the stories among Luba-related peoples in eastern Congo of

  heroes who come from across the river to introduce civilization as right marriage,

  right eating and right government [de Heusch 1982a]. In both east and west, the

  elsewhere from which the king comes is a land of spirits (Bupemba, Mpemba,

  Upemba), although it may be identified with a geographical location. It is a place

  visible to diviners in the reflecting surface of the water; in the form of a cemetery,

  a cave, a grove or a pool, it is a place of testing and investiture for chiefs and

  other persons whose special powers are signified by white kaolin clay, mpemba.

  The initiation rituals of chiefs retrace and recapitulate the migration stories of

  the myths. In much more detail than it is possible to recount here, Kongo [clan]

  chiefship rituals read like a reduced or provincial version of those found among

  Luba. (2003: 11)

  Once across the river, the stranger-hero creates a dual cosmopolitical order of

  rulers and subjects whose respective identifications with outside transcendent

  powers and those of the local earth is existential, a difference of being. For Igala,

  J. S. Boston (1968: 15) speaks of a system of dual sovereignty:

  In this political system rights of political sovereignty, in the widest geographical

  sense, are vested in large-scale clans of high rank, whilst rights of local sover-

  eignty are vested in small-scale localized clans who are often regarded as being

  the “landowners” of the areas in which they are settled. The myth represents the

  basic division of functions and attributes in origin to the introduction of notions

  of aristocratic rank from other kingdoms with whom the Igala have been in

  historic contact.

  Directly or indirectly, the indigenous people have an ancestral identification

  with the land: usually because their ancestors first occupied it and in death still

  do, being buried there; or else because their ancestors, having made a bond with

  the original spirits, continue to intercede with these ancient sources of fertility.

  As we have seen, whether the new order is established by conquest, peacefully,

  or by a combination of the two, the foreign rulers invariably forbear from ap-

  propriating the land as such, pretending neither to a proprietary claim to the

  soil nor to a spiritual relation to the ancestral sources of its fertility. Indeed it

  is reported of Mossi that their concept of elite power was foreign to that of

  work: “Their power is defined as the element of completion which achieves the

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  construction of society after the world has been transformed by work” (Izard

  1985: 14).

  This cosmopolitical order is at the same time a dual system of political econ-

  omy integrated by the dominant foreign aristocracy—whose constitution of the

  totality is founded on the occupation and work of their native predecessors.

  Even in the greater galactic polities such as the “empire” of the Luba, however,

  the foreign aristocracy’s unification and dominance of the whole left consider-

  able economic autonomy to the indigenous parts. “The political authority, as

  instituted by the leading family from the east, was a kind of superstructure,

  uniting and fusing the scattered groups living between the Lomani and Lualaba

  [Rivers]. The first occupants of the country remained the real owners of the soil”

  (Theuws 1983: 9). Accordingly, for all the tributary claims of Luba chiefs over

  the underlying population, they yielded precedence in the control of resources

  to the local earth priests:

  In this way they are acknowledging a fundamental problem: the Empire’s politi-

  cal regime did not control village land. Only the village earth-priest could lay

  direct claim on the produce of village land, because he was the descendant of

  the village’s founding ancestral spirit, who protected the land. (Reefe 1981: 46)

  The dual economy was at the same time a division of spiritual labors. In an

  article entitled “The king comes from elsewhere,” Luc de Heusch (1991:113),

  commenting on Alfred Adler’s (1982) excellent ethnography of the Mundang

  of Chad, observes that the ruler alone can “assume command of the universe for

  the benefit of the group as a whole.” A descendant of a royal immigrant from a

  former kingdom on the Benue, a great hunter who came in from the wild as a

  “sacred monster,” the Mundang king “controls fecundity and fertility through

  the power he exercises over the sky” (ibid.: 114). Accordingly, the sovereign

  deploys his authority “in a space outside the jurisdiction of the [native] clans

  where, with the help of his men, he secures wealth by violence without interfer-

  ing in the affairs of the clans” (ibid.). However, no one has such extensive powers

  over the earth, which belongs in severalty and on an equal basis to the autoch-

  thonous clans, each of whom has made a pact with the spirits of the area. Or as

  the Tale elder said to Rattray (1932, 2: 344), “We were once owners of the lands;

  since the scorpion Europeans came we have entered into holes. You have burned

  our bows and arrows; we once were keepers of the moons [i.e., custodians of the

  festival calendar for prospering the land].”

