Twin Shadows: Moral Strategies Of The Kinga Of Southwest Tanzania

TWIN SHADOWS MORAL STRATEGIES OF THE KINGA OF SOUTHWEST TANZANIA

GEORGE PARK ©2001

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TABLE OF CONTENTS TWIN SHADOWS, INTRODUCTION ONE Plan of the Book Toward a contextual reading of Kinga culture Designing the book Documentary sources Structure and content Situating a cultural portrait in time

1 4 7 8 10

TWIN SHADOWS, INTRODUCTION TWO Kinga are a special case The culture as a lifestyle Male sensitivities: when friendship fails Dispersed families Why marry? why beget? why bear?

15 16 19 23

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER ONE Mists of time & glory Kinga in their Region Map talk: the political archipelago

31 38

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER TWO Kinship—Friendship Amity as an organizing principle Two contexts of moral strategy

42 50

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER THREE Gentle Warriors Mask and face: the warrior role Histrionic warfare

57 59

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER FOUR Imagination

65

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER FIVE Ambisexuality

72

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER SIX Counterthemes to rank & seniority

79

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER SEVEN Republican nurture, lordly dominion

86

BOOK ONE, CHAPTER EIGHT Eros & Philia

91

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TWIN SHADOWS, FIRST FOLIO Having a marriage A long preserved virginity The view from woman

95 107

TWIN SHADOWS, SECOND FOLIO Childhood and after Motives in early life—infancy Motives in early life—childhood Gender in childhood: separate worlds Men & maidens: courting The style of courtship

114 122 126 135 140

TWIN SHADOWS: THIRD FOLIO Age & wisdom Dominance & seniority Pathfinding Sharing a common fate Case One: Iligala hamlet Careers: the context of moral effort Cases: How do people cope with adversity? Cases: How do the people sanction reciprocity? Cases: How do people count kith and kin? The pursuit of happiness

150 156 165 169 173 175 176 178 182

TWIN SHADOWS, FOURTH FOLIO Spontaneity and sanctions Structure and spontaneity Sanctions Context of the documents Women speak of themselves Men speak of themselves Events in the village Insecurity

186 189 194 196 199 203 206

TWIN SHADOWS, FIFTH FOLIO Intimacy and autonomy Character & history Character and psyche The observable psyche A question of style

209 217 222 230

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BOOK TWO, CHAPTER ONE A moral universe Qualities of an extended youth A phenomenology of values?

236 244

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TWO Sowetan cultures: social ties

247

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER THREE Sowetan cultures: aggression

256

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER FOUR Sowetan cultures: arts

269

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER FIVE Sowetan cultures: libido

278

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER SIX Sowetan cultures: status Privilege and its rules Men and women Gender and its rules Aristocrat and commoner

291 301 302 308

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER SEVEN Sowetan cultures: freedom

313

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER EIGHT Sowetan cultures: involvements The presence of persons to persons Nyakyusa Kinga Bena Hehe

318 322 324 326 327

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER NINE Deepstuff: the regional routine A polymorphous culture? The growth of styles in the Sowetan region

329 334

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BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TEN Psyche and Style Noticing style Self & ethos Expressive & instrumental action (I) The inner dialectics Expressive and instrumental action (II) Psyche & belief

341 343 348 353 358 365

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER ELEVEN Style and strategy Reading a style Style dualisms in three classic studies Moral strategies

372 376 385

BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TWELVE Twin shadows

389

TWIN SHADOWS: SOURCE NOTES Source Notes: Book One Source Notes: The Folios Source Notes: Book Two

399 403 406

REFERENCES

415

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TWIN SHADOWS, INTRODUCTION ONE

Plan of the Book

Toward a contextual reading of Kinga culture This volume is one of three I have prepared on the Kinga people and the neighbours in Southwestern Tanzania. The pages of this volume deal with character values, lifestyle, and the daily round, placing Kinga traditions in a regional-historical context. The other volumes are: The Four Realms: Religion and Politics in the Making of an African Protostate. A Politics of Fear, a Religion of Blame: Kinga and their Neighbours While each volume reports fieldwork in uKinga, each makes use of archival documents and published monographs on neighbour peoples of the Kinga. My effort is always to see Kinga history and culture as part of a regional culture. The result is a reasonably credible account of the way Kinga have diverged from their neighbours and what these peoples severally have in common. The aim is always to use comparisons the better to define Kinga traits. As my subtitles suggest, Twin Shadows presents a ‘portrait’ or ‘ethical reading’ of Kinga manners. Four Realms is a more straightforward report of field observation and retrospective interview on Kinga law and government in its precolonial context. The third monograph defines the place of the Kinga and their region in the comparative study of political and religious practice. As all three volumes deal with Kinga and their regional neighbours, all do in this one respect break with the common wisdom on reporting fieldwork. The importance of ‘controlled comparison within a region’ would not have escaped any student of Fred Eggan, though most will have seen that it can put an extraordinary call not only on the writer’s but the reader’s patience. A great regional study would demand a life’s work to produce and would want a corresponding effort to take in.

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What I attempt here is more modest. I select published material on neighbour peoples to put pivotal Kinga characteristics each in a pertinent ‘cultural array’. My methodological position (‘analytical phenomenology’) was set out in my privately published Flying Armchair and derives from the same common-sense premises an honest policeman employs when choosing men of generally similar appearance for a ‘line-up’ to confirm a witness’s ability to identify a particular suspect of crime. Fine discrimination is essential in portaiture. Still, small children can be relied on to know you with a baffling certainty long before they could draw your face so well you could be recognized. From two years in the field (in uKinga) I came to recognize many of the features of their culture. But recognition is an intuitive form of knowledge. Now I am in the position of the child wanting to draw the picture which makes my intuitions available to others. I plan to do this by showing what is un-Kinga as well as what is Kinga. The best way is to compare them with long-term neighbours who are alike in some ways while differing in others.<<[lit = see Source Notes] The interpretive tradition in anthropology got its first big push with Malinowski’s publications on the Trobrianders. His first publication on his soon-to-be-famous Melanesians was Argonauts. It did indeed deal with the region, but of necessity through borrowed Trobriand eyes. Independent studies of other peoples in the regional trading and raiding circle had not been undertaken. The two ethnographies and the two interpretive studies which followed Argonauts treated his islanders as self-inventors. The Malinowskian project was always to discover how the native person thought and felt about whatever he (or, rarely, she) might be doing. The contrast to standard American monographs of the time—think of Swanton, Boas, or Lowie— was like that between science and literature, data files and dramaturgy. Malinowski, by the sheer persuasiveness of his descriptions, freed us from the fear of trivial inaccuracies by plunging fearlessly into the far more serious risks of interpretive error. His Trobrianders at the time of study (1914-15) remained far less radically molested by outsiders than the North American peoples Swanton, Boas, and Lowie were trying to put on record. There was more to observe in Melanesia, and the climate, setting, and protagonists conspired to inspire it. As subsequent fieldwork has confirmed, the Trobrianders’ unusual qualities of personal style (they are great showoffs, dedicated extraverts) were in fact sufficient to keep them on top of their own affairs for generations to come. What the series of subsequent studies has also shown to my satisfaction is that I could not possibly understand how life works in the Trobriands (their ‘social structure’) without a firm intuitive grasp of the islanders’ character. I took this under-

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standing with me to Southwestern Tanganyika and wanted to apply it in planning fieldwork. As this developed, the problem defined itself as one of portraiture: not the seeing something for one’s self—intuition— but the showing it to others.<<[lit] I have set out here accordingly to use commonalities and differences among Kinga and their neighbours to discover for a reader what Kinga character and culture were in the context of what they might have been. Partly, I do this the better to control interpretive risk— there is an unavoidable fictive element in any ethnographic study. Partly, the reason is that I regard local and regional cultures as equally systematic, and as comparably important for our understanding of the peoples we study. But I leave further pursuit of this point to later chapters. Both my volumes on the Kinga were written and rewritten over several decades. Neither was intended to have priority as an introduction to Kinga culture, but for what is most distinctive about the Kinga this one must be the volume to choose, as it deals with the private life. It is doubtless also the more difficult volume for readers unfamiliar with the region, as they will encounter Kinga and two or three nonKinga faces in each of my comparative arrays. Fieldwork (1961-3) was commenced in the final months of British colonial rule and continued into the second year of Tanganyikan independence. Tanganyika became Tanzania some months after we left. I was accompanied in the field for the first year by Alice Park and our four young children. We set up housekeeping in the proverbial (but really rather special) mud hut, and family contacts proved a source of insights for which I am particularly grateful. Funding was through the East African Institute of Social Research (as it was then called) in Uganda; and in our second year Alice took a job there in Kampala, where she could have the children in school, while I moved about to improve my sense for differences within the four realms (or ‘chiefdoms’) of the Kinga. My job-description was Senior Research Fellow at EAISR, and the assignment had originally been to study all of what the British called Kingaland. This plan proved unwise, as I found it would have meant taking in the Wanji people, whom the colonial authorities had tacked onto their ‘Kinga Native Authority’. My linguistic problem was a consideration. After an eventful foot tour of Wanjiland I was able to ascertain that the cultural distance between the two communities was as great as the geographic—the Wanji were on the other side of an empty Elton Plateau—and we narrowed the assignment slightly. Now I had only to

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learn Swahili, for which a grammar was available, and kiKinga for which there was (somewhere) a grammar in German. But cultural differences of some importance had remained in 1900—the approximate date of colonial contact—within the territory I still had to cover. Regional history was all question-marks then. Apart from the District Books, then uncollected, the most useful source was Monica Wilson’s stencilled survey, The Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika Corridor (1958). I was determined in any event to do what I could to understand the Kinga in an historical context, and I gradually came around to a focus on their political past. In the field this meant constant inquiries into local lore. In the decades since, it has meant more and more of the same. My partial up-dating of Wilson’s survey has been published in Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 9 (1988). It is an essay in ‘probabilistic history’ for the region—a cross-over study between ethnography and ethno-history—placing it within the scope of Eastern Bantu civilization. The present work is organized around two major projects: (i) I use culture comparisons within the region to illuminate the special character of the Kinga world—what is and what is not Kinga; and (ii) I introduce the concept of ‘moral strategy’. We have all worked out our own very private ways of handling ourselves and others in order to get where we want to be with them. These are our moral strategies. We are apt to persist with them even when they don’t seem to pay off— they sometimes feed only more distant (fantasy?) expectations. This notion allows me to portray the gender life-cycles of the Kinga as the historically generative forces I believe they have always been. My double interest has called for special thought on a suitable writing plan.

Designing the book All ethnography starts with direct observation. Information moves through perception (by a quite particular and chronically cluttered mind) toward word-pictures (rescued later from the clutter) which somehow, in some degree can evoke what was seen, heard, or sensed to be lurking behind the scene observed. All the best ethnographies I know were written by the person who did most of the observing. That consideration has prompted me to rely on the Kinga culture of my field time, the early 1960s, for my best clues to what life would have been in 1900, wherever I have had to interpret oral tradition. That means I have a ‘time problem’ to discuss, and I shall do so shortly. Some excellent reports are written up quickly on leaving the

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field, but other monographs are much mulled over—aged in the brain before publication. This is one of those. It is not much like the book I would have written thirty years ago, fresh from the field. Much of the difference is owing to my learning a great deal about the regional culture Kinga share with their neighbours; much more is owing to rethinking what I knew about Kinga in light of my later comparative study. The book is designed to record not only what I saw in the field but what I have since managed to see from my ‘flying armchair’—the actual revisit I hoped for has not proved possible, but I am rescued by much relevant work which has by now been produced by others working in the region. It is not only my mind and its store of information which has changed over thirty and more years of rumination. The scholarly pursuit we call anthropology has broadened and deepened. Some might want to add, it has suffered fragmentation. For those who won’t read quite broadly and deeply, that is certainly so. But much more is known about the big agrarian civilizations of Asia, seen at the local community level, and about independent peoples there, in the Pacific, and in subsaharan Africa. We have a vast ethnographic literature now against which any interpretive generalization can be measured. Africanists have been especially important in this expansion of knowledge, since the range in political sophistication and scale is wider in Africa than elsewhere. Published ethnographic work on peoples in Southwestern Tanzania includes three major studies. Our sense for the ethnographic past has been enhanced by archaeology and historical linguistics. We are even beginning to learn, I think, that if one object of good anthropology is to produce good theory, the case may equally well be put the other way around. I confess to being a champion of direct observation as the real ground of social knowledge. Probably half our understanding of the world comes to us through living narrative: catching the story line of events, from the briefest dramatic episode to the life history. I have sometimes regretted I was less belligerent in the field than I might have been. My genealogies and censuses languished as I preferred observation to cataloguing. But as my language improved I was alive to narrative and learned to trust not always the veracity of a tale but the sharper sense I got for the teller. The design of this book flows from a methodological position I’ve advertised before. It favours undogmatic use of theory backed by a contextualist or phenomenological approach to the exploration of facts. Theory is used heuristically—it is a tool for seeing better, shifting perspectives, moving closer. The thing to avoid is, as always, ‘reification’—confusing the real

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world of your ideas with the real world other people inhabit, the portrait with the subject. The project here is to understand the culture of a hill people living in Southwestern Tanzania. Historically, Kinga culture is a part of the regional culture found there, and I use cultural comparison within that region to tease out meaning from my observation of Kinga institutions. This is the first step in my design. Intuition tells me that the most important stuff we can know about another culture comes from careful empirical comparisons; that a simple way is to compare ‘them’ with ‘us’; and that a better way is to compare ‘them’ with the peoples they have always compared themselves with. The vaunted ‘isolation’ of the Kinga, regularly assumed in British colonial records, so far as it is real is far from complete. The deeper cultural differences within the region derive not from lack of acquaintance with neighbours but a (predictably) low intensity of social interaction with them. I suppose the distinctive character of any people within a given culture area, excepting obvious environmental adaptations, is no more a product of true ‘isolation’ than is your distinctive personality or mine. The Kinga and each of its neighbour cultures may be treated as a local variant of a larger, regional culture. All the same, it is axiomatic that differences will go deep. The deep stuff of a culture comes out of intensive interaction. I need to know the neighbours because unless I know what ways Kinga might have taken and did not I won’t be able to say much about the ways they took. History and culture, in this thinking, are one. The ‘deep stuff’ of any culture begins to come clear as you obtain a sense for the personal moral strategies which yield deep rewards there. The second step in my design for the book deals with organization—how to present arguments for my findings. I move between ‘interpretive analysis’ or ‘analytical phenomenology’ of the culture (Part One, returning in Part Three) and a more intuitive, descriptive mode which I conceive as ‘close and middle-distance portraiture’ (Parts Two and Four). In this way the conceptual sequence (breakdown—redintegration) is repeated twice. Since this is the trick of design which is most likely to go unnoted and unused by a reader, I’ll explain my thinking further.<<[lit] Since I am treating the individual moral career as the primary instrument of integration in Kinga society, I do not have to find a source of integration in the institutional complex, ‘adaptive needs’, or ‘personality’—I feel free to look separately at the various aspects of the culture which interest me, without feeling obliged to show that they comprise a single big ‘system’ of any kind. This is the ‘analytical’ project. It is balanced by a more holistic treatment which explores the

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moral careers of men and women as they are pursued within the world they are fashioning. The ideas of Robert Redfield which originally drew me into anthropology doubtless lie back of this double approach. I resist, like him, the idea that any one conceptual approach to human nature and culture (one ‘paradigm’) should preoccupy anthropologists. I have found many or most of the novelties in recent anthropological writing fresh and fun—but I have also found them, in the end, distracting. My enduring concern is to understand what I have seen in the field. I find the best use for my armchair is for flying back there. I am satisfied that methodological wheels do not really have to be reinvented by each new generation. Using the long label for ‘the regional culture of Southwestern Tanzania’ will prove awkward. Wanting a short form, and taking into consideration that a small but important part of the region I want to consider (Ungonde) happens to lie in what is now Malawi, I’ll call this group of neighbouring and interestingly related peoples the Sowetan region. It corresponds to what in American ethnology is called a ‘culture area’ and includes the “Corridor peoples” of Monica Wilson and peoples of the Southern Highlands, with fuzzy edges all around. The degree of unity the region deserves on linguistic, historical, and comparative-institutional grounds has been discussed elsewhere, learnedly and at some length.<<[lit]

Documentary sources From the precolonial era I have consulted what accounts by early European explorers are to be found with a bearing on the Sowetan peoples. In the post-colonial period a certain amount of history and archaeology has been produced, some of it directly touching the region and more of it bearing on pertinent aspects of the still more inclusive historical and cultural entity, Eastern Bantu civilization. Supplementing these new sources there has been a development of glottochronological studies of East Africa. My recent cooperation with the linguist Derek Nurse has allowed me to make the earlier ‘qualitative dating’ scheme I had worked out for the Kinga into something reasonably firm. But the main documentary sources for this volume and my earlier diachronic survey of the region come from the two colonial periods: the main German sources are detailed ethnographic surveys and missionary publications; the main British sources are the District and Provincial Books. While there is not a lot which is ‘newsworthy’ today in these documents, reading them through has contrib-

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uted immensely to my sense for the regional culture—its reality and its special character. Except where specific use was made of a particular source, I don’t encumber the text with references. My deepest unspecified debts are surely to the many British district officers whose regular safari reports are compiled in District Books covering the score or more peoples whose oral histories and political systems I was able to consult and digest as background to the corresponding records consulted (particularly in the Njombe district boma) on Kinga and their immediate neighbours. But beyond the few specific references made to sources like Fülleborn, Merensky, or Nigmann—and beyond the many explicit references to works of Monica Wilson on Nyakyusa, Stirnimann on Pangwa, the two Culwicks on Bena, or Gulliver on Ndendeuli—I must admit an imponderable debt to the perceptive minds and the hard intellectual work of others whose names appear less often. While the Kinga themselves were not studied before me, a host of professional colleagues and antecedents has made the regional dimension of this study possible.

Structure and content Since the project for this volume grew slowly from seeds, as with many slow-growing things it developed a structure all its own. Because the plan of exposition is unusual and may baffle an unsuspecting reader I take the trouble to outline it carefully here. There are two things to note: the recurrence of a series of eight topical frames in Books One and Two; the insertion of ‘folios’ after Book One. The main aim of the book is to reconstruct the Kinga world as it had evolved in its traditional period. The ‘folios’ speak to that aim by touching in various ways on the persistence of Kinga tradition during the fieldwork period.

Book One A preliminary chapter is followed by seven more which are devoted each to an essay on Kinga culture seen in a particular conceptual frame. The eight topics are in order: (1) general, (2) social networks, (3) violent action, (4) creativity, (5) sexuality, (6) status relations, (7) political ordering, and (8) emotional life. There is no inherent reason why the very same episode could not be examined within each of these frames, since their locus is in the mind of the beholder, not in the social situation under scrutiny. Obviously, though,

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each frame will tend to encompass special material. Each will complement the others rather than simply duplicating them. Any overlap, if noticeable, ought to be interesting. The eight chapters taken together will comprise one ‘scan’ of the Kinga world. Another such scan, complementing this one, is the main project for Book Two.

The Folios Five descriptive folios are inserted between the two more analytical Books. The Folio section comprises an ethnographic sampler of the Kinga community I observed directly in 1961-3. These accounts, some in the form of brief ‘case reports’, are designed to bring a reader closer to the people and their lives. The materials touch marriage, growing up, and growing old. I consider ‘individuality’ and ‘intimacy vs. autonomy’. The general plan of this section will seem more familiar to readers of earlier field studies situated in an ‘ethnographic present’. But I have organized the third and fourth folios so as to minimize my own presence in the act of observation. If I seem to shift at various points from panorama to close-up, it is because I hand the camera over to a young assistant (Soda) to capture moments in the lives of his friends and neighbours. My assistants in the field were partners not pawns. Soda worked as I normally did with a notebook not a tape recorder, and provided texts in Swahili for my translations. Names are altered, but the mind behind the ‘close-up’ texts is Soda’s.

Book Two—Chapters One through Eight The eight chapters of this section exactly parallel the eight of Part One. After a preliminary chapter I take up the same seven frames as before. This time through, I rely on a reader’s understanding of the seven aspects of Kinga culture discussed in Part One and assume they have been given a certain context or depth by the descriptive material of the Folio section. My new purpose here is, by moving inside the semiotic circle of the broader culture area, to explore ‘family resemblances and differences’ among the several peoples I can use as keys to the ‘generic culture’ of the Sowetan region. Beyond providing a useful portait of the region, Part Three again places the Kinga with respect to neighbour peoples in seven distinct cultural arrays.

Book Two—Chapters Nine through Twelve The final section of the book is concerned to explore the personal sources of style and energy in Kinga lives. The master concept is ‘moral strategy’ and my first assumption is that the ‘strong forces’ of politics, religion, and sexuality are less telling in

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deciding the long-run drift of culture than the ‘weak force’ exerted by individuals over the very long term in their efforts to protect and improve their lots. A phrase like ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is more descriptive here than simple ‘self-interest’. What I intend by ‘moral strategy’ does touch ‘ethics’ but is nothing noble. As a weak force in history, it is hard to observe and harder still to demonstrate effectively. But in Kinga culture, with most of the stress taken off the marital relationship and the family fairly atomized, I was faced with a case which challenged common-sense notions about the importance of family systems in the ‘stabilizing’ of society. In the field I was struck by the structural importance of ‘the culture of women’, which their unexpected measure of independence made clear. The argument of these final chapters tries to bring closure to a line of thought which started in the field. What can we learn about sources of individual strength?

Situating a cultural portrait in time Since in this book I explore aspects of Kinga culture which can best be described as mind, my time dimension must somehow take account of memory, if only because no one’s statement about ‘real time’ experience can place it in the immediate present. And since my inquiries fastened especially on times past, but all the time leaned heavily on direct observation of Kinga life in the sixties, I’m obliged to give some account of what precautions I’ve taken to keep recent novelties out of the picture I give. It may be time to say at this point that I am not attempting to do a historian’s work here, and have not felt obliged to adopt the vaunted strictures of historiographic method. An ethnography is a study of a culture, not a study of events in sequence. Dating a culture is not done in the same way as dating an event. Memories are long and clocks or calendars few in the communities I have to describe. Kinga tend to be closest with age-mates— peers not kinsmen—and rarely seek serious discussion with others, older or younger. One consequence is that older people tend (in greater degree than in most human communities) to hold and find reinforcement for the cultural outlook prevailing when they came into adulthood. I could in the sixties be fairly sure about the mind of preBritish times, which means in effect about 1920. Getting at the mind of 1895 entails coping with a good many more uncertainties.

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The position I’ve taken is probably incautious as conventional anthropology would judge it, but seems to me reasonable. Did Kinga reinvent their culture in the sixty years between the Germans’ arrival and my mine? They invented a good deal. I’ve written about one prize example, new bridewealth customs. But their moral life, which is my subject here, is source not object of this kind of change. Tactical thinking (Max Weber’s Zweckrationalität) in that case only shifted the better to serve strategic plans (Wertrationalität). It is the latter I’m concerned with, and I have the advantage that lifetime strategies do tend to be lasting. There are also some philosophical concerns.<<[lit] Everything Kinga think or do is not ‘Kinga culture’. It isn’t today and wasn’t a century ago, before the programmatic changes of the colonial era began. Whatever is ‘culture’ is deep in time, refined by a continuous, sedimentary process of communication so ubiquitous it is hard to give it a single name: we talk of tradition, diffuse sanction, instruction and schooling, normative example, the introjection of values. It is through the winnowing out of the accidental and irrelevant that a culture is endowed with the kind of meanings which give moral substance to community life. The sources are at least as many as there are persons involved, young or old, male or female, bold or not. There are a hundred ways to designate the kind of optimizing behaviour characteristic of individuals in any human community; I’m interested in the long term and content to focus on the phenomenon I call moral strategy. Two principles are important for assimilating this concept: (a) Enlightened self-interest means taking gracious account of others’ wants, needs, and proclivities in the way one seeks to realize one’s own. Wherever most people most of the time abandon this strategy, ordinary community life becomes impossible. The ideal type of the ‘folk society’ was constructed to explain how some small, selfcontained communities can achieve cultural stability even when maintaining a fairly high, chronic level of internal conflict. Kinga comprised such a community. But while the microcultures, as the classical subjects of ethnographic study, have often been stereotyped as ‘stable’ or even ‘in equilibrium’ they range considerably with respect to the kind of moral enlightenment their circumstances allow. Even where every household pursues its livelihood in the same way, the level of personal and intergroup stress may be high, and the good life hard to get. Where that is the case, cultural continuity will suffer. Kinga know all the usual kinds of stress, but cope relatively well with them. (b) When you consider the consequence of this principle for wellbounded human communities as a whole you will see in it the essence

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of the winnowing process by which a cultural style is produced and refined over time. Politically fragmented societies with high levels of stress are unlikely to exhibit the kind of moral strategy it is easy to label ‘enlightened’. A few anthropologists simply rejected Berndt’s major monograph on some such communities in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. They found some of the most lurid narrative evidence incredible. When you read the monograph you wonder that ‘culture’ in such conditions can persist at all—yet it obviously does under even terribly stressful conditions, and I think the reason is that the ‘weak force’ operates, and the winnowing proceeds, much more continuously than the ‘strong forces’ in the social life, with their ever-gathering storms and scattered episodic dramas of strife and rampage. In relative terms, Kinga were isolated—one might say, electively so. They developed a strong, low-bloodshed political system. The circumstances favoured lifestyle continuity at the deeper levels.<<[lit] I present Kinga society as well-knit: its institutions all of a piece, its gender relations in balance, lawfulness well understood and honoured, violence sublimated through indirection even at the level of warfare (Park 1994b). I try to show that this is best understood by assuming men and women in any such society will engage perennially in an intelligent search for the good life, identifying the main obstacles they meet, and finding ways to minimize them. The working of this ‘weak force’ contrasts in two special ways with the working of the ‘strong forces’ of politics, cosmic fear, and sexuality: (i) It has no institutional locus, no regulatory norms, and informs no power games; it rides on the backs of individuals. (ii) However much it is alluded to in conversation and public rhetoric, it remains private because no one can accurately sense the inner sources of another individual’s success or failure in his or her moral career. To do anthropology of the reconstructive sort I think we have no alternative but to learn what we can about the minds that carry a tradition. My study is centred not in what the Kinga were doing when I knew them but in what they were and had been for a century or so. Since I initiated fieldwork before the close of colonial rule (in 1961) it is convenient to set 1960 as the approximate date of the new beginnings which aren’t my subject here. Kinga society was reassuringly intact when I left in 1963. For men, women, and children Kinga identity wore a halo. If my work had offered me no other attractions I think that would have been enough. I believe I may boast all the usual ineptitudes of anthropologists in the field, and I may have suffered more than I realize from some of them. So there wasn’t a day when I wasn’t grateful to be surrounded—predominantly—by cheerful people. I felt

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my main obligation to them was to capture, in the kind of picture ethnographers are wont to construct, as much as I could of their culture. I have taken a few jabs from colleagues for seeming to devote my work to the past. They are drawn to a search for solutions to the Third World’s mounting problems. I defend my stance. I think it would be useful to know what makes a people cheerful in face of quite considerable hardships. In the century past all Kinga communities have endured a series of radical changes affecting the pattern of daily life. Observers entering the high court village of Ukwama in 1860, 1910, and 1960 would have had to describe quite different scenes: on the surface, three different villages. But as my study is the mind which has met the challenge of new circumstance I am particularly interested in what the three villages would have had in common. This is Kinga court culture, the centrepiece of this book and its companion volumes. Ukwama has retained its identity as a capital village and princely domain through centuries of broken/unbroken political history. The other court centres were not copies of Ukwama but congruent structures, some of them probably coeval, each expressing in its own way the ceremonial patterns lacking in the simpler communities of Kinga bush culture. These simpler communities were less distinctively Kinga than the court centres, more congruent with bush communities elsewhere in the Sowetan region. To make one ‘definition’ explicit: The word culture in this book refers primarily to the collective identity of a human community which has continuously lived in its own past for its own future from times long forgotten. It is in the nature of a culture to change, and particularly in response to the massive kind of insult Kingaland suffered in the first decade of this century, but to change as far as possible on its own terms. A ‘human community’ is identified by the fact of its members knowing a keen sense of sharing a common fate. So my scholarly interest is less in the village of 1960, which I got to see with my own blue eyes, than in the village of 1910, which I have seen most clearly through the borrowed brown eyes of the late Tunginiye Sanga and a few other thoughtful elders he took me to. The village of 1860 is the one I should most like to have observed myself. I can know the scene only at third hand through eyes Tunginiye last looked into when he was young, perhaps even before he had begun to love history. There was a good deal of talk, up to a quarter-century ago, of ‘nation building’ in East Africa. It meant many worlds giving way to one.

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The slogans of the independent government were insistently optimistic. But a modern political system is no friend of free tradition, and in retrospect it seems the colonial system was little more than a prelude to ‘modernization’. The best-intentioned post-colonial government in all Africa could not want to repeal that consequence of European intervention and give power back to its several, separate peoples. Wherever ‘tribalism’ has gained ground in independent African nations the result has been catastrophe. Tanzania to date has been spared, and the integration of all its ethnic groups into citizenship has proceeded under an admirably stable political system. One consequence, of course, is that the Kinga and their neighbours have gradually lost many of their differences of style and perspective—the very differences this book is about. It is not a book of advice or advocasy. None of the three volumes in this series is, in fact, about worlds to come, all are about worlds we have lost. Their value is not as catalogues or inventories of the cultures dealt with, or as history in the usual sense. A number of archival sources have been consulted, from German times and the British period of indirect rule; but a reader interested in an historical survey should consult an earlier work (Park 1988) and the sources listed there. The purpose of the present work and its sequels is to propose a reconstructive ethnography of the Kinga in their region as it was in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and to elicit its most important lessons.

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TWIN SHADOWS, INTRODUCTION TWO

Kinga are a special case

The culture as a lifestyle From the north shore of Lake Malawi, as you look eastward from the Great Rift Valley, Tanzania’s highlands rise a vertical mile above the lake. In the high valleys of their Livingstone Mountains older men of the Kinga people told me about snow though they had no word for it— it was “cold and white and might be up to our knees.” My two years with Kinga bridged the transition from colonial to independent government, half a lifetime ago as I write. It was then some years since they had had snow, but nights were often frosty, and except in the bright season there was rain enough for anyone. The Kinga people once had a culture quite their own. No one from the outside was telling them how to live. I’ll call it their free tradition. Though it began to change with the coming of missionaries about 1895, this traditional culture is the centrepiece of this monograph and of the others in the series. The ‘old days’ were still very much with the elders I knew in the early 1960s. Because of the people’s relative isolation in a high mountain area, a fair reconstruction of those days was still possible. Kinga of both genders are by custom ambisexual. Calling them bisexual would be simpler but doesn’t say it all and doesn’t say it well. For Kinga, sexual relations with a person of your own gender are not in competition with heterosexual relations. Sexual intimacy with a gender friend comes naturally to men and women. The reverse is equally true—intimacy opens the way to friendship. Sex of the other kind is hedged with more formality, being pretty well restricted to marriage. In this way the two sexual orientations are subjectively distinct, as if you could keep your libido in two separate compartments. One kind of sex would never be thought of as a substitute for the other. A person in the throes of a same-sex infatuation hardly ever really tries to dissemble, and must take teasing in stride, but a

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cross-gender attachment is more serious. The heterosexual tie is meant to be permanent. One approaches mutual commitment with care if not caution, wanting to keep one’s own counsel. All of this helps to make Kinga a special case in the annals of African anthropology. It is not that bisexuality as such is out of the ordinary for Eastern Bantu, though some observers have wanted to associate it with the license of civilization, a kind of urbanesque corruption carried inland from the proletarianized Swahili/Arab coast. Another case of the systematic arrangement of society explicitly prescribing an ambisexual orientation has not been reported. Kinga do not stand apart like the classic “hill tribe” of South Asia; they are historically part of the mainstream of Eastern Bantu civilization, but have gone their own way. Their institutions are superficially like those of many neighbour peoples but at a deeper level can’t be properly understood without taking account of the life cycles of men and women, and the special moral strategies Kinga institutions impose on the pursuit of happiness. It becomes apparent when they are seen at close range that Kinga social institutions could not have evolved in a rigidly heterosexual community. What I have to describe is a ‘free tradition’—one which a people has made for itself, not one imposed from without. Because of its special interest, I’ll be describing Kinga life mainly as it was before Christian missions came. Many communities had already adopted new ways before I got to Kingaland (uKinga), yet even in ‘modern’ settlements the changes were not as profound as (knowing Lutheran and Catholic moral teachings) I expected. It is true enough that in spite of the liberal application of ‘indirect rule’ by the British, colonialism imposed restrictions which eroded the power of local courts. But older men usually had clear ideas about the world they were losing. It was a unique and coherent pattern of life which had evolved slowly during East African medieval times, the half millennium before 1900, and was not lightly to be blown away. To an unusual degree for an Eastern Bantu people, sex, religion, and politics were woven into a single fabric.

Male sensitivities: when friendship fails It is a long journey from youth to age in Kingaland, though measured in years it may be shorter there than in my own country. The reason is not that age comes prematurely. Under the colonial pax Kinga who survived the onslaught of introduced childhood diseases

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could generally expect good health and a long lifespan—they could, at least, before AIDS. But youth ends late. Traditionally, men might remain bachelors well into their fourth decade, maintaining the free lifestyle of youth all the while. The high callings of youth in the days of the princely courts were those of warrior, minstrel, and dancer. Men who were drawn to the life at court refrained long from marriage, sleeping with their fellows in barracks, partaking in war games, raiding, and warfare; collecting taxes; constructing and reconstructing the houses of the court or princely harem and the stockade; doing male work in the fields cultivated by the royal women on behalf of the court establishment. It was after as much as two decades of this life that a man would retire to marriage. Ideally this meant moving out to the boundaries of the realm, clearing land, and settling in as the court’s representative in a bush community hitherto only loosely affiliated to the court. Where there were no struggling bush settlements to colonize on the court’s behalf a party of friends could move out together with their new wives, with or without acknowledged leadership. Such new settlements on the political periphery could in time develop into satellite court centres, but more often they subsided into typical bush communities, increasingly self-sufficient over time. The circulation of young men into court centres, and their return to bush life much later at marriage, meant that lineage continuity within a fixed locality was broken. In the Kinga case this put kinship in a nebulous condition, for local relations assumed more importance—a feature we might easily associate with modernity. A weak emphasis on lineage continuity meant that relationships formed in youth, when men were wont to move about a lot and form far-flung contacts, came to have paramount structural importance. Friendship largely replaced kinship as the basis of a network of trust and personal identity. Here I am concerned particularly with the psychological difficulty this posed for men. The female life-style was distinct and had different if related psychological consequences. For men, who bore the political responsibilities of Kinga society and had to deal in a wide yet shifting network of trust, always with the real possibility of betrayal, the last decades of life could be hard. Their networks shrinking, their stalwart friends proving every year less stalwart, their credit dealings (as the chief basis of the respect they could command of others) becoming at once more central to their concerns and more difficult to bring off well, older men had many cares to add to their physical infirmities. Often, a man who was strong-willed at middle age would fade to ineffectuality as he grew older. The exception

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to this would be a ruling lord or a prince with many wives and a cohort of sons holding to the court for its perks and subject to its disciplines. A ruler enjoys a stabilizing structure of expectations denied the common man. A man could not really count very much on his offspring. Most often he would have loyalty but no close ego support from his wife. The gesture of sacrificing to his own ancestors might entail a long journey into unfamiliar country; the idea was more often entertained than taken up. But when friendship is called upon not just to supplement kinship but to substitute for it, friendship can fail. Psychologically, kin and friend networks are distinct. In their logic both are open; but kin networks have structure and, for psychological purposes, closure. Ego has one true parent of each gender, a fixed number of true siblings and close cousins, a fixed number of kinsmen and kinswomen of the next ascending or descending generation toward whom he has practical duties and on whom he can lay legitimate claims. Persons occupying these fixed positions only abandon them in death. The bonds of close kinship are maximal-claim ties (Park 1974). Friendships by contrast can be disaffirmed; new friends may replace old, and friends-of-friends may also be friends of enemies. There can be no clear and compelling structure to the network of friends Ego forms in his day-to-day dealings with the world. Without meaning to, Ego can fail a friend; without knowing it, Ego may be the real cause of a friend’s dereliction as well. It is over time that deep differences may be felt between kinship and friendship networks. Friends beget friends in the sense that you may gradually extend your network through friends-of-friends. But you are most apt to extend it only laterally, within your own generation or age group. As a Kinga man ages, so do his friends, and they become fewer. Kinship continues through time begetting new generations of kin. Compared to kinship, friendship is almost doomed to fail in the end, if only for these structural reasons. In youth, friends are easily made and almost as easily lost to view. One is part of the big generation, demographically and psychologically. But as you live on into the narrow tip of the population pyramid your outlook changes. Men you know, but who are not your friends, never will be; if they are not hostile to you they are likely to believe you are hostile to them: otherwise why are you not already friends? The psychological ease of youth wears gradually away. Confidence, in others if not in yourself, wanes as your network fragments and loses meaning.

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Dispersed families Kinga prefer not to live in conjugal families. While it is normal to marry, it is not for husband and wife to cohabit with infants or children. Babies are nursed three or four years, and a nursing woman has no use at night for her husband. He is likely to sleep in the men’s house or he may pass some time at court or on business elsewhere. Kinga do not say nursing is a woman’s substitute for sex, but they know a woman with an infant is fulfilled. There is no reason for her to encourage a husband who wants to sleep with her. Only a prince or a lord has risen by virtue of his office above sleeping with other men—he has to be distrustful—and so needs women. That is why he will have many wives. For the ordinary couple, intercourse during nursing would endanger the child at breast—infancy is finished when a mother conceives again. After weaning, a child is brought up by older children living in a house they have built and which they keep for themselves. In the smallest hamlets children of either sex might share house temporarily, leaving as puberty nears. Kinga say rules of modesty are pointless before children begin to mature sexually. They will feel the pangs of shame when their time comes. If there are only a few maturing boys and girls in a small hamlet they may have to join a neighbouring peer group away from home. For boys, especially, the distance will not matter. Boys are expected to defend themselves, nursing their own illnesses and learning to sanction their own standards of cleanliness and civility. Girls stay closer by because they daily co-operate with their mothers in working the fields and preparing food, but a mother would rarely butt into the affairs of a girls’ house even if she suspects her daughter of (naughtily!) cooking food there. By the time she is seven or eight a girl is prepared to cook and keep house for her father, should her mother fall ill. Where boys are supposed to “act wild” and “live in the bush,” and they clearly thrive on doing so, girls are drawn with a passion to domesticity. One of my little friends was eleven and, having no brother, spent most of her days herding goats instead of gardening with her mother. But she was no tomboy, she was a leader of her peers with all the bright, communicative style of the perfect Kinga maiden. Boys in their “wild” stage hold away from the rest of society. They rove about in little gangs once a day, in the evening, picking up cooked food from all the women any of them can call “mother”—usually, in short, from most of the kitchens around. The non-equivalence of men and women in a Medieval East African community is (was) almost obligatory on account of the war

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pattern. Kinga courts are armed camps. In season, men do much of the heavy work in the fields, but for most of the year they opt out of drudgery, tending to odd jobs and, especially, attending court on days when there are cases to be tried or when the beer may be flowing. The high calling of a man is to be an effective Protector—of the realm, of the fields and homestead, of women. Women carry no weapons and rarely think of turning a bush-hook or hoe to that use. In time of war the danger men have to confront may be human, but a properly staged war will only last a day or two, and everyone knows about it in advance. Most of the time no one has to fear human violence. A more terrible enemy than man is the rogue leopard. Only an occasional visitor from the warmer plains, it knows no season. Sometimes people say leopards are instruments of evil, creatures of witchcraft. Kinga find this credible but still treat leopards as belonging to nature. When one is about, women look to men and lads with their spears for protection, the sense of dependency suddenly made vivid. Every generation in every community has its leopard tales, tragedies and escapes. Every tale is a reminder to women and a confirmation to boys and men of their high calling. Men did hold in 1960 that a maiden should live close to her father so she could call for help in case of an aggressive suitor. I never heard of an actual case of alarm of that kind, but in 1960 the Kinga bridewealth was greatly inflated. A father stood to gain a fabulous wealth with his daughter’s marriage, and suitors could well be frustrated by that—there were grounds for a father’s concern. Yet traditionally bachelor women lived in their own places with up to a dozen or even a score of roommates and no sign of insecurity. Women do more of the steady hard work of farming than men, and where a man may be taller and more agile he’ll know women are very strong, especially in a group. Anyway, men just don’t conceive the powerful lust for a woman which would lead them to impose themselves on her. She only need say no, and she is expected to. The world is not like that outside Kingaland, but only a man is likely to have been there, and it’s not certain he would have found out. Marriage is (by cultural consensus not law) late as against African or general world standards. The work of young boys, apart from helping little brothers or cousins along, has always been herding (goats and cattle), hunting and snaring (small forest creatures), and what might be called adventurous foraging. “The work of a lad is to make himself tough enough to last.” If you can steal a goat from a herd around the mountain, you set it quickly to cook in a pit-oven, a buried fire which won’t betray your position with smoke. Should you catch a

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rival gang trying to steal your goat, you are instantly at war—but you can’t expect a ruler or grown men to intervene. Boys have a world of their own. When they are grown past youth all the best of them will seek to the local ruler’s court. They’ll be his army and retainers, men of all work, for a decade or two unless they should be drawn further to the court of the prince of their realm. The court in its heyday was a ceremonial centre and a school in the fullest sense. Only when they tire of the bachelor life will men marry. Traditionally the bridewealth was nominal—no bar to marrying. The delay is thus technically optional but actually a matter of ‘structured choice’: a pattern most people go along with for a whole host of reasons. Normally, men until middle age prefer living and sleeping with their peers. When age begins to slow them down they think more seriously of marriage—moving away from the court to a smaller place where a man can be his own boss, with a wife to garden and cook for him. The court life is exciting, but you are a dependent of the lord, always beholden. There is no need to ask why a man wants to marry—if he is to go out on his own he will have to marry. Sometimes the lord himself may notice that a man is ready and give him a wife. A quick man will be sent out to a frontier place with a royal daughter as wife, there to rule the march on his chief’s behalf; a slower man will be told to follow. From the man’s point of view, delayed marriage is built into the political system. Of course, the present tense in all my discussions of the old culture refers well back in time. As the free tradition erodes away, and the (Christian) conjugal family becomes common, the distinctive culture which is my subject fades into Tanzanian history. For women, biology is more prominent. The life of the bachelor women’s house is treasured and prolonged, but after her youth a woman will want time to bear and nurse four children, to fulfil her destiny. Though Kinga don’t count their age in years, a maiden will know by her body’s signs that her sprightly lesbian lifestyle can’t be prolonged much past (say) twenty-five. She needs two decades more to bear and properly nurse the four children she means to have. All through their long quarter-century of bachelorhood, men will have slept together and practised intercourse without forming exclusive bonds. Men use the same word women and neighbouring peoples use when they refer to a woman’s vagina, but Kinga men apply the word to their own backsides as well. “Child of your father’s vagina!” is a youthful taunt equivalent to little more than “You turd!” The ideal relationship for boys, only occasionally realized, was life-long friend-

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ship. A bond of love could be formed with a stranger, a sort of honeymoon phenomenon which your friends would always look upon with indulgent sympathy. But such a bond would not outlast the few days of honeymoon. If love settled down into friendship, things were going well. A deeper (but still not possessive) relationship was that a young man might have with his next elder brother, who would make him his protégé, even opening his own marital bed as a kind of school for marriage. Young men are expected to court maidens and eventually promise themselves, but they may let years go by before consummation. Kinga law allows a man may be away and out of touch for seven full years before every claim on a wife will lapse, and some youths in 1960 were confident a maiden would wait that long, though none of them was ready to put it to the test. Courting relationships ought to be maintained with regular gifts. When a young man is serious he’ll visit his girl by night as often as every month. They won’t be alone, but he’ll spend the night with her on her mat, hands always friendly and above the waist. Whenever desire is properly consummated with a maiden he will know she is his wife from that moment. She can never sleep with her peers again— then and there if they ‘fear custom’ she must follow him. A man will absolutely never try to consummate his passion for a maiden in her house, though all the others may seem to be asleep. “If you can’t contain yourself you just step outside and take care of it.” Even the earliest missionaries remarked on the exuberant morale of Kinga young women. They sang at their work and on their way home at night, they were always together, almost always in high spirits. What the missionaries didn’t know, or possibly chose to ignore, was that they were observing the civic expression of a lesbian lifestyle. Menarche didn’t occur until 15, usually later. Initiations followed but not hurriedly. Where young men were almost never put through a ceremony, maidens always were and always were lightly circumcised. Proceedings were strictly controlled by married women of the neighbourhood, who gave sometimes ribald advice on having sex with men. A point of particular importance was that, whereas excision of flesh from the labia minora would prove a boon in intercourse, damage to the clitoris or its hood could only put at risk a woman’s normal capacity for sexual enjoyment, curbing her fertility. A maiden might pass as much as a decade after initiation before putting these ceremonial instructions to the test. But marriage had acquired religious weight, and its rationale had been defined in terms which would direct her later moral career.

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In spite of delayed mating, the evidence is that fertility remained reasonably high throughout the Kinga medieval period. Doubtless, the four-year nursing term protected the child as well as the mother. A woman who has nursed four children is in Kinga law done with reproduction. The marriage doesn’t end, but her husband will now live permanently at the men’s house, where she’ll daily bring him his supper. One old man I knew in 1960 had built a new house for his wife with a fine prospect—it was a site well chosen, had the two of them been ready to move. But now she was living alone and he in the men’s house not far from her. When she found she had to turn down the new place, the underlying reason was that it would have meant moving away from women friends. Her disappointed husband had not had the insight to predict that turn of events nor, evidently, had any of his close peers. He hadn’t thought to consult his wife about her house before building it; he was being ‘modern’. If he had thought to sleep there sometimes himself, and keep effects there, that plan was dashed when she decided she couldn’t move. Men don’t sleep alone in closed houses the way women do. Marriage for women usually meant a translocation and quite gradually winning new friends. Women always want to keep a field or two at their home place, allowing them to visit. This offers some security before you are sure of yourself in the new life. A woman who goes out to cultivate alone every morning is the very figure of failure. But these are matters men don’t pretend to understand. I began to feel I understood the underlying pattern of Kinga sexuality as I came to see the place which reproduction occupied in the separate moral strategies of men and women.

Why marry? why beget? why bear? The strongest pull toward marriage and away from the comparatively carefree life of the men’s or women’s house is not a sexual but a gender need. A man wants progeny because they transform him. He stands to gain a new identity and the new self image to go with it. As a now-aging bachelor he has been outclassed in martial skills and the other manly arts (hunting, dancing, wit, minstrelsy) by younger men. As a household head (granted that a traditionalist hardly shares an actual house with his family) a man has property and standing on his own. He eats at home independent of the court, its women, and their gardens. Bachelors having no one to till for them can claim no fields. A man of importance is one who has his own place, wife, animals, crops,

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stores, cookhouse—and what justifies all this, children. A woman wants marriage and progeny for much the same reasons a man does, but with far more intensity. As a maiden she looks forward to heterosexual relations not out of lust for the act but for the realization of her own moral career—for being a woman with child, with a place of her own, fields, family to feed. For both men and women these are gender needs, deriving from Kinga ideas about autonomy and personal fulfilment. Kinga men don’t often worry that a man without sons may be doomed to woe after death—ancestors are not often troubled or troublesome in a society where friendship is more basic than kinship. A man with four daughters in 1960 (when the sums entailed were going up to the sky) would only be delighted at the prospect of four bridewealths coming in and nought to go out. A son is traditionally no companion to his father. A man is not apt to move back to his father’s settlement before the old man dies. Kinga say one son, usually the youngest, should be there to help his widowed mother—at least, he should have a place there and keep in touch. By contrast, Kinga women do desperately want to have babies and are always close to their daughters in late childhood, when the two will get along “like sisters.” But just as a woman would never try to dominate a daughter who is staying near home, she never expects to depend on her in old age, after the daughter has married away. As for needing a son, a woman knows quite enough about the dependability of men long before she is widowed. For the most part, the two genders live out separate careers, closely entwined during middle life but never merged. Within their sphere, women do not have significantly less autonomy, though they have less mobility, than men have in theirs. A happy marriage is possible, just as a quarrelsome one is, but doesn’t replace the need of a man or woman for friendly support from gender peers. Can this mean that for Kinga heterosexual relations are just instrumental, good for reproduction and nought else? If so, the implication would be that only one deeply meaningful sexual orientation is possible in the circumstances of their lives, and a second orientation can never be more than a psychological add-on. That is the way I saw the matter at first. Boy-girl relations seemed to be sibling-like, friendly and informal but erotically neutral. Then I began to notice that sexual excitement was running high in any open encounter between groups of young men and maidens. In the traditional court culture dancing was the most important form of display, and the form of the dance was contrived so that men and women were aligned like two

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Kinga armies opposing each other on a field of battle. Instead of weapons and war paint they wore bells, monkey tails, and head displays. The two sides displayed first as groups, swaying forward and back but always carefully aligned and keeping an ample noman’s land between. As the evening progressed individuals would stand forward in the dance, now from the one side now the other. Just as in Kinga war, the champion of either side stood to gain royal honours, fêted by the whole community. The stories Kinga particularly like to retell are about the minstrel-dancer who took the court by storm and was rewarded with the royal princess of his choice. Here, I had to recognize, was the stuff of fairy-tale romance. Finally I began to hear that Kinga youths in their twenties come to have a great belief in romantic love and think marriage ought to be based on love alone. As with our older Hollywood plots, the road to romance can be rocky. As with our newer soap operas, getting along in marriage can be yet rockier. But Kinga have the advantage of us in this, that marital ties after a honeymoon period never need be any closer than both partners want them to be. Most often, a man will genuinely respect his wife’s right and obligation to nurse her child until she knows it is ready to live apart from her. The man must also respect her right to his sexual services when a maturing child has been weaned. It is easy to see that we are here dealing with rules, without which the systematic dispersion of the nuclear family into four separate parts would not work. Since Kinga believe a woman needs sexual fulfilment to conceive, they say a wife may demand seven copulations a night. Even if you read that “seven” only as “many,” the legal point is that a husband unable to perform to her satisfaction has no recourse if his wife should turn elsewhere. (The best solution, it seems, may be to arrive home in top condition and leave on a pressing errand the following day, trusting your wife to have conceived.) A reasonable woman who wants her husband around home will know she has to be easy on him. Though we have no proper polls on marital happiness to turn to, my impression after two years was that good relations have always been common. Rates of adultery and divorce are very low by standards of the broader region. Christian couples in 1960 might be found with small children sleeping at home. Lutheran elders encouraged women to favour cohabitation after child-bearing age, and if the result when that did occur was not a loving couple nothing on the surface of their lives betrayed it. In spite of changes in public attitudes toward what we used to call “sexual deviance,” Westerners today may still find it hard to picture a world in which inverse and transverse sexual orienta-

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tions are not only equally legitimate but equally expected of all. Kinga, for their part, had trouble with the notion that ‘homosexuality’ could stand in the way of ‘heterosexuality’. I did what I could to explain those two ideas, which we find it easy to treat as categories of natural reality. Kinga understand a man can be impotent—they know it as a rare pathology. But how could copulating with men make it harder to copulate with a woman? Our way of looking at this is not reasonable to the Kinga mind. Semantically, men and women both have ‘vaginas’ only differently placed. When Kinga see a man neglecting his wife’s sexual needs they just suppose he is intent on prolonging his own bachelor youth. Perhaps he has come to feel he isn’t competent to set up on his own. If she needs to, she will find another man. A few men in 1960 seemed destined never to be more than wageworkers on distant tea estates. A man may be a drifter, always depending on friends. Kinga tolerate this but treat it as deviance of the muddlehead type. Whatever the reason, a man can expect his wife in the end to leave him if he neglects her. But ‘neglect’ by Kinga legal and moral standards is behaviour which goes well beyond what some other peoples would conceive as ‘abandonment’. A woman leaves a man by moving out of the house he has built for her, usually to join another man directly. The bereft husband can expect eventually to get his bridewealth back through the court in order to settle down at last with another wife, older now and a little wiser. The problem as Kinga see it is one of lifestyle and readiness for a new stage of life, not sexual orientation. Kinga are puzzled to hear that a Westerner may let his whole career be dictated by a gender preference in sex relations. Cases I tended to perceive that way were differently understood by their own communities. Only two cases of (self-dramatizing) masculine women were known. A commoner woman in the 1930s took in several (female) wives, living with them as a polygynist would, and was eventually sued for adultery by one of the ‘cuckolded’ husbands. The native court, always representing a masculine view of life, took the position that unless a dildo could be found there was no case. When court inspectors found no such incriminating instrument there was no further intervention. The lesbian wives explained in court that they had chosen this way of life for their own safety, after earlier troubles in childbirth. I gather from this case that the official mind of the (male) court finds it absurd to picture two women arousing and fulfilling their amorous needs without coition. The other case of female masculinity was less spontaneous. On the premature death of the king (or High Prince, ruler of the Central

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realm), as none of her brothers was old enough to take office, Kipole was made ruler. She inherited all the queens except her own mother, according to rule, and slept with them on a regular schedule, as a king should do. She also did a good deal of courting in the maidens’ houses around her royal village. She was eased out of office when a suitable brother came of age—there was no real precedent for females ruling, and the arrangement came to be regarded as a makeshift kind of regency. War was not necessarily the business of a High Prince, but he usually would have come to the office from doing heroic deeds in his youth. As for male transvestism, there are no cases of a spontaneous type. At the highest royal court there was a traditional role for eunuchs as guardians of the harem and ritual assistants. Eunuchs wore their capes in the feminine fashion but were verbally referenced as youths (bachelors) not as women. Kinga say eunuchs are born not made. The contrast between Kinga and Western sexual cultures is rich but can be conceived as stemming from a small number of differences in their premises. The most obvious difference is in what is assumed about human nature. Kinga define bestiality and oral-genital sex as unnatural—the first they treat with amusement, the second with fear and revulsion. The premise of a hetero-/homophilic dichotomy inherent in nature, ever a popular alternative in the West, is nonsensical to Kinga. Though they would grant differences of degree among individuals with respect to preference for the opposite sex, Kinga do not conceive of attraction to the other as an involuntary or “physical” phenomenon in the sense that it could be a precondition of sexual arousal. This allows them to be much less dyadic than Westerners about intimacy. Kinga do suppose that heterosexual relations may lead to pairbonding. Thus there is the usual Eastern Bantu assumption that a polygynist will have a favourite among his wives even when he knows it will sow discord. But polygyny is mainly for rulers not ordinary men; the main evidence for pair-bonding in marriage would simply be its stability in their communities. By contrast, pair-bonding in the sexual relations of gender peers is unnatural. When it becomes dyadic withdrawal, as may happen among bachelor youths or maidens, the group will no longer sanction the tie. The salient exception is the close (and naturally asymmetrical) association prescribed between an older and a younger brother.

