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  of entertaining stories not told as truths, nor in the social or ritual contexts

  that suppose they are. The African “myth-legends” are the product of a simpler

  dichotomy of true and fictional narratives: cosmic and historical traditions are

  thus grouped together and distinguished as “historically true,” as distinguished

  from folktales—by Yoruba, for example:

  The Yoruba recognize two classes of tales: folktales ( alo) and myth-legends ( itan).

  Myth-legends are spoken of as “histories” and are regarded as historically true;

  they are quoted by the elders in serious discussions of ritual or political matters,

  whenever they can assist in settling a point of disagreement. (1965: 11)

  Note the implication: these “historically true” narratives function as paradig-

  matic precedents.

  Two different issues of historicity are entailed in these myths and legends:

  whether they make history—that is, as paradigmatic precedents—or they are

  history—that is, as reports of what actually took place. Too often, however, in

  opting for one alternative, Western scholars are apt to ignore or discard the

  other. Considering that the myths and legends are a priori true for the peo-

  ple concerned, hence that they function continuously as precepts of order and

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  213

  action, for some analysts (mainly but not exclusively anthropologists), whether

  the events reported in the narrative truly happened is irrelevant. Alternatively,

  in concluding that that these traditions are a priori untrue and could never have

  happened, either because of their fabulous character or because they are merely

  functional reflexes of existing institutions, other scholars (mainly but not exclu-

  sively historians) eliminate them from historical consideration altogether, either

  as being history or as making history. For reasons to be explained, I will here ar-

  gue against both these extremes. But for the same reasons I would also reject the

  common average scholarly refuge in “the answer lies somewhere in-between”:

  that these traditions may well harbor some historical realities, which we can

  determine by subtracting their obviously fantastic and irrational elements.

  This common, average historical wisdom about myths might be labeled the

  “kernel of truth” thesis. The supposition is that the traditions are more-or-less

  valuable means of discovering real-historical events provided their fantastic as-

  pects are debunked and discarded. The object is to find the “kernel of truth” in

  an otherwise unbelievable story, upon which the rest of it is best ignored. Or

  else, as in the case of certain traditions of stranger-king origins, the rest is writ-

  ten off as a counterfeit claim of legitimacy. Among scholars of African history,

  Jan Vansina (1985) has been the great master of this kind of historicist exegesis.

  In an interesting way, it involves an inversion of the relation between “myth” and

  “fact” that has been argued above concerning the analytic value of a demonstra-

  ble discrepancy between traditions of origin and what actually transpired. In the

  typical kernel-of-truth practice, one subtracts the “fanciful” from the “mythical”

  in order to arrive at the “truly historical.” But if the so-called “myth” is known

  to be the historical reality by the people concerned, what actually happened be-

  comes the means of historical wisdom rather than the end: for the comparison

  with the tradition shows how these happenings have been appropriated within

  a given sociocultural scheme. The relationship between what happened and how

  it was construed, which is also to say what historical effects it may have, is the

  work of culture—or, more precisely, of people making what happened intel-

  ligible by means of cultural standards of what there is. Too often, scholars have

  worked from the tradition to the event by a process of rational abstraction, sup-

  posing historical truth is factual; whereas a comparative anthropology would

  work from the event to the tradition by a process of exegetical elaboration, sup-

  posing the cultural truth is historical.

  A parenthesis here, lest I be charged with the crude notion of relativism to

  the effect of “any morality is as good as any other” by which critics too often

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  slander an anthropological sensitivity to the ways other cultural orders, and cor-

  relatively other histories, differ from our own (cf. MacGaffey 1976: 116f.). My

  understanding of cultural relativism has always been the following:

  Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological—that is to

  say, methodological—procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or

  custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription

  that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed

  in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of

  their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral

  judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own

  judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural

  order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy. (Sahl-

  ins 2012b: 46)

  Cultural relativism is an anthropological way of discovering cultural differ-

  ences, rather than a charitable way of granting them moral absolution. End of

  parenthesis.

  By contrast to “the answer lies somewhere in-between,” some scholars would

  endorse the radical argument that since myths are sacred truths, all that matters

  is that they function as historical paradigms, regardless of their factual status.

