onkings Page 32
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
THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY
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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ON KINGS
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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ON KINGS
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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ON KINGS
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