27

In their traditional setting and in isolation from our venereal infections, Kinga didn’t seem to me to be making problems for themselves by the way they conceived human nature. But when your metaphysical mindset is meant to match stable conditions of economy and structure it can make you terribly vulnerable to change. Western scholars have lately been becoming aware how deeply their own psyches are produced by history, the chaos and the order of it all alike overlaying and sometimes seeming even to overwhelm nature. But a little rumination on other peoples’ mindsets can’t be amiss. The very difference between the Kinga view and our own ought to help us see our sexual orientations better for what they are—doctrinaire beliefs, metaphysical persuasions which, once we have begun to live by them, will be hard as chemical habits to shake. Anthropologists have long noticed how the sexual orientation of an exotic community has to be sanctioned by taboo. A mere touch by the wrong kind of person on the right body part produces panic not arousal. I see the same sorts of taboo operating in my culture as in the Kinga, the difference being that my culture is pluralistic, accommodating various codes. But we have to consider more than a difference of rules. My Kinga friends resisted my culture’s persuasion about sex because they couldn’t afford to accept it. Their premises disconfirmed, they would have risked their moral careers collapsing. It is that way in any human culture. The fact that in uKinga there was relatively little choice of occupation should not confuse us. Men and women can still be more or less successful in the worldly sense, more or less respected, more or less appreciated in their personal networks. One is dogged by fate, another blessed. There are losers and winners, fools and philosophers and champions. Kinga pursue their moral careers against a context of rules and semantic maps differing from our own. They develop strategies for getting the results they want from their relationships and casual or formal encounters with others, whether in the fields, at home, at court, or in the weekly market. Inevitably, some are more successful than most and some less. Sex in a small, ambisexual society is a pervasive business. Heterosexual links are few, as liaisons are only rarely made outside marriage. But homosexual links, from what I can calculate, must spread a wide web, especially for men. Most maidens and many of the women singing or working together in the fields must be or have been close—must have known intimate love before, and well may hope to again. Yet they put no claims, wear no passions on their sleeves. Men and women learn, whatever their momentary feelings for a particular gender peer may be, to bracket them after the first rush of feeling is

28

gone in favour of smooth relations with all their friends. You can’t be possessive without exposing yourself to envy, and envy is the surest enemy of friendship. Kinga moral strategies subordinate what we would call (and even honour as) passion to the cultivation of friendships, good peer relations. Compared to friendship, kinship (with the license it gives to privatizing human relations) is not important for Kinga. We may say that homosexual relations are played openly warm but privately cool. Marriage is played differently: it should be openly cool once the romance of courtship is over, but may be privately warm. Kinga who can’t read the signs and pursue their moral strategies successfully— men exploding on their friends, women demanding ego support from a husband who can’t understand their needs—are likely to lose their way in life. There are cases enough in any community. Kinga who want to have a good life have to share their deeper moral premises with others, men and women mainly of their own generation, who command the passes along the way. A young man who convinced himself his troubles with a lady love could be blamed on his or her ‘homosexuality’ would be taking a long step on the wrong path for a happy career in Kingaland. Suppose an older woman began thinking all the hard work she’d done all her life in the fields to produce a ‘surplus’ could amount to nothing but her sacrifice to a ‘ruling class’ of inverted ‘male chauvinists’. How could she judge herself anything but a fool who had thrown her life away? In prospect or in retrospect, if you pull the rug out from under me by changing the rules and landmarks I have to set course by, I’m unlikely to prosper. It is not hard to see why Kinga resisted what were to them radically devalorizing Western ideas about sex and human destiny. It is only disinterested persons in my culture who are likely to give more time to Kinga views. Still I think some of us can afford to look seriously at this small world, built as it is on a ‘different’ view of human nature. Lusty academic voices today are once again thumping the drums of Nature over Nurture. This is partly just the old law of the jungle called Academia—when you can’t find anything new under the sun, look for something that has been buried for a while. But there is a bit of a Zeitgeist too. There is profound disillusionment with respect to the uses of history, even for the many among us who recognize how much we know of it today, compared to our fathers and mothers. The major decision-makers seem to care little for the kind of knowledge which complicates the pictures in their crystal balls. We have been remarkably content, for one thing, as a civilization predicated on hard science

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to cloak our sexual worlds in myth. Two of the main myths, left and right, about homosexuality are: It’s natural—there are no more today than there ever were, they’ve just come out of the closet. It’s a sign you are very sick. This view has so far found unimpressive support from science. Whatever threads of truth there may be in either myth, men and women working at the loom of truth have not been able to weave them into anything substantial in a scientific way. Between the left-myth and the right-myth are a thousand others men and women somewhere live by. You can’t really put a practical philosophy to test with the tools of science, though I think we can glimpse the eventual form of a genuine social science in the comparative study of independent traditions like that of the Kinga and their neighbours.

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TWIN SHADOWS: BOOK ONE, CHAPTER ONE

Mists of time & glory

Kinga in their Region The population of Kingaland at midcentury was 60,000 according to the Handbook of Tanganyika. By this measure the Kinga are a marginally larger people than the Masai, Tanganyika’s photogenic pastoralists; but the Kinga are dirt farmers and, though surely handsome enough, seldom photographed. All I know of Kinga traditional dress I’ve learned from old photos, by word of mouth, or by observing the occasional ritual procedure which still required it during my years in the field. Though the men are prone to wandering they aren’t nomads. The ancestors of the Kinga settled, some on current evidence as many as sixty, some as recently as five or ten generations ago, in a mountainous country at the northern end of Malawi, southernmost of the great lakes. The geography, the tenacity of the people, and the growing efficiency of their political organization served even through the turbulence of the nineteenth century to insulate their mountain realms in some degree from troubles in Bena-Hehe country to the east, Sangu in the north, and Nyakyusa to the west. Still, the peoples of the whole region share common traditions and have known ritual co-operation. While in the Handbook some of the neighbour lands seem to dwarf the Kinga—Nyakyusa with a population three times as large, Bena-Hehe with still more and a vast territory to boot—the disproportion would not have been so apparent in pre-colonial times, when what we now regard as (linguistically) single groups were not supposed to be (politically) integral. A walk-through in 1800 would have impressed a traveller with the absence of any but local boundaries, with an uneven but generally small-scaled development of chiefly authority, and the familiarity of all the peoples of the region with one another’s customs. Despite the rise after 1840 of ‘overnight empires’

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like those of the Sangu (under the Merere dynasty) and Hehe (under Munyigumba and later Mkwawa), the really solidary political groupings throughout the region were personal chiefdoms seldom encompassing more than a thousand huts. Contact was normally experienced not between ‘peoples’ or ‘tribes’ but between much smaller, face-to-face polities—at least, this remained so for Nyakyusa, Kinga, and many Bena. Probably in 1800 the traveller would have encountered many more ‘peoples’ (named ethnic groups) than were recorded a century later. In 1700 there would have been even more, the typical size being smaller still. Nevertheless, the beginnings of chiefly political development were present in islands of intensive cultivation comprising a ‘political archipelago’ running in crescent form from Hehe in the northeast of the highlands region to the lower-lying Nyakyusa in the southwest. It was owing to contact with the now-infamous slave and ivory trades, and threatening population movements, that wars of amalgamation transformed the political condition of the Sangu and Hehe peoples (as they came to be called) at an accelerating rate. War was the theme, often replacing the older pattern of stationary feuding, throughout the region in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Hehe were particularly successful in war, bringing together diverse peoples under a centralized rule; but even in their case, when the first tyrant-conqueror died the whole task of welding separate peoples together under a Hehe identity had to be done over again. The true temper of the region is probably best seen in Nyakyusaland, where autonomous chiefdoms were formed, flourished, and perished in the manner of personal enterprises under capitalism—and where some few chiefdoms or princedoms did become large and powerful, only never threatening neighbours with true territorial conquest and amalgamation. While Kinga are closer linguistically to Hehe, they have much in common institutionally with Nyakyusa. All that the Handbook says of the Kinga is given in four sentences: The Kinga are believed to have come from [Hehe country] many generations ago. The chieftainship passes to the eldest son. Ukinga is a deeply dissected mountainous country where the headmen are almost autonomous, obedience to the chief being more religious than political. The Kinga used to dig underground houses in which they hid from their enemies (Moffett 1958:237). There was not much information available to the colonial power even in its final years. Notes in Moffat’s compendium are a bit meatier in reference to other peoples in the same region, but not much better

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informed. In fact the underground houses he alludes to had the more practical purpose of providing cosiness for young women on a frosty night. In war such places would have been traps, since any human settlement puts scars on the land, which a practised stranger might follow to source. The Handbook’s notes on fragmentation are correct so far as they go; and the writer’s failure to learn and say more is also a reliable index of the attention which his government, even in the Territory’s last decade, had managed to devote to sociological information. The Germans before being forced out in the 1914 war had managed a good deal more. They established the Lutheran church at several centres, where they also planted apples and peaches which have survived, and introduced wheat which has become a Kinga staple. German missionaries and scholars left a legacy of descriptive material of a rather more scholarly sort than the District Books of the British period afford. Kinga at national Independence (1961) as at colonial Contact (the earliest in 1894) lived mainly from their gardens, which supplied them amply with grains, pulses, and root crops in a normal year, supplemented more often by the flesh of goats than by mutton or, what was prized, beef. Kinga for all their wealth of goats knew no cheese and made limited use of skins. Basket-making might be taken up by an older person of either sex. Most men would in their youths have apprenticed themselves to a smith, for ironwork was the community’s main manufacture and accounted for all its significant external trade offerings. The only constant and quite pacific trade relationship was with those Kisi potmakers on the shores of Lake Malawi who were under Kinga domination. A trader to Kisiland would carry hoes and grain down, pots and dried fish up the following day. What is most important to know about a system of subsistence agriculture is almost always hard to find out and evaluate: how reliable were the crops? What is certain is that a surplus was normal, though always the product of great industry and the focus of shared anxiety—subjectively the Kinga enjoyed no economy of surfeit. The major real threat was an infestation, whether of locusts or of army worms, which could take out one entire crop or severely damage all of the crops at one place, and which always came without warning or any hope of defensive action on the practical plane. The chronic concerns of Kinga with weather—with signs of too much or too little rain or the onset of rains before gardens were ready—were generally marginal to the deeper fears of plague against which the best garden-sense could not prevail; and this may be taken to explain the inflated trust Kinga

33

put in the ritual undertakings of their priests, designed to placate the gods of pestilence. The clearest evidence for the regularity of surplus is the traditional division of labour, which put women in charge of the gardens almost to the exclusion of men in all but the preliminary soilturning parties [imigowi] (which prepared a field as well and as quickly as the European’s plough) or in the original clearing of brush and forest. During the long season of growth and cultivation the work of the fields was mostly for women. Half the population was freed in this way for less productive if no less honourable pursuits: for a little hunting, for the barracks life at court, and for discussing low deeds at a moot or high deeds over beer.<<[lit] Politically, the Kinga were a self-consciously expansive people who conceived their success as a function of class division and dynamics. The rulers—“five great and innumerable minor chieftains” as an early missionary put it—were all supposed to be of royal lineage, but this was a palpable fiction. What they did hold in common was the surname Sanga. Whereas in a true lineage society the adoption of surnames in adulthood would never do, the major court villages comprised veritable Sanga factories, tending to flood the land with upward mobile ‘rulers’. I give here one way of sorting them out, but with the warning these are social categories not social classes: <<[lit] The Prince must have a grand harem, and all his wives produce offspring—the royal Sanga. After a period of service, royal men must be rewarded with wives of other lineage and sent out to settle frontier communities owing allegiance to the Prince and producing for him a population of frontier Sanga. After a period of service, royal daughters must be awarded to men not of their own lineage, mainly commoners completing their period of service to the Prince; and they in turn should move on to settle under the frontier royals, siring offspring in the royal name— the matrifilial Sanga. Captive women must bear children to the Prince and wean them before being released; such children would grow up at court bearing the royal surname—we may call them booty Sanga. Sanga princes (no relation to the Sangu people living with their cattle on the plains below the northern escarpment) had devised for themselves an open class system tied (as such a system has to be) to territorial expansion and improved productivity. Sanga courts

34

promoted the smithy and trade in its products, as well as fostering a grain surplus to meet ceremonial needs. In the ruler’s ideology his mandate came from the east and was destined to extend the Sanga dominion westward. When European Contact broke the spell there were in each realm fertile slopes still to be won from the forest, and Sanga rule was yet unconsolidated on the southern and western frontiers. Two of the five princes mentioned by Wolff were rivals for dominion in the Western Realm, and a less flagrant rivalry, brewing in the East, appears to have escaped the missionary’s notice. These were not the conflicts of breakdown. Princely struggles, schism and alliance, were the stuff of a slow pattern of political growth measured in generations not years. The political system of the pre-Contact Kinga world (“where headmen are almost autonomous”) did produce a standard set of institutions for a large population—by one important measure Kinga had achieved a ‘civilizing’ politics. But their form of the state was segmentary, close in essentials to Aidan Southall’s ideal type, reflecting his study of the Alur of Uganda (1954). Centralization in this kind of state is nominal, though it must be realizable at need through the military leadership of the central chiefdom. To emphasize that the Kinga ‘state’ was very much in-progress, I refer to it as a ‘protostate’. We can’t know how far this kind of rule ever was actively demonstrated for all Kingaland. Their own military history deals only with the nineteenth century and affords no clear instances. Most likely, the co-operation of even two princes in war would have been rare. Kinga rulers, though they may rightly have called themselves “sultans,” owned no impersonal authority. It is the essence of such segmentary states that a hierarchy of rule cannot exist since no citizen will accept the authority of a ruler he has not chosen to side with in war, and the choice is direct not mediated. Since in principle any ruler may eventually quarrel with any other, alliances are temporary and don’t have the effect of merging citizenries. A prince as headman of his own village has absentee prestige but no command in the other domains comprising his realm: from their point of view he is always on probation. If an index is wanted of the continuity of Kinga political culture after a half century of subjection to two power systems, German and British, as thoroughly hierarchical as any the world has known, we have Moffett’s admission that headmen remained at his writing (in the 1950s) practically independent. Without supposing that all the change in the twentieth century was superficial, I have tried to accom-

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modate my analysis to a culture which at a deep level of structure has remained the product of its own free tradition. This is anthropology of the eleventh hour—in the years I worked among Kinga only a few men and women survived who had known that freedom—and anthropology worth doing. Without an explicit ‘ethnographic present’ a reader will want a way of assessing the time relevance of statements not obviously dated. Place is another factor, since some enduring features of Kinga culture were not practised everywhere. With the loss of those features—warfare and a vigorously promoted ritual legacy—of the Old Culture which tended to bridge barriers between major localities, internal diversity has continued. A Kinga betrays his origins narrowly by his dialect, and change long taken for granted at one place is stormily resisted at another—cultural space and time are correlatives. I rely on the occasional dating-and-placing phrase, wherever I can quickly cut away ambiguity, and on the reader’s sensitivities. Whatever claims I might have made to describing the Kinga in a single ‘present’, most informants would have had to delve deeply into their own past and even future expectations when we were conversing about things Kinga. Minds everywhere are long in time, and Kinga men are travellers in social space as well. Wherever discontinuities are discussed, time-referencing can be clear and simple. To that end I offer (for convenient reference, at the close of the chapter) a chart of the main cultural periods with approximate terminal dates. These are the periods Kinga think about historically—periods of post-mythical time. The rounded terminal dates will function as convenient tags for placing institutions or structural changes in their period. Thus to say the bridewealth, which in 1890 and 1915 had been nominal, was in 1960 a substantial expense is a statement about three periods not three individual years. In addition to the chart of cultural periods I offer one intended to summarize main characteristics of the culture in the two epochs, before and after Contact, so far as they show contrast. For each historical phase the terminal year indicates the beginning of a fade-out not a sudden transformation of the culture. Kinga know many heroic tales of princely exploits in the period of warring camps. Only the time before is truly legendary, foreshortened by lapsing memory. Kinga identity for most men in 1960 was focused in past glory; for women it was focused in present pride of workmanship and productivity. The regularity of a woman’s life contrasts to the variable pattern of a man’s days; gender works a difference in perceptions of time. Men in 1960 were keenly aware of change, most being

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fluent in Swahili, the language of news. Only a few women travelled to work abroad, so getting the chance to learn Swahili in the usual way; and only a few school-educated women had resumed the rural calling, though that was becoming common for literate young men. A direct effect of the colonial pax had been to enhance the status of women (the influence, especially, of the Lutheran church) and demythologize that of men. A man could counter this by keeping past glories alive and by earning money which could be used to assert control over clothing and other luxuries valued by women and children. As pragmatists men devoted themselves to money; but as visionaries they ranked high deeds over wealth. The age of the warring camps entered into their traditions as a world of triumphant masculinity, confirming the dominance men continued to claim in political, jural, and (though much less fully) religious affairs. The final (and first radical) break with the past in 1960 awaited a new rationale for male careers, able to compete with the warrior mystique. The interim solution of the Pax culture was migrant labour— a transfer of the barracks life from the court village to the sisal or tea estate some days’ journey away. By setting themselves to accumulate far more than the tax money needed to meet the colonial poll tax, Kinga men were able to escape the demands of domesticity from which the barracks life had protected them in the Old culture. By tying wealth to prestations for women (for wife or mother) and by saving for or paying off a prodigiously inflated bridewealth, migrant men maintained a perennial absence without breaking their ties to home. Census figures for 1948 showed that more than half the male adult population of Kingaland was living elsewhere, leaving their families to be reared at home. The independent Tanganyikan régime took strong measures to repatriate migrants, and toward the end of my tour some Kinga men were becoming cash farmers, growing pyrethrum. Either they must find an accommodation to domesticity at last, or the mystique of the warrior role must be kept alive. My first field assistant, a brilliant if erratic sixteen in 1961, was all but hanged for his part in a cattle raid on a neighbouring tribe a few years later (in an episode of defiance of what one may call the “nationalist pax”). He’d a paying job close to home and hundreds of friends, but many of them were as restless as himself. I had to ask what could account for this domestic malaise. Kinga men may fight with their spouses but aren’t prone to doing so. For the most part Kinga are civil and considerate men and women, usually monogamous by choice. Their cheerfulness never seems forced. A lot of the stress of parent-child bonding is relieved by the daily care arrangements—separate houses

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and peer discipline for the young of either gender. But the lurking malaise one observes in men can be shown to have deep roots. Oddly, the Christian missionaries I knew, apparently judging Kinga values by those their Christian converts espoused, had little to tell me about male wanderlust and its meaning for domesticity.

Map talk: the political archipelago The Sowetan is a cultural not a natural region. The borders as I have drawn them comprehend a loose string of politically developed societies, each rising above its immediate neighbours, but with telling traits in common. These protostates were still in-process in the final decades of the nineteenth century; it is reasonable on present evidence to suppose that they had been developing for ten or more generations. For the purpose of understanding the political cultures which the European powers found in the territories they claimed as colonies toward the turn of the century, it is sufficient to say that local folk memory extended only backward within the protostate era— folklore about an earlier age was legendary not historical. The maps show the terrain (Map 1) and the approximate locations (Map 2) of the polities mentioned in the text. The base map in each case is the same, allowing easy juxtaposition by eye. The political information on Map 1 is meant to differentiate an ‘inner crescent’ and ‘outer crescent’ which have particular relevance to precolonial military history. The specific village locations on Map 2 are those relevant toward the end of the colonial era. They may prove useful in placing the Kinga scene on published reference maps, and more immediately in showing the approximate locations of the old court centres. The ‘Sowetan political archipelago’ comprises the four protostates on which we have relatively full information—those associated with the tags Hehe, Bena, Kinga, and Nyakyusa-Ngonde—and one, the Sangu, about which our information is mainly from older records. Two other peoples, the Pangwa and Ndendeuli, will be much cited. They are well described but were less well developed politically; they suggest what the Kinga were like before the Sanga political development began. Finally there are peoples for whom we have little information beyond knowing that they were politically marginal and interstitial to the protostates.

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Periodizing: Discontinuities from Old to Pax cultures

Sector

The old culture

The pax culture

Tradition.............

Free

Eclipsed

Rule......................

Segmentary state

Native Authority

Rulers.................

High Prince

Paramount chief

Prince

Subchief

Local lord

Headman, Jumbe

all Sanga realms

Tribal Area

Realm

Subchiefdom

Domain

Jumbeate

Ordeals

Government courts

Ruler’s court

Native court

Moot

Moot

Tribute

Tax funds

Bridewealth levies

Court fines

Raiding & warfare

Migrant labour

Court games

Cash cropping

Smelting, smithing

Smithing

Woodworking

Building

Priesthood

Teacher, preacher

Healing arts

Rural medic

...............

Tailor

...............

Shopkeeper

...............

Court Clerk

Herding

Herding

Petty raiding

School

After bachelorhood

After bachelorhood

(Women) a decade

.... a half decade

(Men) two decades

.... a decade

Princely court cults

Mission churches

Ancestral cults

Eclectic paganism

Witch ridding

Witch purging

Chthonic cults

Travellers’ lore

Jurisdictions........

Jural agencies.....

Public coffers...... Men’s sphere....... Specialties...........

Boys’ sphere........ Marriage age.......

Religion.................

Since the ‘least political’ people in the region are the Ndendeuli, and since the Mawemba, Wanji, Magoma, and a few others named on the German maps but not in the Handbooks of the British period were on about the same level with respect to political development, the best model I have for their collective lifestyle must be the one Gulliver

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gives us in Neighbours and Networks (1971). It is most important to have in mind that the protostates had centres of power which, though sometimes shifting, always could be located; but that the horizon of influence of any political centre was never either quite definite or permanent. Any ‘protostate’ will have a developed system of law and law enforcement, but if this suggests nascent bureaucracy it should not be taken to suggest a fully fledged one. You can have all the law you need in a pedestrian community without record-keepers. Every centre of political power was a local, self-supporting, face-to-face community. This settled land-holding and land-exploiting community was the primary source of political coherence. Statelike institutions and laws, applying as they must to the coordination of a plurality of such local communities, had to be built on top of such local foundations. These institutions evolved in each case with a hegemonic system for extending power beyond its ‘natural’ borders. This entailed a central court and chiefdom receiving tribute and/or service from a grouping of lesser courts. The rationale for the limited cession of power which made this modicum of central direction possible was always military security. Typically, the rhetoric of hegemony used the metaphor of siblingship, with rank order, as between the central and several peripheral courts. Arguments about ancestry were thus arguments about rank, and a weak chief could lose even the claim of his domain to the realm’s central position. The problem of stabilizing power was resolved in a distinct way in each of the protostates. While the subject of this book is Kinga culture, a glance through these pages will betray an authorial purpose going rather beyond the ethnography of one protostate. I use a series of detailed comparisons to show my subject culture in its regional and historical context. The aim in the first instance is to gain descriptive control: describing any complex thing has to profit from comparison and contrast showing what it nearly is but clearly isn’t. A different sort of aim is making a small contribution to African and human history. The main comparative analysis I shall be using in this monograph will be based on the Hehe, Bena, Kinga, and Nyakyusa. I find the Kinga have to be understood as participants in their common regional culture. I suggest that the ‘culture of rules’ which is the matrix of law in each of these four protostates has been drawn from a regional political, jural, and ritual heritage. Each local culture has drawn differently from the regional reservoir of possibilities, and the reason for this is a matter of some historical and theoretical interest. As it happens the Kinga lie both geographically and ethnographically between HeheBena and Nyakyusa cultures, and this makes these communities espe-

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cially pertinent. It also happens, I am thankful to say, that Hehe-Bena and Nyakyusa ethnographic information is of a high order for my purposes. The two other local cultures especially featured on the Maps, the Pangwa and Ndendeuli, also serve me a crucial purpose. They are culturally but not politically comparable to the Kinga. The Pangwa, it might be argued, are Kinga as regards their ‘culture of rules’ but without the political overlay brought in by the Sanga ‘aristocracy’. The Ndendeuli (pursuing now the same logic) might be called politically still less developed cousins of the Pangwa; and from the point of view of the analysis I pursue here, which always concerns what moral strategies account for major life-decisions, the Ndendeuli are supremely well described.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER TWO

Kinship—Friendship

Amity as an organizing principle Kinga are distinguished by a structural reliance on friendship. Within the region they share this culture pattern only with the Nyakyusa, their western neighbours below a rugged escarpment which runs like a sterile suture between the fertile highlands and the lush Great Rift valley. Monica Wilson, wanting a central theme for her initial monograph on the Nyakyusa, called it Good Company (1951). In summarizing the distinctiveness of Nyakyusa-speaking peoples she wrote: The Nyakyusa and the Ngonde reckon descent in the male line and agnatic lineages of three or four generations’ depth were traditionally held together by common interest in a herd of cattle and participation in common rituals... Lineages were not named or associated with any special taboo or praise-name, nor were they grouped in clans of any sort, and in this, as in their system of age-villages, the Nyakyusa-Ngonde differed from their neighbours. Kinsmen did not live together... (1958: 10). The Kinga fit more closely to the pattern Wilson described than at the time she could have known. The structural importance of herds for Nyakyusa had no real counterpart in Kingaland, and the reason for this (setting aside the obvious bearing of environment) is a substantial difference between the two cultures. It’s a difference which sets Kinga even farther apart from the larger region, by the criteria Wilson has employed, than the Nyakyusa-speaking peoples she and her husband studied in the 1930s. I think we should recognize a positive association, hardly restricted to Bantu Africa but particularly pertinent there, between the emphases of wealth and domesticity. The association of cattle with polygyny, wealth in herds with wealth in wives, unites the Nyakyusa in spite of

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their peculiar age-village pattern with hosts of their Bantu-speaking brethren. Kinga, placing little emphasis on domestic achievements and relegating their few oxen mainly to the political realm, made little of competition among men for reputation through wealth in herds and wives. The Bantu trait the Kinga have relinquished might be called heterosexual careerism. Ethnographers have tended to see this trait, in its worldwide distribution, as structure: a sort of peasant patrimonialism, so common as to be taken for granted. But like other ‘isms’ this one is an ideology and—seen from a Kinga vantage-point—is neither ‘natural’ nor the mere creature of rules. The main environmental feature to have considered is the apparent fact that cattle do not thrive in the higher mountain slope areas Kinga occupy. An armchair socio-logician might think their goats could have substituted for oxen. Boys slept with their goats after spending the day herding them, and though there was no regular milking in Kingaland, neither were dairy arts particularly advanced below the escarpment. One may scoff at the lowly goat—she inspires no hymn, no devotion. But she will find her defenders as well. I think that for material wealth to have had great meaning for Kinga men, family and lineage must have had more substance. Where wealth is important so is inheritance. The ordinary household must have had some guarantee of continuity beyond the premature death of a wealth-holder. Kinga culture in contrast to the Nyakyusa made no such provisions. Kinship should be understood as man’s first great legal fiction, as important to the organization of the primitive world as limited corporate liability to the modern. In the absence of political techniques for forging consensus, kinship establishes the belief that consensus follows from family membership. Identity overcomes dissent. Kinship finesses the politics of right by assigning it to immutable corporate groups. Families, in turn, have relativistic boundaries outward in society and backward in time—family networks sanctioned by common descent. Putting the point in terms of action not thought, kinship constitutes a social universe of distinct bodies of kinsmen, each body capable of concerted action on a unilateral basis but recognizing mutual individual obligations within. A kinship system comes to be sanctioned within the territorial boundaries of such a social universe, comprising all its segments, when the regulation of affinal relations has become critical to the maintenance of centripetal kinship hierarchies. African lineage systems are typically quite complex and can branch with only minor variations over vast areas. They do not always

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produce large political units but do extend the lateral reach of the component political units in a region. They make organized social life possible on a grander scale than bare face-to-face politics can do. As an Eastern Bantu people, the Kinga ought to have a strong unilineal kinship system, and the fact that they don’t makes them the kind of exception to a general rule that can throw light on it. Anyone who argued that the evolution of the limited liability company wasn’t guided by an active political intelligence would be laughed out of an economics seminar. The like should happen to an anthropologist who sees no evidence of political intelligence in a complex kinship system such as those one may find so widespread among the Eastern Bantu peoples from Kenya to Zululand.<<[lit] But if kinship itself is a fiction, its higher levels of organization are fictions on fictions. Superstructures are political phenomena, whether their rhetoric plays on the themes of alliance and advantage or loyalty, affairs of state or kinship. So the clan heads of a tribe will not be found meeting in a council of war unless political authority exists in its own right, kinship/clanship being retained as an effective rhetorical convention. In the kinship society rightly so called the scale on which concerted action is realized in practice will be only a fraction of what, in kinship theory, it ought to be. The kinship society has found its surest political form in an ideal-typical construct first nursed into being in 1940: There are societies in which a lineage structure is the framework of the political system, there being a precise co-ordination between the two, so that they are consistent with each other, though each remains distinct and autonomous in its own sphere. (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940: 7) A good deal of subsequent confusion in the literature of social anthropology (British style) could have been avoided if no one had been inspired by this passage to go hunting the ethnographic unicorn so elegantly described. The question is not whether segmentary lineage systems, ideal fusions of kinship with politics, are real, the question is in any immediate case how real. It should follow that on a practical plane the de-emphasis of kinship by Nyakyusa-Ngonde and Kinga peoples may be rated less radical than categorical thought would have it. Political fictions had in each culture displaced kinship in the rhetoric of higher councils (superstructure) while the cement of kinship remained in liberal use in the politics of ordinary personal interaction. Nyakyusa explicitly emphasize ukwangala [enjoying social communion, good company] as a distinct kind of social ethic. Kinga hold the same ethic but find no need

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to sanction it directly—their attitude toward friendship is at least less explicitly political. They generalize their concept of kinship/ kin-group [ulukolo/ikikolo] to mean friendship and community. The values of kinship and friendship flow readily into one another. Is the friendship ethic a Sanga artifact, part of the court culture of the Kinga rulers, imported and imposed on an autochthonous bush culture—in short, an overlay without endogenous roots? I think not, for three reasons: (a) There seems to be no empirical argument for the existence of a strong, patrilineal ‘kinship order’ here in the past, and I am skeptical of any merely theoretical principle calling for an ‘original’ condition of local descent-group organization. (b) Without having to endorse a holistic model of cultural evolution, I think we know enough of the past of Eastern Bantu civilization to equate the Sanga era in Kingaland with the more general phenomena of ‘medievalism’—a period beginning for some regions five centuries before Contact, and for the Sowetan almost surely three or more. This period is generally taken to represent a new level of socio-cultural integration. There is no need to suppose the Sanga rulers had to destroy a sophisticated non-chiefly political system in order to establish a chiefly one. I find it more reasonable to assume an evolutionary transition, Sanga organizers finding a hill culture on a par with the bush communities we know. That is what oral history testifies and what the spread of Sanga influence at Contact suggests. (c) Though the time-depth of chiefly cultures in Kinga country may have been anywhere from ten to twenty generations (and on current evidence can have been less or more) we are not considering the primeval social evolution of the state but the use of ready-made institutional formulae, ideally available to any East African people, in building up systems of local authority. The peripheries of the four Sanga realms (not including in 1890 fought-over lands between the realms) were even in 1960 characteristically peopled by self-isolating bush communities. They were disinclined to participate in the mainstream life of the court (after 1927 the Native Authority Baraza). They preferred to settle cases informally in the home village, a practice amounting to a mute declaration of independence. But this meant they had resort at need to violent forms of self-help. This practice for obvious reasons was unlikely to be reported by a headman or subchief to the office of the District Commissioner, but for the same reasons a local ruler would do what he could to suppress it. (I

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never got the news either, unless I happened to notice the newly burnt remains of a country hut and carefully inquire.) Self-help as a response to the breakdown of fiduciary relations is transactional sanctioning not authority. Supposing a politicized kinship organization, with a constituted lineage authority for mobilizing force, had once existed among these communities, it would have persisted under such conditions. Efforts of the Sangas to control it would have been famous in barracks histories. I take the message of their silence along with the absence of local descent groups in recent times.<<[lit] The rubric I use for the major cultural schism in Kinga society (to which I have just alluded) is court-bush dualism. Kinga support two fairly coherent value systems or subcultures, roughly comparable to those so interestingly explored in Highland Burma by the British social anthropologist, Edmund Leach (1954). I positively don’t want to suggest by this comparison that Kinga communities ‘oscillate’ in any sense between two polar ethical schemes (about which more much later); but individuals circulate between the two kinds of community, learning how to be comfortable within either system, and on the ground every settlement has to find its place in the range between the two ideal poles. This is not especially mysterious or rare—the court-bush axis is something Kinga presumably have in common with most other East African Bantu-speaking peoples, though it may be a more prominent feature for Kinga than some other societies. The most apt comparison is our own (fading) distinction between town and country, and I suppose that is part of the reason ethnographers of East Africa have not noticed this gradient—to good modern townsmen, all ‘tribal’ peoples (prince and priest included) may seem to be ‘rural’. What is noteworthy here is that, setting the mission communities aside, both court and bush cultures in 1960 shared a fragmented pattern of domestic life. A Kinga child lived with its mother just until weaned; actual cohabitation of husband and wife was usually discontinuous except for a period after a weaning and until a new pregnancy had been clearly established. At other times men (at home or away) would sleep in the men’s house [ikivaga] or quarters. Children lived in separate huts, usually with peers of their own sex, and this sexual segregation (as opposed to the grouping of siblings of both sexes within a nuclear family) was universal for later childhood, youth, and an extended period of bachelorhood. Exceptional patterns could be found in the case of some Christian families where a two-room house had been built, the second

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room being intended for small children of mixed sex or for an adolescent girl; in acculturated (Christian) communities where the use of a men’s house was dying away; and commonly where a bachelor male was content to keep house alone, accommodating to the absence of his friends at migrant labour. But a second room for a girl must always be a separate apartment with its own entrance, and a solid barrier should segregate children from the parents’ sleeping room; a man who didn’t frequent a men’s house was often away from home, earning, visiting, or accomplishing an errand; nor did I see any bachelor house with bedplace for only one. In my outsider’s view, these domestic arrangements tend to atomize the nuclear family in favour of extended peer relations, whether with cousins or friends, for each sex. But mutatis mutandi typical nuclear family arrangements elsewhere, seen from a Kinga point of view, mix sexes and generations together in a heedless manner, de-emphasizing community in favour of familistic privatism. Does this (putatively) atomistic pattern antedate the rise of court culture? Since oral tradition pictures the pre-Sanga culture as a vague and legendary one lacking even knowledge of civilizing fire, evidence must be inferential. If familism and/or lineage organization were pronounced in bush communities of the same ecological zone, wherever untouched by Sanga influence, my inference would be negative. That the opposite is the case shifts me to the positive side. Perhaps the clearest example of a major subregion retaining a good measure of autonomy and ‘ordered anarchy’ through the colonial period is that of eastern Wanjiland. The Wanji are highland neighbours of the Kinga, and (though separated from them by the miles of high barrenland called the Elton Plateau) were treated as Kinga by British. The Wanji tongue is distinct from but cousin to Kinga (Nurse 1988: 92), and the people has never been politically united under rulers of its own.<<[lit] In the far eastern part of Wanjiland are a few small communities which escaped the full press of Plains Sangu domination during the Ngoni and Slave Trade wars of the middle and later nineteenth century, mainly by reason of geographic isolation and obvious indigence. They also escaped Sanga domination in any form, for the same reasons and because they couldn’t be drawn into the Kinga trading sphere. Through the colonial era their remoteness all but saved them even from the regular contact other Wanji had with the District Office—whose authority (though flouted in the observation of forbidden ritual traditions) was never directly challenged. By contrast to the other Wanji communities, these struck me on my brief

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treks there as lying outside recent history. In times of trouble, I was told, village elders themselves would take gifts to an Earth Shrine (in Sanguland) without the mediation of any local political-ritual offices. The remembered past in 1960 was not one of lost glories: as cultivators they were pursuing, with the modifications introduced by government taxes and the need for migrant labour to pay them, their full tradition. So this pocket region deserves to be taken, cautiously, as a suggestive model of pre-Sanga bush culture in the Livingstone mountains. It is at least one secure enough from tax collectors that the inhabitants didn’t all vanish off the earth at the approach of a pink-eared Mzungu. The bush pattern is that of a village-organized society. Headmen controlled the allocation of land and were positively, competitively oriented to the recruitment of able-bodied settlers. Hamlet or ward organization within the village would normally reflect agnatic ties but not to the point of excluding new settlers from the same close neighbourly relations which kinship could sponsor. Peer socialization and fiduciary networks took the place of familism. This is much the same pattern which was to be observed on the eve of national independence in the heart of Kingaland, in post-Sanga areas. With the eclipse of the lavish court culture and its barracks life, and with the partial adoption of Christianity, some Kinga were beginning at the close of the colonial period to live in keeping with a domestic village pattern, betraying on its surface little of the Sanga influence. In close parallel, I am told by Ray Abrahams that some Nyakyusa youths born after mid-century have claimed to know nothing of the age-village. Still, in the years when those Cambridge students were growing up below the escarpment I found no Kinga communities whose bachelor lads or maidens had not built separate sleeping houses for themselves; and since the Kinga-style, atomized domestic group is shared by the Wanji though not by the lowland Sangu people who most recently dominated them, the premise seems to me reasonable that the Sanga would have found that pattern established throughout the highlands when they began building their courts. It is something the first rulers-on-the-make hardly could have done in the way they did without a clear field for attracting young men to them. Still the evidence currently in hand is inconclusive, especially with respect to dating. In the main, I have been guided by oral tradition not concerning history but lifestyle—in particular, what was the “original Kinga” domicile. This was a tiny beehive hut not tall enough for standing and only large enough for husband and wife. Cooking is supposed to have been done in the open or in another slight shelter,

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and children are understood to have lived apart from adults—all from time immemorial. Except for their use as temporary huts for guarding fields from night-marauding animals only a few old men, in remote bush hamlets, built such dwellings in 1960. They are much less substantial as shelters than even the ‘gingerbread’ huts (as my children knew them) of bachelor boys today; and the maidens’ huts of course are finer yet.<<[lit] The Germans report villages with a more substantial architecture, sponsored by a thriving court culture. By 1890 a stout rondavel, with cooking fire at its centre, was the standard Kinga domicile within court settlements. But avoidances prevented children past weaning from enjoying the freedom of such a house, nor were they in any way inclined to abandon their own places and the company of their friends. It is this basic attitude toward family and friendship which I believe we can project indefinitely backward although, to say it again, we are left to speculate how far. What is at stake is our sense for the depth of moral acceptance which the pattern commands. The private experience of being Kinga is profoundly affected by the absence of a solidary family group and hence of a retreat from peer intimacy during the years of childhood and adolescence. There is idealization of brother love by Kinga, which might even be taken to indicate a felt need among boys for such a retreat: siblings in this non-family system are not rivals. The hypothesis of need would be particularly credible if the pattern of atomization could be shown to be recent, imposed by the court culture contrary to bush values, and still faced with resistance. But the opposite seems to be the case. Whether we take the culture of 1960 which I observed or that of 1890 about which I made most of my scheduled inquiries, the pattern of early weaning from family life was deeply established in the local sense for moral proprieties, whether at court or out in the hidden hamlets where bush culture has its roots. Seeking an explanation for the age-village pattern among Nyakyusa, Monica Wilson (1951) makes much of remarks concerning the danger of group-wife adultery (“incest” with a mother’s co-wife), should young men grow up in intimate association with the new young wives of their polygynous father. The only Kinga polygynist with whose compound I was familiar did have that trouble but seemed little put out by it; and Monica Wilson’s own ethnography of the Nyakyusa emphasizes as a running theme the frequency of young wives’ adulterous affairs. Do we assume the interloper is never an agnate of the cuckold? To the contrary, we learn that an old man might arrange for the needs of a young wife to be met by a grown son . Nyakyusa pieties

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about “incest” are just that, but serve as explanatory myths. Perhaps any society aware of the comparative peculiarity of its own structural patterns will find convincing moral principles to explain them. But when you have grown up knowing your culture as the ground of all moral being you do not crave an explanation of it which would appease the comparativist. Any child growing up in the bosom of a well established family system may be expected to accept the natural basis of kin solidarity. Likewise the Kinga child may be expected to accept the natural bases of friendships reinforced by sexual intimacy.<<[lit]

Two contexts of moral strategy Though oral tradition links the Kinga-Nyakyusa royal lines to Bena-Hehe country, and some commoner descent lines in the highlands evidently stem from the same subregion, I think it likely the autochthonous communities found (in the long-ago) by westward-moving migrants to and through Kingaland stood apart culturally from those they had left. There is a Boolean overlap between Kinga-Nyakyusa and Bena-Hehe-Sangu. Together, these two groupings comprise the Sowetan ‘political archipelago’—the arc of developed protostates within the region—with Kinga linking the two. Linguistically Kinga are closer to Bena-Hehe than to Nyakyusa. But at a deep organizational level the divide is at the Kinga-Bena border. The regional culture has two distinct sorts of moral nexus, and they probably have a long history. They can be epitomized as a Friendship type on the one hand and a Kinship type on the other. As always, using ideal types entails overstatement, and that will have to be softened later; but for now I want to make the point that two quite different patterns of moral strategy are sponsored within the region. The settings of Kingaland’s neighbours are distinct enough to warrant mention. Though Sowetan peoples are for the most part reckoned as settlers of Tanzania’s southern highlands, that nominally geographic term is loosely used. The Kinga (with Wanji, Mahanzi, Magoma, and some Mawemba communities) occupy an elevated area with altitudes generally over 2000 meters and the whole naturally broken into many separate living spaces. In their high valleys, geography might be said to reinforce a tendency to local separatism which only an effective politics (for the Kinga, built around the rivalry of princes) can hold in check. But Nyakyusa show just as strong a localism without the help of rugged country, even resembling Hehe (or Bena/Sangu) in their commitment to cattle. Kinga raiders, looking out over Sanguland from atop the escarpment, saw a flat and rather

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featureless plain, supporting impressive herds. Hehe country as well, though more varied, would have seemed open. Hehe, Bena, and Kinga shared roughly the same set of political offices and ritual orientations, though the emphases differed characteristically, and in respect of these institutions belonged together, with the Nyakyusa standing apart. But Hehe went far enough beyond nominal recognition of agnatic principles, that their local settlement could realistically be classed as a sort of descent group. By contrast to the Kinga they emphasized domesticity, polygyny, and the accumulation of wealth. Symptomatically, the traditional Hehe house was the massive tembe, a structure into which you feel a dozen of the “original” Kinga huts could easily fit, perhaps even a half-dozen of the more substantial rondavels the Germans found in the Western Sanga realm. Are Kinga the lone representatives in East Africa of a princely politics carried on the back of the goat? This creature is not only the patron of all capricious natures but a perfect bafflement to rustlers, who might approach a strange herd in full force and fare well to come away with a single animal. That gave the Kinga some immunity from counter-raiding by their neighbours—one of those privileges of place a marginal people may enjoy. That Hehe, though short of cattle by reason of their ceaseless warfare, had adopted the typical pastoral reverence for big animals is attested by Nigmann, who describes the ordinary Hehe as a masterly herdsman dedicated to the preservation of his cattle even in times of drought—and so disdainful of the goat that he wouldn’t sacrifice one if he had a sheep or even a hen he could possibly put his hand on. While Kinga of the same period afforded the ox due prestige, the animal didn’t thrive in their country. If you found a herd of any size you’d know it must belong to a prince or a major local ruler. Animals were best eaten while young and healthy. Breeding them wasn’t impossible, just hard to manage.<<[lit] Sanga political authority couldn’t well have been based on lineage solidarity even to the limited extent the Hehe system exemplifies. A Sanga prince depended on the creation at court of a compact barracks community: bachelor warriors recruited as individuals to the attractions of court life, and so away from home and lineage, where younger boys could safely be left to tend the family goats. The age-village system of the Nyakyusa, as described by Godfrey Wilson (1936) and Monica Wilson (1951, 1959), may be deemed a neat solution to the problem of combining polygyny and the agnatic kinship ethos with the type of peer solidarity Kinga stress.

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Because Nyakyusa villages, though independent, tend to remain tightly clustered in space, the fact of their being composed of male householders who are peers not kin is no impediment to the expression of solidarity with agnates within the same chiefdom or princely realm. As Monica Wilson details at length (1957, 1959), Nyakyusa have elaborated two complete sets of rituals—of kinship and of political community—which may be said to run in parallel rather than intersect. Without them I think the maintenance of two such distinct principles of association wouldn’t have been feasible. As it is, their distinctness remains one “in principle” since in practice they are bound to intersect.<<[lit] Kinship, except as it may be modified by outcasting and adoption, or by erosion in less intentional forms, calls for association in a prescribed degree of intimacy within a prescribed social network. Peer friendship is more compatible with a man’s direct expression of allegiance to a ritually established political leader, since the peer network imposes no internal hierarchy and leaves to chance the question of degrees of intimacy and permanence. Kinship, even where in practice it has to bear little structural weight, remains axiomatic— an unchallengeable premise of existence—where friendship can never be that. To persist, a friendship must be affirmed at any obvious opportunity or it will have been disaffirmed. That accounts for a turn of the plot in every known romance. It explains why the possibility of witchcraft so preoccupies Nyakyusa in their village councils, and why (as quite generally among Bantu peoples) accusations often fall upon a spouse: the tie of marriage is contractual, loyalty within it easily found wanting. Nyakyusa men preponderantly accuse village neighbours but are also likely to accuse their wives. For Kinga men the archetypal witch-attack is the treacherous work of a friend. Hehe, when asked where a man should place his reliance as a hedge against poverty, answered with one voice: cattle—and this despite the fact that half the respondents were not pastoralists but cultivators. When asked whether there was one person to be trusted beyond all others (e.g., father, mother, brother, friend), Hehe answered with the same unanimity: no. When asked simply, Whom can a person trust? there was almost no pattern in the Hehe responses. Where non-Hehe would most often name a kinsman (father, brother), the only two answers given by more than ten percent of Hehe were chief (leader) and friend. Thus while the outward settlement pattern of the Hehe is that of a kinship society, a candid, psychological look shows kin loyalty among them to be deeply flawed.<<[lit]

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How Bena and Sangu would have fared on the same questionnaires we can’t know—impressionistically from the evidence of the Culwicks (1935) I would expect the riverine Bena to place their trust more freely and, likely enough, about evenly with kinsmen or friends. I should be more hesitant about guessing the Nyakyusa response—with so strong an ethic of trust they could hardly escape self-consciousness in this, and it is in such circumstance the ethnographer is least sure of the difference between what someone “thinks” and what the same person “thinks one ought to think.” Still, the balance of kinship and friendship would presumably find expression in Nyakyusaland. I have less hesitation in predicting Kinga responses to such a hypothetical questionnaire. Where is the best hedge against poverty? In a good wife. Who can be trusted before all others? A brother, a friend. Whom can a person trust? The same. Edgerton found the gender of the respondent made little difference to the answers obtained in any of the four societies sampled. But if questions were asked Kinga women directly about their own kinship and friendship involvements I should expect their responses to reflect their deep dependency on neighbourly companionship with other women. Though no Hehe men named a wife as trustworthy, some Hehe women named their husbands. I found it rare for Kinga men, married or bachelor, to express distrust toward women or to expect it from them, though close affective dependency upon a spouse is usually short-lived.<<[lit] None of the Sowetan peoples for whom we have the wanted information can be unambiguously identified with the ideal-typical Kinship society—the region may be atypical in this for East Africa. But kinship is the key to the settlement pattern for Hehe and Bena, while kinship crossed with friendship is the key for Nyakyusa. For Kinga, though the principles are not sharply distinguished, mere kinship would be a poor clue to a person’s identity. Though the Kinga court village had disappeared as a ceremonial centre by 1960, the less-colorful administrative centres which served an equivalent function were still in no sense communities organized by kin groups. It was the same for the outlying hamlet. Though there was much talk of kin groups [isikolo], no one was held in second-class standing by reason of a descent name. Friendships remained the all-important foci of positive affect and ego-involvement from earliest childhood. The moral world was built around friendship not kinship; and this, even within a region where kinship as a principle has a low profile, set the Kinga apart.