  For Edmund Leach, what is structurally and historically effective about myth is

  that the people believe it is true; that it may or may not have “really happened”

  is “irrelevant.” In the Frazer lecture of 1988, he offered a most un-Frazer-like

  take on the historical value of “myth”:

  In the language of contemporary anthropology, the assertion that a particular

  story (either oral or literary) is a myth need not imply that it is untrue. Stories are

  myths if they are used as . . . justifications or precedents for social action, whether

  secular or religious. Whether the precedent story in question was or was not true

  as factual history is entirely irrelevant . . . . Myth is believed to be true by those

  who use it. In this sense, all the Christian gospel stories are myth for Christians.

  Although practicing Christians are deeply committed to a belief that the key

  events recorded in the gospels “really happened,” the fact is that the historicity

  of the stories (if any) is irrelevant for the religious implication of what the texts

  contain. (2011: 283–84)

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  215

  In his excellent treatments of history in the Kazembe kingdom of the Luapula

  Valley, Cunnison comes to a similar conclusion, but with an important caveat

  about the nature of the truth-values at issue:

  What actually happened matters little unless the people concerned have means

  of knowing that what they say hap
pened, did happen, or did not. The important

  thing is this: what the Luapula people say now about the past is what they know

  actually happened in the past. Simply to say they believed it happened in the past

  is too weak, for they do not doubt it. (1959: 33)

  It thus seems sociologically irrelevant whether the history is in quality possible,

  improbable, or downright mythical . . . . What is important to Africans about

  their histories is not their probability or reliability, which are unquestioned and

  outside discussion, but it is the implication present in the form which the history

  finally takes; and nowadays this conception has found currency among some

  of the people by the use of the English word “meaning.” And in the mythical

  histories of clans and subclans and tribes the meaning is the raison d’être for

  the group’s coming there in the first place, of their position in regard to the oc-

  cupation of land, and their relation to other neighboring groups, or groups with

  whom they live together. (1951: 22)

  Clearly Cunnison’s stronger contention that traditions of the past involve in-

  dubitably known, objective judgments—this happened—is preferable to the

  dubitable subjective propositions entailed in belief—I hold that this is what

  happened. Moreover, given that this history organizes the relations between

  groups, it also has to do with what will happen. Considering the sense of fiction

  that ever attends the word, then, why continue to call these unquestionable nar-

  ratives “myth”? Even Malinowski’s “charter myth” is an ethnological oxymoron,

  inasmuch as a tradition that establishes the constitution of the society could not

  be fictional in the society in which it so functions. On the other hand, if “belief ”

  and “myth” are too weak for a proper anthropological understanding of these

  origin stories, to say that their relation to what really happened is irrelevant

  goes too far in just that anthropological respect. Especially if by archival or ar-

  chaeological means one could determine a discrepancy between wie es eigentlich

  gewesen and the tradition thereof, it would be an intellectual bonanza. To repeat:

  it would expose the cultural work in the organization of a historical praxis, how

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  ON KINGS

  what happened has been effectively recuperated in the terms of a particular

  sociocultural order. What the discrepancy between “fact” and tradition would

  reveal is the way—which is never the only possible way—the events have been

  culturally construed by some social process of valuation. For historians and an-

  thropologists both, the fundamental question is not what actually happened, but

  what it is that happened.

  But that cannot be a question addressed through the Kongo indigenous

  traditions of the past according to Wyatt MacGaffey. MacGaffey could agree

  with Leach and Cunnison that whether or not such narratives are factual is

  irrelevant; for in his own view, they are not really about the past. Whatever

  their relation to the actual past, they have no place in a historical account, since

  historical is not what they are. Merely epiphenomenal is what they are: discur-

  sive expressions of social institutions whose logic, purpose, and content they

  embody, syntagmatically or metaphorically, explicitly or in disguise. For Mac-

  Gaffey, to give charter traditions any historical credence is to make the major

  methodological error of suborning the analytical position of the anthropologist

  by an indigenous point of view beholden to its own structures and functions.

  Speaking of conventional attempts to separate historical fact from the magical

  aspects of traditions, he writes:

  The conventional ethnographic view regards such magical details as accretions

  upon an historical core. Tradition, that is to say, is implicitly sorted into a class of

  events that seem likely to the European mind, and thus as possibly or probably

  historical and a class of unlikely events that are discarded the procedure is arbi-

  trary and unjustified . . . . Real history cannot be inferred from tradition in any

  simple way. To accept as historical even such portions as look real to the foreign

  eye is to submit unawares to the authority of indigenous cosmology as much as

  though one had also accepted the magical portions as historically real. In fact,

  there is no boundary between the two: the myth is all one piece and all of its

  parts make sense from the same point of view. (1974: 420–21)

  And since the traditions of stranger-kingship too are functionally dissolved in

  and as religion or some other social institution, since they cannot be “real his-

  tory,” everything is then written as if they had no temporality or historical sig-

  nificance of their own.