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  193

  Linked to the ancestral sources of the earth’s fertility, and often, by the same

  ancestral token, to human fertility, the autochthonous people’s claims to the

  land had survived intact through the centuries of domination by rulers of for-

  eign origin before European invaders changed the conditions of colonization.

  So do the typical narratives of kingship origins say—to which the normal rela-

  tions of power, production, property, and piety correspond. In a well-known

  tradition of the Ouagadougou Mossi as recounted by Elliott Skinner (1964: 15),

  the conquest of the native Ninise villagers by a Mossi hero consisted of inducing

  or forcing them back to their villages from the forest into which they had fled,

  in order to resume the sacrifices to the local earth. As a corollary, many of the

  Mossi ruling lineages, the nakombse, are land-poor. Similarly, Jacques Lombard

  relates that the seminomadic Wasangari “conquerors” of the Bariba peoples of

  Borgu had little interest in land, as distinct from pillaging or otherwise ex-

  acting its fruits from the indigenous producers. What Lombard writes of the

  system of powers established in the formation of the Borgu states, the contrast

  he describes between the Wasangari control of the native people and the native

  people’s control of the land, is typical of the political economics of stranger-

  kingship: “The conquest brought no impairment of the aboriginal rights over

  their land. The ruling aristocracy leaves the power of disposition to the Masters

  of the Soil, with all the prerogatives pertaining thereto . . . . The principle was

  that power should be exercised directly over men but not over land” (1965: 185).

  Lombard goes on to s
ay, however, that considering the toll the Wasangari ex-

  acted on the people’s output, they might as well have owned the land.

  Maybe so, but that is not an intrinsic condition of stranger-king systems.

  Highly mobile ruling groups such as the Avongara of the Azande kingdoms

  exacted minimal tributes from the various peoples they subdued—one is re-

  minded of Owen Lattimore’s well-known observation that “the pure nomad is

  the poor nomad”—as is also true of small-scale stranger-kingships such as Alur

  (Evans-Pritchard 1971: 33; Southall [1956] 2004). What is invariant, rather,

  is the principle as succinctly enunciated by Nyoro people: “The Mukama [the

  King] rules the people, the clans rule the land” (Beattie 1971: 167). Referring

  to the Namoo chiefs of the Tallensi, R. S. Rattray writes: “‘The people belong

  to me, the land belongs to the Tendaana [the Tale earth priest].’ Is a statement

  I have repeatedly heard made” (1932, 1: xv). Likewise, it is said of Bemba chiefs

  that they count their wealth in people, not in land (Richards 1961: 245). In

  Loango, neighboring kingdom and quondam tributary of Kongo, the king does

  not possess the land and cannot dispossess anyone else. Divided into diverse

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  territories, the land is the property of the spirits of nature. The king gets his au-

  thority from their representatives, dwarfs and albinos, and from the high priest

  of the realm (de Heusch 2000: 54). Michel Izard provides an exemplary sum-

  mary of such dualism in relation to the Yatenga Mossi:

  The bipartition of the society of the kingdom . . . between “people of power” (the

  descendants of the Mossi conquerors) and “people of the land” (the autochthons)

  corresponds to two regimes of authority, the first which concerns men, the sec-

  ond which concerns land. One of the most fundamental functions of the king is

  to be the guarantor of the “alliance” between the power and the land. (1990: 71)

  These economic distinctions are spiritual endowments, amounting to a com-

  plementary relation between the transcendent powers introduced by the stran-

  ger-king and the local powers of the earth inherited by the native people, as

  integrated by the former through his domestication by the latter. Where the

  native people mediate relations to the local earth through the ancestral sources