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Like men and women everywhere, in associating with intimates Kinga operate within a framework of moral reciprocity, avoiding shame and disgrace. They seek approbation and, behind it, transcendent merit: they want to be worthy, as such things are judged, according to mystically validated standards. The kinship-friendship dimension illuminates especially three facets of Kinga concern with the maintenance of moral reciprocity: facets tangent to the questions of boundaries, residential alliance, and solidarity/authority. In contrast to kinship rules, a friendship ethic generates impermanent boundaries. In principle, since conciliation or realignment from strength is always possible, any boundary may be annulled or re-predicated. In practice, individual networks tended in 1960 to show a remarkable independence of political boundaries as such. Loyalty to the central court of a domain had always been an inverse function of residential distance from it, since place of residence had always been a sensitive expression of individual choice. An exception must be made—because we are dealing with two Kinga cultures—for the Sanga emissary [untsagila] sent from the court to colonize a bush area. Initially he would depend on a show of close royal backing. The norms of bush culture favoured a kind of anarchic localism upon which Sanga political morality would always be an imposition. Since it takes about a thousand people to support a local court, it follows that the political success rate of a first-generation untsagila could not have been high. The Sanga name does geographically cluster about the courts but isn’t absent from bush hamlets. For men who chose the court career, marriage was especially late. The ties of continuity from which the practical strength of kinship claims must grow had been broken before a man committed himself to a permanent residence. The choice of a place was accordingly the choice of a group of companions, and this meant the main guarantee of local solidarity at the hamlet level was friendship—a tie not of the axiomatic sort (ethically not like kinship) but one contingent on regular affirmation. Belonging to this pattern of voluntary residential alliance is the old system of social sanctions of the selfhelp variety: reciprocal (as between individuals) or transactional (as between relatively autonomous factions or groups) retaliation for wrongs, a system which if it does well does very well without hierarchy. It was always sanctioned in Kingaland by the bush culture and only suppressed where intervention was feasible by the courts. They would have any internal dispute referred to authority and any external dispute sublimated into militarism. Not only kinship but innocent friendship itself may be cooked in a fashion to feed the military mind.

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In kinship societies patterning co-residence of small descent groups (minimal lineages), a respect hierarchy is usually found coded into the structure by rules about age, genealogical position, and the inheritance of wealth. Dissensus is absorbed within the group without affecting the strength of the alliance it represents, until actual schism or formal segmentation should occur. The moral strategies of individuals then have a fixed dimension, the overriding commitment to a kin-group and its fortunes. Alternative residential options exist but only as a concession of doxy to praxis. By comparison, the moral universe of the Kinga is an open and unbounded network whose residential centre is fixed rather late in life, after an extended period of shifting between natal hamlet and local and/or royal courts. Settled men in Kingaland as among Nyakyusa were apt to decamp overnight from one jurisdiction to another for reasons of personal security. Yet the extended bachelor phase which the Sanga court culture in its heyday entailed for both men and women subjected them to vigorous collective discipline, sanctioned by princely and priestly authorities. For persons of either sex, early adulthood saw the conversion of informal peer-group intimacy into the communal solidarity of barracks [ikivaga] or bachelor women’s house [isaka]. An equivalent context was to be found in the colonialism of 1960: Kinga living in barracks at migrant labour sites enjoyed good morale and a reputation for orderliness which some of their neighbours didn’t, while the morale of bachelor young women at home was especially high where the Christian churches had organized sodalities.<<[lit] Kinship and friendship generate different moral contexts and careers. Where the rule of agnatic kinship is carried to its logical limit, the self-enhancing moral strategy for ego lies in advancing his private standing within the group which co-opted him at birth. His world-enhancing strategy will be to advance the competitive standing of that group, broadly or narrowly defined, against others. But where the rule of friendship dominates the social life, ego will find his private advantage a function of popularity among peers. The same strategy will extend to his world, which he may seek to enhance in a fashion attractive to outsiders. Nyakyusa villages were much praised by early German visitors. They were clean and pleasing to the eye. On a holiday the princely court of a Kinga realm was given to the production of magnetic spectacle. Sowetan social organization ranges along a shift-dimension from Kinship to Friendship. No culture falls close to the extreme of the Kinship type, though Bena and Hehe norms place them within range. Nyakyusa, representing a balance, may be placed centrally. But Kinga

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so favour Friendship as a principle of association that, while they give nominal weight to kinship principles, their social system falls within the opposite range. It is not quite true to say a Kinga man who has lost his friends has no one to extend him personal support, for some Kinga (especially rulers) do build big polygynous families and rely on them for a firm identity in their communities and for personal support; but it is true that the typical Kinga man or woman would be bereft without friends. Even a close kinsman who is not within that category will hardly honour a serious claim. The cardinal moral strategies of Kinga take their orientation from the need to keep faith with peers.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER THREE

Gentle Warriors

Mask and face: the warrior role It is no deep puzzle that the fiercest of warriors may be gentle with friends, his children, and the women he trusts. Attitudes are as often struck as they are spontaneous; moods are by definition selfconscious. To be fierce, to be gentle—these are acts within the standard human repertoire, displays which can be evoked in children everywhere. What distinguishes the acts of ‘real life’ from those of ‘drama’ is hardly more than the presence or absence of theatrical conspiracy—the intersubjective situation. The dramaturgical dimension of experience is stronger in one person than another, stronger in the same person at one age or in one kind of predicament than another— and, being contagious, may be hard to predict. Critical clues can be left out of account when the problem is approached through individual psychology alone. Our puzzlement about human cruelty begins with a premise about our own natures. The puzzle fades away when the premise is brought in line with worldwide evidence. Usually a person responding to a manifest situation—one whose audience is contained within it—will not be aware of ‘putting on’ a mood and may rightly deny doing so. Yet a mood must about-face when a situation does, and in that moment of shifting ground we are apt to glimpse ourselves as actors: the moment when Officer goes off duty, Cook reappears as Siren, or Tycoon-head starts playing Daddy. In Good Company Monica Wilson described the Nyakyusa in predominantly gentle mood, and I shall so describe the Kinga. As ethnographers we saw some but not much quarreling, arrogance, or cruelty, and we have to trust our first-hand experience. It is simply foolish to suppose the presence in the field of one alien observer can turn a whole lifestyle into a charade for years on end. Invisible ethnographers would have found more but only more of the same. In any event, in traditional

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times the age-village with its ethic of civility among males had a hardcore rationale. In the absence of politically accessible kinship solidarity, these compact bachelor cohorts, closely grouped about the court village, gave a Nyakyusa chief his fighting strength. The centrepiece of the communal rituals, the celebrated though puzzling Coming Out [ubusoka], is best understood as a renewal ceremony dedicated to the same ends. The Kinga equivalent to this was an elaborate succession drama which I describe elsewhere. Nyakyusa also showed Monica Wilson their truculence in armed fighting at funerals, where the parties were kinship factions; they seem to have lacked the regular war games Kinga courts put on.<<[lit] A paradox in early accounts of Nyakyusaland by the German missionaries is the ease with which a peaceful traveller crossed boundaries, despite frequent warfare between chiefs. The most likely explanation is that warfare was properly taken up or ‘staged’ as action within a special frame, ritually sanctioned and set apart from ordinary affairs. It was not simply ‘declared’ but set to a given place and time. This was the case with Kinga warfare, even to the extent that we may describe their civilization as centred in armed camps but predominantly peaceful. The ‘switchable’ alternation of mood is graphically described by missionaries in accounts of their early contacts. Meeting first with a belligerent stance, the Germans watched it give way to confident hospitality once the peaceful intention of their visit was understood. But war is played for high stakes. When competition is strong, it is a people with a chronically high level of pugnacity which will survive. In social anthropology the celebrated case is that of the Nuer and Dinka in the Sudan: one lesson seems to be that bold and braggart warriors will always outnumber and outfight more serene pastoralists in any actual engagement, whatever the reserve numbers of the two sides might suggest.>>[lit] Until a proper phenomenology of primitive war has been written we are left to form our ideas from less systematic impressions as to the variety of war cultures men have devised. The contribution of a single case is small, but in the limited state of our knowledge I think each new one should be carefully presented. In what sense are the Nuer a truculent people (for they are so described) and the Nyakyusa not? When does the mask, chronically worn in the doing of savage deeds, become the face? We look to deep ethnographies to validate judgement on such questions; but though the Nuer and Nyakyusa are among the best-reported peoples of Eastern Africa we know less of them than would be wanted. This argues for psychological fieldwork, of

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course, but not of the kind that doesn’t know a face from a mask, person from persona. The studies of the Kinga I mean to report here do not deal directly and extensively with war, its institutional structures and its event-history, but are concerned with character. The portrait I can give of warfare before the Germans is meant to sensitize a reader to the hard (and perhaps some softer) facets of Kinga male existence— it is mainly male character values the military dimension will expose. How far do litigants really demand justice and how far satisfaction? How far does ego want his own moves to be affected by sympathetic understanding of a fellow creature’s plight? and if that creature be a peer, a child, a woman? How far in this or that situation will ego feel his human condition enhanced or degraded by showing explicit consideration for others? If we knew how effectively the ritual-ceremonial trappings of war protected the man’s face from the mask he wore in games of war and in war itself...? Questions of that order are essential to any full study of Kinga character and culture. They relate to that psychological study of institutions without which the study of Motivation and the study of Society will forever remain two academic islands. In this chapter I offer a review of the ethnography a reader should have in hand before attacking the problem of bellicosity as a feature of protostate politics in the Livingstone mountains. In a recent article (Park 1994b) I’ve offered an extended discussion of Kinga warfare considered as high theatre. Elsewhere (Park 1990a) I have reported an episode of shattering violence which occurred in German times in connection with the so-called Maji-Maji Uprising, when the princely courts were suddenly in eclipse, and all the theatrical framing of the Kinga medieval dispensation dropped away. In the present discussion I simply ask the reader to consider as a matter of fact that Kinga could massacre Kinga in quite brutal fashion but in the times of their free tradition didn’t do so. That is what makes the metaphor of ‘theatre’ essential here.<<[lit]

Histrionic warfare One point which emerges from a comparison of Nyakyusa or Kinga with the faraway but especially interesting Nuer of the Sudan concerns the subjective test of heroism. For each of these peoples the preferred arena was battle with one’s close neighbours not a distant enemy or alien people. But Nuer were expanding at the expense of a (perceived) alien people with equivalent or even superior

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technology. If facts sometimes speak for themselves this seems to say the Nuer get higher marks for pugnacity than Hehe, the Sowetan contenders. Kinga and Nyakyusa expansions by contrast to Hehe were hegemonic invasions, intrusive colonizations, backed by a show of superiority at arms but culminating in co-optation. Aidan Southall (1954) reported in detail on such a process of political expansion by Nilotic speakers, the Alur, which continued unabated during his fieldwork. Ideally, whole settlements would be taken under the wing of a politically talented man styling himself as chief or prince, and in short order take on the cultural identity of their new host.<<[lit] The structure of a Nyakyusa realm bears witness to the power-building process: only the royal village is ruled by hereditary right, the other villages of a princely realm being ruled by commoners who must be able to claim no hereditary privilege. Kinga realms had a similar structure except that all local rulers were or claimed to be ex-royal Sanga “sent out to rule” some generations ago by the prince of the realm. In both cases fighting could well occur within the princedom as local rulers vied for influence. But blood-feuds were not a feature, and an appellate system existed to mediate dispute settlement. The summit of the war pattern was the armed rivalry of princes. The prize was not usually territory so much as cattle or women in token numbers. Nyakyusa commoners explicitly call their rulers an intrusive set of lineages who brought the first cattle and fire, symbol of authority, from Kingaland. Cattle and the transforming fire of the smith are presumably as old as the Iron Age in this part of the Rift Valley (early in the Christian era) but the transition this myth is likely to concern is the onset of the Later Iron Age (say, 1400 a.d.). Kinga legends make an equally explicit distinction between the intrusive Sanga ruler and autochthonous lineages, cowed by the superior culture and technical mastery of the newcomers. Part of the cultural baggage which the intruders brought was evidently a war pattern with which they were able to set themselves up in business.<<[lit] Following is an account of the Nyakyusa-Ngonde style of battle, as witnessed by Rev. D. R. MacKenzie probably around 1900 in the Ngonde area. The account conforms in essentials to the retrospective accounts I was given by Kinga elders, making allowances for the British missionary’s special narrative style. Obviously, war patterns will tend to be standard for a region, since they won’t stabilize until they are. The fighting began when the opposing forces came within a spear’s throw of one another. Here and there a great hero stood out

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to hurl insulting language at the enemy, challenging them to “come on,” and be scattered by his single arm. When the fighting became close, stabbing took the place of throwing, and if a very few were killed on either side, the losing side retired. But only for a short distance; for a hero stood out, and called the others to rally round him, and a few desperate men would drive back the enemy. And so the battle swayed to and fro, until one chief considered that his men had had enough, and made his submission; or perhaps the fight was renewed the next day when the tired men had rested. (MacKenzie 1925: 171-2.) War horns and whistles were being sounded all the while on both sides, and medicine vessels advanced and retired, whose relative powers were thought to control the bravery with which men found they could fight. MacKenzie found his people shocked by reports of the casualty rate in European wars, and their fathers must have been equally shocked by news of the mutual slaughter of Hehe and Sangu warriors in confrontations like the one Elton happened to witness in 1877, only a day’s walk to the north. The moral strategy behind the histrionic style of battle favoured by Nyakyusa-Ngonde and Kinga princes was the pressing of claims to precedence among royal siblings. A prince’s subjects shared in his prestige and to some degree his motives, as well as in the royal largesse which must follow a victory. Princely rivalry is confirmed for Nyakyusaland by at least one early observer (Merensky 1894: 264), although we don’t know just how overlordship was expressed as between ‘brother’ princes, or whether a pyramidal order of any sort might emerge and stand for a time against the radically decentralizing tendencies of the political system. We know that in late precontact times what we call Nyakyusaland fell into various ethnic spheres, each internally segmented into large or small princedoms. The war pattern centred in political rivalries internal to a given ethnic sphere; but we know very little about the natural history of the military arena so formed. In Kinga political theory there should be four realms only; and war within a realm was understood to constitute rebellion if the prince was involved. The purpose of a petty ruler in leading a rebellion would not be apprehended as separation but assumption of the princely mantle. Kinga realms, as territorial realities, had to this extent been sacralized. It is not clear the Nyakyusa constitution had evolved so far; and I have elsewhere argued that Kinga had constitutions for all seasons—all the players weren’t always going by the latest rules. Since the Western realm was openly, and the Eastern covertly, in schism at Contact, we have to suppose Kinga theory would have

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been adapted to new circumstance if either schism were eventually conceded as permanent. This is what the theory of just four realms, promulgated by the High Prince at Ukwama, served to resist. The act of legitimation would have been taking a new prince into the summit group and reconstructing a genealogy of some fourteen generations showing him to be a collateral descendant of the Founder. As between princes, rank order was expressed in ritual procedures and through nominal tribute—a few goats sent “from time to time”—rendered through priestly officials. As to the priests, their protean calling made them free of boundaries, unless in the very heart of battle, even while their local loyalties were the firmest of any men’s. While in the nature of the case we can’t know how stable the rank-ordering of princely offices may have been, we have abundant evidence that genealogical right was supposed to establish military might, not the other way round. However independent the actual behaviour of local rulers, the constitution they operated within afforded a more coherent ideal structure than the one Nyakyusa knew. How much real time was devoted to war? Tunginiye, the Kinga historian, was sure that war had been restricted to the dry season, the half-year beginning in May. The rituals associated with sacrifice at Lubaga would likely occupy six weeks or more of this time, during which any hostilities must be suspended. A preparatory rallying of forces through war-games at the courts, combined with the launching of young men’s cattle raids on distant (culturally alien) targets, would presumably fill the time to midsummer. Wars were not fought to any calendrical schedule, of course—even major ritual occasions were unfixed, following only the perennial rhythms of weather, vegetable growth or decay, and presentiments of doom. Intermittently throughout the nineteenth century there were serious incursions of marauders (Ngoni and Hehe) resorting to barbarous techniques of warfare; and there were punitive raids by Sangu, who would follow the ridges into highland strongholds by night and attack in the morning—an un-Kinga practice. These conditions of external threat evidently would have strengthened the hand of a Sanga prince as warlord, collector of revenue, and promissory protector. When the pax arrived about 1900 the Sanga expansion hadn’t quite reached the Magoma settlements on the western marches, where a handful of Sangu visitors were in fact in process of setting themselves up in chiefly style, while far to the south the native population of a promising new Sanga province weren’t quite ready to identify as Kinga. Under the Native Authority set up in 1926-7, Kinga acquired the one and lost the other. Many are the hero tales of men

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and events on both these fronts. But the borders of Kingaland in its final period (1926-1961) served the convenience of the District Office well. Local ethnic alignments were served less well, but the pax had brought in a new game. Not every Kinga prince was prepared to do battle in person. The commander’s regalia could be worn by a distinguished commoner hero—a general officer. The heroes who stood forth in battle could be ambitious commoners, princelings, or even mercenary adventurers whose reputations were calculated to shake an enemy’s courage. The ritual preparations for fighting were intricate, and projects were always subject to being muffled by unfavourable divination, whether the enterprise at hand was an anonymous raid on a distant community, aimed at taking cattle without bloodshed, or formal battle. In the latter case the real issue was usually princely rivalry—the need to exact a concession of rank, or to establish one’s power to refuse— although the manifest quarrel might be over possession of boundary lands. In any case the engagement was unlikely to be more than a oneor two-day affair, long and carefully prepared but quickly disengaged once blood was shed. Battle was in effect a form of divination on the grand scale: whereas on the surface the issue must be decided by the superior dash, skill with shield and spear, and endurance of the one side, still the blame for defeat would be laid in the end to the power of the victor’s medicines, and a sign of such disequilibrating power—an adverse turn—was quick to be read even in the thick of battle. It would be hard to design a better system for cutting losses. But at the same time, since everyone didn’t always play by the same rules, the dramatic element was high. The style of warfare was not cautious. Kinga courage leaned toward the foolhardy, as though men required the histrionics of boasting and bravado to put them on their mettle. The lifestyle of boys and youths was such as to generate admiration for the hero figure we glimpse in Mackenzie’s account. Games and adventures among the goatherds were patterned on the battle-games and raiding sorties of older brothers at court. In the stick fights boys would arrange in the bush, cudgeling was forbidden. The sticks were thrown spinning, aimed at most to break a leg. From accounts, I surmise that the aim was generally wild enough that a bad wound or death need not seriously inculpate the flinger; and that supposition suits the picture I was given of relations among boys from neighbouring hamlets: all were on a first-name basis, and the level of ambivalence was generally under control.

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The continued bachelor status of actual warriors would have contributed to their reckless bent both in the formal war games and in battle; and a special feature of barracks life for the Kinga (as with age-village life for the Nyakyusa-Ngonde) was the personal intimacy enjoyed by fighting mates as individuals. Particularly in the British version of current-and-recent Western culture, we know a parallel in boarding schools and university men’s residences. But there can be only limited comparison to Western barracks life as such—Kinga and Nyakyusa youth culture stressed self-government and generated its own lively ceremonial life. The Bena court school differed in respect to sexual orientation and achieved its integrative ends in its own way (Culwicks 1935) but shared the regional pattern of educating and resocializing youth to the political culture of a court claiming more-than-local authority. Each of these systems of schooling is matched to its own gender and career patterns. For Kinga this dimension of the culture informs in a special way the absence of close family living for children, and the substitution of peer intimacy.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER FOUR

Imagination

Creativity is infectious. Art begets art. The springs of our creativity are deeply personal, individual, close to the springs of vision itself. But the sound of catgut stretched between the nocks of an archer’s bow is not the sound of the ’cello, though their source in a narrow sense may be the same. To pursue the metaphor: any resonator which produces a pleasing sound through a fair musical register will be an intricate structure of coupled vibrating systems, having many degrees of freedom but operating nonetheless severely as an acoustical filter. The expressive culture a child finds in the world acts like a filtering resonator, selectively deadening or giving life to elements of a raw or natural style of action, so that the persona which eventually forms will belong to an individual in a cultural setting— you are alone among your fellows, perhaps, but always a compound of ego and experience. In a special way and in an important degree, Kinga culture evoked a style and demeanour we don’t usually associate with folk society: individualistic expression, creativity, spontaneity, reflexive awareness. Kinga have their conformists, conservatives, rigid keepers of routine, witch-finders, authoritarians. But such persons would not often or for long dominate the mood of a typical community—or so I felt in most groups I got to know. The people who became my special friends were open, communicative men of different ages, all of them imaginative and entertaining. Looking back, I recognize I sought out such individuals as friends and felt most comfortable with them. Granted that I must be at pains not to make my friends stand for everyone, they were not eccentrics. Through an unmatched set of individuals who participate in it, even a stranger can gain a fair sense for the mainstream. Personal differences over a considerable range are to be taken for granted in any society and don’t detract from the characteristic differences between one culture and another.

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Cultures weren’t well conceived in the culture-and-personality literature of a generation ago. They were pictured as expressions of the typical or modal personality found in a defined population. That idea derived from the notion that cultures were ‘internalized’ phenomena located inside their exemplars. This is rather like saying that its special timbre is ‘internalized’ in a cello: the statement is not so much wrong as out of focus. Culture like music is sui generis. As the body of the cello forms a hard surround for the air set in vibration by bow and string, and the broader surround of a still room is wanted to translate the vibrations into music; and as in fact there must be a sense of change, sequence, and aesthetic expectation created in an audience before music is realized; so it is with culture and the individual mind. Only those personal vibrations to which your particular culture can give resonance are truly expressible. A culture, being intersubjective, is identical with no mental phenomenon, though it may partly lend itself to description in psychological terms. The reason for looking to art in the study of a microculture is not simply that the art is there and may interest readers who especially value aesthetic productions but that art provides that ‘hard surround’ by which the vibration of a style can be amplified and established as an element of the air a people shares. Consider the centrepiece and prime vehicle of Kinga expressive culture, dance. Before a dance can have its occasion at court, and so come to exist as more than mental imagery, a vast social enthusiasm must be generated. Preparations will be under way for days in advance. Beer will be brewed, pigment processed and brought in, regalia readied, hair fancy-dressed, instruments repaired and tuned, expectations raised above the humdrum. Individual projects of quite varied kinds will be adjusted to dovetail with the collective plan. Unless there are moments of high aesthetic achievement—star minstrels emerging bigger than life, putting new and memorable verses to old tunes—when the dance does get under way it won’t come together as an integral phenomenon, something in the realm of art worth the heightened expectations under which it was prepared. During the long generation of the colonial hegemony the “pagan” dance, condemned out of hand by missions and churches, finally even dismissed by Kinga sophisticates as frivolity, languished away. The institution lost resonance. All that did remain of dance in 1960 to give cultural reality to the old ideal were the seeds from which the court institution can be supposed to have sprung: the dance traditions of children, surviving everywhere, and of the adult bush culture where it stood free of mission influence. The spirit of dance was distinctly alive, I can report,

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at such occasions: exuberant, joyous, and gender-equal. The energy level was a cut and more above the simpler drum-dancing I observed elsewhere in East Africa: the occasion seemed to have more special meaning—a true celebration not mere entertainment. More than these impressions I can’t report from observation, but I’d cherish the chance to be back there, dancing with ankle bells by torch and moonlight in a high valley transformed by night. I had to depend on the memories of informants and their readiness to paint word-pictures for me—these supplemented by a few documentary references—for a reconstruction of courtly dancing as it was done in its proper time. We do know that excellence in the dance was honoured only less than conspicuous proficiency in war. These two were the cardinal arts. The psychological impact of Kinga expressive culture can be brought under the rubric of primary creativity, which with Abraham Maslow we may relate rather to cognitive than conative processes. In common-sense terms this means intuitively creative responses to life situations, falling into an episodic rather than a programmatic pattern over time. Concretely, “primary” just indicates a tendency toward a transitory and fragmentary product. For Kinga we have to deal with music and verbal art almost exclusively, and to-us anonymous artists. It would take a systematic project to collect a corpus of Kinga songs, tales, and skits; the examples I was able to record were, except for the tales, improvisations, since that is the usual style of a Kinga performance. Within the frame of its genre, any Kinga performance or composition would be measured by its audience against an established aesthetic standard, as are works of art in any society: we have only to think of the rather debased form of taletelling which does survive in our own culture—passing on jokes. Some have and some lack the talent. The Kinga material I have strikes me as being of high quality—it is high enough that I predicate creativity as a major attribute of the culture. Still I think ‘primary creativity’ is most apt, since the Kinga artist did not tend to make a cultural object of his own work or of another’s. A good tune is quickly picked up and adapted to new verbal uses; ideas and phrases also soon become public property—the standard conditions for the emergence of folksong are there. But works as such do not become frozen in the way, for example, that a memorable Toda song will do. Perhaps the art of creation has more value to Kinga than the art created. That would help to explain the absence of notable graphic art or sculpture in their inventory, though I hasten to say they are not ‘performance artists’ in our just-now fashionable sense.<<[lit]

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Much of Kinga verbal art had its proper setting in the evening, whether indoors or by an open fire, among intimates. That universal setting of the myth or folktale, the family hearth, did exist, since children from time to time would gather in the house of a grandmother for a night, though a parents’ house was never open to such slumber parties. But the quintessentially Kinga setting was the bachelor house where young maidens or young men entertained one another with their wits and with games of veiled meanings. If the minstreldancer at court was virtually a professional entertainer, apt to be loved and rewarded by royal decree like a hero in war after a fine performance, the minstrel’s formative training in wit and the art of holding an audience would have been at home with his special friends. That being at home was being with friends not family is an essential clue for understanding the culture. The same spontaneity fostered by young men was flourishing in 1960 among the gregarious maidens of the several Christian sodalities, and the pattern was evidently no recent borrowing. The ebullient good humour of these clubs bespeaks a bachelor lifestyle in which peer network participation is featured in mixing work and play. Conduct is intuitively sanctioned on the level of manners and symbolic reciprocity rather than being held to the hard standards of right and obligation which characterize the producing-and-consuming domestic unit of most societies. The longer bachelorhood of men (more than two decades past puberty as compared to about one for women) presumably accounts in some measure for their dominant part in the verbal and musical arts in public fora; but the revolution of male fantasies around hunting, games of conflict, and the exploits of raiding and warfare must have the most credit. The masculine is the bolder gender in such a society if not the braver; but I found girls more apt to be intellectually precocious. My personal candidate for a prize in the art of storytelling was an elevenyear-old girl who, for lack of brothers, was a goatherd and lived the tomboy’s life. The spaces over which a herd of Kinga goats will range are wide. The dangers there are real. But the experience, now alone and now with a few friends, can give wings to a child’s imagination. What the extended bachelor phase of the life-cycle seems to allow for Kinga is that an expressive freedom, at home in a largely unrepressed childhood, will survive into later stages of life. Compared to the Nyakyusa, Kinga men enjoy loose networks of peer intimacy. Nyakyusa age-villages recruit young boys prescriptively from all over a realm (chiefdom), the criteria being simply physical maturity and accomplishment. But having been recruited in that

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virtually random fashion, the same group will remain together, barring defections and replacements, a steadfast fraternity to death. Kinga residential patterns were always more shifting. Even for those who took up a full career at the princely court of their realm, the solidary barracks group would be seasonally dispersed when men’s work was wanted in the fields. Recruitment and attrition were continuous processes, and the peer group’s exclusiveness was compromised in a host of ways. No man was tethered. Only small contingents normally stayed together when it was time to marry and settle down to farming. Hence Kinga peer relations can be said to have a comparatively transitory and apolitical (non-communal) basis. Is unpredictability a spur to the human imagination? That is a vague formulation but probably sound. One connection particularly worth exploring with Kinga materials is that between stress-seeking—courting danger— and creativity. There is a firm association of youth with conviviality, elderhood with conservatism, self-containment, and querulousness. All elders are not hide-bound. Tunginiye was a veritable sprite at sixty. Not all youths are extraverted. But in principle the association holds, and a corollary is that a man’s marriage is a major turning-point, marking the start of his withdrawal from male conviviality for increasing devotion to heterosexual duties and heavy economic responsibility. The deep associations which seem to fit the surface facts are these: Youth: Peer sexuality ~

Creativity

~

Transitory ties

Age: Cross sexuality ~ Accountability ~ Permanent ties With appropriate allowances, particularly for the greater constancy of maidens living together before marriage, the same equations apply for women. Marriage will ordinarily mean a slow succession of childbirths and absorption in the care of infants, in gardening, and in food preparation. Withdrawal from the particular friends and haunts of bachelor days may be virtually complete, whereas for men it will usually not be so. Once a pregnancy is established, a man is not expected to require sexual congress with his wife, nor she with him, until the child is weaned some four years later. He will take most of his food at home but spend a good deal of time at one of the men’s houses where he has entrée. What he has withdrawn from, with his passage into the married state, is not the recreational company of his peers or even the pleasure of sensual contact with them but the calling of adventurer: the stress-seeking lifestyle of youth and its extension in the bachelor phase of adulthood.

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In my model life-cycle for Kinga men there is a ‘post-creative’ phase. It comes after withdrawal to marriage and the initial establishment of a household, which is likely to evoke a burst of constructive energy. I suppose the end of youth, its style and its mood, used to come gradually in the old culture, so that the mature style of the householder would be prefigured in the more settled habits of the aging bachelor-warrior. This was so in 1960, when marriages were entered earlier but migrant labour continued, with only short visits home, up to the same age at which a man in the old culture would have married—what we regard as middle age and they as maturity. This is the time of life when physical ailments begin to feature increasingly in a man’s experience as well. His perspective darkens: how can he trust his friends when they seem envious of him? Men notice his absence from the convivial life of the men’s house and the occasional beer parties at places he used to frequent; it is known that attempts have been made to poison him. This picture of the paranoid elder is a prime target of lampooning by youths who have not yet felt the touch of suspicion; and it is institutionalized in “the Kinga method of drinking beer” (which young men will proudly display)—a supposed technique for filtering out poisons. The beer must be poured by a companion in a thin stream from a height and received directly in the hands, cupped to the mouth. Any suspicious lump can then be splashed to the ground. You would think, from the good spirits with which the “Kinga method” is demonstrated, that it never could be used in earnest. It is in fact a typical, doubleedged Kinga joke. Youth and age will present a phase contrast in any human society. Human social life produces an accumulation of unrequited emotional claims, dimly glossed affronts, and rankling disappointments. We may call this accumulation the neurotic load of the community. Freud in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) has perhaps led us into thinking only of a sort of anticulture rooted in a universal human predicament. But the idea of the neurotic load belongs to a cultural rather than an individual psychology. Discontent is recessive, unformulated, intersubjective; it is precisely correlative to local values—it is the small print in the social contract of one human community. Creative arts, particularly the satirical wit Kinga artists make their specialty, can provide a refractive awareness of the fallibility of human ideals, dissipating neurotic load. In the Kinga life-cycle creativity and the psychic freedom which stress-seeking and art help to provide are characteristics of an extended youth. Neurotic load accumulates almost unfelt in the culture of youth but weighs upon the

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community of older men, leading to individual phantasies of witchcraft or murderous intent which are beyond the exorcism of art. A dour judgement seems to emerge: the deepest intention of the arts among Kinga is holding back the knives of time. I can’t fault that intention, though. It is the Kinga maiden not the older woman with a child on her back whom I and the German missionaries before me heard singing for joy through the fields at harvest time. In the theatre of everyday life, I suppose the art of song is spontaneous and belongs to youth. The mirrors of art and fame are distinct and possibly of opposite nature. In the satirical skit or song men see their folly for what it is: art holds a mirror to life. But in the bravado of the hero men see not what they are, only what in the abeyance of worldly considerations they would be: they see their folly proved virtue. Aesthetic distance is still there, since they admire the hero with a love compounded of envy, what in its sociological aspect is charisma. But instead of being the more content with themselves and their failings, under the spell of fame men are prone to renounce the real as mundane and to lust for a transcendent style of being which may have little correspondence with the persona an observer would call theirs. As the mirror of art makes ideal forms of being seem attainable, so does the mirror of fame; but where the one will produce contentment the other breeds restlessness. The prince who first made an artist a hero by awarding a minstrel the hand of a royal princess was a canny judge of his options. In a careful study of contemporary, stratified society Stanley Coopersmith found an “independent and creative” personality associated with high self-esteem. Owning lower anxiety and higher skills than their fellows, creative persons (as he uses the term) would “gravitate to positions of influence and authority.” More than most small, preliterate peoples, the Kinga had created a society favouring social mobility. The social structure itself favoured an individualistic ethic, and internal turbulence leavened the mix of meanings against which any actor would have to project his own deeds. Art conspires to enrich an ethic of individualism insofar as art creates an authentic illusion (as Sartre might have it?) of a world that can be based in human freedom. I can’t be sure how effective this illusion remained the morning after an all-night dance, or how the aging casualties of war might have looked back on its heroics, but it is not incorrect to say that wars were staged in the same sense dances were, and that the illusion of freedom—sensing no drag on self by others even in the thick of action—was never long left to languish for want of an impresario. <<[lit]

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TWINS SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER FIVE

Ambisexuality

Kinga erotic orientations are better described as ambisexual than bisexual, as the more usual term can imply that the two sexes enjoy parity as objects of a male or female subject’s desire. The situation for Kinga is rather that two distinct styles of erotic life are open to a person of either gender and are appropriate to different situations, not always elective. Though some allusions to the pattern have been made, here are the main features in brief: Men enjoy normatively non-possessive relations with peers, steadily before marriage and situationally afterward. Women enjoy normatively loyal but nonexclusive or at least non-possessive relations with peers, on a steady basis, before marriage but turn then to a heterosexual adjustment in which the mother-infant relation rather than the wife-husband tie is thought to offer fulfilment. A woman’s heterosexual adjustment, in the narrow erotic sense, was ethically coloured by labiotomy and the teachings which accompanied the operation. This was at least in the literal sense traumatic, the centrepiece of a fairly elaborate set of initiation ceremonies staged by the women of a community to honour a girl’s adolescence. The Kinga operation was always done well after menarche, most often in a girl’s late teens. Labiotomies were formerly widespread in the Sowetan region and associated (as elsewhere male circumcision generally is) with belief in the special dignity of mature members of the sex. The second-hand information I have on Kinga practice suggests it was very like that of the riverine Bena, reported in detail by the Culwicks in Ubena, except in respect of the subject’s age. Removing the labia minora was supposed to facilitate male penetration. Whether it was expected to facilitate male arousal as well, by beautifying the vulva, I don’t know; but since maidenly notions of beauty prompt girls to keep their pubes plucked, I take it that a paedophilic thema runs below this surface—what, if Dr. Freud had been

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an Englishman, I suppose we should be calling a Peter Pan complex. At the psychological level the most probable immediate meaning of the rite is, “It is good that I sacrifice (a vital part of) myself for my (yet unknown) partner in procreation.” The operation has no direct meaning for men, who know little or nothing of it.<<[lit] For the Bena, who performed the operation on little girls, the meaning would presumably have been stronger on submissiveness; and that of course was also a theme of the Kinga. All considered, we can still say for the Kinga that the rite was practised by women on girls, not by women on women, since the rite itself marked the passage from girlhood to bachelor adult status and was administered by parous women. The difference is that for Bena the subject was a child—for Kinga she must be physically full-grown only socially still in her minority. How deeply cut is the female psyche? Here is a custom the Kinga share with peoples of the larger region who haven’t institutionalized ambisexuality. (But it is true for the riverine Bena, the one case where we have an adequate account, that children approaching adolescence move away from the parental home to peer residences.) In the absence of proper eye-witness accounts it is difficult to know how Kinga teachings were suited to their special context. A girl learned well that women generally discount the erotic potential of the organs they cut away, and that (with compensating energy) they prize the clitoris instead. Girls’ initiations were manifestly women’s affairs—a good part of the point seems to have been the mystification of men, and the anthropologist fell unhappily into that category. Any search for meaning should be guided by the mood of the institution, which throughout the region is one of celebration not sexual alienation. Kinga initiations (virtually lacking for males) were not tunnels to marriage. They were schools more than they were rites of passage. The bachelor life might continue, at least for women in the court culture, as long again as the years of girlhood which were past. A second powerful normative influence on a woman’s heterosexual adjustment was a perceptual set or preconception as to the nature of coital relations which must be rare if not unprecedented in ethnographic annals. Kinga men profess to believe that a woman needs a great number of successive acts of copulation to be sensually satisfied and so to conceive. Consistent with this, my older informants insisted that only a man who could mount a wife on demand seven times in a single night could claim exclusive rights to her sexual favours. I couldn’t joke my interlocutors out of their statements. A woman who demanded and didn’t get her full measure might claim dire

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frustration and must be morally free to take a lover should her husband continue to stint her. I’m disinclined to be puzzled about the sexual gymnastics entailed. I assume the rule is used by a woman only at need, and the need would be for a pregnancy. So an infertile or impotent man may be obliged to tolerate his wife taking a lover, but can do so without losing face, citing the fanciful number seven. But women do teach that only multiple acts of coition will produce pregnancy; and after the loss or weaning of a child, especially where her situation is aggravated by the husband’s prolonged absence (in 1960 at migrant labour), a woman craving a child might bend other rules using this one. The Myth of Seven Mountings does have a special fit to social reality. The sexual arithmetic is only unbelievable if you make the assumptions I do about ovulation and the prostate gland. But psychologically the beliefs Kinga claim to hold about coital gratification in women and potency in men translate into limiting values. By holding up an expansio ad absurdum as an attractive model for both man and woman, you leave the typical couple to negotiate their contract on a basis of intuitive reciprocity. In effect, when that fails they have sanction for disengagement. Setting aside physical handicaps, the limiting case is that of a wife happy only when carrying or nursing an infant, but with a husband emotionally unable to extend his repertoire to include regular heterosexual relations. Sex in such a marriage could be reduced to a frantic month or two of intensive sex relations earnestly devoted to conceiving a child, followed by a five-year hiatus. At the marriage bed the woman has been dealt the better cards. However, there follows an extended period of sexual neutralization of the marriage, and here the man’s lot is by far the freer. A woman carries the main burden of steady work in the fields and the whole burden of infant care while her husband returns to the world of men. But how many actual marriages would closely approach this limiting type? I think some of the logic of the extreme case is felt within the typical marriage, however independently couples may make their intuitive contracts. But it is also true that in 1960 many established couples seemed devoted, spent idle hours together without friction, and had found (Christian) norms of monogamous householding not just acceptable but quite to their liking. Men were marrying earlier in 1960 than they had done in the old court culture, but as they typically would spend most of their first decade and a good part of their second at labour outside Kingaland, the transition to housekeeping norms was gradual for them. Their perspectives on moral values were

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affected by the cosmopolitan experience of wage labour. In the bush culture of 1890, which had not quite disappeared in 1960, the tiny marital domicile had contained no public space at all—it was a place for dyadic withdrawal. Informants always mentioned a quaint custom, at which they would smile: the little doorway required crawling in, and this a man would always do backward, not for fear of attack but to keep from exposing himself provocatively. For women, who wore backaprons, the problem didn’t appear, but a man ought to care enough to demonstrate his commitment to marriage. I take the evidence to show that couples have always found their own balance in sexual matters, including the degree of their involvement with family and with peers. The step from pagan to Christian was never a wrenching one for Kinga, and seemed not to call for a radical change in self-image. Kinga are partial to lore about themselves as rather special among their neighbours but prize their adaptability as well. Is there an ambisexual ethos? I mean by this a style of civility and sociality which owes its quality to the heightened probability that random same-sex encounters might generate mutual attraction. Kinga studies bear upon the question in a special way. It is true that both older men and older women greet peers at a chance meeting with elaborate respect; and discretion is characteristic of Kinga at any age. But the ethical principles that seem to me fundamental are most evident in the homophilic peer relations of maidens and of young men: they are easy-going, episodic though communicative, and non-possessive. Oblique jealousy (a young man resenting his friend’s visiting a maiden, or the like) seems not to be part of the Kinga way. That is one reason for my setting aside the idea of “bisexuality” in this discussion—the two modalities of sexual love do not merge in envy. For an observer who may have come to expect that human sexuality, building on its own insecurities, is bound to be possessive, Kinga evidence is contrary. Hehe, reckoning pederasty as a major crime, seem to have betrayed repressed sexual feelings for the male victims of their marauding wars, whom they would impale like scarecrows on stakes rammed up the anus. Methinks they protested much too much. Kinga were horrified and thought worse of the Hehe [Avajinga] than of the sheerly opportunistic Ngoni [Avapoma]. Colonel Nigmann’s frank and reasoned admiration for the Hehe is important evidence. But it was that of a soldier, formulated after the pax was well established. In Edgerton’s comparative psychological studies Hehe men emerge as impulsively aggressive, hypersensitive to insult and argumentative, relatively constrained in sexual matters, and prone to secretiveness.

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Uncontrolled furies and intense suspicions characterized one of his communities, a less constrained form of truculence the other. In the traits which Edgerton finds pronounced and distinctive for Hehe, their profile stands directly in contrast to Kinga character norms, and I believe also to Nyakyusa norms, as these are to be judged from missionary and ethnographic accounts. The general similarity of Kinga and Nyakyusa erotic orientations, and their contrast to Hehe sexuality, which is notable for an almost compulsive emphasis on selfcontrol, sexual sin, and concealment, might be thought to call for a depth-psychological diagnosis. Sexual repression and heightened aggressiveness are linked, while permissiveness (the provision of ready and legitimate sexual outlets through peer relations) appears to leave the capacity for aggressive performance intact but less powerfully driven.<<[lit] Alternatively, the difference in levels of aggression may be conceptualized in terms of neurotic load. I use this phrase to make the point that cultures differ in respect to the anxiety load (or overload) the ordinary ego has to bear in the pursuit of an ordinary career. The relatively casual quality and openness of Kinga-Nyakyusa erotic orientations facilitates dissipation of the load, where the sexual constraints characteristic of Hehe culture favour accumulation. Taken in a strictly Freudian frame, this has the tail (institutions) wagging the dog (deep personality). I’m not sure any deterministic frame is appropriate, but it’s worth noting that Durkheim always faced his dog the other way. Hehe, Kinga, and Nyakyusa ego structures can as well be taken for creatures as sources of the distinct levels and forms of aggression these peoples display. Sex in Creation’s most versatile animal has such protean potential that no imaginable society could be both liveable and unrepressive. Our otherwise notable drives and proclivities have to be ranked well behind sex in this. But your sexuality is not hermetically sealed in your ego, what you know about it except from experience itself is little indeed. How often does the association of sex and aggression not derive in fact from experience? Kinga are apt to learn an easy, unaggressive approach to sex in relations with their peers. Their quiet approach to women in courtship can be seen to derive from this. For males, especially, this sexual style sets them apart from most of their neighbours. Does permissiveness in sex lower aggression levels? In my book, character—defined and sanctioned in a thousand ways in any human society—always represents a massive buffer between ego and experience. The typical level of overt aggression in everyday life must be a

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function of the interplay of ego-generated with evolved, institutional forces. And when an individual’s tentative persona confronts established character norms, the latter are likely to dominate. For an understanding of the Kinga case I think the point would be that the frequency of such confrontations in the course of everyday sexual traffic is low. Kinga culture calls for a good deal of formality in social relationships, but offers flexible, not hardened character norms. It is particularly through this fact that I would link sex and aggression in the traditional culture. If Kinga men appear, by comparison with other Sowetan peoples, to favour a laid-back character, I’d point not to high frequencies but low hassle in their sex lives. At the same time, any study of character which ignores the sexual dimension of life—the way the two main gender roles are turned toward and from one another, and the semantic worlds which inform the doing of sex—is incomplete. The two poles of Kinga culture, court and bush, teach separate principles for the organization of the intimate life. At the court the exaggerated heterosexuality of the prince stands apart from the norm, which is peer solidarity for bachelor men and bachelor maidens. In the bush, far from the men’s house of the nearest petty lord, the bachelors are youths not men, or they are daughters directly assisting their mothers not privileged maidens of the royal class, treated with avoidance and respect by men and youths. So in the bush, homophilia is assimilated to an extended childhood, in which one’s work responsibilities are to parents and only one’s play life is one’s own, but at court homophilia has the normative standing of an initial phase of adulthood. The deepest sanctioning force any human society possesses is its power to assign and position the red and green lights that control sexual traffic among its members. In microcultures like those of the Kinga and their neighbours everyone is pretty well agreed about what kinds of sexual act are strong or weak, praiseworthy or ridiculous, healthy or dangerous. That doesn’t mean Kinga all stay on track, it only means that they have a consensual cognitive map. Sex without ego-involvement is probably easy for shellfish. For humans sex almost always leads into intimate involvements with others, and so into some degree of dyadic withdrawal into a world with its own rules. In urban societies this usually means that a complex pattern of alternative sexual paths will evolve to supplement the highroad traffic. In the microcultures this kind of complexity is not to be expected. The Hehe taboo of homophilia effectively discourages its outward practice, even while attraction to peers no doubt remains a feature of the inner worlds of men or women. By giving a green light to

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homophilia, the Kinga might be thought to have run the danger of sidetracking heterosexual relations and the reproductive potential of their society. But when the evidence is weighed, that fear seems unfounded. Moral careers without marriage are no more popular with them than with their neighbours, only that a fulfilling period of bachelorhood comes first for both genders. Women effectively have the right to a pregnancy when they are ready, and the right to make alternative arrangements to conceive where husband is absent or unable. Before the pax and the lethal childhood diseases introduced by Europeans, prolonged and successful nursing of Kinga infants, uninterrupted by new pregnancies, appear to have compensated the putative population loss entailed in delaying a maiden’s marriage.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER SIX

Counterthemes to rank & seniority There was more than one way a Kinga man of rank might be reminded of his insecurity. Legitimacy has psychological depths, it is not a mere matter of rules but a function of political culture. Kinga have tales of the exercise of genuine countervailing power when an unpopular succession was prevented, but the main safeguards against overweaning power are not specifically political. The manifest cause for disquiet if you were a prince or local ruler was the knowledge of a secret rival among near kinsmen. It seems to have been rare that a prince’s right to rule was not challenged in some quarter. The commonest cause of irregularity in the line of succession was a regency, and this is because an effective regent was ruler for life, not just until the proper heir had reached his majority. There were no precedents for dethroning a strong ruler, though a weak one might be persuaded to step down. So long as he were not himself too weak to hold the throne, a regent’s own heir could soon be entrenched. Still, memories were long for by-passed lines, not only within the family of a potential claimant but among men with quiet grievances against the régime in power. There were three reasons why there were no ‘Shakespearian’ tyrants prepared to kill off such claimants: In the absence of a visible aristocratic class the possible claimants were legion. The anointing of a successor by an independent hieratic élite had to occur some weeks after the death of an incumbent, and this was an élite with an ear to public opinion. A pretender, in short, would have to prove himself the right successor not simply the heir under law. The only accepted way to kill off internal enemies was by witchcraft, which isn’t practical— the main vehicle is the random phenomenon we call disease, which nightflights and fiery projectiles can’t control. Kinga know poisons,

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but these are also impractical in politics. This is because, whereas a man who was seen to take power by witchcraft would be showing he had the right stuff, a man who resorted to poison would certainly not. It was standard practice at court that a royal taster try all the food and drink put before the prince, and only trusted persons had access to his kitchen. Such precautions, though pressed upon him by the priestly group, avanyivaha [great men, court élite], could be brushed aside by a strong young prince inclined to take a personal lead in warfare: risking his life directly, he would lean less to fantastic fears. But the same prince, aged a decade and grown soft to the manly arts through fitting devotion to beer and the needs of his harem, would find clouds of anxiety and suspicion settling upon him. Deaths among his offspring would be read as the depradations of a rival. Secret enemies were forever finding foreign medicines—even the priests’ best protective potion [ikivyoka] might be ineffective. Loss of a favourite wife or daughter could be doubly traumatic, suggesting hidden lines of conflict even within the royal enclosure. Little by little the princely establishment would become a stockaded sanctuary [ululindo], the business of government being carried on outside it by the group of great men. They, the avanyivaha, merited special trust for being commoners and ineligible for royal office. As the prince more and more secluded himself with his women, it was the great men, priests and commoner heroes with entrée to the royal enclosure, who expressed to the court and the realm the will of a kept ruler. In high office the pattern of withdrawing from the world with advancing age is dramatic; in the lives of ordinary men it is writ smaller but slave to the same logic. The very system of values which seems to have given youth an almost measureless stake in the world could produce alienation in later life.<<[lit] How far should this Kinga paradigm be considered a consequence of late marriage, particularly for men, in the court culture? There would be new forms of stress, partly from the need for a radical change in lifestyle, temporally in association with physical symptoms of failing health in later middle age. Beyond this there are technical and medical questions without answers. What is the effect of chronic drinking in this setting? (Millet beer seemed to me nutritious—the Kinga brew is rich in solids. But seasonal use of the fermented liquor or “cider” of bamboo may be a less wholesome, possibly pernicious substitute.) What disorders of the alimentary tract are common among older men, and what are the likely reasons? The information we’d need about alcohol and diet is not to be had, and the same holds for the whole subject of aging in such a setting under precontact conditions.