  The point of view from which BaKongo construct these traditions and

  which thus comprises their native logic and substance is variously determined

  THE ATEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

  217

  by MacGaffey as ritual, political, sociological, religious, or cosmological. And

  while any and all such kinds of narrative or practice cannot then be “historical

  material,” in a recurrent deference to Marxist anthropologies they are deemed

  to have ultimate sources in the relations of production and social reproduction.

  In one of MacGaffey’s latest statements of this position, the dual system of

  stranger-kingship featuring the complementary relations between immigrant

  chiefs and autochthonous priests, as summarized for Kongo by Luc de Heusch

  (2000), is referred to the even more abstract basis of Space and Time:

  De Heusch dwells quite rightly on what he calls “dual systems,” but evidently the

  pairing of earth-related and dynastic rituals is independent of the narratives that

  purport to account for them . . . . The pairing can be understood sociologically,

  in that every community exists both in space and time, which are the necessary

  dimensions of production and social reproduction and will be ritualized to some

  extent in every agricultural society. Space is the earth itself and the forces of na-

  ture on which all depend in common. Time, on the other hand, is the source of

  authority and the measure of social differentiation; reference to the past purports

  to distinguish older from younger, first-comer from late-comer, aristocrat from

  commoner. These two dimensions are what Victor Turner called communitas and

  societas, although he thought of communitas as occurring only in marginal situa-

  tions outside the reach of societas. As Michael Jackson put it, “The complemen-

  tary principles of social organization which are variously called lineage/locality,

  kinship/residence, ancestors/earth, descent/territoriality, can be abstractly and

  heuristically polarized as a distinction between temporal and spatial modes of

  structuring.” Not the origin of this polarity but how it works out in practice is a

  contingent, historical question. (MacGaffey 2005: 195)26

  We are not specifically informed either by Thornton or by MacGaffey how

  one accounts for the particular attributes of stranger-kingship by the mode of

  26. Speaking of Lele religious symbolism involving animals, Mary Douglas observed

  that it is not relevant to ask how
accurate the observation of the creature’s behavior

  need be.

  A symbol based on mistaken information can be fully effective as a symbol, so

  long as the fable in question is well known. The dove, it would seem, can be one

  of the most relentlessly savage of birds. The pelican does not nourish its young

  from its own living flesh. Yet the one bird has provided a symbol of peace, and

  the other of maternal devotion, for centuries. (1959: 56)

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  production. A Marxist “determination by the economic basis” involves the forc-

  es and relations of production, but in this MacGaffey text all the explanation

  we get by “production and social reproduction” is a generic reference to “agri-

  cultural society.” As a technical means, agriculture does not entail any particular

  structure of society. Certainly it does not specify that the working class of native

  subjects monopolize the ownership and control of this primary means of pro-

  duction by virtue of their forebears’ original settlement of the earth in life and

  continued occupancy in death, such that the descendants of these first-comers

  are uniquely able to ritually nurture the growth of crops which are in effect the

  transubstantiation of their ancestors. Rather than explicating stranger-kingship

  and its rituals by determinate properties of production, then, MacGaffey’s treat-

  ment becomes more and more abstract. Now we are told that the dualism at is-

  sue is an opposition between Time as the source of authority and of the measure

  of differentiation and Space as the nature upon which we depend in common:

  Time is to Space as societas is to communitas. But perhaps nowhere is space so

  radically differentiated as in the pervasive African distinction between the hu-

  man community of the settled and the wild populated by powerful evil and ben-

  eficial forces—through the associations with which the stranger-king derives

  the measure of his authority. Finally, we learn that not only are the dualisms of

  stranger-kingship forms of Time and Space, but likewise the complementary

  principles of lineage and locality, kinship and residence, ancestors and earth,

  “can be abstractly and heuristically polarized as a distinction between temporal

  and spatial modes of structuring.” We are thus encouraged to explain differences