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What we have is the mute evidence of stress—unquantified but clearly not negligible—in the symptoms. In the cold light of common experience it is likely men were pushed to their physical limits in being kept at soldiering past forty, then sent out to a rigorous life in uncleared, socially untamed homesteading areas. The economics of maintaining such a bachelor soldiery can’t be worked out in technical detail, but a subsistence agricultural base can be strong only where the morale of the cultivators is the same. Kinga mounted small raids intermittently with rapine as object but they sent out no marauding armies across rich lands in the fashion of Ngoni, Hehe, or Sangu. Plunder was not a substitute for productive work. The Kinga war pattern was self-contained and expensive, requiring meat, relishes, and grain-based beers in lavish quantities in spite of the male population’s strongest element being (largely) withheld from the labour force. Here is a political economy which must have been hard pressed to maintain the community in the style to which it was committed. Much depended on the success of frontier colonizing settlements, which provided the external (bush) base of the court’s affluence. The new beginning which marriage and the grant of land and patronage would launch must have been the start of a rewarding as well as a stressful life. But Kinga could claim no exemption from the general rule that stress-seeking is easier on the young than the old. It would be misleading to describe the passage from youth to age as a radical revision of cognitive maps. At the centre is witchbelief, and in this the difference between young and old is in self-confidence not cosmology. Many older men shrug off cares as easily as ever; it is men who have lost that ability who are most inclined to talk with a paranoid tinge. Even then the manifest deviance from the robust norms of self-confidence and mutual trust among peers is not extreme. One might call the syndrome ‘extraversion betrayed’ (I haven’t as many friends as I thought). None of my informants offered wholesale accusations or showed comparable symptoms of irrationality. Given their universal etiology for illness they were prone to responding rationally to what they took to be clear evidence that some friend—some one friend— wanted them dead. After a good evening with friends of long standing, a man nearing home at night feels a sudden stab in the gut. For some days he undergoes periods of intense pain, which he survives. His world has grown more cramped. The witchcraft beliefs common to most of

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East Africa give the experience of such an attack a special story line. Where formal accusation is made, after divination, the victim’s initial crisis of self-confidence is narrowed from fear to focussed hostility. There is acting-out of a search for justice and signs of supernatural favour. Kinga of all ages shared this worldview before Christian ideology was brought in, and almost all continued to accept the same view afterward, at least where they or theirs were under stress. That princes themselves were not immune to the depradations of witches, having to fight off malice with malice, told everyone that mundane achievement was never secure, as even the powerful, the mystically armed, have their rivals and will finally be brought down. It is against this ethical background—the legitimation of projected blame—that we should view systems of authority under the princes. The most striking power conceded to a prince was that of ordering an execution. We have no roster of cases from the decades leading to 1890. Probably capital punishment was occasionally invoked for any of several types of offense. But in folk memory the main occasion for a public execution was the conviction of a witch, and one of the strongest claims a Sanga ruler had to acceptance by a bush community was the power of witch-finding—his readiness to confront mystical aggression in kind. So princely authority was in part a reflex of the currents of self-doubt and suspicion within the bush culture itself. A bush community’s concession of rank to a Sanga ruler getting established in the locality bears analogy to the picking of a scapegoat, though on the surface the two phenomena are contraries. Rank-concession in one aspect is recognition that the community, being unable to resolve its problems of internal conflict, requires the ritual intervention of outside agency. Henceforward the prince can be blamed for what goes wrong: he has claimed the power to prevent it. For Nyakyusa, Monica Wilson describes the countervailing power of the chief’s entourage, a power representing public opinion objectified in the mystical “breath of men” able to bring fever or paralysis on a chief who ignores current feeling. She cites testimony that before Europeans came (and buttressed chiefly authority) the people had more power than since. The priests at Lubaga, normally subject to the living Lwembe, had “the right and duty of admonishing” their Divine King if they found him in the wrong, and village headmen enjoyed the same relation to their chief.<<[lit] Kinga great men making up the entourage of a prince or local ruler were particularly apt to admonish him for stinginess but had the duty of correcting errant ways whenever popular discontent threatened to reduce his following in favour of a rival court. A ruler was taken

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from his own turf (the court) to the priests’ (the sacred grove) where he faced them alone, quite in the manner of a lone initiate in the bush school, perhaps even of the accused witch before his inquisition. In priestly memory, such sessions achieved high seriousness and never needed repetition. I could learn nothing from the rulers themselves. Where a prince’s following at court was secure his power over home domain and (less directly) realm was assured by a formidable policing arm. Internal sources of revenue included a marriage tax (about half the small traditional bridewealth), court fees and prestations, and ritual dues; revenue from subject domains included tribute and ritual dues from the royal garden, set apart and communally worked, which would be located at each lesser capital village; exterior sources of revenue were the irregular gains of raiding and warfare. To collect taxes and keep the peace in his home domain a prince would send a task force on tour from time to time, headed by great men of the court—conspicuously, priests. Such a force could settle land claims and other local disputes, provide ritual services including trials of innocence, and operate as information broker. For their services, the great men could expect good meat. Sanga politics was confrontational, gemeinschaftlich, and ceremonial. One function of the touring task force was the recruitment of ambitious youths from the peripheries to the barracks life at court. We are told that a young man must present himself ready to demonstrate battle skills and manly courage in a duel with an experienced fighter chosen by the prince. I have no close accounts of cases. A youth was attracted not drafted to service: there was no parental authority at home to have sent the young man, and no such authority was vested in his peers. A lad sought his fortune where he could best hope to find it, and unless the Sanga governor [untsagila] of his own area were ready to set up a bachelor house [ikivaga] and claim a domain of his own, the action would be elsewhere. Though population estimates from German times are fragmentary, they show that a charismatic kind of recruiting power could be achieved by a belligerent ruler with a flair for hospitality. The other side of this coin was that a prince without victories and feasts, unable to offer the resources of patronage to which his court was accustomed, could find half his people prepared to move on. This is an aspect of what I have elsewhere called the antipolitan ethos of the region: The antipolitan persuasion treats political loyalty as a suspension of disbelief, expressing dissent with an exit (1988: 161).

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The operation of a thriving military-ceremonial centre where, in strict economic terms, only a modest village ought to be must have put a strain on resources and organizing skills. Each of the courts seems to have depended on two effective élites, the great men [avanyivaha] and the royal women [avehe, ing’engele]—the wives, unmarried sisters, and daughters of the prince. Such women enjoyed a protective rank vis-à-vis ordinary men. Since the major economic tasks—food production and processing, brewing, the gathering of fuel and thatch, and housekeeping—for the court were left to women, the prima facie evidence is that their organization as a group matched that of the priestly élite. But if there were any feminist historians among the Kinga in 1960 I didn’t find them. What was the influence of the royal women on style and policy at a Sanga court? To listen to male lore you would think they fulfilled themselves by tilling the fields, brewing beer, grinding corn, bearing children, and submitting cheerfully to marriage by royal fiat. In cold fact this picture probably bears about the same resemblance to village realities that the scene on a typical Christmas card does to Christian lifestyles. We know little about women’s power. The virgin queen Kipole, who ruled the Central realm in early German times and is said (in current official retrospect) to have poisoned her father to please her mother and take the throne, remains a shadowy figure ignored or unrecognized by missionaries, administrators, and princely genealogists alike. I heard of her only through some lucky questioning. She was successfully deposed (on a retrospective charge of having resorted to poison) by the priests when her younger brother had come of age, but I don’t know what subsequently became of her and her peerwives. They would have stayed, I suppose, as harem to the young prince. Was Kipole’s truly a palace revolution or an ordinary regency? How many others, quite forgotten now, might such a figure stand for? As with men, women who were healthy and strong had a good chance at the good life. But an older or disabled widow unable to grow her own food could find herself thrown back on a fallible personal network. A man in similar conditions had, so to speak, his men’s club to support him. Was the sisterhood in fact its equal? It likely was, judging from the solidarity of women two generations after Contact. But in the full bush culture kinship not sisterhood was the widow’s safety net, and the best net anywhere was self-reliance. Looking beyond problems of government and its role-structure, the Kinga paradigm of age and alienation may be read as one more way the culture favoured youth. The extension of bachelorhood for both genders was not just an extension of youth but a kind of glorification

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of being young and sexually unattached. But for that what must a human community be willing to pay? I was moved to find Prince Mwalukisa himself, who had reigned in the Northern realm during German times, surviving in 1960 as a destitute old man without manifest tokens of rank. It is true that a more popular ruler might have fared better, but Mwalukisa by outliving most of his generation outlived his royal standing as well. I first saw him half naked, only his loins covered, carrying a great length of firewood on his head, womanfashion. He’d survived all his wives and had to care for himself at an age few men of the West, with all their advantages, ever reach. Historian Tunginiye in his sixties, having buried two wives and taken a third still young in her thirties, was keeping up with her in bodily energy and spirit; but not every September can put on May weather, and my spritely barefoot scholar wasn’t to live through his own October. Kinga have no secret formula for extending youth on the physical plane to match the scheme of values by which they try to live. Some old men were strikingly young for their years, but none took that for granted. The strongest counter-theme to respect for rank and seniority is probably the solid awareness that to be young and free of encumberment is to have a prize great men have lost. Most Kinga men in 1960 clung to the style and demeanour of youth [undume] for at least a decade longer than the males of other Sowetan cultures. It would be hard to argue that peer-anchored narcissism could have no bearing on that. Narcissus is at home in two seemingly opposite roles, which we may call Victim and Showoff. Kinga in the bachelor phase can usually balance the two masks, as it were, in one hand. When, rarely, the game of balance is lost, it may be because an individual has asked too much, whether of sympathy or patience, of peers. For a man the way out is wandering off, touching in at a far point in his network, or extending it. For women, in the bachelor phase or later, the network is more firmly bounded, and the winning strategy is always keeping the balance which signs her eventual accommodation. It is the men, after all, who need a political system.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER SEVEN

Republican nurture, lordly dominion If Kinga in 1960 were usually polite and submissive to constituted authority, they were not conspicuously so. It amused them to recall the elaborate protocols of subservience required of a (rustic) supplicant at court. A man who would bring his case before the Prince had to prostrate himself, uttering the placative greetings to greatness in a woman’s voice and running a gauntlet of humiliation at the hands of the court faithfuls. Kinga often use the Swahili word sultani for their princes, and German accounts show that the small local courts had equally adopted a military model of organization. In the widely accepted terms Morton Fried has defined, Kinga was an unstratified rank society, its “positions of valued status” being numbered. But just as surely, the Kinga ethos was egalitarian.<<[lit] How far is rank-concession a phenomenon of the psyche and how far is it of culture—a plain and simple rule of social grammar? Armed only with the conventional wisdom of learning theory we’d find it paradoxical that Kinga boys, growing up with their peers from the earliest years and circumventing parental authority with increasing success as adolescence approaches, would embrace a rank-ordering of their lives in adulthood. In 1890 the context was the barracks life at court, in 1960 the equally authoritarian tea, sisal, or wattle plantations. Are we to suppose that boys could be so glutted with freedom in growing up that they are glad to compromise it when they reach adulthood? The trouble is that our favoured models of socialization emphasize the internalization of values, directly laying down (unless in quite disturbed individuals) a permanent pattern of social attitudes and behaviour. The sociologist might argue that such phenomena as rank-concession have no real psychological depth and may be regarded as land-

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scape. The metaphor is social space: as we adjust to the constraining features of natural topography we can adjust to the partitioning of social space through rank, class, and vertical division. In a society where everyone treats such features as immutable they never become problematic. It is unsurprising that Kinga children accept ageand size ranking among their peers and accommodate to it. Wouldn’t Kinga adults view the court or colonial plantation scene in about the same light? Even conceding the justice of this argument, my sense of anomaly is not dispelled. The rules Kinga youths live by are anti-authoritarian. Kinga manners are egalitarian: supercilious or arrogant postures don’t pay off as they do in some East African societies. Men of rank are admired for their feasts not their kept wealth. Favourite tales tell of by-passing an expectant heir to high office for the offense of snubbing a commoner. In the barracks life no pattern of segregation discriminated between men of royal and common birth—they made their own friends and resided accordingly. Yet rank remained. The glorification in folk legend of a cruel prince and his arbitrary manner of rule betrays an inconsistency in Kinga values which can’t be dismissed as part of the landscape. We sometimes assume that in folk societies there is room for only one coherent ethos informing the full range of social institutions. But long before Contact the Kinga had left behind that way of ordering community life. Their world was not homogeneous and was politically organized under a régime dedicated to programmatic expansion through persuasion and force. Other ideal types we might draw from comparative study—the primitive state, chiefdom, or segmentary state—offer insight into Kinga social organization; but what especially characterized Kingaland was the dualism I’ve noted as the court and bush phases of their culture. These two phases represented partlycontrary models of right behaviour. On the whole, nurture was according to bush values because most children were not reared at court, and youth in any event had a kingdom of its own. On the whole, too, the frontier life was not rank- but achievement oriented. It is life at the court which was special and commanded a special code of behaviour, the more elaborate the greater the ceremonial importance of the court. On the sociological plane this account seems adequate to me. But there is more to be thought through on the plane of psychology. I see two options: accept that rank concession doesn’t go deep (which contradicts experience for me) or accept that socialization does—socialization occurs as much below as on the surface of a child’s

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behaviour. According to this premise, a person can learn ‘packaged’ behaviour which, lying in wait for its occasion, in its abeyance need never be unwrapped—and yet may undergo radical change. If you reject the notion that manifest behaviour is all there is to culture, your sense for the processes of socialization must allow for deep levels of learning. More correctly: since talk of ‘levels’ suggests a mechanical stratification of culture, say simply that the longer an institution has been around the thicker its textures of meaning will be. To borrow a musical analogy, socialization normally exposes an individual to the polyphonic texture of a culture, not just its melodic themes. A boy comes to know other parts than his own. He learns a good deal about authority by resenting and resisting it as an intrusion on his peer world. Eventually he is ready to come to terms with authority in order to move beyond that world. Through all this time, a vast series of ‘items learnt’ have been put down with others learnt before, and the melange matured a bit in the deep well of experience.<<[lit] To accept authority in practice doesn’t require blind devotion: Kinga had at least five words for tyrant. What is socialization? Where it is not quite superficial it is becoming worldly wise. This happens through intense emotional involvement in scenes much bigger than the one part a child plays in them. If authority figures are off-stage for most Kinga children—particularly boys—most of the time, they are all the same figures of substance. A nice expression of the way egalitarian and subservient styles can thrive in the same person is the seven- or eight-year-old girl who (quite typically) has become a miniature co-wife to her mother. In choosing that expression I don’t mean to imply rivalry but reciprocity. The housekeeping competence of Kinga girls is phenomenal at a stage when their brothers are veritable strangers to civil society. Still, the girl will not be imagining she is her mother’s equal. She doesn’t mistake style for structure and overplay her role: to avoid conflict she just nullifies authority by ‘anticipating its every command’. I surmise that by putting a firm aesthetic distance between herself and her daughter, as a mother does by expecting the girl to reside with peers not parents, yet co-opting a lot of her time during working hours, a Kinga woman secures a kind of socialization which, by and large, has eluded the rest of the world. That may be too neat a formulation but it points to a dimension of the culture especially interesting to psychology. Some Kinga subservience is achieved without repressive ego involvement for the reason that an individual’s home base (where affective self-expression is unconstrained by an audience of alien

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mind) is a primary group without the repressive structure parents, being giants however indulgent, can’t avoid introducing. Close identification with an adult of the same sex is absent in a boy’s socialization. He is expected to lead a wild life tied to the adult world only by responsibility for keeping the goats and by the daily exercise of rights to food at virtually any kitchen in the neighbourhood. But boys’ games were mainly competitive if not sharply individualistic; and since a few (older) boys in any group could be expected to excel in most activities, the idea of a rank-ordered society had a coded presence. The difference between bush and court was a matter of which structure or style was to be submerged and which manifest. The distinction Fried sagaciously makes between egalitarian and rank societies is not one of attitude or demeanour but rules: in the rank society élite positions are scarce. The power and prestige attached to them may be no different from what is usual in (non-restrictive) egalitarian communities. For practical purposes, you make the simplest rank society by creating some privileged offices, and this the Sanga did.<<[lit] The transformation of the ruggedly independent goatherd into a manageable member of the court community was a self-transformation which occurred when the boy (undîmi [herd, guard]) decided he would become a young man (undimi [cultivator, worker, bachelor male]). The same distinction as to age-status can be made without reference to the work role, e.g. undume [boy] and unsala [bachelor male]. Again, ulugosi means a pre-adult youth, being a sort of diminutive of the common word ungosi [man]—but has the connotation “admirable youth” and thus refers us to his emergence before (and transformation by) the full community as audience. Morally, court culture introduced a two-tiered world in which prince, priest, hero, and minstrel [unyalwotsi] (=artist) transcended the mundane. These men were attributed peculiar endowments (mystical qualities of the same kind my community attributes to famous musical artists) setting them apart. Avanyivaha [great men] wore insignia of rank. The right to wear particular tokens of royal favour was awarded to individuals from time to time to commemorate deeds of distinction. Early German photographs always show the Kinga youth in his red-ochred ‘dancer’ hairstyle. The meticulously crafted transformation put him in a world apart from the uncouth bush youth he would have been only a few years before. Such diacritical marks were signs of transcendent status, mute claims to sharing some of the élite condition of prince [unkuludeva] or priest [unteketsi]. The same moral dichotomy is engraved in formal ritual practice. The in-

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stallation of a prince was a rite of passage which set the chosen heir forever apart from his former comrades, with whom he wouldn’t again share the barracks life. Once installed, a prince must regularly submit himself to re-anointment with medicines reserved to his unkuludeva status, calculated to put a magical wall between him and the conspiring world outside his enclosure. There is at least the suggestion in the figure of the prince, who is the perpetual elder brother to Lwembe the wizard-and-trickster god of the Kinga, that heterosexuality is linked to a special knowledge of good and evil which gives some men the right to rule. If that suggestion may be projected also upon the life-cycle of the ordinary man, the meaning would be that marriage as a final step into maturity confers rank as well as responsibility. Married men are elders [avagogolo] with the right, and perhaps an obligation, to sit in judgement in the moot. An egalitarian ethos does not produce a flattened social structure, rather a set of rules for keeping the ethos in healthy working order while routinely conceding (scaling) rank and privilege.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK ONE, CHAPTER EIGHT

Eros & Philia

The final dimension of Kinga culture I want to consider is sexual morality. I found it a wonder that Kinga approved of sexual love between brothers. It is possibly a still deeper wonder that love, sexual or otherwise, should be so explicit a feature of the moral order of a microculture. We are used to assuming that small, face-to-face communities adhering to a settled tradition will set up a prescriptive ‘structure’ for the sibling relationship, yet here is a tradition setting up and intensifying a dyadic involvement within a structured sibling bond. Our usual idea of social structure seems to be challenged: shouldn’t close kinship, as a maximal-claim tie, be exempted from the play of individual passions, so dangerous to social order? A kinship society may provide a framework within which love can flourish without a name; but the moral bastion of kinship is demand-right and duty, not affection.<<[lit] Perhaps we must think of this one Eastern Bantu people as marginal to the type of the kinship society. In Gesellschaft with its fine-grained division of labour, its market nexus, and overlapping power pyramids we have taken a different way out of kinship. In Gemeinschaft we have learned to expect a great variety of family systems. What we don’t expect is a weak one. But friendship societies are special in reducing the structural importance of axiomatic ties (kinship and affinity) in favour of more frangible bonds. It isn’t surprising, when the matter is framed this way, that a friendship society should seek to strengthen social bonds by somehow idealizing constancy. For Kinga, the obverse of the ideal of brother-love is suspicion of witchcraft. (That begins with intimations of hypocritical betrayal by a friend, leading quickly to fantasies of a fearful sort of intimacy, usually cannibal.) Constancy as a virtue is not the same as devotion and isn’t linked to possessiveness. Young men’s affairs of the heart may

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flourish in expressive fashion for a few days, fired by new-found enthusiasms, but are expected to be brief and subside into lasting friendships. I observe a young married man who brings his new friend home. Whatever the gymnastics entailed, three young persons are seen to emerge happily refreshed in the morning. Can a triangle, instead of strangling love, be made to strengthen it? The relation of sex to love is often discussed in light of the Greek distinction eros~agape. One or the other must dominate (so it is held) wherever they meet. Though it seems to me philia is a better Graecism for the Kinga case than agape—friendship is not necessarily a form of selfless love—it will be worth quickly reviewing the issue in the terms in which it has usually been discussed. The reason for turning round to look for a moment at Western culture is that doctrine on these subjects has been long and convincingly cultivated within that culture—it is hard to consider them without a Western bias. I only want to touch lightly on the nature of that bias, the better to get at implications of the Kinga construction of sex and love in relation to a Western reader’s ideas about ‘family’. It was the argument of Denis de Rougemont (1957) that eros and agape (treated now as social phenomena and now, capitalized, as virtual “religions”) were antithetical forms of love. The one was possessive, the other bathed in grace. He argued that Western culture has “amplified” eros to create a driving passion which, far from being natural to humankind, ought to be seen as a strange, even perverse invention. Setting aside his arguments concerning the mythic sources of strength for his two principles (in what may be deemed, as one looks about, a rather uneven battle between carnal and ethical forms of love in the West), what sort of ‘amplification’ can we observe and what is its cause? Freudians offer the Oedipus complex. They predicate an infantile struggle on the part of male infants to free the self from an intransigeant mother-fixation. This can be so traumatic as to leave the resulting adult male forever restless in love. Others, on evidence no less plentiful, blame print or the electronic media for amplifying erotic egotism, blending sex with violence and material success, and glamorizing the courtesan type. A more sober and simple account is the sociological. The bundle of functional competences which used to characterize the family have been stripped away as the organizational complexity of modern society has grown. With the family reduced to a lean, nuclear form, the individual may experience a need for escape. After adolescence this often takes the form of escape into intimacy with strangers, and in the process love takes on a tinge of madness it

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will probably never shake. While it may become fashionable to wear a “cool” mask into scenes of passion, if the passion were thereby quenched the mask would have missed its purpose.<<[lit] I find most credible those critics who search for the roots of trouble in dominance struggles within the family, in which a child finds itself reduced to an instrumentality of adult emotional needs. For their part, adults being frustrated at home turn away for love, but the bad faith at home only carries over with them into the marketplaceof-love to which they must turn. Older bourgeois societies than mine are sometimes pictured as having stabilized that marketplace by the routinization of prostitution in higher and lower forms—but I think we are entitled to be skeptical. Current trends are toward a sort of decontamination of the family through therapy, rationalized divorce, and serial monogamy; but in spite of prophets foretelling its doom no successor-institution to family, able to sanction personal responsibility as effectively, has appeared. Kinga living arrangements speak to us at this point, since the Kinga family minimizes pressure on the egos of its members, and the auxiliary ‘marketplace’ is for a very large part of their lives where they live. A major premiss of European thought is that Eros disennobles. Lust is not only self-serving but basely so. Man should stand apart from other creatures of the barnyard. The notion of ‘Platonic’ love in modern European languages is not one the philosopher himself would easily recognize, the sexual element having been surgically removed. The idea of ‘brotherly’ love in the same languages refers to an even more sublimated phenomenon, dedication to strangers on a categorical basis, fictionally adopting them as brothers in a grand, universalistic gesture which I believe has never been rendered operational. Rhetoric here reflects the fact that love between actual brothers is axiomatic: whatever you may say to the contrary, the world expects you to realize when you come to your senses that you may not want to be estranged from your own brother. But the rhetorical notion of ‘brotherly love’ refers to categorical friendship quite unlike a true sibling tie. It would be improper to suggest that true brothers ought to have a dry ‘Platonic’ relationship, because one’s duty to the other within the frame of an axiomatic tie shouldn’t have to wait on spontaneous assent or even on good will—one has a claim.<<[lit] A major premise of Kinga thought is that Eros has a civil function. Tunginiye was proud that whenever he visited a certain ruler, his age mate, they shared one bed. In Malanduku there is the tale of a man who, in a desperate incident, grabbed a rogue leopard by the tail and found himself unable either to proceed or let go. His friends could

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keep the angry animal distracted but none was brave enough to move in for the kill. They must send for his full brother. Though it meant a perilous delay, it was perfectly understood that a full brother would find the courage required; and so, indeed, the rescue was accomplished. As in Western or whatever other culture, this tie is axiomatic and mutually sanctions maximal claims on loyalty, but the Kinga tie lacks the depth of emotional meaning which must come from common socialization within the frame of close family life. Kinga feel the bonding of brothers should be affirmed before Eros. I did once see a man bring his younger brother to court for adultery, but the court wouldn’t hear the case. The proceedings devolved to a moot, which was held a few days later on the man’s home ground. The case was considered a family affair, and the elders insisted on reconciliation. The plaintiff had been long absent at labour, his wife had needed a new pregnancy. The younger man had done the right thing: “This is the Kinga custom.” The moot, which is to say the court in other guise, was paternalistic not authoritarian, being at pains to re-socialize a man who’d spent five years or more among alien Southern Bantu. The staging was ‘modern’ but the plot was very old. Kinga have had to be culturally self-aware in this manner from traditional times. The suspension of taboos on taking a ‘group wife’ to bed is atypical for all of Africa and much the greater part of mankind. It is possible for Kinga because the family is not and the larger kin group can’t be for them the prime locus of emotional self-expression and moral reciprocity. But a dire consequence could be loss of the axiom of kinship itself. This possibility is so drastic that its implications can scarcely be known: can human society exist without unambiguous birth-identities? So if it had not been assimilated during socialization to the ideal model of friendship—Platonic love in the presurgical sense—the tie of brotherhood might have had too little weight to stand up better under stress than ordinary friendship, the open colleagueship of peers. It is not everyone in every human situation who needs no recourse from the judgement of friends.

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TWIN SHADOWS, FIRST FOLIO

Having a marriage

A long preserved virginity I was doubtful at first of informants who claimed that men and women in the old days waited for youth truly to end before they would marry. They meant that period of youthful intensity which may last a decade or two after physical maturation. I knew their life had been perilous and yet their society was expansive. That should mean they had placed a high value on fertility. In many warlike societies men marry late. Population fertility is not affected in a polygynous culture so long as women begin to procreate about the time nature has them ready. But how could an expanding society, organized around warring camps, allow the late marriage of women? Did Kinga women perhaps bear children in their bachelor stage and only marry late in a nominal sense? I was assured that never happened, though my doubts were understandable. A woman’s chastity was firmly sanctioned. First copulation constituted marriage to one’s partner. Quite apart from bearing a child in the isaka [women’s bachelor house] even risking a pregnancy while living there was strictly unthinkable. How to find out how long they meant a woman would have guarded her virginity? In a civilization which doesn’t make a point of counting years, estimates of age are approximate by our standards but not therefore the less accurate as judged by theirs. A woman was not expected to marry before her breasts had fallen “as if she already had nursed a child.” At a minimum this meant more time would have passed since her menarche than she would have needed to bear, nurse, and wean a first child. Hence: owing to her prolonged bachelorhood the number of

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children a woman could be expected to bear would be reduced by one. We have a minimal position here. But probably the best Kinga estimates of the actual marriage age of women before 1890 are not greatly misleading: they are translations from an ‘analogue’ apprehension of age to our preferred ‘digital’ reckoning. Kinga elders in 1960 were perfectly competent to make such translations. They say a woman was usually between 25 and 30 when she quit the isaka. If we assume fertility begins at 15 and accept testimony that the spacing of pregnancies was normally about four years, we are left with the implication that the real loss of potential group fertility may have been heavier than our minimal figure suggests. A woman seems to be forfeiting two or three children. Against this I think we must reckon that the rate of survival of Kinga children before 1890 may have been high, owing to the maturity of the mothers, their high morale, and the effective spacing of births allowing for prolonged breast feeding. The critical question is what proportion of her hypothetical brood, given early marriage, must be discounted to fit the actual conditions of Kinga court culture. There is a suggestive answer. Kinga customary law has it that a woman who has nursed four children to weaning, having done full service, is justified in withdrawing from the sexual union entailed in her marriage, as she normally does on reaching menopause. Under such rules the age of marriage would not have been a critical determinant of group fertility so long as that age for women was under 30, supposing health and survival among adult young women were not a problem. But without such a limiting rule, which is not found elsewhere in the region, the Sanga court system would not have worked. The moral orientation to bachelorhood for both genders would not hold, and the protostate apparatus must have been erected on a more conventional Eastern Bantu model. It might or might not be as fertile.<<[lit] Infant mortality throughout the Colonial era was forbiddingly high, and in 1960 young women were marrying in their early twenties, men still a decade later. Probably before Contact the highest death rates were among children, but it is unlikely that before the advent of ‘European’ diseases the rates were so high that a woman could not reasonably expect her four children to grow up. Kinga marriage thus didn’t violate community interests but served them well enough. Men and women were most often free to decide for themselves when they’d marry, and their decisions were not made in the light of fancied community interest but of private moral strategies. We should look at what people were saying for themselves and their culture about 1960.

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The testimony I recorded isn’t altogether uniform. At first I was bewildered by the variety and seeming contradictions. Some women, agèd in 1960, had married as soon as two years after menarche (which means under twenty) in communities they called Kinga. Since the cases are few and the places marginal to Pangwa country (to the south) the implications for us are not clear and cogent. Though I know this was not the pattern for all bush communities I could make no systematic survey. There is no reason to suppose social organization was any more standard than dialect outside the court culture. One variant pattern occasionally described was child betrothal. It is present among some neighbours and was countenanced by Sanga rulers. It occurred sporadically among ordinary Kinga in 1960. Possibly it always had. But it was generally mentioned as an odd or alien custom undertaken by a few men in the interest of speculative advantage. One Kinga man, who had lived more among Bena than Kinga since adolescence, thought the ideal marriage pattern was the same for both peoples—the boy should be about five years older, and the young couple should have tilled fields for both sets of parents for some years before marrying at the girl’s menarche. It wanted a lot of talk with his friends before we got things sorted out. All of this suggests that what system there was in 1960 was impressionistic at best. We can make sense of the situation by noting two things: (a) Actual ages of marriage had not dropped far. The major change in train was a shift toward domesticity. But the high bridewealth was delaying marriage effectively, and migrant labour (before Independence) militated against young couples adopting ‘Christian’ patterns of cohabitation. (b) Decisions about marriage were, in spite of growing efforts by fathers to maximize their profits from bridewealths, negotiated in the light of personal moral strategies in a community where love talk was endemic. This was not something new but a feature of Kinga culture. The people making decisions which hastened or delayed a particular marriage were many, and none were trying to follow a rule or fit a fancied pattern. This is the way it had always been. No one in 1960 felt strictly bound by any custom except the requirement of time to amass bridewealth, which had become monumental and now dominated all marriage strategies. A rich pagan in the Western realm had married off his son at 15, and it was usual to hear high bridewealths blamed for the number of bachelor males over 30. In one Lutheran area the elders discouraged marriage for either sex

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before 20, and this was felt by some to be a strict rule; but in one Roman Catholic area girls might marry two or three years earlier. In both those Christian communities some young men married before 25 and did so because of a strong personal commitment in spite of all difficulties. What is particularly interesting is that young women were remaining chaste as they had in the Old Culture. Underlying moral strategies remained much the same. All indications are that until British times (effectively, 1926) the amount of the bridewealth was slight and couldn’t have been a hindrance to a young man otherwise determined upon a course of marrying his sweetheart. The reason for her long-preserved virginity lay not in any simple material circumstance. I judge the context of court culture in 1900 was such that neither young men nor their sweethearts were greatly attracted to marriage. Whatever the precise mean age of marriages may have been then, this is what elders like Tunginiye and the folk he consulted on my behalf were saying. Only the rare man or woman would be in a rush to marry. The court culture didn’t fail to generate a desire for the heterosexual life but gave it a long sleep before the final awakening. The community attached reward and dignity to the homophilic life. In the case of men the prestige to be won at the ceremonial centres belonged primarily to the bachelor; and as to the marriage age of men, there are plenty of precedents in Eastern Bantu civilization. Many peoples require men to wait for their fathers’ generation to falter, before they may take wives of their own. But the solidarity of young women is unique to the Kinga and seems to belie our ideas about the position of women in the Bantu world or marriage as a game of exchange in which women are pawns. We’ll do well to examine the rationale of Kinga marriage in the worldviews of both genders. Here is the way a woman’s sex education was explained to me by a sister of the first Paramount chief in colonial times. He was Mlambakyuma Mwemutsi, known as a boy by the name Dembademba. He’d been too young to rule at the start of the German period but had assumed office before the turn of the century. His sister was in 1960 one of the eldest of the women at Ukwama, the capital village. We were clear that my interest was in traditional institutions, as they were before the Germans. Her interest was the same. A young woman should remain at least four years past menarche, living in the isaka under its rules. Usually she would remain up to about eight years. Menarche came no earlier then than now [16-18] but a girl would have lived with the same group of friends all her life, since infancy, and so when she married would be leaving companions of two decades. Her man to be

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ready for marriage ought to be over thirty. Often he would be mtu wa makama makubwa [Sw: a man past his youth but not yet in old age], agosipe [K: he has had all his growth, he is in middle age]. A young man got instruction only at the time of marriage—it could be on the day of marriage itself, and the teachers were not only old men but women as well, past child-bearing. [But my unmarried assistant was with me, and we didn’t hear the content of these instructions on that account.] Instruction for a maiden was more thorough. There would normally be three sessions before marriage. The first would be in a small group where she was together with a few other girls who had just reached the menarche. At the second instruction, about a year later, each girl will be sole pupil at a gathering to which her mother or guardian will be hostess. Old women and unwed girls who have completed the course will be there, and even very old men. Several years later the girl’s mother would usually want to brew beer again for another private schooling on the same scale, and this would suffice to prepare the girl for marriage. Later, after marriage and the birth of her first male child, the girl become woman would be subject for the last time to schooling. [This would be at the place in the wild where the baby would be born and sheltered for its first weeks.] On her return home she and the child would be painted across the forehead with the white clay isyogo. When menarche has come a girl will be put in isolation for the full month until her second period is over. She is dressed in rags and mustn’t answer any boy’s greeting. She can’t leave to till fields or do any work with others. If she is disobedient she will be starved for two days, for others are feeding her and she will find no way of getting food alone. Thus she is taught her dependency. At the school which follows the isolation her older brothers are asked if she has been dutiful. Unless they will affirm that she has been, each is given a stick to beat her where she stands naked; and this still happens today. The taboos which pertain to ordinary menstruation are these: a menstruating woman mustn’t feed men. Her husband or her male children past nursing must eat elsewhere. She should have a menstrual hut or trench-bed made by the husband. She mustn’t pass behind the backsides of men and should announce her coming by clapping hands while calling tupau [K: I’m menstruating]. Though she could feed a dog she mustn’t touch it or any other animal, even with a stick [evidently a special taboo of the royal line]. She could till fields without constraint. She must live alone, as each wife of Mwemutsi does today, in her own menstrual hut [i.e., no other woman was to use or share her hut or her trench-bed]. Girls lived in larger groups than they do today. Though the pit house would belong to one girl, many would crowd in, the floor being spread with mats and covered with girls at night, sleeping naked. Fire was used to bake the dugout dry and only removed at dusk. The roof might be flat or slightly peaked, with an entry hatch at one end. Boys might come at night and be taken in as a group—they didn’t have to come alone, and there was no fear that any boy would try to force intercourse on a girl, they were guests on good behaviour.

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There were three routes to marriage for a girl, only one of which would begin with night courtship, but that was the most usual. The prince might award a girl to a man who was ready to leave the barracks life. Sometimes a girl’s father might engage her on a long-term basis to a boy, by approaching his father and arranging to “borrow” against the expected bridewealth; or sometimes the girl’s father might give her to a talented young dancer or minstrel. [IV 18-19]<<[lit]

These words reflect a life lived out in the place where we talked in the Central realm, and some information pertains particularly to local custom. An informant with greater scope and equal authority was Mwanadyo of the North. He was Chief Councillor to the Northern prince in German times and acted for him in dealings with the military government. Though likely in his tenth decade (or past it) when we talked, he was impressively erect, a tall and grand-mannered person, readily recognizable from German photographs dating from his prime. His account represents the view from a man’s vantage point and bears the imprint of a life spent hearing cases, but the life-cycle he is viewing isn’t markedly different to that of the Central realm. He was one of many who perceived the timing of marriage even in the old culture as a function of economics: a shortage of goats and/or hoes for bridewealth. As theory his point may be weak, but he expands our sense of context. A man would be past middle life when he married, and women also remained many years after their puberty before marrying. A good many men could be expected to die unmarried, but few women. The difficulty was getting bridewealth. I, Mwanadyo, married early in this century for one cow and three goats, which in Kinga money could be expressed as 16 hoeblades. In the British money which came in by 1916 this would have been 32 shillings, a richman’s bridewealth then. Here is the procedure which was followed. A go-between [untuni] approached the father of the girl, speaking in the honorific plural, “We would marry your daughter.” The father named his price by asking the man to sharpen so many stakes for tying goats right there at the girl’s natal place. In addition it was understood that if the suitor were rich he would bring a cow or a bull and two hoeblades. Even a poor man would bring the hoes. Any man could earn them by apprenticing himself to a smith—there would always be one nearby who required a helper. With two hoes you could buy a goat, with three you could buy a bull from the Sangu. Eventually when the daughter of this woman is grown and marries, this father (now a grandfather) will receive two goats from his son-in-law: a virgin kid and a castrated male for the two men to feast on. Girls always lived together in a large group, sharing a modest house. In similar quarters, the boys and young men of a community would live together, though their parents lived far away. A youth could leave his house

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by night to visit with the girls of another community. Men here, in the group taking part in this conversation, have courted grown women in this manner in both the East and the West. After first menstruation a girl is taken by some older women to bathe in the river, but not at a place where water is drawn. Another day her father will call the ceremonial gathering, after [his wife’s] fixing beer or [in the wet season] hard bamboo cider. The men will gather to drink while the women go off in the bush to teach the girl. The men will dance and make merry—they may occasionally visit the school to make a contribution but can’t stay to see and hear the teaching of women. At this school there may be several girls, but it is a family affair, and this is also true of the schooling of a young man, which his father may decide to do in similar fashion, so that his son will be respected as one who knows. Husband and wife together must be taught when the woman first becomes pregnant—men and women of the kin group take part, so the couple will know what taboos they must keep for the child to stay well. The life of a girl can’t be compared to that of a boy. A boy eats at many houses, a girl only at one. While a girl may be given bits of food where she has legitimately come on a visit to kin, she can’t be regularly fed from any hearth but her own mother’s. A boy should, when his own mother is there, take food from her hearth in preference to that of her co-wife; but he is free to get food where he will among other kin of the parental generation and also from a brother’s wife. He may go off for two weeks without any notice to visit his pals at the place of his father’s sister, living there in the boys’ house and eating from her. Of old, no boy would dare enter the house where he came for food, but would beg outside. But a girl wouldn’t beg like a boy: she is a mother, isn’t she? She provides her own food, she won’t take it from others. Sisters would be close. Again and again it would happen that a young girl would choose to follow her elder sister in marriage, first visiting her sister’s new community, then becoming lover to the husband and following in marriage. Everyone considered it happy. The significance of this is that close kin—siblings—are a person’s best protection. Within one princely realm you could move about and still have this protection of family ties, for trouble travels quickly. If your sister were chased for cause, or if she should leave her husband without cause, and if there were no other sister there to make peace, the case would soon come to you, the brother. Brothers will hear the matter out and perhaps make a peace offering to the wronged husband, so that he will agree to have the woman back. Oh, perhaps a woman who had left her man for cause might be allowed to pass a night or two at the isaka where she had lived before, but her business is to find some new man and cleave to him. She couldn’t join the maidens’ life—isn’t she a woman now? [III 20-1]

Andoliye Mahenge was a deputy magistrate of the Western realm, at 50 a young informant on questions about the old culture. The value of his opinion comes of his special insight into pagan/

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Christian differences, his psychological bent, and a long-standing interest in the process of institutional change he had observed since his childhood in the last German years. He is accustomed, by habit of mind and in connection with his work as a magistrate, to sifting evidence for its meaning. He views the age of marriage as a function of jural norms and Kinga values. They married very late as compared with today. A young woman might attain the age of thirty without having married. As for the young man—for example, I myself would have no more than two children now [though in fact he has a grandchild]. You must understand they grew old, as compared with today. After getting two children you became an elder [ungogolo]. A woman over 25 could be married, but I suppose you would say that in the old days they didn’t marry carelessly, as they do now. All the same, if a man had intercourse with a girl, that very day she would go off with him, the very hour they put their bodies together they must leave—she couldn’t possibly return home. Mwiko! [Sw: mystically dangerous]. A grown person was not, let us say, twenty—it was not as today. For instance today a young person only has to be 18 to have the right to marry, but in the old days that was tabooed, mwiko. He would be sleeping with the cattle. Children after they were weaned, until they were about eight, might sleep both sexes together in the original kind of Kinga house, ikigwiba, just like the houses of their parents. A small one would be four or five feet high [an arched cone], built small to keep in the heat of the fire and body heat. But a boy of nine or ten would move to a cattle house, to sleep with the older boys and the animals [cows and especially goats]. The work of the boys was to guard the animals at night from leopards or thieves, and keep smoke against the flies. We built our house where the lineage hamlet [ikikolo] was, and there would always be others not of the lineage who wanted to join us—we must all agree, otherwise they couldn’t come in. It was felt a lineage boy couldn’t leave, as the parents would say he had been chased—he had a right. Still, there was moving and visiting about. The girls of nine or ten also lived on their own, each little group [Sw: kikundi] to itself with a hut and their own fire, like the boys. The girls in the old days, I have heard, dug down so deep [about four feet], a large pit with the earth thrown up around it and covered with boughs and grass, with a hatch door. Here we called that house ilisumbu [elsewhere ingumbwe]. Boys only dug so [about 28”], using sticks for the walls, and that is the way they slept, uncovered. They didn’t use bamboo as they do today, or smear mudplaster [to make a tight house]. Or a group of boys might sleep out in a trench, putting down grass, then a mat, and a mat above them covered with grass again, the last boy piles on the grass and they save a place for him to slip in. Women of the lineage area had charge of the puberty school for the girls, and its teaching was completely effective. Every girl knew that as soon as she let a man join her, she must follow him. No woman was ever known, until recently, to bear a child before marriage. [VI 52-3,56-7]

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In another Western community less affected by mission influence I was told by a lively old man that until about eight years of age children used to be allowed to enter their parents’ houses and sleep there, but young children would soon learn to prefer their (classificatory) grandparents ukuku (m.) and upapa (f.). In later childhood and youth they still could enter the houses of these grandparents, but otherwise they would be sleeping here and there as they chose, with friends of their own sex. Most hamlets were a mixture of lineages, and most lineages were spread all about. Kinship ties were easily broken. A man or woman had only to fail to assemble with the lineage at a funeral to be counted as stranger from that time forward. [VI 65] Lusayano, also a Westerner, had worked as a young man for the Germans. He thought the main change today was among boys, wanting to live in smaller groups. Formerly they had preferred the larger, communal boys’ house to smaller, “lineage” houses which also could be found. He estimated the age of the typical child joining his or her peers at five or six. He also held that the standard house was a rondavel, the inverted, arched cone ikigwiba over an excavated floor a foot deep— this was the house a man must enter backward. Visitors could sleep only in a kitchen house. The sleeping house would be too small even for a fire. [VI 24-6] The impression of inadequate housing wants to be corrected on two counts: the unspoken identification of “old” things with the bush culture, and the tendency for retrospect to leap to the legendary, pre-Sanga epoch. Like good evolutionists, Kinga have a myth of Original Poverty. So far as court-village housing is concerned we have the evidence of early German records, including some photographs too early to represent any post-Contact changes and showing neat, substantial houses set on carefully-prepared sites. Fülleborn (1906: 452-3) estimated the houses of this type to range in height or diameter up to six meters from a minimum of two to three meters. This estimate would have included houses put to various uses, including children’s houses. He reports and displays rondavels with mudplastered walls and conventional eaves. I think the most significant conclusion we can draw from the architectural evidence is that Kinga women were the beneficiaries of a double standard of comfort— their houses were designed to be warm while those of men were not. Males shared this womanly warmth in infancy, in courting, and in the active phases of a marriage. But the male life-cycle normally ended in the communal men’s/boys’ house [ikivaga] where selfconscious maleness had begun. The marital household normally came to an end when the woman was past bearing children. That the man

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would have built the house counted for little, since a man wouldn’t live on his own in such a house, belonging as it did to the woman’s life. The man whose procreative life was at an end moved back to a house whose openwork walls would not enclose a narrow or private world. A woman’s life remains firmly domestic to the end. Her existence is stabilized particularly by ties and obligations maintained in connection with her work as cultivator. If men generally admit the great strength of women, it may be they see a spiritual connection between womanhood and growth of the soil. There is an elemental quality of constancy in a woman’s devotion to her fields. I think it must affect men who, with the passage of time, begin to feel less secure on their own ground. Women’s companionships, and the affinal and agnatic ties women maintain with men over the years, are always associated with cultivation rights and enhanced by a successful harvest. Once a married woman has established virilocal residence (the likely choice) and has children there coming to her for food, it becomes unlikely she would move away even in the event of being widowed, if her fields are prospering. In this way, the very dispersion of her “mothering” role to include any of her own boys’ peers can be said to give her roots. The ideal rule for a widow who hasn’t finished with child-bearing is that she accept leviratic inheritance, preferably to her late husband’s next-elder brother, as the two men will have been close. But in practice if any man qualifying as husband’s brother lives in or will move to the area she is likely to accept him. She retains field-rights from her youth in another community but will probably have developed more substantial rights where she was married—commonly there is an hour’s distance or more between. The companions of her youth will usually be dispersed but not out of touch. After some years, if things go well, her original community is sentimentally less important than it was in the early years of her exile-in-marriage. She is at home in her new place. Through the constant companionship of other married women, many of them age-peers if not actually roommates from childhood, and through taking pride in her offspring and fields, she will have got roots. A widow whose children are grown can often expect a son to move back and build near her when his father dies, so that the son with his wife gradually succeeds to the place in the community—its fields and its working groups—which his parents had. A woman who is widowed after menopause will not remarry, and it is the duty then of sons to see that one takes responsibility (of the male-task sort) for her welfare. They are bound at a minimum to put up a house near hers, which some of them will use from time to time while seeing to fields there. But as

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long as she is physically able she will persist with her independent ways, keeping her own house and tilling her own fields as she has always done. It is rare and only a function of illness that a woman would become dependent on another person to feed her. If it does happen, it must be to another woman she turns, for men are not the economic mainstays of Kinga society. This was as true, as concerns subsistence, in 1960 as it had been in 1890. But why do Kinga put it that a son must “move back” when his father dies—are the sons expected to move away as they mature? In practice they are, though it needn’t be very far. On the whole, Kinga adopt the moral strategy characteristic of more nomadic peoples— moving away from trouble. Reflected here are deep motifs in the father-son relationship, but also the special logic of late marriage, since men who married at forty can rarely have lived to see their sons in turn married and settled down. The father would quite probably die while all of his sons (and there would not be very many in any case) were still bachelors and, in Kinga fashion, homeless. But if men marry women ten to fifteen years their juniors the women can expect to survive into this grandparental stage of the life-cycle. A woman still fertile and still wanting children would probably choose a leviratic marriage and not require a son’s return. But another side to this is that while women are the real cultivators, the main jural claims to land are agnatic rights. A man who fails to show an interest in his father’s land-claims when they are vacated will be handicapped later on in pressing claims against rival interests: as her needs and energies wane the mother’s de facto control of the land will dwindle away. So the quality of that land can be a major factor. No doubt there are sentimental ties between mother and son, but it would be hard to prove they are crucial for typical individuals, though they clearly have been for some. Kinga lads grow up calling many women mother and begging food from them all. What is demonstrable is that sons are likely to feel the pull of sentiment when their return might prevent family fields from reverting to communal ownership. Do the facts warrant judging that father-son tensions are so high as to hold a young man away from home so long as his father is alive? I think the relationship is seldom so intense: father-son ambivalence is real enough but in the absence of a tightly-knit nuclear family is not likely to be so powerful. If the value which dominates a young man’s life is the glory of emotional freedom, it is strategic for him to

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move away from the maximal-claim ties of family even where they have a low intensity. The movement Kinga see is not that of sons away from fathers but of young men to new friends and circumstance. Women in 1960 were apt to show contempt for the work of men, even when it was well remunerated, on the ground that it didn’t produce food. Ebias was a young tailor in the East who said he would be slow to marry as it would mean cutting back his trade in favour of cultivating—a wife would harass him, “Go and eat your money if you can!” This wariness in Ebias derived from his father’s being a busy, sometimes harassed polygynist, whose wives had demonstrated a hundred ways of threatening the withdrawal of their sexual and gastronomic support. The usual division-and-submission among cowives has no strong place in Kinga culture, though it is known well enough. “They’ll lend you money to start a little shop, then quarrel and demand it back, and you are left in financial ruin. It means nothing to them!” The line Ebias was drawing between women and men was that between one party espousing the labour theory of value (and recognizing no labour as valid but that in the fields) and another party with a market model. While the situation is that of 1960 the pattern is presumably older: the two sexes foster separate spheres of value, and translation from one to the other can never be complete. The independent spirit of women is certainly old.[V 19-20] And is the wariness of an Ebias justified? Is a Kinga marriage probably doomed, on a sentimental plane, to failure? Ebias carried the bias of one who has grown up in (what is rare for Kinga commoners) a polygynous compound. My own casual observations in 1960 would have an opposite bias, affecting backward extrapolation, since most of the couples I came to know as such were Christians accepting the ideal of a permanent marriage. As a passer-by and passer-through I should have to report that Kinga men and women in 1960 were generally cheerful and likable, if a little less so in middle age than in the early years of marriage; and this is consistent with the impressions of early visitors. Of course, as a guest I tended to see people on their good behaviour, but I came to realize that Kinga is not a society in which people are accustomed to wearing two faces. Men did tend to portray women, not only co-wives, as preternaturally jealous. “You have only to be a bit inattentive to draw scorn—Go to your wife So-and-so! referring to some other woman you have scarcely stopped to chat with on the path.” A woman might trade in this way on the legitimacy of sexual jealousy, just to gain a bit of leverage on her man, but she is probably not often deeply moved by envy. It was clear enough in several communities, as anyone might

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learn by attending court cases, that a woman who pressed too hard with the rhetoric of envy could risk a beating—pushing her man to exasperation rather than gaining control. Was the root issue sexual frustration on the woman’s side—or was the implied claim only smart rhetoric? I don’t know. I can see that a man who approached marriage with the scruples of an Ebias would be vulnerable to any sign of the woman gaining an upper hand, and that the mingling of status- with sexual uncertainties in such a case could be explosive. When violence did arise the man seems to have had a psychological if not a physical advantage—I found women, weight for weight, actually the brawnier sex but they were from childhood unaccustomed to fighting, whereas men were adepts. Kinga marriages seem easily enough to survive an episode of violence without building up chronic strains. In part this follows from the popular legal fiction of Kinga that drunken persons don’t know what they are doing. But part of the reason would be that Kinga women are strong in the non-combative sense. A man can’t keep a wife by intimidation. She will have more effective support from her peers than he from his—the solidarity of women doesn’t abruptly end with marriage and withdrawal from the nightly contact of the isaka. If only by admiring feminine solidarity so often, men recognized they were its main beneficiaries. Where else could women be found so constant and so self-contained?

The view from woman Understanding Kinga marriage calls for special attention to women’s experience and the meanings which commit them to their work. They till fields with wonderful zeal and few complaints. Kinga women have a double dose of the work ethic Kinga men have in halfdoses. For about a decade (more or less depending on place and date) after she has attained adult weight and stature a young woman will continue to work her own home fields. She will be producing food for herself, her family of orientation, a handful of agnatically related male bachelors who are able to call her ujuva [mother], and their special friends. Her pattern of work will be, so far as is locally feasible, cooperative and not competitively individualistic. Her constant company will be close friends of her own sex, companions of the isaka. From time to time this group will be joined in the fields by a comparable group of youths and sometimes by elders of both sexes. By the time

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a girl is physically of adult strength she will have left off her original pattern of gardening most days with her mother (something she will have done daily in later childhood). She will have fields of her own, serving her mother’s kitchen, and in helping to work her mother’s fields she will arrange to till together with a friend or two if not with a larger group of young people. When co-operation is formally organized on a large scale (a dozen participants or more) there will be beer specially brewed, and the institution is called ungovi [a work party]. It isn’t feasible to brew beer for a festive group so regularly as would keep the whole community (whether of youths or adults or both) engaged in a perpetual round of work parties, nor is it every sort of work which lends itself to spirited attack by twenty or thirty hoes in unison. Still, there are days when a husband and wife must split their obligations in order to meet the demands of their network, while early missionaries could record the impression that no one came home sober from the fields, and “merry songs ring out everywhere from the hillsides.” <<[lit] In 1960 you would have noticed work parties in the fields through most seasons of the year, if only the small-calabash gatherings of young people (which sometimes seemed to be rendered rather less efficient by the presence of middle-school boys on holiday, suddenly responding to the aphrodisiac qualities of Kinga beer). The party makes work festive, and that adds a good deal to the enjoyment of life for everyone, as well as their enjoyment of each other. A special aspect of the work party is that the four kinds of active cultivator take part as four distinct groups: married men, married women, bachelor men, bachelor women. Enthusiasm is generated as rivalry first within each group, individuals trying to set the pace of their peers ever higher; then among groups, principally between masculine and feminine contingents of the same generation, but finally between the generations. Rivalry is converted to co-operation in a practical way by this institution, and ecstasy becomes accomplishment. Can women be said to have property rights in the fields they till, though they most frequently live where their men have land? Do women themselves reap the rewards and bear the risks of their labour? On 1960 data the answer is unambiguous. There was such a skewing of the men’s work sphere, with migrant labour very common until later middle age, that comparatively few men were there to eat the fruit of their fields. This enabled the women in turn to market some produce for money. But this situation was an outgrowth of traditional conditions. Men’s ‘ownership’ of land was an adumbration of their prerogatives in the field of law, not strictly economic domi-

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nance, since land was never used as a bludgeon. Women were always in rightful possession of the fields to which they had undisputed access through their husbands, and women were acknowledged to have sounder judgement about gardens and crops than men. In her own right a woman would have fields at home which she had worked as a bachelor, and she would continue to make full use of them. When land disputes did arise women were often little concerned. Men would be presenting the claims on either side and men would be the arbiters, women’s evidence being restricted to the facts of actual use—no judgement of land rights could affect a woman’s right to the crops she had grown, only where she might grow them in another season. Within the purview of men, women “owned” fields only back at home; but since women commonly disposed over ‘affinal’ fields no less authoritatively than ‘agnatic’ fields, the matter of legal ownership may be said to border on fiction. That is not to say that, as observers, we can afford to ignore legal fictions. The position of a woman in relation to a land-claim case (Sw: shauri la mashamba) may well stand for her position before the law generally. Whatever the men decide, her crops won’t be harvested by someone else—her identity is not profoundly touched. At the moot, concerned women sit as attendants not principals. Consensus is wanted of the men to settle the case, only acquiescence of the women. In the social situation of the court or moot, even where the case turns on family relations (Sw: shauri la ukoo), the superior importance of the men’s sphere over the women’s is acted out through many of the same techniques a group of adults will use to keep children from interfering (in the serious business at hand) with their typical irrelevancies. The boast you will hear from men that “women vomit words” and so needn’t be heeded on matters of law largely reflects, apart from masculine vainglory, two facts of life for women: the difficulty of mastering Swahili (the main language of the law in 1960) when you are not often away from home and your fields, and at a deeper level the enforced pre-occupation with practical rather than political concerns. In agrarian society the philosophers are seldom females. While the myth of the special dignity of politics is as widely spread among the world’s peoples as the masculine mystique itself, it isn’t all societies that give women primacy in the economic realm, which has its own heroics. Within their own sphere of concerns Kinga women may be as contemptuous of masculine failings as men of women’s juridical sagacity. Practically, women know more about the ownership and relative value of fields than the men who argue the cases, and they may more often than not come away from a moot with

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a sense of their own superiority confirmed. The comparative ignorance of men in 1960 must have been partly an artifact of their absence from the local scene during their intellectually formative years, but I think men’s abstraction from practical detail has a long history. So far as I can tell, the court-military, political-jural, land-clearing, and hunting activities of men in 1860 would have occupied about as much of their time and concern as migrant labour and politics (in the broad sense) a century later. While there wasn’t much game there was plenty of scope for defensive hunting, as marauding animals were everywhere when forest predominated in the highlands; and there is no evidence that Kinga were less litigious a century ago than now. Fülleborn says, “The position of woman seems not bad at all in Ukinga, seen comparatively, although more of the heavy work of the fields falls to her lot than among the Nyakyusa.” I think we must attribute a portion of the well-being of Kinga women in traditional times to their sense of a creative participation in the productive processes of nature. This is an obverse to the negative qualities of envy and belittlement which have been so aptly emphasized by George Foster in the study of peasantries. Envy and an image of Limited Good plague those latter-day peasantries subject, as the free Kinga were not, to the degrading population and class pressures of urbanized nation states. Envy has its proper niche—witchcraft suspicion—in the Kinga world but doesn’t dominate where misfortune is in abeyance. Much of the time the Kinga did know prosperity by their standards, and it emanated from the dedication of women to the growth of the soil, in which they could afford to take a generous delight. The atomization of the Kinga family and the random feeding patterns of youths mean a woman’s surplus product can’t further any kind of domestic empire-building. If she works hard and takes pride in feeding many mouths, it is not a ‘breadwinner’ mentality which makes her do so.<<[lit] Since 1900 there have been three basic changes affecting the status of women: (a) The advent of a money sphere of the economy, in which men have the advantage, has given men a new arena comparable in scope to that of the barracks life before the ceremonial centres decayed. (b) The incorporation of bridewealth into the new moneymanagement arena has made the marriage of a daughter a matter of great political importance to men. (c) Women have begun to marry somewhat earlier and turn more toward the values of domesticity. The three changes are obviously not unconnected, and we can expect that with time a less distinctive culture pattern will evolve. But the lessons of the free tradition are worth trying to grasp, both for the

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light they throw on newer versions of the same lifestyle and on account of broader implications. In the model kinship society either women or men will enjoy the advantage of continuity of social space through the transformations of the life-cycle. In patrilateral societies women generally suffer dislocation and a sort of ‘nuclearization’. That is, they are pulled away from a world where they are only beginning to enjoy the social scope of an adult, and pushed into child-bearing among strangers, where they are pulled inward toward identification with a nuclear family of procreation. Often their domestic nucleus is part of a compound family and even openly opposed to the rival nuclei of their co-wives. A woman in the child-bearing years works and carries for her children and their father, perceiving a world centred in domesticity. Kinga society in 1860 seems to have allowed its women a generous period of years in which adulthood was achieved but domesticity—nuclearization— remained pending. A woman in those years worked for a wider community than a household. The food she produced was served through her mother’s kitchen but not narrowly to one group, since the rights of bachelor men to take food from kin (and friends’ kin) were extensive, and the productive orientation of society wasn’t coloured by the usual pattern of economically self-sufficient domestic islands. By withholding herself from marriage and reproduction she was able to develop a network orientation to her social world rather than moving directly from minor member of one domestic island to stranger member of another. A network orientation in this sense is one which doesn’t order the world of persons by groupings but individually. A Kinga woman after marriage encounters a new, nuclearized world. In traditional times in court culture she must, once she has a baby on her back, emphatically crouch or cringe in greeting a Kinga man she meets on the path. Men say she must show herself ‘very shy’. As she will normally have moved in marriage to a new community, her approved moral strategy is to display that (new) character, so to achieve acceptance among the married women she is joining. It is of special interest that bachelor men of her acquaintance will continue making free to joke with her (in the easy ‘courtship’ manner) after the marriage, but cease teasing as soon as her pregnancy is obvious. From that time (men say) she will be carrying a child until she is too old, and after the excitement of the first child the fun is gone out of her life. Fülleborn asserts she should (traditionally) avoid her father-inlaw “so that her marriage may not be infertile” and is banished from the isaka. But nuclearization doesn’t take so profound a hold on her as it would have, had she married immediately on gaining sexual majority.

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By the standards of many other societies she will neglect her child, sending it off to live with other children and to depend on them for loving care from the time it is weaned. The system works. Children grow up with the capacity to care for one another and to live as happily as children elsewhere. If the child is a girl, she will be emotionally reaccepted by her mother as a tiny adult: this happens as soon as the child is old enough and inclined to work beside her mother in the fields— something she will eagerly learn. When you ask a Kinga man about the nature of boys and girls he will have little to say in praise of his own sex. But he will tell you that he wouldn’t fear being widowed if he only had a daughter of seven years for, indeed, “she can do all that a woman can do.” We may find this, with our post-Freudian consciousness, ironic. The Kinga, who are not travelling the same sort of sexual ridgepath we do, don’t.<<[lit] As an artifact of the establishment of heterosexuality in most cultures, the primary interdependency between adult men and women seems to be generated by erotic needs. Kinga don’t share this syndrome to the exclusion of erotically-deepened friendships outside the marital relation, though since these friendships are normally homophilic they don’t threaten it. In their world the love of one woman for another is as genuinely charitable as love anywhere is likely to be, and a Kinga girl as a tiny adult has the advantage over her brother of being favoured: her mother won’t have acquired the same prejudice against her sex which prevails in many or most neighbouring societies, where domestic groups not networks dominate the scene, and a woman has her best insurance as the mother of males. The universal asymmetry of domesticity is rooted in the special intimacy between a woman and her children. In many East African societies the heterosexual bias of the mother is reinforced by a jural system which favours the male child— men want sons for what we may loosely term political reasons while women favour sons personally, with the result that male solidarity and the moral strength it nourishes are signal features, often expressed in unilineal organization and “exchange of women.” Kinga society evolved a different balance, still fairly intact in 1960. The extended bachelor phase of women presumably will shrink to insignificance as the effects of other conventions are felt in modern Tanzania. As women cease to enjoy the extended years of comradeship into adulthood, and absorb the values of domesticity requiring a diminution of woman’s economic productiveness, there may well be a progressive demotion and remotivation of the sex. But until then the early identification of a girl will be with a mother who is not constantly

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made subject to a stronger partner—not, that is, in the inner domain of social experience. Kinga women in the public arena are elaborately “inferior.” But the outward exhibition of impotence (as so often) functions as protective coloration, and Kinga women are reasonably free behind the mimed veils they take on with motherhood. As long as women have access to strength—to honoured sources of moral energy which aren’t simply at the pleasure of a man, I expect their daughters will continue to respond to them, and this identification will continue to reinforce the solidarity and moral self-containment of women. Given traditional Kinga arrangements, late marriage of a daughter is in the interest of both parents, since while she remains at home she will be in the most generously productive phase of her life and all the while producing food for the home kitchen. The little food that she cooks and distributes from her own house will be thought of as “stolen” from her mother’s stores. Though by 1960 the bridewealth had become a significant prestation, this wouldn’t have been the case had not the young men taken gladly to migrant labour and to saving their earnings from it. When these were eventually transferred to another family as bridewealth, the reward would accrue to the father and his agnates—secondarily to the mother’s brother but only marginally to the mother herself. Her interest was still served by maintaining the custom of late marriage and, ancillary to this, the love-attachments of maidens for one another. The buttressing of an institution by deep motivational patterns built into the component roles is universal (Park 1972). But for the non-Kinga observer the fact stands out particularly in this case because the reinforcing motives are unusual. It would be hard to attribute Kinga sexual orientations to ‘universal human needs’ as such. At the same time no one should doubt that Kinga have always found their style natural and have developed their moral sense accordingly. To them the standard domestic morality of other societies, with its deep motive patterns, seems skewed.

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TWIN SHADOWS, SECOND FOLIO

Childhood and after

Motives in early life—infancy A crucial difference was recognized between a boy’s prospects and a girl’s. Where she is re-absorbed into the mother’s sphere, returning to some of the security of early infancy, the boy is not. At the same age as a girl who “can do all that a woman can do” a boy is scarcely seen about the village except when he comes round in the evening to beg his daily bellyful. Anything he gets to eat in the morning or during the day won’t be kitchen food—that is his own affair. He is a goatherd whose chief concern is to keep himself and a few animals away from the plantations and settled places of any adult community. Defending the herd against predation is necessary but not arduous. “His only work is to toughen up. He should live by his snare and learn to be a fighter.” Out on the hillside a group of herdboys can remind you of the goats they are charged with, now spread about in all directions, now gathered again, holding to one slope for some hours, then all at once out of sight and, as like as not, into mischief. Though a boy is often in trouble with his elders, he has only to hide out with friends elsewhere and the affair will blow over. Volatility is his chief tactic of accommodation to the overworld. Boys are ‘wild’ only in the sense of ‘untamed’—they aren’t antidomestic, having their own level of domesticity which they share with the goats. Both genders try to keep clean, but girls are generally successful. Unless for lack of a brother she must play the herdboy herself, a girl is born to a domesticated life, playing with and caring for small children around home or hoeing in the gardens. The formula for childhood until puberty is: Boy:

wild

bush

taker

Girl:

tame

garden

giver

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The same formula, though it ceases to describe surface behaviour so well in later years, will have detectable relevance through life. Infancy prepares boys and girls for separate moral careers. So far as I could ascertain there is symbolic but no practical discrimination between boys and girls in infancy—a baby of either sex was always taken as a blessing and treated without gender. The symbolic recognition of sex amounts to giving men the prerogative of declaring a boy fit to join the human community—he had to pass a test of his “warlike” disposition before he could be moved into his mother’s house. The following account is based mainly on Elder Lumanyano’s information and refers to the Western realm but is adequate for most other parts as well. It is valid as a statement of Kinga proprieties as they were still understood and in large part practised in 1960. Birth is never in the house but in a sheltered glade amakoko. The place is strewn and a tiny grass hut ikyale is put up, all males and children being warned well away because of the mystical danger. The mother is attended by women who are experienced. Ideally, the first responsibility falls on women married into the husband’s lineage, if the settlement has a true lineage core, but in effect this extends to all experienced women on neighbourly terms with the new mother. They undertake the responsibilities of midwifery, bathe the baby and the mother after birth, and move them into the hut ikyale (whenever the weather has allowed delivery to be accomplished in the preferred way, outside). For the first few weeks the women will bring prepared food, then they will set up a hearth for the mother, supplying fresh firewood and foodstuffs each day. They are generous and often stop to chat and take food—it can be a pleasant interlude in a woman’s life to give birth in a season of fair weather. [Although the early German missionaries thought the hut ikyale woefully inadequate, Kinga found British tents a good deal worse.] Until the mother’s bleeding stops, she and the baby will remain withdrawn from normal routines, visited only by women. If the baby is the mother’s first male child the women may hold the final school for her before she comes home. [But as males, neither Lumanyano nor I qualified to hear what wisdom about boys is imparted]. When the mother has been declared clean there will be an assemblage of all members of the lineage neighbourhood who are of the baby’s sex. If the child is a boy, the men will take a small stick or a real arrow and pass it before his eyes. If he is ready to join his father’s household the baby should evince a masculine interest in the weapon shown him, following it knowingly with his eyes. Otherwise the men will decide he should stay a while longer with his mother in the bush hut

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ikyale. The men put on episodes of spear-play to frighten the child, and interpret any promising reaction as a sign of proper masculinity. A girl isn’t subject to a test but is accepted on the mother’s sponsorship. Back at the house a mother assumes normal duties forthwith—she returns to work in the gardens and feeds her older children again, who will have been going elsewhere. A woman’s expectations for her infant will be imbued with some of the lore and experience of pregnancy. Morning sickness is “very frequent” and later there is often stomach trouble and swollen ankles. Knowing no traditional remedies, a woman could only “bide with the pain.” On the other hand, abortifacients were well known. The potion must be taken right away in the second month, as by the fourth it could be lethal. While male informants said such medicine would only appeal to an adulteress fearing discovery, I hear the special conditions of 1960 in that: labour migration was heavy, husbands were in the habit of staying abroad for years on end, and generic lore about women passed freely throughout the Swahili-speaking world. The medicines used by Kinga women were not new. Under traditional conditions adultery could occasionally have been a problem in the case of an older polygynist’s young wife—the generational triangle so prominent in Monica Wilson’s account of Nyakyusa women (1977)—but there weren’t many such in Kingaland, and they would scarcely have needed to conceal pregnancies. It’s more likely the main currency for abortifacients was for spacing births. This accords with women’s doctrines and may have featured in the puberty school. Pressure to resume intercourse in spite of a child still nursing seems to have been a regular feature of the domestic scene (discouraged only by the weak belief it could harm the child) while adultery by all accounts was not. At the same time it’s clear enough that abortions wouldn’t have been undertaken in a socially bare, pragmatic mood. We are dealing with one of the secrets of women iviswalitumbu [little matters that die in your belly] about which there would have been extensive conferencing within the subject’s trusted circles. Medicines, perhaps the same ones, were often supplied the youngwife by women of her mother’s circle or by the mother herself, “to prevent the sickness of the baby if the husband is insisting on intercourse while it is still nursing.” Here the young wife’s neighbour circle will be holding to an official line, teaching abstinence, while her people at home, making allowance for human frailty, unofficially provide her with secret remedies. This separation of function goes back to the rule excluding a mother or elder sister from the subject’s gynaecological schooling. The balancing value is the propriety of a woman’s dedication to a

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particular baby, as distinct from the espousal of fruitfulness as an end in itself. A baby shouldn’t be weaned until well into its fourth year, and often is weaned later; but only the last child is usually left to “wean itself” by leaving the breast spontaneously. “The last child knows the mother well indeed.” If a woman becomes pregnant while still nursing at night, she will wean in the third month of the new pregnancy, as soon as she is certain, but just the same she may keep her baby with her at night until the new one comes. Babyhood ends with a series of weanings, first from the breast during the day, then from the breast at night, and at last from the mother’s body contact. Even in the case of a little girl, who will be living close by, taking the last separation is not an easy matter for the mother, whose outward status and inner world transform. The conscious norm for spacing births was four years or more, and the norm of abstinence from full intercourse was generally respected, with its implications of a peculiarly Kinga double standard. The woman’s attachment to her nursing baby having no counterpart for the man, he was expected to revert to the company of peers, comfortable in this open sexual orientation. While the same reversion was not unheard of among women, particularly in cases where there was ground to fear an abnormal pregnancy, it wasn’t expected. A husband wasn’t barred from sleeping with his wife and baby but would have to revert to the sexual patterns of courtship, finding satisfaction in some way short of intercourse. She, the well-instructed one, knew she must neither demand nor tolerate full consummation. In 1960 few communities close to the road still had a flourishing ikivaga [bachelor house] where married men might stay—it was the practice of men to go abroad as soon as all had been done to see that the mother and child were well established. “A man has no interest in his child until it is old enough to run errands and will be responsible.” Old men were apt to attribute a husband’s easy detachment from domesticity to this distaste for living with infants rather than the strict rule of abstinence, which was taken as unproblematic in itself. The infant belongs unequivocally to the mother. Father-identification by a male child is unlikely to go deep, at least in early years. Perhaps it has been a result that when a boy has grown he hasn’t identified readily with fatherhood himself. A herdboy son, with his seeming carefree attitudes to life, must often remind a father of what he has lost.

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I learned only a little about the cognitive context of birth from terminology. There is no foolproof way of probing a foreign vocabulary in the dark, however helpful a group of native speakers may wish to be. Wolff (1906), who worked for long years in the Tandala area of the North, has two entries in his vocabulary, ikyale for the lying-in hut [G: Wochenhaus] and ilyeve for the parturition hut [Geburtshaus]. The common term for a lying-in hut in some regions is ikisulutsi, which I recorded merely as nyumba ya kuzalia [Sw: house for giving birth]. It was owing to deficiencies in my own cognitive map that I failed to make the same distinction German does, but there is a clear implication that when the season forbade giving birth like a wild creature in the open, the midwives of Tandala would have insisted on a separate hut for the purpose. Perhaps in other areas, where ikisulutsi is the term in use, the procedures have never been so strict. I hardly need list the reasons why local differences are more pronounced for women’s than men’s worlds.<<[lit] It is the water of the ilivangalala, a plaintain-like weed, which midwives use to wash mother and child, and this is the same that is used after ordinary menstruation. The word ilimali distinguishes menstrual blood from other kinds: unkisa [gwamunu] blood [of a human being] (as from a cut) and unnoge [gwihuma mumeno] blood [running from the nose] or ugwalonda [gwasenga] blood [of a cow]. After the washing with ilivangalala the rationale for the woman’s continued seclusion rests on the continued bleeding [ilimali], which must be concluded, as ordinary menstruation must, before she resumes the marital bed. Although Wolff gives two terms for afterbirth, ilivaho and ilipapelo, I have no satisfactory explanation of their distinct meanings. In the interval between birth and naming by the mother, an infant is a stranger [umenza], and I think for men, including the several elders I found with a nose for female lore, it is the whole world of women’s seclusion which is strange. It is a more spacious world, anyhow, than I am fit to give a full account of. Janeth Luvanda, a young social worker who had grown up as a Lutheran in the Western realm, was willing to help with my study of women’s culture. Though fluent in what we might call exoteric kiKinga, she was unfamiliar with certain expressions relating to rites she hadn’t encountered herself. In short, she was qualified by her sex and Kinga culture but hampered in these inquiries by her status as a Western-educated Christian. My account in the condensed paragraphs which follow is based on her information, supplemented on most points by confirming details from men who were willing to ask their wives or women friends particular questions on my behalf. Bi.

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Luvanda put 109 questions, which I had composed and typed for her in Swahili, to a small group of older women in the Northern realm, speaking in Kikinga and recording consensual answers in Swahili. Here and there her own bookish hygienic lore was blended into her answers, and I have not included that. But on a number of crucial points she was able to overcome the interventionist bias of her profession, to represent mine. The result is at least a tentative exploration of the cognitive map women use in bearing and nursing their infants. There is spontaneous recognition in any community of women as to who shall take charge of midwifery and how tasks shall be assigned. This is regarded as a communal not a kin-bound affair. A stranger who felt labour pains while working nearby or passing through would be helped as readily as another woman, and messages would be rushed to her kin. Usually the husband’s mother will be living nearby or will come to stay with her daughter-in-law when the delivery is expected. Women say that the methods of handling parturition aren’t standard from one place to another, depending on local teachings and individual experience and judgement. But everywhere a woman without experience of giving birth is excluded, and any woman who might try to block the birth by witchcraft is kept away. The husband should build the lying-in hut [ikisulutsi] if there is no little hut nearby which is appropriate and available. It should be out of sight, within the border of a nearby wood. The husband should stand by at home, if only so that if the midwives call for a special medicine he can fly to collect it from the bush or purchase it from a herbal doctor. Should a woman fail to deliver for some time after the onset of labour, it is because an invisible rope or chain has been bound round her body beneath the skin. To break this rope placed by witchcraft, the woman’s attendants will seek to obtain a special potion from a doctor of good reputation. Otherwise one of the midwives may have the requisite powers. She will call for green twigs from a special tree, break them in short lengths, and tie them with grass to her patient’s hands, wrists, upper arms, and other limbs. From green reed-grass (of the sort used for ordinary mats) she will fashion a band to be wrapped about the subject’s body at the chest and lower abdomen: and into this band are inserted more of the medicinal twigs at hand’s breadth intervals. Then there is a special smear which is rubbed from the top of the head over the nose straight to the vulva. At the setting of the sun the outer ropes should break and the inner ropes are felt at that moment to loosen and give way so that delivery begins. [This information is from the Central realm.] News of a successful delivery is announced by the triumphal trilling of women, which will be heard from the woods, and by handclapping as soon as the infant is held in her arms by one of the attendants. Hearing the announcement from the woods, in 1960 a Christian father was expected to fall on his knees to give thanks. After the delivery, as soon as the bathing

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and settling of the mother is accomplished, the women will feed the baby a little porridge, traditionally uvuletsi [finger millet]. Like its Swahili equivalent ulezi this word means both “child rearing” and “finger millet.” The grain has mystical status among the Kinga, who say it was the staff of life in the earliest epoch of man’s life on earth.<<[lit]

The name of the ritual feeding is ukutsilula [counteracting the refusal of food]. “Behold the child is hungry,” say the women, considering that it has been so long without food in its mother’s womb. As lela means nourish, I hear uvuletsi as a noun formed on the causative— “nourishment”—but my skills in eliciting such linguistic information were pretty raw, and I can’t confirm the name of this little porridge is also a noun used in that more general abstract sense. In 1960 some infants were being given ukutsilula in form of a potato pablum, sweet or white, since finger millet was no longer plentiful despite its special place in ritual. The tiny grain has great food value but represents a relatively meagre return on labour. Do we know enough to judge the larger meaning of the feeding ukutsilula which so outraged the Germans (and Janeth) but which survived all their efforts to change it? My premise would be that the act is a presaging of the end of nursing in its beginning, a countering of the totalitarian tendency of the bond between the woman and her nursing infant, a warning from Society as well as a blessing meant to help the little stranger survive its infancy. A stillborn child is buried there in the forest where it was delivered, and a neonate who dies before the homecoming is treated likewise. The jural implications of this are manifest. When you ask a woman about her fecundity she will normally not count such children. The verbal form which refers to such deaths is not the same as the form for children who have died after being brought home: avijangike ~ avejangike. Baby names tell us something of the state of mind of the mother at delivery. Ordinarily there is no indication of the baby’s sex or its own supposed character. The name expresses a mother’s private experience of bearing and delivery. There is no attempt to form the infant’s soul or spy into its future. It comes as a stranger. Some birth names will clarify this: Vutsange ~ Birth-giver. “The mother was anxious about her ability to produce a child.” Heg’a ~ Take leave. “The mother had been preparing to leave the community because of bad feeling but the baby came first.”

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Ndidega ~ I’m surprised. “The child came prematurely.” Syaka ~ Doubt. “The mother had no confidence the child would live.” Kitavungwa ~ Without being taught. “The mother hadn’t received the traditional schooling for women.” Situlwa ~ Homeless. “The mother had a deformity and must live like a beggar.” Mwampaja ~ Bamboo sort. “At the time of delivery the mother was gazing up at a stand of bamboo.” Kivulilo ~ Calumny. “Someone had carried tales about the mother.” Pavusule ~ Resentment. “The mother felt disliked in the community where the child was born.” Salangwa ~ Ignore. “The mother was in need of help but no one would offer it.”

The interpretive glosses given are the suppositions of neighbours, who must simply guess: the name constitutes no sort of boast or invective, the namer receives the name as inspiration at the time of delivery and doesn’t therefore consciously intend it as a message from herself to others. Through the years until the child chooses a name of its own, its birth-name will memorialize for the mother a moment of truth. For others it will simply be a name, a tentative means of reference, later to be associated with a particular short period of years in the life of the community and the individual who bore it. Psychologically, the act of bestowing a name here is not an ‘opportunistic’ but a ‘propriate’ act in the sense of Gordon Allport (1955). The mother of Salangwa or Heg’a is not to be read as trying to affect her environment but as formulating experience. While Christians by 1960 were given to letting both parents (and perhaps other kin as well) join in selecting a name—the fashion then was for Biblical or secular European names—the pagan mother still sought for a name ordained in the event of birth itself. Mother and child were traditionally shaven clean before being settled in the ikyale. The mother’s clothing was completely renewed. I have no special information on meanings assigned to these ritual observances or why, according to some informants, a pregnant woman was not supposed to take hot food. Intercourse was forbidden in the later months of pregnancy “lest the babe be born blind.” There was

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also a belief that the re-occurrence of twins could be forestalled by limiting intercourse. But most of the mystically sanctioned precautions affecting pregnancy and delivery can be read as generic precautions not just particularistic messages. The common feature of these prohibitions is awareness of the vulnerable new life in the womb—they say that pregnancy is charged with danger, and that socially-given knowledge about these dangers is required to bring it successfully to term. Natural danger lends depth to these precautions as sacraments, and they in turn bosom the event in culture. The sacralization of human reproduction is an affair of women, having as one of its points the distancing of men in time and space from the events of childbirth. An easily anticipated consequence of these solemnities is to lend sanction to the rule against intercourse during the long period of lactation which ensues, in accordance with women’s doctrines. There is a consignment of the child to the woman’s sphere so long as it remains an infant. This is modified only in the case of a male child, by the ceremonial contract implied in the “showing of the arrow,” which provides that when infancy is finished this child will revert to the sphere of men. It is the conceptual separation of these two spheres which is expressed in the special terms (such as ilisipo [bowl-calabash] or uluketo ulwa kukyale [razor]) for items used in women’s lustrations, and the absolute removal of such things from the dwellings of men.

Motives in early life—childhood What is the baby’s own early experience? For the first year or more it meets the world while perched incuriously on its mother’s back. In 1960 women wore cloths above the waist, conforming to westernized norms of modesty, but these left the shoulders and upper back free, giving a baby ample skin contact. In early days the soft goatskin carry-sling was always used, and no clothing otherwise was thought to be needed above the broad belt umwepinyo. This was worn by a woman from the time of bearing a child to the time she was prepared to conceive another, to signify her special status. While some informants (in the Central realm) held a woman would wear the belt “from five to seven years,” I have taken this as an upper limit, true for last-children who, being left to wean themselves, may continue to nurse so long they will vividly recall it in later life—or those frequent cases where the father is absent. Monica Wilson (1950:115) gives four or five years as the normal spacing of births in traditional

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Nyakyusa society, and I would make the same or a higher call for the Kinga. The reserved status in which a woman was placed by the belt umwepinyo was precisely defined by the greeting, elaborately deferential but (as there was no reciprocal part for the man) particularly distance-making, she must give to a man she might meet on the path. The baby’s tenure was thus secured for three or four years at least— a long babyhood by cross-cultural standards, as the one appointed companion of its mother. Part of the rationale for spacing births was, as with the Nyakyusa, so that a child could be carried by its mother until it was ready to flee on its own legs from enemy attack. But there is no necessary logic here—another people might have opted for more births not less to hedge against war. I think these customs reflect a Kinga woman’s own deep preferences: to secure the greatest reward from the nursling by prolonging the mothering relationship to its naturally ordained limit, to the exclusion of cross-gender genital erotism. It is the turning of the mother fully toward the child, more than any particulars of the way children are handled, that I regard as the real moral basis of the baby’s manifest security. How else explain the fact that babies retain their quiescent manner through all the careless treatment they will receive from the tiny surrogate mothers who so often after the first year or two will have short-term charge of them? Kinga mothers do not seem to use much facework with their infants, at least in public. The communication of love is on the level of need. When a woman feels her child ready for independence she brings their mutually possessive affair to an end. Kinga babies are placid. A baby in the third year, when his mother has gone to the fields without him, may take to bellowing in the evening for her return, joining in choir with the kid she has locked in the house to wean it from its nanny-goat, and both are likely to bellow until their respective mothers return. They know what they want, and their little nursemaids are only respecting their judgement by letting them be. Such events are generally handled in good humour and without anxious concern—a lusty bellowing betokens good lungs. As a rule, Kinga babies are easy to have around, being rather passive observers of life and stolidly engaged in the private business of alimentary getting and spending. Granting that any effort to judge how hypoactive they are would be impressionistic, I think they should be placed well toward that end of a cross-cultural spectrum—I find it hard to imagine there is a society anywhere whose normal babies would make Kinga babies seem active by contrast.

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A child is toilet-trained before weaning, but children of either sex may not be dry at night when they first move to sleep in a children’s house. I take this to indicate a regressive phase for the child, but in this I may be reading irrelevant values into Kinga experience. The major explanation may simply be that a mother, having trained herself to avoid soiling, and letting an older baby sleep apart from her as often as it will, can afford to ignore enuresis, while in the closer contact of the children’s house it is an immediate cause for action. Their cure is as follows: The child should be brought to a safari line of brown ants, should squat there and pee on them. As the ants all at once begin to bite, the child will stop urinating and must run home without ever looking back, until the place where the ants were has disappeared. Now when the sleeping child wants to pee in the night the same ants will bite and the child will awake and run outside to urinate. Be it noted that both genders squat to urinate. Kinga men find standing urination a brazen and repugnant act. Normal toilet training is gradual, and women teach that it should be gentle: it is to be accomplished by talking, shaming, and showing. Since a young mother normally spends her day close to women of the community she has plenty of advice. Early along she will pay a formal visit of a few days to her mother or to the person taking her mother’s place, and more instruction will be forthcoming. Since the baby is in constant contact, she learns to anticipate its business. Owing to the intrusive character of my presence, except in the two households where I was able to become a fixture, my own observations weren’t often of spontaneous behaviour, but a number of young informants assured me that when alone a mother will carry on chatting with her baby and reasoning with it. Janeth Luvanda’s informants told her that a mother ought to have her child clean before it is walking (but walking is not encouraged early) since this is more efficient. As the child becomes mobile there will be a further stage of training it not to soil the hut or embarrass traffic. In 1960 a mother would generally dig a special little hole to be the child’s latrine and see that it was used, taking a switch to the buttocks when wanting to concentrate the mind. The switching was always to be done on the very spot of a delict—it was aimed not at the soul but the act. Since none of this control is scheduled until the child’s third year, toilet training can’t be called hurried or strict. It is combined, after the early cleanliness training of the immobile child, with a gradually-tightening practical obedience training, which Kinga

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conceive to be the major task in the schooling of a baby for its independence at the time of weaning. While traditionally the father of an infant took to the ikivaga for sleeping until obedience training was finished, as in 1960 he took to migrant labour, his pre-eminent duty remained the protection and care of family. In the old circumstances he would supply game, as he saw fit, to supplement the vegetable diet his wife could supply; he would take responsibility for construction of houses, bins, and fences as well as for the acquisition of needed trade goods (salt, tools, and utensils); and he would help manfully in the breaking of ground for new plantations when the season for collective work came around. As soon as the baby was weaned, or at least sleeping away, the norm was to resume nightly cohabitation with his wife until, with another pregnancy advanced, he was expected to return to the ikivaga. Hence for the unweaned child the father could be for some months or years a constant presence and was always about in the background, but wasn’t a partner in the mother’s close supervision, even in the case of a boy. A boy will always be left behind as soon as the mother feels he will tolerate it, when she has distant fields to till and there are older children around home to cope. There is no rule against leaving a girl, but often a tiny girl will be included in the gardening party because it is assumed by everyone that she wants to learn. Mothers and their children are allowed to differ considerably in the attitudes they take to weaning, obedience, and independence training—so one child may be weaned in a week from the day the mother decides on it, and another may go on for years without finally ceasing to nurse. Sometimes the women will make a point of testing a child by giving it errands—if the task is done without accident (fetching water in a bowl, or getting a hot ear of maize from the hearth) the child is ready for weaning. In the old culture there was no counting of years and months (not for ignorance of numbers) but a developmental approach to domestic time. A child who can be left for a few days with family and sleeps the night without crying may still be nursed on the mother’s return but is thought to be ready for an end to babyhood. Yet the boundaries aren’t usually sharp nor the transitions painful—many children who are already living apart from their parents still come to nurse. One boy, a last-born, recalled bringing water with him to wash off the pepper with which his mother was half-heartedly trying to discourage him. About favouritism I found out only that elders ascribe it to the child’s manners, while young people tend to think parents can have individual preferences for one sex or for children at a particular age.

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Because of the separation of children from the nuclear family before the birth of a sibling, because children are never told that the reason for separation is the mother’s expectancy, and because children will usually be looking in a non-possessive context to their peers for emotional support, sibling rivalry is absent. None of my questions about favouritism elicited echoes of that peculiar affliction as it is found among families elsewhere. With the progress of their world in directions the Kinga don’t control, I suppose rivalry will soon enough make its appearance; but the solidarity of siblings, especially of the same sex, is a cornerstone of the traditional culture.

Gender in childhood: separate worlds At least in some areas, and perhaps in all the “pure Kinga” communities, as Tunginiye would designate the old court centres, there has recently been a custom of putting little boys and girls (up to seven or eight years) together in a common dormitory. Tunginiye, playing the historian, opined that under the old culture the elders would have called it immoral because they would have made no age distinctions where the danger of copulation was present. There were no participants in this conversation older than Tunginiye, who was born in 1900 and could claim to have been a recipient but not a master of the older teachings. Quite apart from the possibility of an early pregnancy, he insisted mingling of the sexes on a single mat was felt to be inherently dangerous. He was vague about what the danger would be. When two young men in their twenties quizzed him out, Tunginiye’s explanations sounded lame. His culture didn’t supply him with an authoritative voice, the equivalent of our ‘scientific psychology’, to affirm that early sexual orientations persist. He was forced into assertions which made him seem to be on the side of blind custom. The younger men were skeptical because in 1960 there were communities here and there where older boys or girls weren’t prepared to take small children in, and it was found convenient to put the whole neighbourhood gang of wee folk together in a single house. Everyone found it natural. Boys slept on one mat and girls on another. They had their social life in common and looked after one another. I was living at the time in a courtyard so arranged. Even those communities would always apply a rule of segregation eventually, breaking up any mixed groups of children well before puberty. But usually the children would segregate themselves before

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they turned eight or nine. A Mahanzi youth explained, “Cat and mouse can’t live together.” It is a maturing sense of a social difference—cats in Kingaland are ferile—to which he was referring. What he had in mind was not Tunginiye’s moralism but the rightness of separate worlds. This distinction can be made clearer by considering the parallel case of the Nyakyusa. Tradition has it the Nyakyusa political-ritual élite came down from Kingaland many generations ago. Linguistically they belong with the people they have ‘colonized’ there in the Great Rift Valley, but when their culture is seen from the perspective of moral strategy their Kinga affinities stand out. Monica Wilson explains the segregation of boys (and formerly girls) in places of their own, which Nyakyusa imposed at the prepubertal stage, under the heading of “decency” and the felt danger of mingling the generations. Nyakyusa have no sympathy for the Kinga pattern of delaying marriage for girls, and don’t consider erotic heterosexual contact inherently dangerous at any age. They do outlaw penetration before a girl’s marriage, expecting her to take responsibility. The ambiguous situation which in their communities provokes concern for “decency” and generates the usual rhetoric of blind custom arises from the fact that a young man’s father will be taking wives from among the girls actually junior to his son and entirely eligible (before their marriage) to the son as lovers. To define these girls as belonging to the father’s ‘generation’ the Nyakyusa must go so far as to remove the sons to a village of their own: girls who marry there will be theirs, girls who marry into the father’s village will be taboo. Reciprocally, for the son’s wife his father will be taboo, the object of scrupulous avoidance which assures while he lives they’ll live in separate worlds.<<[lit] For Nyakyusa the rightness of the separation of the ‘generations’ is not morally problematic: what requires so much special machinery and moral concern is the problem of fixing the identity of particular individuals with the one ‘generation’ or the other. For boys, there is the age-village. For a girl married into the age-village of her male peers, there is the special burden of avoiding her father-in-law. This entails annihilating her old identification with those of her ownsex peers who (from her point of view) by marrying one of his peers have crossed the generational line with impunity. In the old Kinga culture females had immunity from warlike violence, and it is probably that immunity which would have made gender-ambiguity attractive to some males just starting out on the stormy path to “wildness.” Raising the genders together after infancy might not so much inflame as endanger the boys’ masculinity. This may have been the inner hazard Tunginiye could sense but was lacking in the lexicon of younger

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men. With the colonial pax masculinity became less stressful, and that prod to moralistic fancy would have receded. By about the mid1920s obligatory participation in war or raiding had disappeared. Twolegged cats and mice, in the absence of identity problems, aren’t sexually jealous of each other. As to the segregation of boys and girls in 1960, both groups perceived this as a positive measure depriving neither group of any privilege—quite the opposite. To understand this, in spite of the good relations of mixed groups in the common dormitories, we have to consider how the underlying, unproblematic moral axioms are laid down. We are examining the ontogeny of gender strategies. The pertinent age for this sort of moral concept formation would probably be between four and about eight or ten. Kinga call these children ikihinza and ikidimi, wee maid and wee lad, classing them as too young for regular labour. In 1960 at Malanduku in the Eastern realm it had become the custom for such children to lie in the kitchen. The neighbourhood group might lie in turn at different houses, for the structures were spacious and of a new style: two rooms with the one an inner bedroom leading off the kitchen, which had the only outside entry. The kitchen served as the public room while the parents’ bedroom was private. A couple with a rather young baby could trust it for a trial to overnight with the children, and still keep supervision. It had seemed practical as an arrangement, when a group of men with young families had built the new Christian village, but there had been some complications. Boys over six (or thereabouts) were going to great lengths to “get out of the kitchen,” which they found demeaning. Even some boys younger than that were putting on superior airs, having got places with independent older brothers or cousins. Hence the kitchen groups were composed of more, and older, girls than boys, as girls had no objection to staying longer. What the un-progressive little boys sensed, and resisted, was an inexorable trend to domestication. The kitchen was, both traditionally and practically, woman’s realm, the place of the grindstone and the big cooking pot on its three black stones—anathema to all the values properly espoused by boys. Still, the new domestication seemed already to have got under their skin, for one little group of emancipated lads only about seven years old had seen fit during my stay to express their independence in a most uncharacteristic fashion—by crashing on a group of older girls nearby, for all the world in the manner of the eligible bachelors who might occasionally be seen slipping in to pay court. When the big fellows did show up they’d send the little ones packing, of course, but the whole affair gave rise (apart

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from amusement) to diffuse feelings that the pattern of life was breaking down, not necessarily for the better. No one was prepared to say where it all would lead. Why did these older girls laugh and fail to expel the pretentious little boys? Young men were saying the girls would have eventually, because they’d have seen that their mutual confidences iviswalitumbu were threatened. Ironically, the term girls were most apt to use then in Malanduku was the Swahili siri yetu [our secrets], an expression with a lighter, often teasing connotation. An arrangement which had maintained itself for generations, probably for centuries, was beginning to lose its selfcorrecting character. The reason was not that Malanduku’s ‘system’ was cracking—the new pattern had no less system to it than the old. The reason for the surface changes was a shifting moral perspective within the whole community, brought in with the founding of a new village on new, Christian ideals of co-operation, new ideas about housing, and a commitment to prosperity through modernization. The children were beginning to respond. What the old arrangement did was to put the whole experience of youth into one of two gender worlds, each with its proper character values and sanctions. The two worlds were articulated to one another by personal ties, first of kinship then courtship, but the intimacy and constancy of such ties was curtailed. Own-sex ties were always more strongly reinforced. Rigid segregatory taboos weren’t needed, because the structure was secure. In this respect one might compare a Kinga marriage to the sort of arranged marriage between important families which we have known in the West, or an African marriage arranged by lineage authorities: the press upon the partners is less than that of the ‘romantic’ marriage, because less depends on their personal commitments. It is true that Kinga marriages are quite often ‘romantic’ and founded on intense personal expectations. But peer groups, wherever solidary network ties are established, here take the place of families or lineages. Becoming an aspect of the community’s structure, marriage in the traditional culture has not been a violation but a subtle reinforcement of the separateness of men’s and women’s worlds. Malanduku’s new institutions press against the limits of almost every functional equation which characterized the old set of institutions. Thus: TRADITION: Because boys and girls grow up and live in separate worlds they can eventually combine in marriages which don’t threaten to become closed units, structurally adrift (i.e., free to form socially inopportune or

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irregular alliances or factions). DEPARTURE: Growing up in less separate worlds, dyadic withdrawal of a married couple becomes more likely, and structural drift becomes a threat. Whole communities convert to denominational Christianity, neighbourhood work groups assume added importance. TRADITION: Drawn into the ceremonial and political life of the courts, men have allowed their nominal lineage ideology to lie fallow, while they eventually settle in virilocal, neolocal neighbourhood groupings based on some kinship and a lot of comradeship. DEPARTURE: Embarrassed by the devitalization of the court centres, and lacking the wherewithal of a lineagecentred organization, men turn to the adventures and delights of migrancy, finding a surrogate “barracks” life on the sisal and tea estates. TRADITION: With dependence on lineage solidarity in abeyance, religious practices associated with it are of minor importance, overshadowed by the emphasis on communal rites and ceremony. DEPARTURE: With the decay of the communal religion and new emphasis on domesticity, religious sanctioning of peer-group identification (Christian young men’s and women’s sodalities) has attained major importance. TRADITION: The glamour of the court centres extended to the bachelor life which they sponsored, so that self-realization through the production of offspring was de-emphasized for both men and women, and both were content with long postponements of marriage. DEPARTURE: The prestige of migrant labour and the imported goods associated with it pertain unevenly to the sexes, leaving young women relatively isolated. They begin to seek earlier marriages and usually succeed in spite of highly inflated bridewealths. Men begin to marry well before their ‘bachelor phase’ (now as migrant labourers) is finished—a development made possible through the emergence of ‘banking networks’ at home allowing bridewealths to be paid in full in advance with borrowed funds. TRADITION: With serious interest in the opposite sex being considered a prerogative of royalty and the middle-aged, the need for segregating wee children by sex is perceived with some urgency as a tutelary measure. DEPARTURE: With a serious interest in the opposite sex becoming the major motivating factor tying the migrant labourer to home and kin, the demand for segregation in early childhood comes to be regarded as moralistic and old-fashioned.

Departure from tradition is ‘resisted’ not by the system it would amend (whose only power is that of ‘least resistance’) but by friction entailed in establishing a new one. Egoistic ideas and motives form essential links between need and resolution in public affairs. This is where friction is generated by novelty—the heat of public thought, of raising custom to the level of consciousness, exposes cultural roots meant to be hidden. Uncertainty compounds the risk of misun-

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derstandings and produces specious certainty on every hand. But times do heat up, and when they do changes may come thick and fast. Comprehension of our own institutions depends on a structuring of values at a deep level of mind which is in the fullest sense both public and collective. Individual heads have difficulty dealing with these values rationally, as though they must derive from conviction not compliance. But here we are concerned with propositions one comes to accept through engaging in public discussion not private calculation. As people do everywhere, Kinga engage regularly, though generally in episodic and refractive not gossipy fashion, in discussions of the right and wrong of their neighbours’ actions. The formal court procedures are only the most elaborate realization of this scene. Kinga elders are not usually trivial conversationalists—even around the beerpot they seem not to gossip much or judge on superficials. As with people everywhere, the judgements they will as publicminded persons accept are of course not the values which prompt them as private actors. Recognizing that, we ought to discount writers who, ignoring this basic separation of public and private minds, demand that human institutions be psychologically transparent— governed by the (conscious) individual self-interests of the players strutting the parts. Institutions are created and maintained by public thought. Individual informants can’t trace the roots of that thinking in their private minds because the roots aren’t there. Social thought follows turns at deep levels in the history of the group not the lifeexperience of individual members. That public thought is given voice by individuals, and not always in crowd situations, can put us off track. There was possibly not another person in the world better qualified than Tunginiye to speak for the values behind Kinga institutions. Yet to do so he had to search outside of himself. The psychology of the individual is not to be confused with the psychology of social (institutional) roles, which ground in games no more aware of persons than langue is aware of parole. The difficulty Tunginiye experienced, for all his wisdom in the ways of his people, in stating why wee boys and girls ought to be kept in separate houses was a reflection of the peculiarity of public thought that its roots are always obscure. I knew he was embarrassed that he could so easily be backed into a rhetorical corner, pretending that people in the old days were so ignorant as to fear a couple of six-year-olds could establish a pregnancy. There was no need to argue with him that they wouldn’t, privately, be so ignorant. Collective thought, proceeding in its own way, imposes many such apparent absurdities on us. Kinga moral thought is no sharper than ours when it

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comes to justifying custom—public values. It is the other kind of moral thought, the kind used in the private pursuit of the good, which experience can sometimes sharpen. Tunginiye was right in asserting that in the old (court) culture the smallest boys and girls lived apart because any other arrangement would have been found morally inappropriate. A girl until she was about ten would gradually be acquiring the skills and habits of work wanted in adulthood, and after that age when called upon to do so she could carry a woman’s full load around the house, if not yet in the garden. But at first her jobs would be compatible with a leisurely day of games with her friends. At five her heaviest work would be caring for younger children. Then she would be set to grinding the grain or maize for the firm cereal dish which, taken with a vegetable or occasionally a meat dip, forms the staple meal; she would be fetching water and tending the fire; and she would soon be helping with the cooking itself. Of these jobs only one is monotonous: the grinding, done with mano [inyevetelo] and metate [ulwala] in the age-old way, regularly means more than an hour’s patient labour (only relieved by having company) and is something a boy would go to any length to avoid. Girls differ: grinding meal is consistent with carrying on a conversation or following adult talk in the kitchen, and a person always takes pride in fulfilling her part in production. Many days are spent mainly at play, and a girl with the usual social skills is unlucky who has to work long all by herself. By ten a girl will know a good deal about gardening and preparing food, though she will probably not yet have gardens of her own. She’ll work beside her mother, using a spent hoe especially hafted to match her strength. She’ll also know the work of the wooden mortar and pestle, though at ten she will still be too small to be effective in pounding grain. Kikinga distinguishes by prefix the modest mortar and pestle for indoor work, ikitule and ikitwangilo, from those devoted to the heavier tasks, ilitule and untwangilo. Both require real exertion, though, and lend themselves to rhythmical work—what we usually call exercise. No doubt a Freudian interpretation can be put upon the work to further explain why it is exhilarating to young men as well as to maidens, but the matter becomes simpler when you begin to perceive the elements of dance in this work. Watch two pretty maidens alternately pounding the same mash to a song and you will want to join them. The transition for a girl from wee person to a magnetic force in the community is a gradual one but is complete well before she will be considered nubile. Menarche is unlikely to come before she is fifteen. By thirteen if not earlier she will have shifted loyalties to her best

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friends in the isaka: her rewards will come from them; she will be industrious, emotionally dependent on none but these friends, habitually exuberant. There were few communities in 1960 where a boy wouldn’t have had charge of the goats at an early age, driving them out in the morning, keeping some sort of watch through the day, and driving them back at evening. But herding was more dangerous long ago when there were more leopards and human raiders enough in most parts of the land to require the protection of grown youths going armed. In some parts few men found it worth while to keep any animals at all, and boys “had no work” or “their work was only war” in the no-man’s-land between one recognized settlement and another. Boys were inveterate setters of snares for bird and hare, and would always be ready to rob a stranger’s snare when they could, adding fuel to the fire of chronic feud. A boy should dress his own wounds by bathing in a running stream and applying medicinal leaves. Boys didn’t grow up in ignorance even though they must absorb all their culture from tutors within what Malinowski used to call “the republic of youth.” There were gentler arts: swimming, panpipes and flutes, and the interminable games of skill. Some boys became expert with the bow and arrow. At important centres field combats for teams of boys were formally organized. The arms were throwing-sticks and shields, and the typical casualty was a broken shin. As nothing but the football games at the middle schools recalled the raw side of the old public life in 1960, I have no field notes on open aggression among boys; but I’ve no reason to think it wasn’t done in full fury. Tales of fierce corporal punishment in early Lutheran schools, at which the Germans apparently required attendance (on pain of stiff confiscations of food from the boy’s father) confirm a picture of ungovernability which a halfcentury later was much softened. Wildness doesn’t develop as far as it might, when a boy is regularly required to start school at ten, or even eight, and has to become a disciplined ‘townsman’ to survive. While I can’t know how far a softening of masculinity had changed the scene by 1960, the reminiscence of old men suggested it was a matter of degree not kind. Wildness there was in 1960, and even cattle raiding had not quite disappeared.<<[lit] Boys get food in two ways which are legitimate, and in various other ways. The wife of any man the boy calls umamavangu [my older brother] is subject to joking, badgering, and licensed greed. But the wife of udada [father, father’s brother] must be “feared”—treated with a show of respect. She is udyuva [mother]. To her own boys she must give food without their begging, and they’ll carry it off to share

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with their friends. Other women called by the same term will be relatives on the mother’s side (women of her patrilineage) and of her genealogical generation. They, and women classed with father’s sister [usongi] or mother’s brother’s wife [udyadya], may withhold food if they choose. Then the boys “can only sit and talk, then after a while go on.” They know this food is theirs by a limited demand-right not inherent privilege. As to food from nobody’s kitchen, boys insist there are no rules about when to be hungry, no regular mealtime, no regular place to eat, no right number of meals, no proper diet. Any creature caught in a snare is immediately roasted, anything good that can be gleaned from an old garden is soon put away. A gang so lucky as to catch a goat in a sneak raid over the mountain would make short shrift of the evidence as soon as it could be roasted without smoke giving the hideout away. So boys knew a method for barbecuing even a goat in a closed pit, a smokeless roaster they could leave to cook overnight, returning to dig it up when all was safe on the morrow. Grain was safe enough from boys, except that finger millet can be taken raw at need; but maize and vine fruit weren’t, nor any other food that didn’t want milling—sugar cane was a favourite. Living wild didn’t mean eating food raw but roasting it on an open fire far from the cooking pots of women. The best little prizes (a chicken, a guinea pig) for young raiders were perforce grown only within a home enclosure, so the staging of a successful raid offered fine adventure. Boys were marauders like the pigs, hares, and cats; wherever they didn’t explicitly belong the community would see them as pests. On the other hand, boys were dependent on largesse for the evening meal—they weren’t ‘ferile humans’ but made the best of scouts against surprise invasion. The graduate of this school on the hilly marches was perfectly trained for their defense. The ikivaga [boys’ and men’s house] was also a school. Tunginiye explained how it would be in a settlement affecting the “pure Kinga” court culture: Here food was brought by the women, and small boys were taught, “This is where you are well fed, what will you get by going back to your mother?” In the company of the ikivaga the wee boy soon learned to despise the baby who followed after his mother. A child as young as three could be brought [by his mother] to the ikivaga. He’d be beaten only when he tried to cling to his mother—so the weaning might be done by older boys and the men, not the mother herself. The same never happened to a girl—she was to follow her mother in everything. Boys were taught, “Here is your warmth, here is your fire, nowhere else.” They were under orders to fetch firewood and bring

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it here, never to another hearth. Young boys lay at one end of the floor and youths and men at the other, for this was the house to which a married man must seek when tabooed from sleeping with his wife. This was the society of men.

Men & maidens: courting Old men in 1960 would claim that as youths they had been victims of a primitive world in which “there was no money and it was hard to marry.” As a rationalization of late marriage, this pat formula may be as old as the custom itself. The same informants will in another moment explain that any young man could apprentice himself to a smith for a few months and get hoes enough to marry with. We have again a formula of collective not individual intelligence, an unexaminable premise. Did young men in the old culture not go courting as they do today? The great difference today is that young women have no communal isaka but live in twos and threes, usually with a wee sister or two, in miniature houses of their own, located close by one set of parents, who will claim to be keeping them safe from rowdy visitors. In the old culture boys were always outnumbered on their night visits, and the rowdies, if they weren’t quickly cowed, were quickly ejected. Perhaps we should speak of precourtship, since the scope for passion by all accounts was modest. The mating instinct was kept at a simmer. The press of sexual frustration was lacking on both sides. An elaborate fiction was erected of the need for secrecy and the righteous antipathy of fathers toward lovers; but that was mainly a smoke-screen adding another rationale (to the claim of “poverty”) for procrastination. For men, marriage would bring the end of male wildness. For women it would mean an end to the extended youthful narcissism of the isaka. But where for a man one may speak of falling or even retreating into marriage, a woman had children to think of and want. The age difference for couples in the old culture of 1860 must have been a decade or a little more. This figure is typical for strongly polygynous societies. But Kinga say many men never married, while there is no hint that women who were physically capable might fail to do so, and it was the rare commoner who aspired to taking many wives. We are left then with the picture of a class society, albeit an open one, since a man with several healthy young wives will be rich, a man with no wife poor, and the mass of the population neither rich nor poor. It is likely that any vigorous, mature man recognized as a Sanga could be

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moved to set himself up as a man of importance by taking several wives and beginning to keep a courtyard furnished with beer. He would have to establish himself at a distance from a recognized court; and he might well seek or accept the designation as untsagila [lieutenant] to the ruler of that court, lest he be seen as rival. It was in this way the class system was open, though the fiction was maintained of inherited aristocratic privilege. In some communities I heard it voiced as a norm that a polygynist, having picked up his first wife from the isaka, should take any subsequent wives by inheritance or find them widowed. But if that was the norm for some communities it was not the norm for all, and was nowhere scrupulously honoured. Since the age difference for young couples was under five years by 1960 there was little scope for polygyny and the only sign of a class structure was the presence in some centres of a vigorous “royal Sanga” tradition of rule by an authoritarian, strongly polygynous claimant to hereditary right. But such local rulers were by then few. Whereas Nyakyusa in the 1930s complained that the Europeans had broadened the gap between chiefs and their people, the effect of the (inattentive) British period in Kingaland was to thin down the overclass, leaving only those representatives whose positions had official backing and a salary.<<[lit] After 1900 a vigorous commoner could no longer break into what had become a closed, established circle of rule. Other, more diffuse avenues to distinction were opened, and the wealth wives could produce gradually ceased to be the kind of wealth that mattered. But one principle remained constant for the century after 1860: like the prince himself other men of importance were marked by more vigorous heterosexuality than most, and a man pondering his moral options could plausibly associate heterosexuality with mastery. Kinga had the tradition of plighting troths, contracting engagements under four eyes and relying upon the other to keep the bargain without much personal contact to reinforce the tie. A small sign might be given the girl, usually something to be worn about the neck and of no intrinsic value. (A safety pin would do well, being useful for digging out the potentially crippling Caribbean chigger from one’s feet.) The long era of migrant labour provided plenty of evidence for the durability of such un-reinforced contracts. Positive cases abounded, in any event, wherever I might ask, though I had no way of checking on the (manifestly less memorable) negative instances. In 1960 courtship was generally practised in a more pragmatic spirit than the idealized retrospect of my older informants had suggested, but there have

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been essential continuities. Tunginiye’s account makes this clear, while accounting for major changes:<<[lit] Ingumbwe the girls’ pit-house was for use during the cold months only, May to August. Other houses weren’t plastered as now, and were cold. Youths talked of the ingumbwe as delectably warm. The number of girls in a single house would probably seldom have been over a half-dozen. The floors would be spread with grasses for lying. A fire was put down in a corner where the feet of the sleepers were going to be, the grasses being pushed aside around it. The fire would be small and covered with a greengrass lid to make lots of smoke “for warmth.” In the evening the fire was removed and the floor prepared. In warmer months the isaka was not a pit-house but above ground. Small girls slept there along with the older ones but were bedded apart. Like the boys on their side, girls left off sleeping with their parents at an early age, as soon as they were able to respond to ridicule and the invitation of older chums. The isaka was a place of stories and songs, riddles and games, the young ones learning from the elder in the early evenings before sleep. Suitors only entered after that. The theory was that the young girls slept right through the courting without learning much about it. Ukulavila to go courting was not something a boy would undertake alone. There was no difficulty in forming a party. Boys would talk of the cozy little house the girls of a certain district had made, and arrange a group visit there, each boy choosing a particular partner in advance. Entry had to be made in darkness and with great secrecy. The little ones would be asleep after nine or ten in the evening. One well-understood bit of sign language was: the suitor extends his hand to the girl where she is lying, and if she takes it she will let him slip in beside her. Courting was done in the tiniest whispers and couldn’t go as far as copulation. Fathers were supposed to be cruelly disposed to suitors, listening at a girl’s house and, if they found lads there of whom they couldn’t approve, routing them out and sending them packing. If a girl didn’t want to receive a particular suitor she need only threaten to call her father and the boy would leave. It was felt right that fathers should guard their daughters in this way, and the isaka was never far from the dwellings of married men, though the custom of building them on the same courtyard is new. The distance of courting was settled by two limits. It wasn’t feasible to court in one’s own home hamlet, where a lot of the girls would be too closely related, and on the other hand it was dangerous to go where one was hardly known. To go as a stranger to some place was to court death, as the people would think witchcraft must be your motive: how should they take you for an honest man? But there were two institutions which broadened a suitor’s scope. The first was the girls’ puberty ceremonies, which would be widely advertized and which legitimated travel in daylight by young men, even across princedom borders. The second was the institution of friendship

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among young men—you could visit your friend and court along with him in his bailiwick. In this manner marriages could be made across princedom borders. All the great changes which have taken place revolve around bridewealth. A girl’s father always had the right to dispose. Even after an elopement that is where the groom’s father must go to set things right. But the oldest bridewealth in Ukinga was two hoe blades, and they were easy enough to come by, as the Kinga have always produced a surplus. After the Germans came, Kinga started trading hoe blades for Sangu cattle. We know the Germans in 1900 rated Kinga country poor in livestock because they levied their first tax not in stock but hoe blades. Once trading conditions were stabilized a man could go with five hoe blades and come back with ten head of cattle, some of them advanced on a delivery of more blades next season. The prices then were: 1 hoe blade = 1 steer or bull 2 hoe blades = 1 cow But the pursuit of money and the mixing of money with marriage began in 1927-9 when men first started going abroad as migrant labourers and returning with money they couldn’t use in Ukinga. So they turned to buying cattle from Usangu, though before that cattle had been very scarce. Now it became understood that cattle could reproduce themselves nicely and make a man wealthy. Then the fathers of maidens began to see the suitors’ great wealth and to covet it. [I 32ab]

A key element in courtship which Tunginiye doesn’t discuss here is the sense that a father-in-law gains ‘parental’ (proprietary) powers over a man. In 1960 this was expressed as fear of the old man’s medicines. It inspired a suitor to accept inflated bridewealth demands, on pain of having to abandon marriage plans entirely. But the fear of medicines is older than migrant labour and inflation. Since a young man can’t afford to have bad relations with the girl’s father, it was argued, he must accept the asking-price of peace. If the two men have unequal power as persons, it is not the elder who must fear the younger’s illwill but vice versa. From the groom’s viewpoint, marriage is to be approached as a contract between two men, himself and one whom he must “fear.” So a condition which facilitated the rapid rise in bridewealths after 1930 had in a less explicit fashion sanctioned diffidence toward marriage, on the part of the freedom-loving bachelor male, before that. Psychologically, we seem to be dealing with an unresolved father-son ambivalence (displaced on a new father-figure) and hence a condition which won’t long outlast youth. But in the old days the edge of personal ambition had probably been dulled for a typical man before

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his first marriage was established, and that would have been a factor favouring monogamy. The parallel factor in 1960 was the debt a young married man would have contracted to his own father and kin in order to marry. The debt would have to be repaid from earnings at subsequent wage work. Though a young man through this arrangement would be coming to terms with his father’s generation at an earlier age, the new dispensation granted psychological emancipation with the one hand while imposing economic bondage with the other. The shadow of the girl’s father affects courtship in another way, for people would say of a man whose daughter had borne a child at home (supposing there were an actual case), “Our friend has got his daughter pregnant,” as if to put the shame of incest on him. That is why there was a special urgency falling on the girl who did allow intercourse to flee to the man that very night. Suddenly, entrenched deference to the father required a reversal of feminine strategies. The groom’s father would go around in the morning to say, “You’ve no need to be looking for your daughter, as she is safe at my place.” Then they would arrange the exchanges by which a contract of marriage was formally enacted. In return for the small traditional bridewealth there used to be two- or three-day feasts laid on with major preparations. The ideal is that the bride be bestowed as a maiden by her parents, who deliver her at a time they may set, along with beasts, beer, and prepared food for feasting at the man’s place. She enters his house, which he ought to have built anew for the occasion, and is to remain there throughout the celebration assuming a particularly submissive demeanour. Guests enter to greet her. At night the husband enters but goes out freely to feast and return at intervals. His family provide only a small portion of the comestibles, but the bride’s relatives come in force, collectively preparing and bringing food and beer. The bride’s seclusion represents the beginning of her avoidance relationship to her parents-in-law. I believe it also serves to define the nature of the contract of marriage as one between the groom (with his family) and her father (with his kin): it is not a contract the girl is competent to undertake herself, and as she passes out of her own family’s direct control her agnates emphasize their right to represent her interests. Ideally the agreement between the two sets of parents should be such that, whenever the girl’s parents come to visit, the two older couples will share beds in the one house, man and man, woman and woman. So structural reciprocity should translate into sentimental attachment. Sleeping with others that way expresses the unguarded

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trust reserved for those of the inner domain of moral relationships which in other societies may be strictly associated with the nuclear family. Where marriage was expected to come up to this norm, it was an extension of peer-intimacy values across the new affinal link, and even though the ideal was perhaps always livelier in myth than actuality, the effect was to set the marriage in a personal as well as a legal context dwarfing the spontaneous feelings and interests of the young.

The style of courtship That the courting stage in the normal life-cycle could be so long without eroding commitment to its values seems remarkable. The two genders separately and together had to keep the delicate balance. It required separation of the spheres of youth and mature adulthood while prolonging the former into the third and fourth decades of life. Since courtship begins with moonlight dancing some years before the more clandestine love-making of the isaka visits, it isn’t easy to say when first awakening occurs. Informants report no sense of “discovery” of the other sex before the age when physical intimacies are exchanged in visits to the isaka. The pleasures found there are experienced as profoundly new, quite in the style of much younger lovers in some other cultures. In the latter years of childhood boys on their side and girls on their own would be getting up dances on any warm evening and might be joined by a group of the other sex and appropriate age. Gradually with advancing adolescence these dances would come to be tinged with a subtle delight, as the teasing relationship between boys and girls began to have erotic reference. These little dances are spontaneous. In their duration and frequency they represent the excess energy of youth. The fire, the bells or the drumming, the company, and the singing must always have made the children safe from predators, though they would choose a place away from any houses, and though the night would never have been safe for one child alone. The main season for dance was from February through August, bridging the cold, dry months but including also many warm nights on the margins of the rainy season, when the night skies could be called brighter than the day. It is in the dance that the independent ‘republic of youth’ is most apparent. Here are some songs which Aleksi Sanga was able to help me catch and get written down as we sat one evening in May the better part of a kilometer down the valley from a spot where a band of young

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men [avasala] had been joined by a band of maidens [avahînza] for a party [ulwimbo] of song and dance. The acoustics of such valleys on a quiet evening are without parallel, and the singers were growing bold, knowing that their barbs would be felt by particular individuals where they lay in their huts. Much passed us by. Of the texts we could salvage, our probabilistic explanations are proferred, though none of them could have been quite on the mark, since Aleksi had no inside information from that community. A single song is a single dance, lasting a quarter of an hour or more. All songs belong to the dance-form kivilila, which is done with ankle bells and the two genders in parallel lines dancing toward one another and away with only eyes meeting. The lead singer in each case was a young man, who would have been a host of the party. “Kivilila” means “falala” and constitutes the main body of any song, amply interspersed between the lyrics I cite. With the interludes between dances, this little collection represents several hours’ entertainment. The event of course continued deep into the night. Aleksi and I, being over thirty, turned in before the party ended. Events of this order would still have stirred repressive action by Christian parents in some parts of the land, but they were beginning to regain the standing of an honoured institution under the independent government of Tanzania. The orthography and translations of the songs which follow are mine. Aleksi was not literate but had the gift I left behind with childhood—he could catch, retain, and repeat a verse readily even from a single hearing.

Song Ndilond’ udada nivoneka undisanga ndilond’ imbudila valye n’ avanonu Ndilond’ udada ndapwale

I look for Father, he doesn’t appear— Ah me, what now? I look for a sacrificial beast— They’ve already eaten, the fine folk. I look for Father, if he be here. (This is a tease: everyone will know who the finger is pointed at. The lad is alleged to live by begging things from his rich father.)

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Song Ndavulonda avavonu kuNzombe Lutaga ukalonde avanonu

So you are looking for the fine folk of Njombe-town? Go right on looking for these fine folk! (A lad or a maiden has shown signs of preferring the fleshpots of the town to the company of good friends here in the valley.)

Song Ndawit’ ulinonu nd’ ulinonu dyuve avadala vaswile unne nandinogwa uve vindala nd’ ulindala dyuve

You talk of your being so fine—how are you so fine, eh? Women who have been widowed— For myself I don’t like them. You woman, how much woman are you, eh? (A mime: some young man has been backward about accepting his brother’s widow.)

Song Wimile wilola ndandilivago ndili ’nswambe vani ndili ’nswambe milongoti unda veve walye n’ udada

You stand there staring as if I were yours— Whose child am I? I am the child of Milongoti— Well, and you, have you eaten your father? (There is rumour of love between a boy and girl who are too closely related.)

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Song Umuvile unekelitse ndigonile kitadinda ndikidwadila ndikidwadila

You have seduced me and brought me to ruin— I lay without locking my door and I was afraid, I was afraid. (Another mime: the tone is that of mock tragedy.)

Song Nda vidyuva nda vidyuva uvi kunyima nadyimboga vatye iposolo dyidumulinye

How now mother, how now mother! You who deny me even relish— They’ve been saying the spade has cut down the middle. (A girl whom the lad calls “mother” [udyuva] has been stingy with food, and he pretends to believe the ties of kinship have been ritually cut.)

Song Wiluta ’kusimila ikyuma kwabenki nakwukile mutungetsimya n’ umwalivo ahi-i n’ umwalivo

You are going to elope with a young fellow? Money-in-the-bank isn’t there at all! You’ve ransomed your daughter, Aye, your daughter! (A girl is running away with a lover who deceives her—he is penniless. Her father will have to wait to claim bridewealth when her own daughter is married.)

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Song Vavwene ndyivukiye avene vikwuv’ undalavango na dyune ndiluta ndikakuve vivi vanyina umwana vantumbu lya dadadye

People saw me take my leave— those people are seducing my wife! And I am off to seduce his mother, that child of his father’s vagina! (The jealous husband syndrome is mocked. Since the father’s vagina is in his backside, the verse is ambiguous as to what sort of seduction is planned in revenge.)

Most of the youths and maidens I knew in 1960 (in the Western subchiefdom) would have said they belonged to a “club” or “society” through which they organized the social life of courtship. Boys admitted that the girls were better organized than they, and it seemed to me the boys’ clubs were little more than a half-hearted effort to match the girls’. In the days of the larger isaka each slumber group would have made up a big enough unit for the activities of the “clubs” as they were in 1960—collective work, outings, and gatherings for fun. But there seems also in the old culture to have been a lot of visiting about, and the idea of a “club” may not be recent. The word umbeta, which Nehemiah rendered as chama in Swahili (‘club’ in English), has its most concrete reference to a small-animal path, always conceived as one part of a branching network, like the paths leading to dens (a word English uses for club-house) or the separate doors in a hamlet. The related ikibeto means gateway [Sw: mlango], an expression used to pick out a particular household among several comprising a community. The underlying metaphor is spatial: residential groupings in this society are social groupings, and the reverse should be virtually true. In most or all of the Christian areas in 1960 girls in the adolescent years were much given to forming clubs. They were alliances of several isaka in a neighbourhood, for recreational purposes. Clubs would arrange visits on which they would compete, each side trying to top the other in riddling, tale-telling, and song. It was characteristic of girls but not of boys that the contest hinged upon wit rather than mere physical energy. The side which lost was the one which ran out of invention.

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Herdboys in 1960, apart from school-organized sports, had a hockey game they played with a ball of hardwood root, burnt round, and special sticks. One club would challenge another to inganyo [hockey], and the game seems only to have ended when an excess of injuries on one side gave uncheckable power to the other and forced the weaker team to withdraw. Again I’m not sure how old the custom was, but note that the masculine wildness of the play contrasts characteristically with the civility of games emanating either from the mission-based schools or the community’s ‘gregarious maidens’. Advancing adolescence is, from the boys’ point of view, a process of attrition starting from an original, uncompromisingly masculine stance. What gradually wears it away is contact with the gentler sex. Ndikukongwe [I’ve called you to a gathering] is the way a girl asks her friend to any sort of party, and the gathering itself is termed ilikongo. Twigona twikina [we slumber and frolic] applies to a house party, and as elsewhere in the world it is a lively affair with a good deal more frolic than slumber. Indoors or out a party means keeping a good fire going, and for the younger hostess seeing to that takes the place of preparing any food or drink for entertainment. The evening is always impromptu but never formless or at a loss for life—not the equivalent of our evening at the pub but of a select party. From the age of ten or younger a girl will be an eager participant in the telling of stories and riddles, which she may bring in from evenings away, lying with her grandmother in another community, perhaps with cousins seldom seen. Maidens will be called to special parties once or twice a month throughout the year, and more often (as the parties will be larger) when the weather permits an ulwimbo [outdoor dance]. When there are girls alone they will run out of fun and firewood after a few hours. Then they’ll lie close for warmth until morning, when they may set off to work together in one of their own fields. Boys left to their own devices enjoy a good kidnap more than riddles. The technique is to infiltrate another neighbourhood, set upon a rival group, and try to carry off its leader, who will then be held until (say, the next night) he can be rescued by his mates. The stealing of choice bits of food wherever they can be scrounged is a continual source of delight. In the old days a specialty of almost every young boys’ gang was roast meat got from the glade where an old man had been spied setting up an offering to his ancestors. By 1960 parents were sanctioning dances for young adolescents in some communities by preparing beer and food, encouraging each boy to invite a girl in urbane fashion, but I didn’t get the chance to see how this experiment worked out. In the traditional kivilila dance, where boys line up opposite

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to girls, sometimes a boy will put his hands on the shoulders of a girl he chooses [K: ukwavala] and dance so for a time, though the girl will not often reciprocate. Here in metaphor is the bridge a man must undertake to create. Boys say that two of their own kind can “know each other” but can’t “love each other” [Sw: juana~pendana—K: manyana~ ganana]. They mean that attachments among boys are fleeting and sentiments mixed, but the attachment of boy and girl should be everlasting and the sentiments pure. They sense that girls, mysteriously, can truly love each other [ukuganana], and sometimes a boy finds this uncanny. Here is Nehemiah, aged sixteen: Girls talk in conundrums not just now and then but all the time in their conversations with boys and other girls, talking about what they are doing, who their friends are seeing, and the like. A girl will always use a false name when she is telling gossip, and when she says the most harmless thing someone who is in the know will understand the double meaning. Girls must have their own love affairs, just as boys do. I’ve talked with lots of boys about this: we think they do. A girl herself will say, “Oh yes, we think of everything but of course we don’t do anything but think.” They hide behind their riddle-talk. But if you notice, their riddling tales about two girls can be just like their tales of a boy and girl. Their false names never tell you the sex of a person, you just have to figure it out. It’s their way of teaching about sex: an older girl who has experience will help a younger girl in this way. It is teaching the arts of love. Ti is a girl who is shameless but popular. You’d scarcely believe what she can say. She’s clever at joking with words. More than anyone she’ll tell revealing things about other girls in her riddle talk. And yet when she starts in this way the other girls won’t reject her but follow along and agree. That is what makes girls different. How can they have any heart, following as they do where any girl leads, not disagreeing, not becoming secretly angry as any boy will do? Boys never know the affairs of others well, they don’t know how a friend secretly feels, as girls seem to know. A boy may know that his friend has stolen a girl—he must be very angry, but you won’t know that he is or even that he knows. [I 12g]

Collective play is a feature of adult life as well as youth. The ungovi [work party], the ulwimbo ukunem’ikivilila or ulwimbo ukunem’ inengela dances with bells on or with drums on the belt—distinct forms each with its own type of songs—are, at least in the life-history of the individual, outgrowths of the ilikongo gatherings. How far in the history of Kinga culture itself the ceremonial centre and its dancing inspired the dancing of childhood or how far it was the other way can’t be known, but the children of 1960 were doing their own thing not

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imitating elders. The festival mood in Kinga life is the mainstay of optimism, openness, and mutual trust without narrow self-cloistering and dependency. There is plenty of cause for dejection and misery in the young life as well as the old, and boys’ games, for their roughness, must have had some wretched aftermaths for individuals. But the civil theme of the feminine ethos was a counterpart to the masculine war theme, and helped to keep the wild ways of men in the old culture within bounds. Masculine themes in Kinga moral culture tend to be centrifugal, spurring the hunt, the cattle raid, aggression, and war. Feminine themes are centripetal, relying on the flight of the imagination, on wit and gentle humour. But though in childhood the cultures of the two genders are separate, they come to be woven together delicately in the prolonged phase of courtship. The weaning of a male from his mother is often uncompromising as a beginning to childhood, and a taste for violence wouldn’t be an unlikely result according to the little we know about human nature. The dance, especially as it begins to be oriented to courtship, is a civilizing institution in part because it can play on regressive needs of the male and resolve them. Before the missions, the kivilila was an ideal vehicle for displaying the matured female breast, as girls repeatedly danced up to the men and withdrew. Men would outdo the maidens by fastening monkeytails to their shoulders and doing their hair in dancing ringlets—thematically, a nice combination of nature and culture, the wild and the tame. How long would it take a redlocked youth to realize what the inventers of this dance had to know, that woman was the source as well as the target of his artifice? The soul of the dance resides in its art not its erotic meaning, which has to be muted. The sexes in the Kinga dance always remain two solidary groups. How else could the dancers properly mime their differences? For what it was worth, I suggested to missionaries in the Eastern realm they should end their ban on dancing, considering what Christian young people were otherwise left to do with their time. The missions had no immediate answer, but shortly after that the new government, in the interest of Africanness, began to encourage dance and related native arts. The meaning of the dance in later life no doubt has roots in the experience of youth, as other forms of celebration do, so that dance in a real sense revives an older person, recalling some of the ease with which young people throw off their cares in merrymaking.

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I obtained one autobiographical tale of courting which offers significant detail. The setting is the Eastern realm in 1962. Bw. Koro’s tale makes clear the fun a new watch can be, as well as the special part peer friendships may play in matchmaking. The fine literary style is the teller’s own, though the English is mine.

A test of friendship It was Monday evening when Bw. Koro had made a date with a young woman of Oka hamlet. “This is the day we shall be coming, so don’t fail to inform your companion that two young men will call, by name Bw. Koro and Bw. Maji.” The time came ripe and the gentlemen were dressed in their best, having put on fresh trousers, shirts, and long-sleeved sweaters each one of them. Unfortunately until they were across the river they had forgotten to look at the time to find out exactly when they had left. Having watches, they reckoned (as it was six minutes to nine at the moment) they must have left home in Maku village at just ten-minutes-to. They forced their pace, hoping to find both young women at home and not to be late for their conversation. Along the way the two young men talked of various things. Bw. Maji put a question to his ‘older brother’ Koro: “I wonder how long it takes from Maku to Igumbilo village?” Bw. Koro answered it was a trip of an hour and a half. Then Maji asked his ‘brother’, “Which do you think is farther, Igumbilo or Oka?” Bw. Koro had to guess the distances might be about the same. Now they continued their journey until they came to the river Idete, when Maji remarked, “Truly I’m amazed to hear that a car has passed this way going to Oka and back.” But Bw. Koro cut his friend short, “You think you are the only one who is amazed! Don’t you know everyone in the Eastern realm is amazed by this. O-o-o. E-e-e!” They continued talking in this manner until they arrived. When they got to the young women’s hut Bw. Koro tried knocking at the door but he wasn’t heard. Bw. Maji said the reason is they’re lying in the inner room, so we must knock on the wall corresponding to the place they’ll be sleeping. But his ‘older brother’ wasn’t prepared to listen to that proposal. Going over to the kitchen he saw a fire with a pot simmering on it, then he came back. Knocking again on the door he got no response, so he tried the door and by good luck it opened, and the two young men were able to enter. Hearing people talking in the house, the young woman who owned it awoke rather frightened, saying, “Who is it? Why don’t I understand?” Hearing this, the young men flashed their torches on the wall and laughed. Right away she recognized them. But when they saw she was alone, her friend not there, they weren’t sure what to say. She went out to the kitchen shelter, where she served

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food and brought it to the guests. When they uncovered their bowls they found she had filled them up with pure beans. So they gave thanks [in Muslim fashion], “Praise the Lord, God is not altogether against us!” At this joke they had a good laugh and continued the meal. But since their aim in coming there hadn’t been eating—seeing that they’d finished a good meal before leaving—they soon told their sister thanks, we are well satisfied. The girl herself had little to say, so she excused herself and returned the food that was left to the kitchen. At that point they got round to asking her where her companion could be. She answered, “Honestly, I did send word but I don’t know what happened, perhaps she is away.” Seeing that the odd person would have no one to sleep with, they went to have a look at the other girl’s house, to find out what was up. Having made the journey they found the girl’s door standing open. Flashing their torches inside they found only an empty bed, her brother’s jacket, and some old blankets. Going outside they frightened a goat, which ran for cover under the eaves. They returned downcast, with only the aim of bidding farewell to the girl they’d seen. Bw. Koro said to his ‘brother’, “We should just go home, since you, my friend, are without a girl to lie with you.” But hearing this speech, Bw. Maji answered his friend, “It doesn’t matter. Considering that you, my friend, are the one most involved, we shall arrange for me to sleep by myself. I shall just brave it out in a manly way.” Accordingly they knocked on the door and it was opened. Hearing that they hadn’t found her friend, the girl made a bed for the two men. But when they explained the arrangement they had in mind, she accepted the alteration of her plan. So Maji went to bed all by himself, the little sisters slept on the floor, and Bw. Koro and the young woman shared a small bed. This way these two companions were able to rest and enjoy themselves, though only to the great sorrow of Bw. Maji, as they disturbed him deeply even though they never came over where he was lying. When it was twenty-minutes-past five in the morning they left the girl, saying, “If there is another time you must both try to be home, for it isn’t right for one of us to find bliss while the other has nothing.” When they got home it was ten-past-six, so they reckoned that from Oka to Maku is a journey of one hour and ten minutes [sic], from which they were able to conclude that Igumbilo [a major village] is clearly farther away than Oka from their village of Maku.

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TWIN SHADOWS:

THIRD FOLIO

Age & wisdom

Dominance & seniority Superordination takes many forms, and the categories we choose for sorting them out in another culture can reflect our own too well. For Kinga circumstances, terms like class, rank, or aristocracy could prove misleading. This is not because no one concedes another person superior standing in respect of some qualities these terms suggest, but because the resulting social forms in Kinga culture are not class, rank, or aristocracy. Looking at patterns of interaction in dyadic relations, most of what I have to report from Kingaland can best be referred to one or the other of two ideal types, dominance and seniority. These are not terms suggested by matching Kinga concepts but are chosen to fit the semantic map Kinga build up from experience. They draw a major distinction between those whom you obey because of fear uludwado and those you accede to because of caring uvugane. Though deep emotion may be involved in certain relationships, the distinction doesn’t depend on it. When a young man says he fears his father he may be referring explicitly to the practice of certain obligatory avoidances, as of the father’s sitting place. The “fear” is a feeling-tone adopted and acted on by the two as a basis for their relationship, just as “caring” may be an attitude one strikes rather than a personal motive. Dominance and seniority are of that sort, types of role-relationship first and types of personal experience only secondarily. But the archetypal relationship of dominance is that of father and son, which begins early in a context of unqualified inequality. It would be unrealistic to suppose ‘role fear’ is not confirmed by matching personal emotions by most Kinga sons, despite the distance they usually manage to keep from their fathers. To some degree, later relationships of dominance will presumably have an irrational colouring because of this. Specifically, I’d expect the preferred

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way of handling resentment of dominance would be avoiding confrontation. This accords well with the antipolitan ethos I have earlier noted [pg.82] as a prime characteristic of the political system, and with the reputation Kinga had with plantation managers in colonial times as “good [= accommodating] workers.” The archetypal relationship of seniority is that of older and younger brother. Entrance to the underside of this relationship is early, and in a few years the same child may begin taking the senior role, toting around a new sibling or cousin. While it is not every boy who has an older or younger brother, none quite escape the sibling type of relationship. In the little tale of courtship told by ‘Bw. Koro’ he calls his friend Maji “younger brother”: apart from the mutual loyalty implied, there is the asymmetry which precludes rivalry. Early Kinga experience is saturated with close and continuous peer contacts in which the elder child has responsibility for the younger, while the father and (for boys) even the mother remain relatively distant. In Kinga theory the tie between adjacent brothers should be unsullied by conflict. But since emotional purity may be hard to maintain in an actually close and prolonged relationship, I suppose theory is best realized where the age gap and residence pattern guarantee a fair aesthetic distance. Kinga men avoid close relationships of outright dominance. Such would be patron-client ties, master-servant contracts, or caste relations. The avoidance of dominance begins with early independence after weaning, when the child ceases to be a member of the parents’ household. While it may seem to us this is banishment imposed by the parents, Kinga would be astonished to hear of a child who, having so gained freedom, was prepared to surrender it. The hypoactive character expected of infants helps to insulate mother and child from the mutual fear or resentment which begets dominance behaviour, and this would mean that infantile dependency should be relatively uncomplicated. As the child becomes active on its own behalf, most contacts are with older children, mainly of the same sex, and the great preoccupation of early years is light-hearted play. The tutelary contact of older and younger child, on the whole so effortlessly assumed, comes to be the pattern for many future relationships. My use of seniority here is meant to suggest an amicable mutual involvement, not just an age or status difference. The pattern entails a prior inter pares relationship with a moderate slope, never a vertical structure.

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An ‘involvement’ is a personal relationship which takes on a life independent of the social prescriptions governing it. Involvements are ‘irrational’ when seen in a motivational frame, and may create, override, or intensify socially sanctioned ties. In either dominance or seniority we can expect ‘involvement within the tie’—the rewards of power and frustrations of impotence give (perhaps unconscious) affective content to a tie, roughly in proportion to the amount and quality of the contact. But the intensity and all-importance of seniority contacts during childhood make the Kinga case special, if we are looking for the way early socialization can affect the quality of a social system. It is true a father-son tie must be established on the moral basis of fear uludwado, and the acceptance of dominance has its political uses. But equally the patterned bond between full brothers has to override self-serving motivations.<<[lit] If spontaneity is the stuff of friendship, keeping the bond calls for discipline. Boys are well aware of the transient quality of their peer bonds generally, but in spite of this a boy has a better chance to learn about caring uvugane from senior peers than from women. Kinga political society makes extensive use of the seniority principle, which is ready when a man reaches his majority. But the principle isn’t one of the visible features of the culture. A warning element equivalent to fear [uludwado] for the dominance relationship is lacking. Most of a boy’s intercourse with peers is tit-for-tat stuff, hard to stabilize, confirming his sense for the difficulty boys will have in raising friendship to the level of caring love [ukuganana]. But when the principle of seniority is added the transformation does become a possibility. Dominance among men is reserved for relationships which aren’t close. On the plane of politics, the traditional ruler was remote from his people. In 1960 Sangilino of the Eastern realm was the one local ruler cast in the traditional mold. To young progressives he was a reactionary, but to older men the style was talamu [severe—Sw. kali] and well understood. Sangilino wouldn’t preside personally over dispute-settlement cases but allowed a session to proceed in the form of a moot which he would oversee from time to time but not conduct. When the judgment was ripe he would pronounce it. This technique represented in abbreviated form the traditional practice of a prince, who presided at court only through intermediaries. Sangilino allowed settlement to be reached under the format of seniority—in the moot it is the most respected opinions not legalistic arguments which carry—while himself remaining aloof from the familiarity which the seniority pattern entails. He was a personage whom no one would have mistaken for an ordinary citizen, though he sported no special

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regalia, only a regal bearing. Unlike some other local rulers of the same official standing, Sangilino wasn’t visibly rich, had no commercial interests, and wasn’t extravagantly polygynous. He had built up no impressive domestic establishment, only an unassailable position of social dominance. I found in him the moral values which supported the prince’s high position in the old culture, and a measure of the political decline in other realms. Local rulers there may have matched Sangilino in authority but not in majesty. They failed to inspire the fear which, in his presence, even an obtuse anthropologist had to know. A father’s dominance owes little to majesty. Except for the new, familistic Christians, Kinga fathers aren’t much preoccupied with the parental role, taking no pains to impress their sons as heroic figures. But mutual ‘fear’ is quickly established, as the boy soon learns to avoid a father vested with the right to send him on errands or hold him responsible (whether as negligent goatherd or rascally gang member) for depredations on property. A boy of seven or eight will fight away from his father, throwing stones to keep him at a distance and running away to oppose his will or escape punishment; and a father seems quick to anger in his relationship with a boy of that age. After a few such incidents a boy will tend to keep a good deal more distance than avoidance rules require. Comparing young to older male informants, I found that fathers expressed less involvement than sons, and concluded that the main source of distrust in this relationship is the “wild” ethos of boyhood, which inevitably throws the male child into conflict with authority—of which one’s own father is the natural standard-bearer. Fathers, though they handle boys roughly, seem to expect less in reality than they claim from them. One of the most dominating men I knew, a keeper of shops, cattle, and wives, when confronted with evidence that his newest wife had been seduced by an unmarried son dismissed the whole affair with ridicule: Fancy getting such ideas about your “mother”! Here was a Kinga elder cut from Nyakyusa cloth. Since it is the counsel of peers to fear (avoid confrontation with) one’s father, boys continue to do so at least until they rejoin adult society as avalume young bachelors. There follows a period during which “fear” takes the form of mutual caution, the father trying to dominate by moral suasion and perhaps by angry words but without provoking an open break. The father may say his piece and have done, the son accede well enough to avoid provocation. In developmental terms this is a period, lasting into the young man’s twenties, of shaking off the constraints acquired through conflicts in late childhood and adolescence. This last was that extended period when a

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boy is called undimi, which signifies he is past the herdboy stage, and known to value nothing so much as his freedom from everyone but peers. Most often in 1960 these would be his school years. The young bachelor undume (pl. avalume) discovers other values, calling for fresh moral strategies. I think dominance has less affective meaning for women than men, because women as such seldom try to control one another through fear. The little girl is never encouraged to wildness which would provoke a mother’s anger. At five a daughter has returned in a way a son never does. By middle childhood a daughter relates to her mother in much the same way she does to her eldest sister, helping first the one and then the other in her work. Man-woman relationships can exhibit dominance. My first impression, formed from sitting in the baraza [Sw: official court of law], was that women in 1960 enjoyed all the disprivileges of a separate caste: even a young man could expect an honest hearing before an older woman could, as though not age but sex must confer wisdom. But later on as I listened and watched, sometimes knowing who was speaking and why, I found my “caste” model dissolving in favour of a sphere boundary. The sphere of men centres in the court— in 1960 in the baraza, in 1860 in the ceremonial centre with its equally formal procedures. Men are no more jealous of their prerogatives than women of their own sphere, centred in the reproductive process. Men freely express distance and domination of women as a class at the baraza, but this can’t be counted as a personal relationship of domination between an individual man and woman, or even as lending categorical sanction to dyadic domination between intimates. Men control one sphere, women the other: the public life of each gender centres in its own sphere, and entrée into the other’s is not freely given. There is a custom which tests the rule and speaks to the question of male domination. Women may give an important role to a male kinsman in a girl’s puberty ordeal. If the women of the school find a girl reported as disobedient or irresponsible it is her older brother (or other suitable kinsman) they ask to thrash her naked before the crowd gathered for her homecoming. Young men were so prone to mentioning this scenario (though none I found had actually seen it enacted) I sensed that it stirred their inner feelings as much as it must have stirred a maiden’s. Presumably, the problem for boys is not just one of sexuality but of family privilege as well—a sister must appear as mother’s pet in the regressive dreams of boys who are not taking well to the wild life. But Janeth Luvanda’s informants painted the custom almost as a routine item of their agenda: the thrashing

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should be followed by a gift to restore good relations. Whether or not the custom is often honoured in practice, it is a distance-making rite. How is it that the women themselves, who are fit to teach and admonish, are not fit to punish? The thrashing advertises the asymmetry of the relations between the genders, since everyone knows the reciprocal—a girl thrashing her naked brother—is unthinkable. The rite is asymmetrical on another count as well, since gift-giving only compounds the superiority the boy has claimed by thrashing the girl. It isn’t unreasonable to expect that the seniority pattern, in spite of some formal constraints between brother and sister, ought to govern their relations; but in this rite the girl is denied the equivalent worth which everyone knows as a necessary condition of mutual caring ukuganana. Part of the seeming preoccupation of youths with the rite would be owing to the denial of mutuality it proclaims in a society where brother and sister have otherwise a fairly easy relationship. But for both participants the heterosexual polarization effected must be noteworthy, and its incestuous colour as a privileged confrontation may deepen the sense of family relatedness which (in comparative ethnographic perspective) might have languished in the absence of early sibling cohabitation. The event can hardly stand as an advertisement of male dominance in marriage, since it is the ostensibly asexual nature of his tie which accounts for the selection of a brother. Just as formal chastisement means that spontaneous conflict is not germane, the formal bestowal of a gift carries the meaning that free, informal reciprocity is in abeyance. So the rite restates the association of dominance with distance not intimacy. Use of a male as the punishing figure in a central institution of the women’s sphere is interesting, and the choice of older brother not father has its own rationale. As to the first, by using a male the women avoid violating the amicable seniority pattern by which they customarily teach and manage juniors. The bizarre razzing and pinching of the girl which occurs during lessons might seem a violation in itself but is licensed by the inversion of ordinary rules at the school, while the thrashing is done by family and refers to everyday morality. Might the women have chosen a father-figure instead of a (categorical) brother? By choosing a young man who, while acting as their junior, can only be perceived as the girl’s senior, the women avoid either violating or magnifying a dominance relationship of man over woman. Perhaps the categorical implication would be that, if women outside their own or the male prestige spheres do subordinate themselves to

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men, the world should know they freely choose to do so: the show of humility is controlled from within and is not the mask of fear.

Pathfinding My own sex and the company it put me in during fieldwork may seem to show through when I take the tie between brothers as archetype for the seniority pattern, passing by the tie between sisters. I can’t say one of these sibling ties is more intense or conflictfree than the other. But it is true that brothers normally are free to stay together after marriage, while sisters are more often and more profoundly separated. Whatever the intensity of personal feeling which may be fostered within the ties, the structural uses of brother love are the more prominent. All relationships of superordination work transformations in the persons involved, if there is affective involvement, and the fraternal tie is an infrangible one with roots in early childhood. It will take its most explicit form as a feature of very early experience when there is not a great gap in age between adjacent brothers, so that an own brother is the child’s first little nurse. But this one is in harmony with many similar ties formed within the ikivaga (or among girls of different ages within the isaka) with cousins and friends. The main transformation worked on the young participants should be readiness to form such close relationships with others, for this is not allowed to be a possessive or exclusive tie threatened by rival involvements. As both genders learn openness to personal alliances, there is continuity here with adult Kinga character and the ease with which stable neighbourly relationships are formed. Kinga think of their smallest communities as tiny descent groups isikolo, though generally admitting their fictive character—friendship is simply assimilated to kinship. Except for twins, which violate the principle, all kin ties among Kinga entail seniority, which is derived from generation and the birthorder of siblings or marriage-order of co-wives through which families are related. It remains true that in the republic of youth two peers who legitimately might call themselves udada [father] and unswambango [my son] don’t do so in fact, through not wanting to burden their relationship with the avoidances entailed; but the same kin ties must have explicit recognition after marriage. In the field I formed the impression that the stablest friendships are most often those in which a clear seniority pattern prevails.

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In another context, the young wife who must make a start in a new community will probably find her husband’s “family” a loose and insubstantial organization. Compared with neighbouring peoples (in particular, Nyakyusa and Hehe with their big domestic establishments) Kinga commoners live as individualists. Joining a hamlet of a few scattered households a bride will be lucky to have the ability to accede in amicable subordination to women already established there. In the last chapter we glimpsed, in the woman who called her child Pavusule [Resentment], the possibility of failed adjustment. The seniority pattern plays a role in sexual pathfinding. By steps, an older brother can help extend a boy’s original homophilic orientation by exposing him to other charms. A little boy of ten may be taken along for fun by his brother on a night visit. He will find himself teased and adored by the girls, who make a point of exhibiting themselves and referring to things which mystify him. When the two brothers return home before dawn the little boy will have begun to acquire a sense for the way a night may be passed in play by men and women taking delight in one another, though it will be a decade before he knows the delight at first hand. An oldest son is his brothers’ keeper in matters sexual as the father can’t be. A firstborn has the responsibility of seeing all his younger brothers married before he thinks to take a second wife himself; or if he fails to marry at all he must pass on the privilege to his next brother. The closeness of the tie appears again in widow inheritance. A woman is free to choose among her late husband’s full brothers or pass them over (without rancour) for a half-brother, same father. She must often look less to the virtues of the man than to those of a prospective co-wife. But if she goes outside the sibling set, even to the late husband’s father’s brother’s son, there will be bridewealth to pay the brothers, as with any stranger. The frame of mutual responsibility and dependence between brothers comes to be felt the more strongly as the two leave childhood behind. A boy in the ikivaga would not be sleeping with his older brother, once the latter’s childhood was over, until the boy himself passed puberty. When there is talk of a young boy “dreaming the dream” two men will have him sleep between them and examine his loincloth for emission in the morning. The men, who will be elders of the ikivaga, adopt the attitude of seniority not dominance. If the test is positive the boy can’t return to the children’s mat for fear of polluting prepubescent boys. It is then the two brothers may be reunited, often sleeping together in the Kinga manner. When the senior marries, the intimacy is interrupted but not cut off. The young man and his

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brother’s bride call each other undambango, a special term which carries a privileged joking relationship. He can teasingly call her undalavango [wife of mine], though the understanding is that sexual contact is illicit, or must be mediated by the husband. Supposing that on a visit the bachelor brother shares the couple’s bed, it is said the husband ought to lie between the other two. I could be impertinent enough sometimes to ask how this worked out, but I could only expect to hear from a manifestly delighted young man that “nothing happened.” However, I’m not quite at a loss to figure out how “nothing” could be so uplifting. Something that must have happened was that the young man’s erotic orientation to persons of his own and the other sex were experienced as naturally compatible. There is a like lesson learnt in the isaka when two girls have a boy lie between them, and demand he show them equal attention. The point for the boy is only that the odd girl mustn’t be left out, female solidarity being what it is; for the girls the meaning is that a boy coming between them shouldn’t displace but enhance their own secure relationship. There is a sharp difference between the quality of tutelage between brothers and that of the women’s bush school. If both be taken as examples of the Kinga seniority pattern, hasn’t the concept been made too loose to hold meaning? The distinction of seniority from dominance has been offered to mark the extensive use Kinga make of communicative personal influence in the introjection of established values. A society which depended wholly on social control through dominance, deriving the force of any teaching relationship from fear (in approximately the sense of the Kinga uludwado), must create an extraordinarily tense, hostile milieu. But most Kinga teaching derives its influence from the sense of a positive bond: in their subjective experience the senior person is moved to share hardwon wisdom and the junior to heed. It is a form of social control compatible with a good measure of personal freedom, since a relationship based in seniority easily adjusts itself to the level of mutual involvement spontaneously felt by the participants. The relevance of spontaneity even to an institution as heavily sanctioned as the school is illustrated by a comparison of male and female initiations. In some communities as late as the 1930s boys were given a school [uluvungu] specifically called amavalatso, and Tunginiye believed that the custom used to be universal, before (in legendary time, I think) boys learned to run away and “remain ignorant of adult knowledge.” Once a boy had been brought into the school he seemed to lose his power to fight back. He’d be stripped of his minimal garment and

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made to sit on the ground in a row of his peers—three or four of them of pubescent age, whom the men would have caught and brought in. They must sit motionless, arms between straightened legs, facing each a staff, driven in the ground, which was to be used for beatings. It is here a boy found past sins visited upon him. A teacher might seize a boy, turn him over, and cane his buttocks without meeting any resistance. Semani, who had been through the school on the receiving end, professed to find the sudden impotence of the boys uncanny. The rite is supposed to confer manly wisdom and does include teachings—skill with bow and arrow in war, geographic knowledge like the names of all the rivers, the grave danger to the whole land which would befall in the event men failed to defend their rulers in battle. But the chief motive force of this school is evidently fear, and the symbolic transformation to manhood is effected by an ordeal which doesn’t amount to coopting the boy into manly society. The telling symbol is the crowing of a cock supposed to be young enough never to have crowed before. The boy must hold it where his privates are. Since the cock-potency belongs to nature not culture, manhood is confirmed by this rite but can’t be said to be conferred by it—there is no way a cockerel could feel sacred to a Kinga boy. There was no physical transformation or new garb to signal transition from one age class to another. On the whole, I’m not surprised the institution had atrophied by 1960. As an initiation it failed to induce the boys into any tangible fraternity. The men were attempting a school like the women’s but were ineffective because their approach had to be through domination. In the end they turned the boys off not on—the secrets weren’t kept and the new boys knew enough to run away. The custom wouldn’t thrive because on the level of spontaneous feeling it was off the mark. If men had been willing to go so far as circumcision the case would have been quite otherwise. That they were not willing to go so far says much about fathers and sons, elders and youth. Lurking behind is the special difficulty a circumcised male would have in achieving anal intromission. The ordeal a girl must go through is far more severe without engendering alienation, and this can be because the girls, like their teachers, take the schools more seriously. I conceptualize the difference in terms of the distinction dominance~seniority. I’ve already presented a text based on direct information from a woman of the Central realm born early enough to have passed through schools unaffected by Christian influence. Three schools are pictured prior to a girl’s marriage, the last an optional reprise of the private teaching

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(the second school), arranged by the girl’s mother. In the circumstances of the interview there could have been no mention of the custom of female circumcision (specifically, the labiotomy), which men aren’t supposed to know anything about. I think it probable that the second school, which is given each girl individually and is sponsored by her own mother, is the crucial initiatory rite in all the Kinga realms. At the first school, communally sponsored and focussed entirely on menstruation, the own mother isn’t present. That she is a principal at the more serious circumcision school may be reckoned evidence of the intention of the women not to estrange the girl through fear—not to use dominance to establish the emotional pitch of the episode. The girl by this time is physically the equal of her mother and a regular companion, not alienated and dominated as her brother would still be by their father. Janeth Luvanda’s informants, whom she didn’t interview privately, would have known her as an uncircumcised Christian. They passed on no useful information about the business of the second school. Tunginiye, out of his own abiding interest in the old culture, determined to ask for honest information from women he knew would confide in him because of his status as elder and historian. It is the report of his investigations which provides my general map, valid at least for the Western and Northern realms, and the sole description of circumcision I can give. Here is the account I owe to Janeth Luvanda of the ilimali school she monitored for me in 1963. Four girls from different hamlets had reached menarche in recent weeks. The youngest was fifteen, the others a year or two older, and all were pagans [Sw: wataifa, K: avanyapanzi]. The text is my account in English written after interviewing Ms. Luvanda in Swahili. The word ilimali means what pertains to menstruation. The menstrual hut itself is ilimali, and there is one for each isaka but it isn’t so substantially built because men don’t put up the frame. The ilimali hut is made of grass and light bamboo. Girls wouldn’t share one their mother used, and by the old rules a girl wouldn’t lie inside the isaka at all during her period. All this is in accordance with the ilimali school. There were six teachers avagogolo avakivungo [K: elders of the initiation] and many other women who danced in a circle around the girls, drank, and sang the songs but didn’t teach directly. The maidens had to sit naked beside each other with their hands on their knees, but there were no stakes planted between their legs. The teaching didn’t touch pregnancy but stressed the taboos connected with menstruation. A girl is enjoined from soiling good clothing or her father’s

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house or cooking utensils. To have sexual relations with a male is to be ruined, whether or not pregnancy follows. Any girl so ruined must without a moment’s delay follow the man whom she has allowed to enter her body. The words used are: ukunangika [to be ruined], ukugenda sivi [to go wrong], ukugonana [to lie and copulate], ukusunana [to have irregular sexual intercourse]. The girls weren’t bathed but made wild-looking. They had to lie back completely with their legs spread so that a teacher could take their privates and examine [as if to determine the condition of the hymen, though Kinga has no word for maidenhead as a body-part, and Janeth doesn’t comprehend the Swahili kizinda in that context]. Everyone is merry with beer except the girls who have no way to express their feelings. While the people are jovial the event is serious. At the close of the teaching some elders began searching furiously about the ground just outside the dance circle, crawling about and pawing at the grass. They would keep pulling up turf until they finally discovered a tiny calabash which one elder uprooted by taking its carrying lash in her teeth. Then the special fluid in it was used to cleanse the hands of the teachers, who had pinched and plucked at the girl’s pubes to emphasize their lessons about purity. Later, after the start of the parade from this place back to settled places, something else [which Janeth didn’t see] was discovered buried some fifteen yards along the path. [JL 1] The following document is the only one on this subject I have in my Kinga language transcriptions. The informant is an elderly woman of the Eastern realm but the wording of the kiKinga original is Soda’s reconstruction written down after his interview. The brief text describes the bathing of the girl and gives a refrain which is sung. An institution of the pagans according to their traditions: When a young girl matures then and there they will call together the whole kin-group ikikolo to come for the girl’s initiation. They go with her up on the hillside where they strip off all her clothing. Thereupon they begin to move with her to a river valley where there is a little pool to be found. Perhaps they will be running her hard, or beating or pinching at her. When they’ve reached the pool there and then they plunge her into the water. When they’ve finished the bathing they go back home with her. They begin their teachings of initiation keeping right on until they are finished. For the Christians when a young girl matures they only call together a few of the folk, the parish elders. Then and there they begin to instruct the girl at home. They stay only a little while, then they depart each to her own work. They do this expressly because pagan instruction takes a day-long session.

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For the pagans when they initiate a girl they approach singing from the place where they were, testifying, “Lo, lo, we make a vagina tempting. Let all who are related flee! Lo, lo, while ye have delayed unmentionable beings have been feasting (on it). [Hugu, hugu, tudunza unkundu. Avanyavuku vakimilage! Hugu, hugu, mukelitse galiye agange.] [GSN 3] The song makes clear that the reference is to the circumcision school ikitule. The officiants are not themselves but ‘unmentionable’ spirit beings. The mystical devouring of the girl’s vulva/vagina would cryptically refer to the removal of her labia minora by the operator’s knife, which is conceived to render the vagina more suitable (“tempting” is another licit translation) for intercourse. The purpose of this school is not to repeat the teachings of the earlier ilimali but to prepare for and orientate the girl toward heterosexual relations. For all its ellipses, the text is interesting. What shall we make of the use in this women’s song of the men’s term unkundu for vagina? This is the term women privately use in the sense of its Swahili cognate mkundu [anus], when referring to the anatomy of either sex. The male informants I consulted were unaware of an ambiguity of usage as between male and female speech, by which these important terms were switched, a woman using untsogolo for her vagina while a man would use it for her anus, and related peoples like the Bena used it for cock (Sw: jogoo is cognate). An implication of the song is that women are quite conscious of the ambiguity and see its relation to the sexual inversion of men, as though a vagina would have to be so misnamed to be attractive to men. As for the initiate herself, she will immediately perceive from their oblique diction that the women have chosen the men—the lot of them—to taunt. The shame-related kin told to scatter are all males, including specifically brother, father, father’s brother, father’s sister’s husband, mother’s brother, and father’s father. The reason they must leave is because the girl’s mother is among the singers, and these men shouldn’t hear such a shocking song from her lips. The opposite category, those who can participate, are avatani [relatives in the licensed (joking) category]. When the older brother is called upon to testify that the girl has been well behaved or to thrash her, since he is shame-related, the merriment otherwise prevailing must be suspended. But though the girl in the centre of the dancing crowd is shamingly dishevelled and manifestly much abused, the spirit of this abuse belongs (as joking relationships always obliquely do) to intimacy and caring, not to distance and fear.

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This is confirmed by Tunginiye’s account of the circumcision itself and the teachings about sex relations with men which are the proper concern of the third school, for which I found only the generic name uluvungu in use. Ikitule is the small wooden mortar kept and used in the kitchen. Women explain that the vagina is the man’s ikitule and must be prepared for him. The school named ikitule occurs some time after the ilimali school (some say about a year). It entails excision of the labia minora, but girls aren’t allowed to talk about it lest the younger ones be afraid—in fact, girls always come in ignorance of what is going to happen. They learn in the school that some girls after bearing a baby would have greatly enlarged labia minora which would “cut” the sides of a man’s penis, preventing successful intercourse. Though some girls have larger and some smaller labia, all are circumcised. Immediately afterward medicine is applied, and in two or three days the girl has recovered. At the school she is told, “Now you can receive a man.” The knife is an extremely sharp razor made by the smiths. The women explain there is no danger that the knife would be allowed to cut the clitoris [uludong’o] as that is a necessary part of the passage for water. The knife has no work but to remove the labia (which are only referred to by the metaphorical ikitule). At the third school uluvungu, which is also a big one, there will be teaching about marriage, about the very slow opening of the vagina by gradual steps of penetration. It should take about four safaris before the man comes to penetrate all the way. In this teaching there is no talk of bloodshed, only of the constriction of the vagina and how the penis should be put in with care to pass this constriction. In these later schools a lot of the teaching is about the lubricating fluids of men and women. A girl learns how they should be used to ease the gradual forcing of a passage into the vagina. The lubricant of the man is uluti, which comes before the heavy seed imbedyu. The lubricant is essential to good sex practice, which entails slow entry. Uluti has the penetrating power, not imbedyu which is only the seed. The lubricant goes in first and prepares the pregnancy. A woman will feel uluti like hot water and must learn to sense this. There will be a tremor which both man and woman feel. It is a sign for a woman who doesn’t want a pregnancy to interrupt the coitus. The man should go outside and wipe himself off. When they resume the man will be able to pull out again and grasp himself before ejaculation, casting even the heavy seed outside. When a woman desires the pregnancy she must see that there is plenty of uluti from the man by copulating slowly, for it is a powerful medicine. But the great importance of uluti is in preventing early pregnancy for a nursing mother. Even the first month after parturition she could get pregnant if she practises coitus without interrupting the act. But if she has allowed

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no uluti to penetrate first, then even if the heavy seed imbedyu enters it will all come out when she goes to urinate. These are the words they use: ukugeta ikitule cutting away the labia minora; ukuvunga ikitule making a mortar (of the vagina). A mother wants the operation for the sake of her daughter, who otherwise won’t have a good sex life and conceive children of her own. [III 25] I’ve gone into details of women’s teaching because of the importance of understanding the ‘relationships of production’ where the work is teaching. Cultural values are deeply learned dispositions to perceive and re-create social situations on familiar patterns. Usually the relevant learning occurs in direct relationships, working a transformation of consciousness (but often what an outsider would call a change of heart rather than a change of mind) in the more vulnerable person. If the relationship of learning is fundamentally humane, the resulting values will be. If not, not. As long as Kinga act out of humane wisdom toward their juniors, whatever the institutional business about which the contacts are organized—be it work, the implementation of justice, ritual action, a school, or recreation—I expect the typical result of their socialization to be a humane person. Turning that around, it seems reasonable to judge the bush school by its results. As civil, and at the same time autonomous, as young women generally are throughout Kinga society, it is hard to suppose they’ve been handled cruelly by their elders. No doubt, much of what I saw in 1960 was the product of Christian churches rather than pagan schools; but it is mainly Kinga, and especially Kinga women, who must be credited with the humane character of the churches there. Will anyone argue that Christianity is everywhere unambiguously humane? I have not had that impression of them on the continents I have visited. In any event, the Kinga church councils have taken over local tradition in their careful, hands-on teaching of maidens but not boys about sex. The conclusion one might reach about men, by the same path of reasoning followed above, isn’t quite so clear. Violence is not so rare as to astonish anyone. Though in most communities a cheerful moderation prevails, I could report scenes enough I found Dionysian as against the Apollonian norm I’d come to expect—to use Ruth Benedict’s oncefamiliar diction. But Kinga men generally admire and respect the women of their country, and their reason is, in effect, the same one I’d give: Kinga women are unusually sane, reliable, and industrious persons. They are ‘well brought up’ by the standards of any society which honours those qualities; and as this is the case in a society which doesn’t accord the usual role to mothering in early childhood, I’ve

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thought it a point worth dwelling on. In circumcision, under the pagan culture, a woman had what a Freudian would recognize as her vaginal teeth removed. Though Christians have dropped that symbolism, some churches adopted a regular vaginal inspection (on the Nyakyusa pattern) as a sort of substitute. Psychologically, the point of the exercise is to imbue a woman’s heterosexual needs with the kind of control consistent with a cordial spirit, responsive to ‘feminine’ sanctions. Womanhood in this aligns itself against the sort of sex-antagonism to which, as a reading of Philip Slater (1968) on the ancient Greek family suggests, any society honouring inversion must be prone. I didn’t sense any danger, in 1960, that the point of the schools was going to be lost just because some of the older mechanisms were being abandoned. Women were still putting their heads together and were inclined to take the side of the angels. When the structural fabric of a society is left intact, Wertrationalität continues to govern its main institutions, and the means traditionally chosen for maintaining them are open to substitution. If that weren’t the case cultures would indeed be things of shreds and patches.<<[lit]

Sharing a common fate The two ways Kinga have of conceding vertical distance in personal relationships act as separate matrices of character. A close look at the political and religious institutions of the old culture would show that both patterns had their uses in the Kinga superstructure. But daily life for most ordinary households was played out in the context of primary group relations—the infrastructure. The paramount problem was not the articulation of institutional roles but community. While we have considered dyadic and spontaneous relationships, major economic tasks required co-operation by larger groups operating under more compulsion. Kinga were not in position to make use of the nuclear or extended family in organizing production in the way most tribal and peasant societies do, but an equivalent form of gentle compulsion is present in a Kinga neighbourhood. By the word ikikolo Kinga refer to the social integrity of a neighbourly group as kin-based. The word is cast in a noun-class which gives it unambiguously concrete reference. The same word has an abstract version ulukolo (cognate with Swahili ukoo, the commonest word for kin-group or kinship) which is used interchangeably for friendship or kinship. An ikikolo is a community based on intimate, willing co-operation. Kinga also name and conceptualize every community as a place as well as a collection of people. Here the word is ilitsumbe, which may be

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rendered as “hamlet.” The noun-class of ilitsumbe indicates that a hamlet is conceived as one of a class of matching or mutually equivalent objects. These semantic observations do not take us far, but some effort seems wanted to reconstruct the notions implicit in the vocabulary for groups and places of settlement. A general principle emerged for me from a growing familiarity with the Eastern realm, where only a few communities were re-established as such after the devastation of 1905. In that year the Germans’ right to rule was challenged and, through mercenaries and the usual exploitation of tribal antagonisms, mightily re-asserted. I couldn’t identify 1960 place-names with those on German maps: the task was difficult enough anywhere in Kingaland, but particularly defeating in the East. Kinga settlements are as perishable as the collection of people ikikolo and buildings ilitsumbe that comprise them. Even where the same ikikolo moves to a new location they ordinarily won’t take their hamlet name with them. More often than not some social reorganization is entailed in any move. Kinga men reckon that the life of a house is about twenty years, and when you build again you are likely to want a new site. It was a fact of life still in 1960 that the refuse of ordinary living was bio-reducible matter, so settlements weren’t obviously driven to move by nest-foulings. Still, people die. Survivors fail to recruit a new generation. Life-situations change with maturity and aging.<<[lit] The ecology of the soil and its fruitfulness in high hilly regions of the tropics is a study in itself. As everywhere, the success of a human population is likely in the longer run to be its undoing. Since a woman’s gardens are not clustered about her house, she is bound by them only loosely to place. But firewood may have to be fetched at everincreasing distances from her hearth, and this will be a real consideration as she ages. The conditions of viability for a settlement may be altered through the accumulated consequences of events which, individually, pose no critical threat. In the sixty years of colonialism about half even of the court villages, obvious centres of the population in 1900, had either disappeared or waned almost away. The rate of decay for less important settlements must have been, discounting the stabilizing effect of modern roads, chapels, and a few government installations, much higher. Place names have an historical specificity of which any adult will be aware; and devastated places soon cease to have a name. The country an old man sees as he looks out upon the valley below his courtyard is a map of time and human history which no stranger or child will ever see. One way of referring to a hamlet is to use the plural

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isidyumba [buildings], which doesn’t beg the question of the social integrity of the settlement. In a place where I’d see one settlement isidyumba scattered over a hillside, a familiar of the place might point out two hamlets amatsumbe. Where I saw two he might see one: a hamlet ilitsumbe has its integrity at the social level of reality. Fresh breakdowns and new beginnings in the network of social relations which determines a landscape in Kingaland would continue, I thought when I left in 1963, to separate the old from the young when those who were young in my time there would have grown to be the ancients.<<[lit] What in 1960 must strike a traveller who walks through the Livingstone mountains by such routes as will allow him to compare Kinga settlements with those of their neighbours is the absence of ‘villages’. The Wanji, Mawemba, Magoma, and Mahanzi tend, each after their own fashion, to live in settlements which evoke that English label. They are relatively compact, clearly bounded, and planfully oriented to public space. It is true enough that in 1960 there were some substantial (and to all appearances permanent) settlements in Kingaland, but on close inspection they didn’t correspond to the ideal-typical village, using the three criteria just given. These non-villages were in each case grown up around a mission, school, baraza court, or other exogenous institution. The settlements were anything but compact and clearly bounded. The only public spaces were those specifically attached to the intrusive institution: dispensary, court, school, chapel, roadway. A market or a dance would be held in an open place at a distance from any settlement. None of the public spaces served to integrate communal activities apart from the special purposes to which a particular institution was devoted. It wouldn’t have been possible in the case of any of these settlements to make an appointment to meet your friend at the village—you’d have to specify the house. Even at Maliwa, which was one of several lesser court centres, unaffected by government roads and modernization, where the traditional ikivaga men’s house survived, you would find that building deserted during the day. There is no centre where village people congregate to work or display themselves. The congregations are always eccentric: private funerals, private beer parties, work parties in the fields, country markets at some confluence of paths between settlements. The basis of Kinga co-operation is more personal, being networkinitiated, than communal. Stable groupings are on a smaller scale, and common tasks require a greater scope for voluntarism, than is implied in the ideal-typical village. The ceremonial centres of the old culture by

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all reports were no more compact, bounded, or centred than the same or replacement settlements were in 1960. Even the stockade of the prince was in the strict sense eccentrically placed, meant to be private and not to define a public space. Though this place, the court, was the centre of a realm, in itself it had no centre. The dance-ground would be well enough defined but away from dwellings, and these would be eccentrically grouped, usually hidden away, at various angles off the main path. Camouflage? I doubt that could have been a major consideration. In the East, where the German missionaries came upon a Kinga realm in an unsettled condition of chronic warfare, there were temporary, ‘fortified’ villages into which the population could be crowded in disorderly fashion—that was the practical response to military threat, here as elsewhere in the Sowetan region, not dispersal. Kinga are not anti-communal but can, I suppose, be called un-communal, ready to opt out of any association which rankles, avoiding a pattern of life which entails involuntary intimacies. All this in a ‘barracks culture’ may seem to strike a note of paradox. It is a measure of the open quality of political relations in a society wherein loyalties are always under review. Kinga is not one of those cultures in which formal levels of interaction have been elaborated in compensation for a disability at the informal level. It is true that the most characteristic of Kinga institutions, the ungovi [work party], constitutes a formal framework for cooperation: the participants are all there by invitation (except that among young people the event may be somewhat more spontaneous) and the temporal format is laid down by local custom. But within the institutional frame behaviour is expressive and communication candid. If Kinga have trouble at the level of personal communication the reason is not that the art of easy communication with one’s peers is neglected: possibly the opposite could be argued, that the promiscuous association of youths, particularly males, carries too few safeguards. I believe the stabilizing elements within a hamlet typically will be a couple of established seniority ties, dyadic bonds between men and/ or women, which can’t in the long run constitute a sufficient deterrent to factional splitting or more diffuse, self-alienating tendencies. The relatively formal framework of the ungovi, resting on the sanctioned reciprocity of network ties and never confined to folk from one small hamlet, lifts a burden from the ikikolo or wider neighbourhood group, mitigating its otherwise all-encompassing role as the social matrix of day-to-day existence. I suppose the ikikolo has less inherent stability for its emphasis on voluntary links—that the reason for the “eccen-

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tricity” of Kinga settlement patterns (particularly in the old culture) was the difficulty of basing a society decidedly on friendship rather than the ascribed ties of kinship. Friendship, being freely contracted, has to be freely terminable and will fade when it can’t be actively affirmed.<<[lit]

Case One: Iligala hamlet To demonstrate the ethnographic context of this analysis a relatively un-villagized area of the Eastern realm seems appropriate. It was a place away from road traffic in 1960 and relatively low in percentage of Christian converts. The area was also not yet oriented to cash crops, which make a bad match with the traditional cooperative pattern of the ungovi. A portrait of a typical hamlet would have to be a composite, as any real example would be significantly unrepresentative in some respects. Some hamlets were growing in 1960 because of a favoured location, others dying away, drained by labour migration. One which had been relatively stable since its founding about 1910 is Iligala [Feather], a real place to which I’ve given a fictional name. It is one of sixteen comparable named settlements amatsumbe which recognize Igumbilo, a seventeenth such hamlet, as the centre of their locality— the locality in customary fashion being called by the name of its centre. Igumbilo locality is in turn one of twenty-eight comprising the southern of the two domains which comprise the Eastern realm. In 1960 about two out of three wives and almost all men in Igumbilo locality were native to it, though the women were rarely from the hamlet where they were married. The typical distance a woman had travelled in marriage was about four kilometers, which meant that most women were able to maintain several gardens in their natal community as well as the new gardens in their husband’s hamlet. The implication of this, since all heavy work is done by the ungovi work party system, is that a network of co-operative reciprocity spread right through the Igumbilo locality, involving every woman and most ablebodied men. The ungovi is an inter-hamlet institution: when the hostess lives at some distance it is often sufficient for one person to respond on behalf of the invited ikikolo, to keep reciprocity with her. Working together in the fields by fellow members of the same ikikolo occurs by informal arrangement. But co-operation acquires ungovi status as it crosses ikikolo boundaries and brings together groups of persons not on everyday terms of familiarity.

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Of the fourteen hamlets in Igumbilo for which I have reliable data, only three in 1960 could claim to constitute unmixed descent groups. One of them, having only a single surviving household, could hardly have been mixed, and no hamlets with five households or more were “pure” lineage groups even as judged only by descent name. As these are data covering 80 households in all, I conclude the correspondence between ikikolo, objectively given, and hamlet ilitsumbe is inexact. Here is the record of Iligala hamlet as I was able to get it from the oldest resident, an enthusiastic man who had spent most of his life there, with only short tours of migrant labour to earn money for the British taxes. I began by asking my informant (A) who had been his mates in the ikivaga before about 1920 when he was married, and how many households there had been during his early married life. He shared the ikivaga with three older brothers [avamama], one of whom had the same father. In giving the family composition I list progeny alive about 1925, though only the youngest (supposing it was still an infant) would actually be living in the same house with the parents. By 1925 all four “brothers” were married and living at Iligala. They were, in a manner of speaking, the first generation of sabras— though none of them had been born just there, they’d passed their youth together. None had a surviving father. The hamlet had been founded by two men returning after flight southward from the Maji Maji massacres, when this region like the rest of the realm was laid waste and almost every family broken.

People of Iligala The adults in 1925 lived in eight households:

⊗A’s older brother N & wife, 1 son, 3 daughters. ⊗ A’s older brother U & first wife, 1 son, 2 daughters. ⊗ U & second wife, 3 sons, 1 daughter. ⊗ A’s widowed mother. ⊗ A’s late father’s second wife, 2 daughters. ⊗A’s father’s older brother L, a bachelor. ⊗ A’s older brother M, 2 sons. ⊗ A & wife, 1 daughter, 1 son.

Where I have used “older brother” my informant used -mama-, the Kinga term of which that is an approximate translation, but in genealogical terms only N was a sibling of A. U was a person with whom A had no chartable connection. M was A’s father’s brother’s (?) son. The old bachelor L of the sixth household was someone A’s father had addressed as umamavango [my older brother], but with whom he had no

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chartable connection. The agnatic core of Iligala hamlet reduces to this, where only the solid black lines indicate genealogical kinship:

Iligala ‘descent lines’

L U

M

N

A

By 1960 the same hamlet was comprised of five families:

⊗ A & wife. ⊗ N’s daughter & husband, 2 children. ⊗ U’s son (by first wife) with wife, 5 children. ⊗ U’s son (by second wife) with wife. ⊗ U’s bachelor daughter (by second wife) with friends.

Though only one close agnatic tie corroborates A’s claim that Iligala is “one hamlet, one lineage,” everyone sees it that way. Like so many of his compeers in all the realms, the little boy of the second household has learnt to call the boys of the third “older brothers” [avamama], without being able to explain how they are linked. The justification is putative links between their fathers, who have the same descent name (one of seven found in Igumbilo region) but, having no common grandfather, could allow their offspring to marry. In the Kinga case, kinship terminology as such is not a good clue to the legal relationship between two individuals, only to their social ties. Every young man I asked called a number of other young men “older brother” in the Kinga sense, and got the reciprocal -nuna-, “little brother,” without either of them knowing how they were related. Usually the direction of seniority is passed down over generations, though actual links need not be remembered; but where (as in Iligala)

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an uxorilocal marriage brings in discontinuity I suppose the direction of seniority may be decided as a matter of convenience. Kinga have no word for “kinsman” which isn’t specific and no word for “brother” which doesn’t indicate the direction of seniority. Cousin terminology isn’t usable in any non-specific sense. The terms I have rendered “brother” could thus be said to have double use, and when used in a context beyond the cousin (the chartable) range might best be translated simply “kinsman.” That would give us umamavango [my kinsman of senior line] and ununavango [my kinsman of junior line]. But the young men I asked about it felt the term had a single not a double use. The implication is that every residential friendship is semantically associated with the heavily idealized relationship of actual brothers. In the context of a single hamlet like Iligala the “brother” link acts at need as a mechanism of lineage consolidation, such that the sense of solidarity doesn’t diminish over the generations in proportion as actual kinship does. In the region as a whole—for example in Igumbilo, which is one courtship arena—the same terminological device helps to broaden the ambience of a boy beyond his immediate gang of peers. The seniority principle here has only casual meaning but helps to promote co-operation among otherwise wild and we-centred gangs. The whole pattern is consistent with the Kinga ethic of voluntarism, which prevails in the recruitment of households to a neighbourhood, even to the extent that only one son is expected to settle at his native place—and that only after his mother is widowed. I find it hard to imagine a Kinga hamlet trying to enforce or cope with stricter agnatic rules. While I couldn’t secure reliable data for precolonial communities, there is a fair measure of continuity between the pattern of migration to labour in 1960 and the old cultural pattern of seeking while young to the barracks life at court. Within the social space of the barracks at court or the workers’ quarters at a tea or sisal estate, Kinga men lived with a small circle of friends. Nothing I know should prevent our extrapolating indefinitely backward a pattern in which men found it easy to leave their native hamlets, returning at will or settling new areas. In that kind of movement kinship would provide a frame of reference but not the definitive values. Men were slow to marry and settle down, valuing the comradeship of the bachelor life; but when they did marry they didn’t flock to ‘villages’ as one might expect barracks-accommodated men to do, but sought the good life in the smaller circle of a hamlet. In Igumbilo the largest of these comprised thirteen elementary families in 1960. Iligala was typical of the smaller sort.

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Careers: the context of moral effort If Kinga sometimes manifest ‘achievement motivation’ that is part of a more general pattern antedating the money economy and the challenge of meritocratic ethics which belong to the context of Tanzania today. In the strictest sense, social mobility was part of the fabric of life in the old culture, depending on young men seeking to the high life of the princely centres and later expanding the Sanga influence on the frontiers. And the minstrel who would so delight the prince or a rich man as to be rewarded at the close of the dance with a beautiful maiden in marriage? That is the Cinderella-tale which no man fails to repeat when talking of the old days. There were princesses aplenty at the courts then, and all of them were to be awarded in marriage to deserving men of the isivaga barracks houses. But I think it would be a distortion of Kinga history to suppose that young men sought to the ceremonial centres out of fairy-tale ‘ambition.’ There are careers wherever people tend to see the world as a stage upon which ideal ends may be realized through moral effort. The perception of the world in terms of fate, in the sense of the Greek moira, is an opposite. The career ethic applies to retrospect as well as prospect: if your father died when he was rich he must have been poisoned out of envy, because it is human intention which gives shape and meaning to life, not incomprehensible fate. The gods whom ordinary (pagan) Kinga propitiate are ancestors, preferentially close and personally remembered individuals, who continue after death to will and act as they did in life. Even Lwembe, who might be styled a ‘political’ god, is conceived as the wild younger brother of the high prince. In the myth, Lwembe was mistreated in life through envy of his powers, and continues to smart. Kinga believe that the mind of a living person has powers like that of a god, whose resentment can visit terrible dangers upon you. Envy and hate aren’t impotent phantasms resting in the cellars of the mind but must express themselves in real aggression, albeit obliquely. Men, like gods, can cause mysterious illness and death. The dark side of the career ethic is the failure of hopes and projection of blame on the embittered motives of others. This kind of projection often ‘works’: it can clear away a person’s own bitterness even while defining reversal as undeserved failure. Kinga men, especially, allow themselves a measure of volatility which often risks being heedlessness, as another person must see it. Like the semi-nomadic Semai whom Robert Dentan (1968) describes, the Kinga often resolve unanalysed personal conflicts or flee from misfortune by pulling up

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stakes, starting anew elsewhere. For cultivators this is not always easy to manage, and I think older people of either sex have always been fairly well rooted. But in the three decades prior to 1960 labour migrancy and the cash it made available lessened younger men’s dependence on good relations at home, and made moving house in Ukinga relatively easier. The options women had of leasing gardens where they lacked owner-access also freed them of extreme dependence on the affinal community they usually would have joined at marriage, making some moves possible which a different system of land rights would have foreclosed. Kinga habitually see themselves as open to the kinds of choice a career ethic calls for, and the possibility of living in peace and harmony with their neighbours. I prefer speaking of a prevailing cheerfulness to calling the Kinga, as a number of outsiders have done, a “happy people.” Cheerfulness is a matter of demeanour, a surface phenomenon. For the individual growing up and forming her or his mind in Kinga society the career ethic is environmental, part of the psychological climate. It is, empirically, a technical apparatus one acquires for coping with the world, putting a face on one’s experience, accepting or manipulating blame, renewing one’s own and others’ good spirits. The ethnographic material I have which bears on this is from 1960 not 1860, and much is from parts where Christianity had been established for a decade or more. When due subtraction has been made for Christian influence there is an ample remainder which is local and ‘traditional’, but it is harder to know what to subtract for time itself—and even if one knew that, there are practical difficulties in assembling enough evidence to make so general a point. An ethic is not a hard-edged object which either is or isn’t to be found in any particular bag of evidence. Survey methods and statistical inference from the data so gathered—admittedly not my cup of tea—can’t nail down the variables which bear on character values. I can present some case material, an album of records from the field to lend colour. I’ll touch on what I think a reader might give weight to in a case. Some further materials of the kind, including autobiographical fragments, in the next chapter will amplify what is given here. The sampling I offer now groups conveniently under three headings, corresponding to three questions: (a) How do Kinga cope with adversity? (Testaments of two widows.) (b) How do Kinga sanction reciprocity? (Participants’ accounts of work parties and the modern distribution of bridewealths.) (c) How do Kinga delimit the boundaries of the inner domain and the intensity of its claims? (Funerals, other life-crises, and thoughts they inspire.)

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Cases: How do people cope with adversity? {1} The widow Anyitse My husband when he died left me six children. Of these children three have died and three remain alive. All these children have moved away from here so I live all alone. The reasons for moving away are that my daughters married and my son moved south to Upangwa after seeing that in this country he was always ailing. There in Upangwa he was put in the R. C. hospital at Madunda, and when he recovered he had no desire to return to Ukinga as he was attracted to the life there in Upangwa. There he got permission to build from the local people, and even was given fields which he is cultivating. For a long time he continued living there in Upangwa, until at last he came back here leaving his wife behind. Here he didn’t stay long but journeyed to Iringa town. There he was seeing a Kinga girl, they became lovers, and in the end he returned with her to her family and paid the bridewealth. He just paid it and went on back with her to Iringa town. His wife who was left in Upangwa got seriously ill. The news came to me and I made the journey with my kinswoman. When we found her she was able to walk and we brought her back here with us and kept her that year until she was better. The reason my son moved to Iringa is that he grew to hate it in Upangwa because his children there [two girls] were only dying. Now he has still another wife in Iringa town and a son living by each of his wives there. For a while after my husband and my co-wife died it was her son who stayed here to look after the cattle and goats, but then he moved farther east to get them better grazing. He’s calling me to come and live by him but I don’t want to, I prefer to stay right here where my husband built for me. The food I live on is all my own produce, my wealth, but for clothes and some other things for the house I have help from my children. {2} The widow Amalile From the time my husband died I’ve been taking care of myself. We had six children who died but three more survive. My son who lives in Dar-es-Salaam sends me help from time to time, but I live in a selfreliant way. My daughter is married away, and my last-born is a boy in school. He can depend on his brother for the school fees and he is working hard. I’d never ask him to come back to live here. I say to him, Obey whatever you are told by the teachers, my son, and apply yourself to everything you do. This is the way a boy will have a good life later on. For myself my life is good and I’m always in good health. I have only one problem, my arm. I fell down when it was slippery some years ago, and my arm doesn’t function at all for working. So the hard work that needs two arms I can’t manage by myself but I can depend on my

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neighbours. I live here with this big feeling for my children though they are away from me, all the time I hope they will prosper.

Cases: How do the people sanction reciprocity? {3} A young man’s account of work parties [imigovi] In almost every section of the Eastern realm the people are accustomed to attending work parties starting just after midday, in the sixth or seventh hour, and beginning the work in the eighth or ninth. Folk from all the hamlets sort themselves out in groups of two up to ten persons, going different ways. The reason for some of the men being late is that they’ve stopped where bamboo cider is being tapped. They drink and get talking there until the sun is too high before they remember they should be getting on to their work party. But there are other reasons for being late. Everyone has to see to his own jobs at home in the mornings before the work party, and there can be all sorts of problems that come up. At the work party everyone leaves off at eventide. Then they return to visiting the tapping-places. Every family taps cider at no less than sixteen, twenty, or even a hundred clumps, each with three to twenty bamboos growing. This cider is so popular that when people have it to drink they’ll work much harder. On a day when there’s nothing to drink the work party won’t get going, it will just fall apart because people won’t go out to break the ground without cider in the wet season or beer in the dry. Even if the work is a long way off the women will carry great pots of cider or beer on their heads for miles over hill and dale, as without it the work of the fields won’t be done. Even where there are just two people in the party you’ll see they’ve brought a big calabash. Also cider is like food, whenever you visit strangers you’ll be welcomed with cider and have good cheer. Cider is mainly tapped by women, only a little by men. One day I arrived at a work party given by a girl Ti only to find that the people participating were a mixture of old and young, so I asked them why they had mixed up the age groups. They replied this was to teach the young people how to farm well so they would reach perfection in the work. After completing the course the young people would be prepared to take care of themselves later on. Then the elders continued on the reasons for this custom of operation. The intention is to impel the work forward. One person alone can’t manage work so satisfying as that ten can do together, so the group is better motivated. Now, if one person skips work he must be quizzed out as to what kept him from doing his share. If he skipped deliberately, then though the next day was his turn to get his field tilled they’ll just accept some other invitation, putting off his turn. But if he skipped for a bona fide reason then they’ll accept tilling his field in his regular turn.

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The rules of these co-operatives are as follows: You mustn’t be too slow. By the tenth hour [4 p.m.] you’re supposed to have finished one square measure [Sw: mraba]. If the work goes well they might do three or four such squares by eventide, though when it is tough work the most expected is three. The only thing the host must keep in supply is bamboo cider—the folk must be able to take off and drink whenever they are thirsty, there must be enough. They should be able to keep right on drinking through the night until dawn if they don’t tire of drinking before that. Even long after they are drunk they can demand more cider. {4} Bridewealth: Lukasi Petro, elder of the Western realm Anyone whose daughter is getting married will know the fortune she brings in must find many ways out again. For example, one particular portion goes to the mother’s brother, another to the father’s sister of the bride, and however many brothers she has each must have his share—and a portion must be shared among her sisters already married. Here is the way the bridewealth will be distributed: Initially there is a goat isule sent to the girl’s mother’s brother in token that, “My daughter is being married, whom your sister bore, named Fulani [So-and-so].” Along with the goat I must send a hundred shillings. The bridewealth must be paid over as demanded by the girl’s father, and after some time her family will have prepared millet flour in large quantities, up to three tins [of the four-gallon size] or more. Now this flour is called indodolo [?]. Folk of the lineage are called together to drink the beer of indodolo as token that the child is already married, only waiting to go to her husband. This day of the assembly of kinsmen is the time for slaughtering a cow from the bridewealth, so each person can get a portion befitting his or her lineage standing. That same day the bride’s father’s sister gets thirty shillings and one goat. If the father has a son already married the custom is for the elders to discuss the portion he should have of his sister’s bridewealth. The amount depends on the wealth exchanged. If it was small his share isn’t much but from a big bridewealth he will do well. Untwatsi gets just a hundred shillings. The word refers to a friend of the bridegroom who married to the same neighbourhood or especially who married a girl of the same family. Such friends enjoy a joking relationship and are everywhere recognized as avatwatsi partners [Sw: watani]. Let’s say this friend had led the way to this house by marrying the first daughter, so when his friend in turn comes to marry the second daughter the one who led the way gets a hundred shillings from his father-in-law. On this same day the bride’s mother’s brother gets a hundred fifty or two hundred shillings plus a cow plus three goats. His share totals up to perhaps four hundred

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shillings, remembering that the first day he got a hundred shillings and a goat. If the old man has daughters already married, on this day each will receive one goat. What is left over belongs to the bride’s father, if he is alive, as his private treasure. About the mother’s brother of the bride, if when her father married her mother he paid the full bridewealth then this uncle has no right to a big share, he’ll be given something out of respect. But on the other hand if the father didn’t finish paying his bridewealth for the mother, her brother collects full measure now. The sum which goes to the bride’s father’s sister is because she is of that same family, the bride could be like her own child if you reckon by descent lines. For if this woman were to send her daughter off in marriage somewhere, in case the woman hadn’t been properly married when the daughter was born then the bridewealth would go to her brother. True enough every man who marries off his daughter gets a bridewealth of quite a lot, but it will be divided among many kinsmen according as they’ve co-operated over the years in everyday matters. There are a few just the same who might appropriate the bridewealth without sharing it out, for there can be a man who never got his share from his kinsmen when their daughters married, so now he refuses in his turn. In such a case the two groups separate or they get to despising one another, refusing to recognize their kinship. That is when the use of black medicines might begin. They’ll be grieving that once they had community but one saw fit when he married off his daughter to cut himself off from us, his kinsmen and brothers.

Cases: How do people count kith and kin? {5} Soda goes to a funeral On Wednesday we went to the funeral at the home of Bw. Si to bury his mother’s younger sister. A lot of people were already gathered there, almost the whole of Malanduku village. I noticed that each person came with a pot of beer on her head or some kind of food or firewood. Those who arrived first were helping to receive the late-comers. This is the way it continued without a letup, more people coming and others making place for them and their things. Each person as he arrives, after being received, goes up by himself to the bereaved Bw. Si to offer condolence, or he may stop first to greet others who are there, then going up to the bereaved in his turn to say, “I’m sorry for the distress which has gripped you,” and the other replies, “Thank you, but this is the path we all must walk.” Every member of the kin-group [whether on the side of the dead or the bereaved] will start wailing when he or she arrives, and kinsmen already there will renew their wailing each time, being

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inspired to new anguish by their comrade’s wailing. Everyone will spend the night right there, men and women. As soon as it is about the tenth hour each of the women will depart to tap more cider and cook food so that when they return in the evening they can bring food and drink. There is raw food brought in as well, which is cooked on the spot. The men stay right through to evening. If they are Christians they sing songs of great joy to banish the sorrow of the bereaved. And this action of sleeping the night there at the place of the bereaved is called ukumwitsiga undyitu. Everyone who attends a funeral will be welcomed and given a share of food and drink. The rule for sleeping is that the men lie in one place in their own groups without women, and the women do the same in another place. The length of time they spend there at the place of bereavement is two full days and nights. On the third day the guests disperse leaving the host with his family. {6} Soda recalls a village elder Bw. Ke came of the lineage of Ndelwa and was a son of Kindumile the founder. Bw. Ke died in the year 1959, four years ago, while on a journey to Njombe town to hear the trial of his son Nu [who was subject to high-handed repression at the hands of the colonial regime]. As to the cause of death, he died of anguish for his son at the moment he was crossing a river, though it was a small one. This elder had been of service to the people of Malanduku village in many matters. He was an expert in manufacturing long hoe-handles and fixing the iron tails of the hoe-blade and anchoring them well in the shaft. He could manage the heavy-bladed bill-hook with the same efficiency. This skill of his was a great boon to the people of Malanduku, something they really depended on—anyone whose implement had broken would bring it to the craftsman Bw. Ke. Later there came to be some lesser craftsmen, but only three. People from other places used to come here with their implements for repair. The new craftsmen can do a lot of this work. One of them might even be able to make a new implement as the old man used to do. For this elder Ke, on the day when people heard he had died, everyone there was wailing with a loud voice, saying, “Who will make our baskets? Who will fashion the hafts for our hoes and bill-hooks?” The people were wailing bitterly in sorrow for the old man. Every time a boundary-dispute came up it was this elder who was the guardian of every section of Malanduku village lands. He knew every farming area, and he was the only one who did. Again and again there were quarrels over fields, but this man was always ready to arbitrate. He knew the field boundaries of all the sections of Malanduku and the neighbour area as well. Every time people fell to quarreling in the fields this fellow was called to settle the arguments. The man was well beloved by the people on account of the many favours he did them. The day he died people were saying so

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many things, “Who will settle the boundaries of my field now?” or, “Who is going to make baskets, hoes, or bill-hooks and hafts?” It was a remarkable day of mourning. The man had a younger brother named Li who inherited many tools but not the skill of Bw. Ke. Still he knew the boundaries quite well. In the year 1962 there arose a serious difficulty over fields, as certain folk of Tu village to the south came up here to appropriate a big section of fields. Their spokesman was Bw. Mu and he came up against our Li and was questioned straight away about how he was going to claim the fields were his. Bw. Mu insisted on saying it was his property so Bw. Li took the case to the headman. The judgement was given that Bw. Mu had failed to produce compelling evidence and so lost his case, while our Bw. Li as spokesman for the people of Malanduku explained the truth of the matter and called witnesses so it came out that this area was indeed the property of Malanduku villagers. To this day Bw. Mu has made himself scarce and the property remains ours. {7} Exaggerated report News reached Lana village that Bw. Biga had departed this world, for he’d met his death by falling from his bicycle while he was riding away from a drinking club. He fell, the brake-piece of the bicycle pierced his neck, and he was a dead man there and then. So Thursday the people came together for a funeral but before long some people arrived from Kilosa town saying please quiet down you shouldn’t be wailing as Bw. Biga is there in Kilosa not yet dead at all. But the confidence of the people was little. They weren’t sure what to believe. Then the people all got together and hustled up cider and food there at the place. Drums appeared and the men started playing them furiously, so the crowd gave itself to spirited dancing. They made a point of nominating someone to go to Kilosa town the next day to find out the truth of the matter. {8} A clerk explains his case You see I’m a stranger here from Upangwa to the south. It’s five or six years I’ve been here now as karani [Sw: clerk] of the court. I married a Kinga girl from Tuke village in the western hills. We were divorced and now she’s dead, she died at Tuke with her people. Two boys she bore me, one just a few months after our divorce. The older boy I’ve sent to my family in Upangwa, but the baby who is under two they are trying to keep from me. I went to attend the funeral, you see, but I never came all the way to Tuke, I had to turn back hearing how the keening was becoming too loud as I approached. They could see me on the path and they were threatening, the words they were crying were evil words. I won’t go back. I’m a Christian. I hold the woman died by God’s will, they want to blame some human being. So they accuse me, it is an accusation of witchcraft. How do I know

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what they would do to me if I walked into their village? How do I know they wouldn’t hack me to death with their machetes? Already before she died the court approved the divorce and ordered her older brother to repay a part of the bridewealth. I shall have it and have my child as well, for they wouldn’t care for him properly there. But my way is to go through the court. {9} Obedi helps me understand a funeral we attended We arrived fairly early, Obedi and I, at the funeral gathering at Kugwe hamlet for a child who died last night and was buried early this morning in the nearby woods without ceremony. Obedi says the only formalities held at interment are for heads of household who are to be buried in a special part of the wood in proximity to father and grandfather. These spirits must be propitiated and begged to accept their kinsman. There is a special wood for the ruling lineages here in the Eastern realm. I notice that it is the men in this culture who bring handicrafts with them. Some are weaving the walls of storage bins isibana, winnowing trays inyalo, or other items of basketry. Some are working on tobacco pipes or skin bags. It is the women who are busy with the funeral itself. Each new neighbour or kinswoman is welcomed with keening in a special manner. Close kinswomen are gathered inside the house, others close by it. Obedi says young unmarried persons are expected to call but not to stay, and the women have only their smallest infants with them. As a woman enters the others remain on the ground, each in turn clasping her on their lap. She goes round the group, her back turned to the bereaved mother, going through the full form of the women’s greeting each time. It isn’t quickly over. Obedi explains the business of the men as taking the form of a bush baraza, a traditional moot. The judge, the recognized or unrecognized office holder of the area, sits among the elders. The accused sits opposite among witnesses and audience members, while the spokesman sits between, aligned with neither group. The ruler initiates questioning in conversation with the elders, who in turn prompt the spokesman. It is he who explains the nature of the complaint to the accused and the audience. Now these people who aren’t directly involved in the case themselves explain to the accused in their own words. His answer at length will be addressed to the spokesman, who alone may directly cross-examine him. Obedi says this arrangement is to promote respect. At this funeral in Kugwe hamlet the bush baraza or lineage court is pretty well formed up by the time Bw. Piku arrived. It is evident the elders have decided he is threatening lineage solidarity. As he takes his place in a sudden hush, he must known, if he hasn’t got word before, what is up. He wears an air of unconcern. The spokesman moves out from the elders’ group. He consults some written notes. He explains what the elders have been saying. Bw. Piku had come

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yesterday afternoon to visit the sick child but hadn’t stayed. He went on to drink beer while the little child worsened and died. There must be compensation payment of ten shillings on the spot, or Bw. Piku will find himself no kin of this group, who will look upon him as their enemy. Bw. Piku in his turn refuses to accept the force of anything which has been said. He had no way of knowing the child was so ill. So it goes on. The tempo is slow. The facts, arguments, accusations, and denials are repeated. The hearing lasts altogether about two hours, the alignments holding roughly to the format as Obedi has explained. Obedi predicts the man will endure in his refusal to accept any complicity in the child’s death. He won’t pay the fine of ten shillings even though that is supposed to be justified as simple compensation to fellow kinsmen for their work in the grave-digging at which Bw. Piku didn’t assist. So the spokesman will make a written note of the matter to put in the bottom of his box at home, and they will wait. When a child of Bw. Piku dies the relatives will stand off, refusing to help. They will be firm. “You chose to be by yourself.” They will require at least the sacrifice of a goat [at about thirty shillings] to atone. Then the man will find himself unable to refuse. They would put the same terms at his own death if that were the first to strike his house, but the threat implied here is that one of his own children will die soon. All of his kinsmen who are here—all who are close to this branch—are agreed and would hold to the embargo. Only if he has sufficient kin elsewhere will he be prepared in the end to cut kinship with these men. In the case of a child’s funeral the mourning is rather localized. Obedi reports that only here in Kugwe hamlet area is all work in the fields tabooed for these two or three days. The closest kin will keep up the mourning at this house for six days, then it will be done. But even tomorrow some young people will be going to fields farther away. They aren’t accountable. Only an elder can be accused as Bw. Piku has been, and only the elders may accuse. This is the way sickness and death will turn the people to thinking about personal loyalty and how you hold someone to it.

The pursuit of happiness Concrete cases and ethnographic notes seldom answer general questions about a people’s moral life. Our two widows each seem to have more than the customary allotment of four children. For Anyitse it is because her co-wife’s children became her own; for Amalile it is because six she bore died so young as infants she determined to persevere. Together they have borne thirteen children, mothering fifteen, and lost all but six, yet they communicate good cheer in the

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way they conduct their lives. They are representative but they aren’t without peers who bear deeper moral scars. Our two accounts of Kinga reciprocity are equally representative, emphasizing the positive and relegating the negative to exceptions; yet it is the trouble in the system that preoccupies a Kinga person often and deeply. For Lukasi, for example, on the day we talked about bridewealth we had to skirt a couple of issues I knew were deeply troubling him—we might epitomize them as an un-neighbourly wife and a black-sheep son. He was suffering as well from an economic setback, having given himself through the whole rainy season to the hard work of prospecting for minerals, with first a few signs of success but ultimately only loss. Yet he continued to want to look mostly at the bright side of life. Some clues to the inner dynamics of this optimism emerge from our snapshots of responses to bereavement, where the will to think well of others is balanced by a readiness to fix blame on someone who can be judged an outsider to your grief. Even Soda’s eulogy for Bw. Ke, the Peacemaker, had to be capped by a reference to hostile outsiders trying to ‘muscle in’ from a distant part of the local network—they must not be allowed to make good their claims to land reserved for one of our own. It is in this way, the people heeding their feelings and resorting to the moot, that a hamlet recognizes itself. Soda discovers through reflections on Bw. Ke an inner region of fiduciary relations defining the boundaries of his beloved village. How do Kinga cope with adversity? There are bitter people among them, but what predominates is an un-philosophical cheerfulness like that of the two widows. Neither Anyanitse or Amalile presents her own self-reliance in a self-glorifying light and neither feels betrayed by a son who has moved away, though when one asks about their lives it is these extensions of self through childbirth they want to talk about. They aren’t possessive of others or covetous of special loyalties. The contrast to the classic ‘Jewish Mother’ could hardly be more complete. Possibly our own urban society, against which we are apt to judge other peoples, is extreme in its patterning of longterm family dependencies. As many cases show, Kinga often will go beyond what they are obliged to do to help another person. Many individuals are able to care, extending the boundaries of their inner domains to include a marginal kinsman or a friend as if that person enjoyed the immediate claims of family. But the system of child-rearing introduces an element of distance or strangeness even into that seemingly closest of all human relationships, the tie between a child and its parent. It may be that in the typical Kinga biography the early learning of social relativity and

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self-reliance makes it easier in older age to accept adversity without turning righteously upon others for succor, as the beloved child will turn to its parent or, regressively, the bourgeois husband to a mistress or a neighbour’s wife. The marital chastity of Kinga women, if it isn’t absolute, is notable. In context, it bespeaks a healthy ego structure. How do Kinga sanction reciprocity? The institution of the interneighbourhood work party is one mechanism that takes strain off the kinship network. In the modern period the new institution of “banking” bridewealths transforms kinship into a set of more explicit reciprocal obligations than those sanctioned by the less tangible (and less modern) sentiments we see operating at a funeral. Kinga can’t rely on a very few, lifelong ties of intimacy as in an actuarially safer society a person usually can. The death rate is against them. As they have elected another system than corporate kinship to supply their need for social stability in the local community, there is a substantial element of choice in the way their social networks are developed and maintained. But Kinga keep reminding themselves of the need for help in breaking the turf of a new field. They think of the ungovi collective as having power sui generis, so that even the most reluctant person will turn to others out of economic need, joining a circle of reciprocal aid in gardening; and this draws each person into a formal network of obligations. The requisite sentiments are simply defined—one must turn to with a good will for one can’t keep up the pace without it, and by joining the others in drink and merriment one must affirm one’s trust in them. Kinga are specific about the dangers of drink. The interesting thing about the ‘Kinga patent’ drinking technique (supposed to let a man ward off the poisons his comrade may intend for him) is that it takes two good friends to demonstrate it. Men know you can’t survive long drinking with those you shouldn’t trust. They are wary of halfhearted friends. The ungovi as a formal, sentimentally straitened framework on the neighbourhood level now has its counterpart in the bridewealthbanking system affecting extended kinship links (Park 1994a). Perhaps as the society becomes occupationally more specialized and given to the use of money for market goods—areas in which the older co-operative pattern can’t operate—a stricter rhetoric of kinship will be pressed into use for sanctioning reciprocity. If the number and quality of correlative changes which would be entailed are beyond assessing, that is the way history works. Every Kinga usage finds

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itself in a four-dimensional functional web by which it is joined to every other, and change initiated by pressure at one point will be felt at many. Chaos theory only spells out what good historians have always known about the microcosms they study. How do Kinga delimit the boundaries of the inner domain of the moral life and determine the intensity of its claims? Let the ‘inner domain’ mean that social circle wherein if you can’t be your self you have none. At Malanduku village in 1960 girls in the courting stage were willing to take strange youths into their houses at night—“only for talking, not for play”—because these young people were pressing almost recklessly to extend their circles of trust. Later on, making friends would never again be so easy or proceed so naturally. That is why their elders counseled caution, knowing that an inner circle is only too easily stretched to breaking. At the same time the number of people who are suddenly left alone by death, like the number of maids without swains, is always many and reminds the more fortunate that the inner circle can fall away. Christian communities in 1960 had remarkably active young people’s associations, and parish organization was thriving at remote places like Malanduku village though virtually unsupported by outside funds or personnel. There is evidence that the claims of the inner domain are strong: the marvellous romantic sense of the courting youth says it clearly, the veiled or open suspicions of witchcraft projected upon the ‘stranger within’ say it again with even greater insistence.

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TWIN SHADOWS, FOURTH FOLIO

Spontaneity and sanctions

Structure and spontaneity A spontaneous person is not rigid, introverted, or dull. Kinga are typically spontaneous. In the important idea of spontaneous order, in the political philosophy of Michael Polanyi, the term is linked by deep connotation to ‘freedom’. We are asked to conceive a kind of order which results from participants sanctioning themselves in the abeyance of supervisory authority. The metaphor lurking behind is Adam Smith’s Unseen Hand. Suppose everyone adopted the same rules of action, and suppose they were exceedingly wise rules, everyone would benefit on an equal basis, and the system would take care of itself. Intervention ex machina would not be required to stabilize this imaginary Utopia. Politics would wither away. Justice would be done and would be seen to be done on every hand. Etcetera. But it’s tricky putting utopian models to use in the study of real communities. What Polanyi had in mind was to show that ‘freedom’ is not just a human ideal but a necessary element in the construction of a viable social order.<<[lit] The problem of the free society is finding ways to fend off manipulative controls without dissolving institutional frames in the process. Animal freedom is not what is wanted. Considered as social beings, animals are as true to their breed as they are in appearance. They don’t need institutions. We do. Human institutions are never perfect but normally do set up spheres of activity within which everyone agrees to play by one set of rules. Since we don’t talk about an ‘institution’ until the game has been played the same way for some generations, it follows that institutions, however imperfect, are always by pragmatic standards successful. When that ceases to be the case the institution falls apart. It should be added that a ‘rule’ in

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this context should be understood as a principle or ethic never limited to its explicit expression in formal instructions. Can it be useful to compare the whole of a human society to a market? Peaceable markets need supervision, but where ‘free markets’ are institutionalized the work of regulating production and distribution (or so it is said) can efficiently be left to the participants. The supervisor restricts himself to safe-keeping the constitutional rules which make the market viable and make it free. I take it the principle does apply more widely than to economic behaviour. One could argue that all ‘healthy’ institutions are examples. But the precise sense in which participatory sanctioning promotes ‘freedom’ wants sorting out. I take the position that a prime ingredient of freedom is individual self-expression, and that by studying it we are studying freedom in its most characteristic manifestation. In a social vacuum selves can’t be expressed at all. Simply to exist they require communicative ties to a known audience—they must have both social and cultural context. Obviously, to have importance freedom has to be located inside not outside history: the Fool’s freedom in Lear remains irrelevant until we begin to recognize he isn’t outside the plot but deeply of it. Kinga wit has the charm of spontaneity but little authority until it is seen to strike its mark. The very concept of individuality implies a multitude of persons subject to a common structure and differentiating themselves within it. Yet were individuality to become an end in itself it would only lose depth and viability. To get ‘structure’ in a new-baked social institution you would need a blend of authority, aggressive self-interest, and tradition. It is easy to see that each ingredient can be present in too great or too small a measure, and so to argue that the best institutions are those which show a balance, a triadic golden mean. I have elsewhere discussed this triad under the rubric of sanctions and refer the interested reader to that work. In an interpretation of Kinga culture what seems to me important is to recognize that a rather unique kind of balance had been achieved, which allowed individuality to flourish and which pretty well corresponds to the modern idea of a free society.<<[lit] The authority of local rulers, including the princes, in the old culture was limited by the need of attracting a following—though Kinga were settled farmers they had a tradition of mobility. On the other hand, popular but ineffective authority figures were quickly weeded

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out by the same mechanisms, since a following had to be kept well supplied with meat and beer. Peer society offered, especially to males, a school of hard knocks which seems generally to have produced fairly strong egos, but also to have confronted the exaggerated egoist with a kind of multilateral reality check which the less open context of a nuclear family often does not. There are quite enough selfish and there may be some selfless Kinga of either sex. But if you sit very long in court you will find that the over-assertive person, the bully, is not popular and tends to be cut down while his natural victim gets support. Again, there is remarkably little resort to factionalism in relation to bones of contention within a community. The opposite vice, monadic withdrawal, may account for most Kinga suicides but is rarely found in chronic form as a character type. It does appear from time to time as a projective fantasy—the lone, lurking, envious (and most often male) witch.<<[lit] Turning to the third facet of the triad, Kinga traditions could scarcely be called rigid. The dialectical relation between court and bush cultures offered individuals a broad front of choice with respect to lifestyle. As for ritual sanctions, the tendency of Sanga politics was to incorporate peripheral communities along with their own ritual leaders, who would be co-opted into the broad confraternity of Kinga priests, producing in effect a moving ritual syncretism in which no community was without a voice. The more a culture begets spontaneity the greater the importance of direct observation and a description of manners. Ethnography which depends on informant statements about usage will at best yield an accurate account of norms: it is like having a written script which you know will be cast aside as soon as the action begins. Ethnography which depends on projective tests and dreams suffers another sort of shortcoming: if this thematic material is ‘repressed’ what counterthemes are given preference to it, and what sort of balance is realized in ordinary emotional interaction? An observer wants to catch the logic in everyday manners and the everyday misbehaviours which are their wrong side. The bachelor songs I cited in the last chapter, when taken with the inventive reflexions of Kingaland’s first and only ethno-journalist (“Bwana Soda”) which continue in coming pages, give us a sampler’s taste of those manners and misbehaviours. Cultures are reproduced from within, but not without first being critically observed from without. That Kinga do this well represents a dimension of the culture whose reproduction depends absolutely on the measure of expressive freedom enjoyed by Bw. Soda and his peers.

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In this book I explore a criteriological approach, centring in the idea of moral character. I assume that being of good character may mean radically different things to individuals within the same community anywhere. But I further assume that these meanings aren’t freely assigned by the actors but evolve in and from the moral life of that community, being uniquely and organically a part of it. I don’t assume that the demands of the moral life anywhere are easily met or even easily apprehended. I don’t assume that irrationality is born of repression and a distortion of man’s nature. It seems to me a better premise that deeply personal forms of irrationality are largely synonymous with self-delusion and should be conceived as the normal by-product of moral failure, a direct expression of the human condition. Some degree of failure is predicable of any moral career—the lives of the saints at least are full of it. A criteriological scheme of analysis begins with recognition that a culture may set the criteria for happiness (or call it moral self-realization, or simply the good life) but offers little assistance to the individual in attaining or even properly apprehending these ends. This is a point of view familiar to theology. But when you substitute “Culture” for “God” you move to a cybernetic version of history. The character of the culture today or tomorrow depends on the characters of the individuals producing and reproducing it. What they are busy with is the pursuit of moral strategies they find reason to perceive as life-enhancing. But this is a business like others—some will do it well, some will be lucky, some not.

Sanctions The documents in the next chapter will help a reader to form a direct sense for Kinga character values—a man or woman’s aims in llife. The cases portray some of the vagaries of spontaneous behaviour. As with every human society, Kinga manners are sanctioned by authority, by private persons within relationships of reciprocal selfinterest (which I call transactional sanctioning because reciprocity doesn’t suggest acts like vengeance and forced restitution), and by the diffuse concern of disinterested persons for the maintenance of traditional moral standards. The diffuse type of sanction is properly called, after Durkheim, mechanical in that the motives and even the individual identity of the sanctioner are all but irrelevant. Public thought smothers private. I consider now the authoritative, transactional, and mechanical means by which Kinga manners are given form.

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It was a consequence of the official British policy of Indirect Rule, as matters actually worked out for the Kinga, that up to the end of the colonial period the face-to-face exercise of authority in their communities remained in the hands of local men reckoned to have a credible right to office. The main authority structures of which we’d have to take account are: the traditional constitution and its successive revisions; the Territorial and ultimately the National governments with their local agencies (courts, medical stations, agricultural officers); and the Lutheran and R.C. missions and churches. Setting aside the war years early in this century, “raw” governmental authority has seldom been used, though it has generally been assumed to exist as a reserve power of the secular authorities. In the Kinga polity for the most part, even a ruler with high-handed manners has been bound to take a consultative route to any decisions of importance. There is generally a conciliatory not a dictatorial approach to a trouble case, when passions are not aflame and the matter is left to the Kinga themselves. Efforts by ordinary persons to assert authority are usually no more successful than those of the father who has given up trying to cane a wild little boy of ten, because the boy has got too quick and too tough. In a society where wildness is admired violence will occur, and sometimes it takes the form of punishment. But the rarest act among Kinga would be cold-hearted cruelty, nor are efforts to dominate another by force usually crowned with any lasting success. The most successful rulers seem to be those who can maintain the impression of vast powers of coercion in reserve but never need to test them. There was a case in the Eastern realm of a youth in his twenties presuming to act for his father, who was away at work. The lad was found beating his mother for a transgression having to do with money. He adopted the stance a man will take with a child, pinning it by the upper arm and caning the lower body from behind. The mother was outraged and pulled off all her clothing: “Very well, if you are my husband that you thrash me, let us go in and copulate!” But the young man only continued to thrash her in her nakedness until his anger drained away, then she ran off. Most violence arises in confusion and does little to settle it. Within the inner domain there is not a clear sense for rank: women formally concede it to men but are used to making their own decisions and can deeply resent interference by (as it were) a visiting husband. Even the myth of the physical superiority of the male, which Kinga migrants would have found entrenched in the cities and on the plantations where they had to spend so many of

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their best years, had a less secure footing at home, where a woman will often strike back and but for having missed childhood training in the fighting arts could easily prove the stronger. The immediate context of daily life is relaxed and informal. With some noticeable exceptions the rule is transactional sanctioning among individuals and households. You are held to reciprocity by those you are directly dealing with, and the ultimate sanctions are retributive. As we all know this pattern from peer-group experience at least, the documents should speak clearly enough for themselves. The most noticeable incidence of mechanical sanctioning in the everyday life of the Kinga is their salutation complex, a set of rules calling for elaborate greetings as between passers-by on the path, and affecting particularly married women. These greetings use hardly different verbal formulas to those of the warm, and elaborately prolonged, greetings of friends after an absence, but are not suffused with the same unmistakable affect. Imagine a woman who has harvested a head-load of wheat and is returning from the morning’s labour by a path winding among the terrace-like gardens of her neighbours. The moment she comes within hailing distance of a compeer at work or on the path she will begin to greet her and won’t cease until she has passed quite out of sight. Vagonile va vene -e -e -e -e -e! Women of the Western realm repeat that vowel sound in a masterfully mechanical way. The other must join in answer so that the two are sounding in chorus. Eye contact is hardly needed—it won’t matter that the path is obscured by foliage, that the bearer can’t turn her head, that the work in the field must continue without pause. One greeting won’t be ended before another begins with a new crescendo, then gradually dies away. A blind observer could follow a woman’s progress from field to home and testify in court to every step of the way and each encounter. More to the point, a woman is quite denied the option of monadic withdrawal (or dyadic withdrawal, if one should include her infant). The net effect of the greeting rules, whose operation only falls most vigorously on married women and applies in abbreviated form to all sorts of meetings, is to create the sense of a pervasive, formal structure underlying all informal ties; and in this formal structure all relationships are of equal value, regardless of the actual emotional content of the informal tie concerned. Since the social science literature can be confusing on the way tradition works, it may be worth asking how far its psychological mechanisms are open to analysis. The first requisite is setting aside the notion that tradition works through habit or consists in conformity to rules. It is best to keep a sharp distinction between the inner

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domain of social relations and the outer sphere of impersonal institutionalization, as they are distinct contexts for sanctioning another person’s actions. Transactionalism, so natural a mode of interaction among intimates, in the outer sphere gives rise to ‘arena’ behaviour, which (in the absence of effective authority) soon breaks down into free-for-all. Mechanical sanctions, belonging by their nature to the outer sphere (what Fortes calls a political-jural-ritual domain) are to be seen invading the inner sphere under a multitude of forms, from word taboos and contact avoidances to the sanctioning of a rigid rank order. But the two spheres, though they interdigitate in various ways, don’t merge into one.<<[lit] Perhaps the best illustration of the co-existence of distinct principles is the ‘quantum jump’ the boy makes in Semani’s reminiscence of puberty school: his sudden, subjectively inexplicable impotence comes upon him like shock on a wounded animal. There is a difference in kind between the power of an elder who is conceived as a familiar and his power when he wears the mask of Society. Another example: the power of the moot lies in its ability to transform familiars into powers in this same sense. When passions are high there may be heedless violence which third-parties deplore but dare not try to control. But when the fire is out if lasting harm was done there is a universal sense that the peace has been breached and wants coolheaded reparation through formal procedures. It is the authorless consensus of society, mechanical sanctioning, which convenes the moot or finally the court of law. It is because mechanical sanctioning functions through its cumulative, background effect upon worldview that there is reason to regard it as the primary form of social control, on which transactional and authority systems depend for credibility. The matter can be seen well where the particularisms of religion aren’t there to add their special complexities—in connection with style, cleanliness, and propriety. Like the Nyakyusa, if less devotedly, the Kinga feel the compulsions to personal cleanliness which are evidence of an underlying belief in its rightness. This theme in the Kinga worldview has a semantic structure along these lines: clean ~ filthy tame ~ wild careful ~ careless responsible ~ irresponsible civil ~ brutal

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Personal lustrations constitute a way of aligning one’s self with the angels against filth and useless violence. Every culture knows themes of this general sort, though their emphases will always be unique in some respects. But how else is a people civilized except through the establishment of a world with a semantic structure of this general kind? Of course the complex of meanings which establishes responsibility in any society is intricate not symmetric. A simple alignment of symmetric distinctions such as I’ve offered might be compared to a cross-section or scan of a three-dimensional structure. But the ethical structure of any workable human world will build on recognizably universal premises. The phenomenologists in our time have shown (what before them could only be stated as a philosophical position) that exotic moral worlds become comprehensible once the particularities of their collective representation in myth, dance, ritual, and manner-codes are bracketed together as diverse forms with common functions. In recent decades I’ve seen the emergence of uncleanliness as a technique of revolt among bourgeois youths; in Kinga society the wild and unkempt youth not yet brought into the ikivaga allowed the men there to congratulate themselves on their difference. We’ve seen that girls have a taming relationship to boys. The neatness of girls, their pride in bright clothing, tightly disciplined hair, and glowing skin are qualities not lost on a boy who has begun to ask himself why he’s always been brushed off by girls. Courtship, though not so prolonged today as formerly, remains a profoundly civilizing course. These are all aspects of the sanctioning context the documents themselves evoke, but lie by their nature in the background of action. Properly understood, custom is an accepted frame for the realization of genuine moral intention, and its scope for spontaneity is a function of the particular culture and never an automatic null. Ethnographers can’t avoid the duty of describing usage at the level of institutions and rules. Description at this level of abstraction can be supplemented by or even organized around more nearly concrete cases—we can, in a selective way, describe social life at the level of action. But so far as anthropological tradition is responsible for the view, commonly held, that Custom is a less fallible, more powerful ‘King’ in exotic society than in our own, I suggest we ourselves may be called upon to throw off tradition. Kinga ways of sanctioning one another are not quite like the ways of any other society, and it may be they allow greater scope to individual expression than some neighbour societies, but they are not unrepresentative of what Redfield (1956) called the social organization of tradition. The difference between such societies and our own is

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not in the force of mechanical sanctions but in the kind of superstructure which has been built on them. It may seem logical to suppose that a community comprised of good people would have to be a good community; but things can go terribly wrong when people are acting from the best of motives. It is a little closer to realism to argue that a good community ought to produce good people; but unless that is simply taken as a tautology it raises the question of freedom. How much dissent and non-conformity would the ‘good community’ allow? How much suicide? How many tirades? How much fear and loathing? There may be a philosophical road to an answer, but I’m quite sure it is too long for me to travel. Perhaps a better way, in any event, is the empirical. In what follows in this folio I present a few more cases for a reader to ponder. They have to be taken against the general background of Kinga culture in its context of time, place, and conditions of life. They are not descriptions of that culture but of spontaneous human behaviour in the village ‘Bwana Soda’ knows and loves. In the end, the ‘hard facts’ from which we know their culture are those we will find in the villages and villagers it has produced. The catch to bear in mind is that cultures are not hard facts.

Context of the documents On individuality Kinga must speak for themselves. For that to happen, I needed a villager to have talks with fellow villagers and tell me what they had considered important to say about themselves or their village. I found the right village and had the good fortune of finding a certain young Bw. Soda there. A longer name by which he was known was Asheri Geoffrey Ndelwa, and there were several other names he favoured, but Soda seems to have suited him best that year. He was still in his twenties and hadn’t tried himself as a writer before. But after he’d been assisting me for some months I was called away for a while in 1962. I knew he wrote a good round hand in Swahili and had devised ways of spelling kiKinga in parallel to the Swahili he’d learned in middle school. We decided that whilst I was away Soda would play anthropologist, going out every morning to interview people and writing up what he heard. We talked about what he might do, whom he might see, and how he might use everyday adventures as ‘stories’. Soda took to the idea of making a journal, collecting autobiographic fragments and writing a series of reports on episodes of village life. He was understandably not as keen on interviewing but

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made commendable efforts, sometimes with fine results. I offer selections here, chosen to elicit a range of situations and attitudes Soda and I thought representative of ordinary lives and everyday contingencies. None of this material evokes a world innocent of colonial contact: I must again trust the reader’s powers of subtraction. Soda put in a month of journalistic endeavour in his home territory while I was traveling elsewhere. He lived in a chapel hamlet we call Malanduku and did his walkabout from there. From his notes I’ve chosen episodes and portraits which test the ground of self-reliance by individuals in many walks of life. There are some notable lapses from ‘custom’ as I’ve described it. We discover a hamlet which kept its name when the people moved to a new location, we find the people having a merry time on the first day of a funeral. We glimpse a boy who is sleeping in his mother’s kitchen instead of a hut of his own or a friend’s. A still-young man has made a home with his wife and finds it right to help her look after the children—he regards his past bachelor life as lonely but feels it strengthened his resolve to ‘make it on his own’. We learn about the importance a new generation gives to schooling, and the key role a parent can play in this or in the anguish of a child. We are shown how far Malanduku is a Christian village, a new style of settlement, and how far its Christianity is home-grown. Some of this only reflects the steady winds of change. But individual judgement was no more important in 1960 for Kinga than it had been a century before. Soda’s contributions help underline the reciprocal flow of information between personal experience and culture, the intelligence of action and the intelligence of reflection. We get a few privileged glimpses of the kind of private contingency likely to colour moral decisions in everyday life. Taken together, Soda’s documents comprise a portrait of the small world he knew around 1960 in the Eastern realm. As for the mind and person of my village journalist, he was comely and well-liked, a model of the placid demeanour which Kinga of both sexes admire, and quite a few achieve. Within, he was neither placid nor uncritical (as I came to know) but he possessed such a talent for sympathy with others that he seldom could have offended. His equipment was eight years of schooling, a large notebook, and a pen. We agreed he would not be pushing back into the past as I was forever doing, but report on the world he knew best. He was free to do it in his own way. I’ve been faithful if not literal in my English renderings of his Swahili. The same can safely be said of his renderings to Swahili from kiKinga speech.

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Women speak of themselves I, Tusike My father was named Kwisa and my mother Tulimi Sanga. My brother who was first-born died. It was after his death I was born, in 1945 in the hamlet of Wale. Later on my little brother Eli was born, in the year 1949. My father had been away at work [at a plantation in Iringa district] and on his return they secretly gave him poison to drink [K: unkali], showing they were jealous of his wealth, for he had become very rich. Now after Papa’s death, Mama too was seized by illness, affecting her abdomen and her legs as well—it got worse, until she was quite unable to walk. There at Wale hamlet we had trouble such as we’d never known. Mama was ill for a long time, until we had been starving so long we were near death. [Soda: Their faces were like those of children already dead.] There were kin of Papa’s lineage thereabouts. But they were just refusing to take care of us, as if to say please just die and disappear completely, all of you. [The late husband’s brother by a cowife lived there but had refused to take the widow by inheritance as she was ill.] Mama-my-aunt, Papa’s sister, used to come each week bringing food to us. At last Mama’s illness got so bad that we children had grown so weak we were near death. Then my aunt was moved to bitterness by our plight, she went to the headman Sangilino to lodge a complaint. He was understanding because he already knew of our trouble. So Mama [father’s sister] begged permission to take us and the headman granted it, saying, “Go home and nourish these children until with God’s grace they are full grown, then the whole wealth shall be yours, for all here have refused to acknowledge them as kin.” Mama [father’s sister] came to Wale with my [adopted] brother Asheri [=Soda]. At that time Mama was in such condition that she couldn’t walk, so my aunt took her like a child upon her back all the way to Malanduku village. Mama-my-aunt was very tired from carrying Mama all that way [six kilometers], but at Matu hamlet [near Malanduku] another woman named Anili came out to help and carried Mama to the place where we were to live. When at last we all arrived at this place...we were to live in peace. Mama-myaunt took care of us in the best way you can imagine, until we were good-looking people again. We were baptized...and our godparents welcomed us and cared for us thereafter as if we were their very own children. After two years Mama’s illness overwhelmed her and she died. She was buried by my aunt’s husband and neighbours of Malanduku village. Understand that from the time we left home at Wale until that day there hadn’t been a soul come to see us, either from Mama’s side or my late father’s. When the death came Mama-myaunt sent word to the headman, “The person I took under my care is

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dead.” The headman sent the reply, “It is you who must bury the person who has died, for you shall know that she has no kin, only you [Name] and your husband [Name].” The body was interred, and even then there was not a single kinsman of Papa or Mama who came to the funeral, even though my mother still had family. ...Today I am a mature young person, and lo! the kinsmen of Papa and Mama are all the while wishing they had taken us in, though at the time my aunt adopted us those people supposed we wouldn’t survive. They said we were as good as dead. To this day my little brother Eli is at school, the fees paid by our older [foster] brother. My work is farming and caring for Mama-my-aunt. Today we have forgotten we had a mother of our own and we usually just say our “Mama” is the one we are with. Last year I cultivated two fields of wheat, one of millet, five riverbank gardens [K: isilwa], two of maize and two fresh-crop gardens [K:imigunda] [for pulses, greens, and root crops]. This year I’m continuing with just the same pattern as last. Clothes, soap, and all manner of small items are furnished by my older [foster] brothers... You see, after my mother died I didn’t suffer intensely, I took it lightly because even when she was alive we were always cared for by my aunt, and we went everywhere with her. I got so used to her, when Mama died it was as though everything went on as usual. As for my little brother, he understood nothing and it is only these days he is hearing from people that “once you had a mother of your own.” [Tusike was recently offered clothes by her paternal kinsmen but refused, saying, “You want me now that I’m ready to marry but you deserted me as a child. Who are you to me?” Even the boy Eli was offered clothes. He dropped them where he stood and walked away. Tusike and her roommates have so many callers by night that sometimes Soda is summoned to send them packing. Though the foster father died when Tusike was still young, his brother helps to look after the girls, who have built their house near his. At eighteen in 1963 she has scarcely entered the serious stage of courtship.]

Ame: My marriage From the period of my childhood nothing will ever be known, as there is no one left who could tell me about that. As to the time of my youth, my maidenhood, I remained a long time without marrying, compared to today. My little sister who came after me had long passed the menarche and had grown to be an adult just like myself, you couldn’t have said which of us was the older. In those days we had the custom of sleeping in underground houses [K: ingumbwe]. Down in these huts we would be a great group all sleeping together. Though it is true we did continue that way for so long putting off marriage, our

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oneness made it a joyful life, always being so close to each other in the group. Down in our underground huts young men were allowed to enter to pay court to us. As soon as he was inside, the young man would search out a girl who could like him, and he’d lie close beside her and chat the whole time the other girls were sleeping. It’s a long time ago now that I got my boyfriend and we became lovers in that manner. The whole period of our youth we used to dance and dance. Whenever there was a school for some girls, all of us would attend in a great crowd. Once the festivities began no one could quit the company, we danced on until everyone was so tired they must sleep. The time for marrying came at last. First there were the preparations for marriage. In the old days there was no chance the groom would present a great number of valuables [bridewealth], the way folk are doing these days. To begin with we got only token presents. As to how we became lovers, this young man had a sister, and it was she who befriended me on behalf of her big brother, that I should marry. After he had continued for a while sending little presents for his little sister to give me, then he felt free to visit our hut and become my lover. After the passage of time we were married. My bridewealth was only three cows. Since then I’ve been living peacefully with my husband [who works away] and three children [in school].

Singa: My maidenhood In the time of my youth for years I was physically weak on account of recurring fevers. But it was also a most hospitable, busy existence, for my father took in a great many young people, raising them all until they were full grown living right there and ready to marry. My father was a most generous man, and many people were cared for by him. In those days I was very fond of banding together with comrades to work in the fields. Festivities like the dance kivilila we used to hold as often as we could, and in those times even after we’d retired to bed we could keep up the partying all night long without tiring. Other times there would be drumming, and that was a favourite as well. It was a happy life—we had great fun in bed all the girls lying together. These were the parties we called amakongo, which is just to say calling a meeting for people to have a good time together.

Lulo: I escape with my life Long ago in our land of Lupila there arose the danger of a rogue leopard. The first we knew of the beast he was beginning to prey on dogs, but then it was kids, and at length goats who were full grown.

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Later still he began to take calves, until finally he was eating the grown cattle. Then he took to eating human beings. As was our custom, Kinga in those days as now tilled fields both far and near. One day I made a safari with my comrades [women of Malanduku village] to work fields in the vicinity of Uka, there a way to the southeast. When we had done all we could we found there was still a field left to till, so we decided to spend the night together right in the fields, so that in the early morning we might just finish up and be done. A pleasant sleep had come upon us when I felt something rasping my feet. I kicked out as hard as I could but the leopard seized my calf in a ferocious bite, chewing and ripping the flesh, enough to make himself a meal. The moment I raised the alarm my comrades came awake and began to make a great din. We had to leave and spend the rest of that night at Uka hamlet. In the morning I was carried home to Malanduku village, for I hadn’t the strength now to walk. On my arrival they began working on me with a bellows from a forge such as they use to make a bushknife or a spear. This is the way they managed to clean out all the leopard’s fur from the wound, by blowing. They had no faith I’d recover, as the wound was so large, but by the grace of God I did and I’ve led a peaceful life to this day. Since my husband died I’m cared for by my children. I can keep a few fields but mostly I’m cared for by the youngsters, and they keep me well.

Men speak of themselves Doni’s career My mother died eight years ago, and we were left, myself and four siblings, to a hard life of getting our own meals. When my mother died I had a grown sister, though, and she became like a mother to the little ones left behind. God came to our aid and we managed to scrape along until I [was able to work away, and after some years] was ready to marry. At that time I returned to Kingaland to look for a girl, and as it turned out I was lucky enough to find a maiden of Uka hamlet... Our relationship went on for some time, more than a year. This girlfriend suited me just beautifully, always making me welcome. When I’d visit she would prepare delicious food and something to drink. I was delighted with my fiancée. I used to make the journey by night to visit my girl, always all by myself. Her place was a good distance away, about six kilometers from Malanduku village. At the time of marriage last year I got no help from anyone but managed by my own efforts to pay a bridewealth of seven hundred shillings, two cows, eleven goats, two blankets, and six cotton robes. My father was around but he had no fortune, not a penny, and I had to rely on my own abilities. The property I borrowed for the

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bridewealth was only one of the cows and three of the goats, the rest was my own. As I am without anyone who will step forward and offer to pay it, I know the whole thing is up to me. After going to register the bridewealth at Ukwama court I came to realize that the only thing left was the wedding itself. I had to think and think about it, then on the spot I decided to go and carry off my sweetheart, doing without the formalities. When I got to her place I had to put a lot of pressure on her but at last she accepted me. We ran away together to my house that very evening and have been living together in peace ever since. I look on my life today as heaven compared to the life of my earlier years when I was so alone. We get on well with my in-laws. ... We’re self-reliant and look after the little ones. Though my mother died and left them behind I can say I’ve taken good care of them. My father is still around but he lacks personal ability, he is a man who will just live any way he can. The fields I’m tilling to feed these little ones are mainly borrowed from others, only a few are from my father’s side. Even before I got married I’d started making a big effort at gardening so as to have no trouble getting food when I married. Going to claim my wife I could bring her here and show her crops already standing in the fields. As we began working together, hoeing gardens of our own, I used to tell her, “Your companion is a person without near ones to rely upon, a loner [Sw: mkiwa], one who has no mother to help us, so we just have to help ourselves and depend on each other for getting all these jobs done.” And this is what my good wife liked to hear me say.

Luno and the leopard When I was born I was weaned while still a baby, and had difficulties because of this. After weaning me my mother gave birth to another baby so she couldn’t nurse us both. By good fortune my mother’s sister came to take me and rear me at her village. When I was eight, one day a leopard attacked the house. It pounced on the roof and began tearing at it. Now my aunt [in the inner room of the same house] heard and started raising the alarm, but in those years people were too scared to come help, they just began saying to their families, shut everything double tight as there’s danger abroad—even though they well understood that their friends were in peril. While the leopard was tearing at the roof my cousin grabbed a spear and began thrusting at the beast up there through the roof of the hut. It jumped down outside the wall and began to dig its way right through. But while this was happening my aunt had started stoking up the fire with all her might. When the leopard got through the wall, seeing the fire, it ran away and we were saved.

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In the morning my aunt was so afraid I’d be devoured by that leopard that she took me back home to my own parents, where I lived after that. The times were hard. When I grew up to be a youth able to be of some use, my father told me to come along with him, we had to go after food [Sw: hemera] as there was famine in the land. The place we went to buy food was Igominyi village [some forty kilometers distant]. But when we got to Mgiwi river it was in flood. Papa said he’d carry me on his back, for he was an expert swimmer and is to this day. But I wouldn’t hear of it. I crawled over on a bridge made of a single tree-trunk. By good fortune, God was with me and I made it across while my father swam underneath. When we arrived [at Igominyi] we had no money but Papa was an expert in patching basins. Luckily we were able that way to buy maize and peas and we carried the food back home successfully.

Yesa, herdboy Where I’m supposed to come from is in the Mawemba country in the hills to the east of Malanduku village. [This is a bush-culture region outside Kingaland proper as defined by colonial-period boundaries.] My own clear memories begin when I was around six and had the job of herding for my father, together with my older brother. He was so much bigger he could take the herds far into the open country. But there came a time when he began to extend his herding even farther away, being gone several days, and he was caught by a leopard and eaten together with his companion... When my father saw all this he began to think I too would be taken by a leopard, as I was only small. Though he kept trying to have me herd nearby, he saw I was maltreated, being beaten by people whenever the animals would get away and start feeding in their gardens. I’d run to chase the animals out of there, up would come the owner of the field, and of course he’d nab me and beat me. I remember one person who caught me with a stick across the ear all the way to my nose. I was badly hurt. Seeing that, at last Papa decided just to sell all the cows and the goats, and I was sent off to work.

Dugu: an orphan’s schooldays My life growing up wasn’t easy. After I started school my father and mother both died leaving me all alone [as a young adolescent]. I was shifted about after that, here and there. I might be at my father’s sister’s or another time at my mother’s brother’s or my mother’s sister’s. These two were against my continuing on at school and were after me to quit. But I myself was very happy at school and doing well. For that reason I took great care in maintaining the stock my father left me—why, today people are even showing envy of the animals, goats and cattle, I inherited. When I saw my

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kinsmen were against my schooling I dug in hard. They refused me food, trying to starve me into quitting school. After completing the seventh [penultimate] year I could apply at the court for remission of fees. This was a lot of trouble since the court was seventy kilometers away and I could get no food at home. But I had a friend who was kind to me, he gave me food early in the morning as I started my journey. It was later things got really difficult. The day I left the court to get on my way home I was suffering such hunger I didn’t know which way to turn. I kept on until I came to a field where someone had planted beans, and I began plucking the leaves and chewing them. I kept on until I came to a house and I needed a place to sleep, but the owner raised the alarm and chased me away... After I was married and God blessed us with a little baby, my life entered a new phase. People love me now because they see I have steady work and no problems of any kind. Even those who used to be so set against my schooling today are ashamed and like me a lot, calling me their son, even though back then they despised me.

Zabroni reflects on a suicide We were three of us born in my family, two boys and a girl. My mother died leaving us children with our father, but he was mentally and physically unable to work. My older brother was called Tengeneza and he died a gruesome death, hanging himself by a rope in the woods. This brother of mine was a professional musician and for many years he used to stay away at work, coming home from time to time. He was a mature person whom you would have expected to be a married man already with children. One day this brother of mine was out walking. I don’t know how it happened or what he could have been thinking but in the evening he entered a woman’s hut where she was asleep. He just went on over to where she was lying and was trying to have intercourse with her. When the woman awoke and saw what was going on she sprang up and raised the alarm. “Who are you that you dare intrude on me in my house?” My brother had nothing to say. That same night he returned home, opened his suitcase, took out his cleanest clothes and dressed in them. Then he took a rope, walked about 400 meters from his house to a clump of forest, climbed a tree, tied the rope and made a noose. Then just like that he hanged himself and died. In the morning a girl was passing by on her way to the fields with her mother. She ran ahead to the trees to have a chance to defecate. Suddenly she saw this man and ran back raising the alarm. That was how they found him. The news was brought to the headman who ruled they should bury him. It was soon done and that was the end of it.

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A puzzle for Madeni’s son My life during childhood was one of problems, as when I was born my mother was having hard times. They even gave me a name meaning “misery” —Kikwoma. Mama had just two children, one by her first husband [Name]. When he died she married Madeni...who begot me. After some years my father died a suicide, and the story about his strangling himself was that my mother was supposed to have taken an axe and the grindstone. But so far as is known she actually took only the axe, not the stone. Papa took her to court to accuse her, but Mama still admitted only she had taken the axe, not the stone, and now Papa grew very angry. But my older brother told him, “You, Father, if you suspect this Mama, only go and search inside her house.” So my brother accompanied Papa to search for the axe and stone, looking everywhere. They found the axe which Mama had taken, and nothing more. My father grew depressed. Before nightfall he was dead of strangling and was lying in his grave.

Events in the village Captain Nengo’s self-assertions People say Captain Nengo eats badly because his three wives are forever quarreling. They won’t attend each other’s imigovi work parties. One wife will say he’s already eaten at the other’s—“You’ve had your supper from your favourite wife, why don’t you go back to her?” Other women of the village don’t make their quarrels public. Captain Nengo has had a troubled career. He says he covets the life of the youth who hasn’t married. He hasn’t a wife who really loves him, though he has got children by them all. They resent him as he never tills a field for them. Long ago he was a big man, an important supervisor of workers [on a plantation in Iringa district]. When he left that job he was a [lesser] headman. But he isn’t really headman any more, he’s old and sitting idle. He wanders from house to house and if he gets food from his wives it must be by chance. We’ve seen them beat him and pour water over him while he does nothing but sleep. He may be beaten until his body is weak and swollen, yet he remains a gentle person. Just the same he can also get furious and beat his wives handsomely. The other day he borrowed a cane from a neighbour to threaten his wives but they saw him coming and put their heads together. They took the cane and whipped him with it until he cried, “I’ve made a mistake.” Only then would they let him go. The houses where his wives are sleeping are their own—he didn’t build them, they had to see to it themselves. So when a wife is

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abusing him she’ll say, “Get out of my house, you never built it!” The man’s life is wretched though he has no less than fourteen children. The women must look after all their needs. His last wife died leaving four to the care of her sister. But when the sister was going to move to her husband [away at plantation work] she took off with these four children and Captain Nengo had to take out after them. When he caught up with them it was agreed they should return and be under the care of his remaining wives. Only two years ago another child tried to hang himself and had to be saved by one of the wives. He was only six but he’d done something wrong to his mother and she was abusing him severely. He was so downcast he took a rope into the goat-shed, tied all the knots he knew, and threw the rope over a pole. He pushed his head through one end and his toe through the other, kicking down hard with his toe to tighten the noose. Just in time he was saved by his mother’s co-wife, who untangled him. All the while his own mother was there but wouldn’t stop him. Even when she saw her companion releasing the child she spoke against her, “Let him die if he wants to have his way. It’s not my fault. I never put him up to this, but if that’s what he thinks he has to do, well let him die.” Of course, the co-wife couldn’t heed such words but took the child down and brought him into her own house. It may seem strange that such a little boy would do such a thing, only six years old, but people speculate he must have been copying his mother. She tried a little before that to hang herself and was only saved by good fortune when her little daughter heard a strange snorting sound from the mother’s hut. The girl screamed, “My mother’s dying!” Right away people came out and cut the rope so the woman recovered. All the time Captain Nengo was there and he said, “Just leave her to die, she’s only drunk and wants to play with death.” That’s why people suppose the little one was copying his mother when he tried to hang himself. Today there was a fight between Captain Nengo and Nanasi, the old village pagans. The reason for the fight was that Captain Nengo was demanding Nanasi should bring him “the old man’s chicken” according to Kinga custom. After a man is released from regular taxes because of old age, then each year he ought to send a goat, or a chicken at least, to the headman. It’s true Nanasi pays no tax, and that’s why he was asked to pay up a chicken. The party was on its way from Ukwama to collect the taxes here. When he got wind of all this Nanasi was enraged and he began to abuse Captain Nengo in a loud voice, saying his belly was bloated, it was his mother’s belly, he was a barbarian and a fool. Captain Nengo came right back, saying, “Beware, you rogue, you’ve said too much now, you’re finished—just a few days and you’ll be saying goodbye to this world!” Nanasi replied, “If I die it’ll be by witchcraft you have from your mother, for sure!” Bw. Fipo, the good Christian, tried to restrain Nanasi, but the latter wouldn’t listen to counsel, and Fipo was powerless. Nanasi was

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raising a din, threatening to pound that good man to a mash with his fists. The whole thing was taken as high comedy by the folk gathering here for the funeral of Yase’s mother, which began today. The village was teeming with people, some crying, some trying to comfort the bereaved, and others much amused.

Manly sport Around two o’clock on Thursday afternoon Bw. Soda had been working, doing his rounds of the village. When he came back from work he went into his hut and there was served lunch. On finishing his meal he heard the din of people and dogs on the chase. Behold, as it turned out this was Bw. Lukasi and Bw. Yoel Ndelwa hunting a gazelle. When he got outside to investigate the first thing Soda saw was the big antelope itself with the dogs in chase. Searching with his eyes to make sure there were people hunting as well, he discovered the pack of runners following after. Bw. Soda Ndelwa at once ducked back into his hut, grabbed his spear and his hunting club, and ran off to join the hunt. The gazelle was amazingly fleet. They chased him past the old Kidingili [hamlet] site, where he switched back alongside the Kidingili of today. The youth was quickly exhausted from running so hard, as it had been a long while since he’d had the chance to get so much exercise. There at Kidingili the animal tried to trick them, hiding itself completely in the bush. But the hunters knew their work and scoured the bush until the animal reappeared. Now Bw. Soda happened to be standing in a secluded spot, and the moment he saw the gazelle coming by the young man took after it. All at once it turned, passing right by Bw. Soda’s position. With all his might Bw. Soda struck the creature with his club. The gazelle came close to falling but suddenly was up and running again. This time Bw. Soda didn’t tire but chased after the gazelle with all his force, piercing the creature’s flank. There and then the hunt was over. The animal fell to the ground and expired.

Easter parade It was Saturday evening when Joel, Johasi, and Lukasi with some of the village boys and girls were dancing to drums, starting at about eight o’clock. It is a time-honoured custom of the Kinga, whenever there’s a holiday, such as a wedding feast, or at Christmas or Easter for the case of the Christians, or if someone is bereaved and they want to offer consolation. The people will start drum-dancing or singing. Or for pagans they may start dancing with ankle bells. The reason for this celebration was the resurrection of Bw. Jesus. So they left their own village, which is known by the name of Malanduku or Kilangali, and passed along eastward. Before departing

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they warned the littlest children who wouldn’t be able to keep up, “You mustn’t come, as you don’t want to get hurt and never get home again!” Hearing this, the children turned back—all, at least, but one. At a little distance behind there was one little boy named Abraham who was following the dancers, under the spell of the drum. But when they all got to the river his father caught sight of the little boy and took him straight home to bed. By that time the dancers had crossed the river and were nearing the village of Unyengwa. There they passed on by and then twisted back to the hamlet of Ikovo, where they just got dancing so hard it was around four in the morning before they took their leave. Then they danced on their way and descended to the hamlet of Ukange where they kept it up until dawn. Then they got bamboo cider and food, and indeed they drank and ate until they could take no more. Now they bade farewell to their hosts in that village by dancing there a short while longer, then they took leave to start the journey home. Arriving there they discovered there were only a few minutes to go before worship service would begin, so they quit the dancing then and there, going to wash up and prepare for church. Now it was the turn of the little children who had been left behind the previous day. After church, they began their own dance, going round and round the village, and they kept it up until ten at night. Finally they entered the house of Grandmother Tumwumilile, where they listened to the radio which the teacher Fula had left with her, and then at last the children went to sleep, and the grown-ups who had remained gave up as well and went home.

Insecurity I found no reason to suppose Kinga ever had been slaves to custom. It is hard to judge the rigidity or flexibility of a culture from the ethnographic literature, but my impression is that Kinga, if they vary from the median in this, are among the more flexible folk of Eastern Bantu civilization. A small population by comparative standards, their language still varies so considerably from place to place that local identities are never in doubt as between experienced male speakers. The linguistic variety is paralleled by variations of custom of which Kinga themselves are often not especially aware, making general propositions difficult either for 1960 or for the pre-Contact culture. At the same time, Kinga men were habitual roamers—the war pattern hardly inhibited their travels—and loved to blend in wherever they found themselves. Isn’t linguistic flexibility some sort of ‘solvent’ for social rigidities? I think it often is. A special kind of variability you discover by travelling about with an interview book pertains to cognitive maps of custom. They may

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vary surprisingly from one individual to another even in the same community, and especially with respect to domestic usages—what might be called homely items. This follows from two features of the culture: (a) that marriages are usually made at a distance—usually at the fringe of the world a youth has been able to map for himself in his growing up; and (b) that gossip, with the nosy, conformist mentality which gives rise to it, is weakly developed. Kinga leave others to themselves not in everything but in many things. There is no runaway permissiveness—the system of sanctions is a success not a failure. Eccentricity is noticed: the foibles of others are the mainstay of Kinga lyric art. But when noticed it is as likely to be appreciated as disapproved. There is little sense that an odd person must be seen to be corrigible. Very often, eccentricity is valued over conformity in this moral universe. The Kinga social system is comparatively low on predictability. I don’t mean everyone is unreliable—the contrary is truer. I don’t mean predatory leopards are not unusual hazards: leopards like eccentricities crop up so often in personal histories because they are not a regular feature against which people are armoured. But this is not a society which firmly fixes even the responsibility for an orphan or a widow. Between ideal norms and actual practice the gap can be a painful one, waiting to be bridged by someone of good will. When a man prefers drunkenness to duty or independence to social responsibility, there is little more tangible than a private conscience to dissuade him. The caring for tiny children by their older siblings is given special prominence by the standard domestic arrangement, especially where Christian influence is slight; and this means varied patterns of early learning, sometimes giving rise later to deep personality differences. We needn’t wait for a suicide rate to be published, to decide that the level of personal insecurity among Kinga must be called high; but at the same time we can perceive that it’s not so high as to have bred high rates of anxiety displacement and a prevalence of rigid personal security systems. Spontaneity is encouraged by a reliance on friendship, romantic attachments, and free reciprocity in the arrangement of productive work. Spontaneity and insecurity don’t always go together, but for the most part in Kinga communities they do. For those who are able to keep their psychological buoyancy there is a lot of personal freedom. But since this includes the freedom to ignore diffuse sanctions by adopting the non-conformist pose, it includes the freedom to be uncooperative and unsympathetic. Some persons will be put at the receiving end of that kind of freedom in early or otherwise impression-

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able years. If they survive, the vulnerability they felt is likely to stay with them. Even trusting in the generosity of others, if too often disconfirmed, can become a lost art.

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TWIN SHADOWS, FIFTH FOLIO

Intimacy and autonomy

Character & history When Ruth Benedict (in Patterns of Culture, 1934) introduced anthropologists to Nietsche’s speculations on the attractions of moderation and excess, she took the interpretation of cultures out of psychology and showed that it belonged to the comparative method, as that was coming to be understood in sociology and anthropology. The object of the method now was not to align cultures like animal species in order of complexity (and presumed evolutionary sequence) but to understand the fine differences between cultures at roughly the same level of complexity. Instead of starting with one culture and a set of general principles (what we might call the ‘autopsy model’) we were to start with several, and use our general principles to account for the outstanding differences. Studies of native North America had reached a stage in the 1930s which made it possible to do something like a field study ‘from the armchair’, and some strongly interpretive work had already been done in Melanesia. Benedict chose three cultures she felt she could portray from the literature. Each seemed to exhibit a distinct and homogeneous culture, a distinct ‘configuration of culture’. She road hard on this idea of a special ‘pattern’ or ‘cultural emphasis’ and used it as a sort of magnifying glass. Reader’s seemed to be drawn close enough to an exotic scene to comprehend its most unusual features without a sense of strangeness. The book was a succès fou and dismissed as such by the academy, though the method might have been refined and reapplied systematically if its scientific value had been recognized, hidden though it was beneath an artful and even poetic, literary surface. Benedict didn’t dwell long on her methodological foundations. Metaphor was her forte. Her message was of its time, an argument for cultural relativism on humanistic grounds. Something her magnify-

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ing glass did not do was to bring a reader toward an understanding of the way cultures come to differ. Here are her words on that: The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a certain segment of the great arc of potential human purposes and motivation…The great arc along which all the possible human behaviours are distributed is far too immense and too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize…Selection is the first requirement. Without selection no culture could even achieve intelligibility… (Benedict 1934: Ch. 7 [1959: 207])

Is it likely that collectivities anywhere choose their values? Moderation and excess, reason and passion—her themes—are universally familiar states of the human psyche, and correlatives. To have excess one must have boundaries to cross; to know the need for boundaries is to know the attractions of excess. Choosing moderation is putting up walls against one’s self. Choosing excess is riding through walls. People everywhere do both of these things in pursuit of their moral strategies. But it makes little sense in reference to human history to use the metaphor of (personal) choice. Cybernetic processes are formally stochastic—if you want to predict an outcome you have to know everything the Omniscient knows, and logic prevents the Omniscient from making either a prediction or a choice. As stage-setting for a dramatic plea for sensitivity to other cultures, no matter how small or how hard-featured, this 1934 diction of Benedict is not perfidious anthropology, but as history it is bunk. I’ve gone into this because the comparative method seems to me the best way to approach interpretation of a culture, and because I think the reason for this is that cultures do not simply happen but do have explicable histories which do rest on choice. What people do, I’ve argued, is to ‘pursue happiness’ on their own accounts. They develop moral strategies in their daily efforts to cope with contingency. The result of this over the generations is social change but not change anyone has ‘chosen’ from a great spectrum of ‘human possibilities’. I’ve touched ground a few times in recent chapters with individuals caught in moments of reflection on their own moral careers, and perhaps admiring or scoffing judgementally at a neighbour’s. Nowhere have we encountered a person choosing the ‘values’ which will prevail in public thought. What they do is quite private. All the residents of Malanduku village are in a situation of ‘presocial competition’: that is, an existential not a role-motivated rivalry. Moral strategies are invented, not in any deep sense borrowed: the conscious imitator and his or her role model are not on the same track. Most of the moral choices most of us will remember making were probably bad ones, but none of them have had consequences

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which were not submerged by a sea of other mortals’ choices. In the final section of this book I try to show that ‘close comparison within a region’ can be used to explore the way moral choice does affect culture history. In concluding this section I want to show that it offers an escape from the fixedly nomothetic methodology of the experimental sciences in explaining human behaviour. Moderation and excess are the Nietschean themes developed by Ruth Benedict. She may not have convinced us they are labels we can properly apply to real, whole cultures, but she did convince me they are ideas which can sensitize me to the phenomenon of style as a feature of culture. You can’t discuss the moral context of personal choice anywhere without premises about the range of possible human cultures, and Nietsche’s lead in this is better than most. One way or another, all human cultures probably do honour, as Greek culture did, to both Apollo and Dionysus, allowing each god to preside over its own end of a moral battlefield. What Patterns of Culture did show was that moral ideas about excess and moderation, as elaborated in each human culture, may determine the tilt of the field on which our neverending struggles are waged. Here moderation is for the weak, admiration reserved for the strong—elsewhere excess is weakness, moderation strength. Perhaps some culture somewhere even has something to teach us about keeping the battle on a level plane. But most mortal men and women share the condition of the Kinga, who have to frame their moral strategies against broken country. When I asked Soda to portray for me some of the most respected men of his community he didn’t choose men who had exercised significant authority. All the men he described were church elders. Their virtues were perfectly Apollonian, even truly Aristotelian. Moderation for Aristotle was always to be seen as the golden ground of virtue between too much and too little of a good thing: between cowardice and foolhardiness, thoughtlessness and Angst. Such a man in Malanduku village would be a moderate drinker, sociable and not argumentative when passing the bowl around. He would be steady in his work but not a plodder, finding regular work away but returning each year with necessaries (cloth, sugar, tea), gifts, and money. He’d see that his wife and daughter had solid houses placed attractively on a well-graded clearing. He’d not neglect clothes and school-fees for an able son. In turn, his son would show enough respect to keep their relationship on an even keel, while wife and daughter would keep up a cheerful spirit of work in the fields and the kitchen. In Soda’s interviews there was never a boast to record. There is no emphasis on pres-

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tigeful accomplishment of office, popularity, or magnificence. The ‘big man’ syndrome is lacking. I got less unequivocally Apollonian snapshots from another young informant, with experience closer to the centres of power and population: Nima had a Dionysian taste for escapades (including a near-fatal fascination for cattle raids) and admired moderation less. His character values at sixteen were tuned to untamed youth, and even in his immoderate disparagement of elders it was always excess, whether of drinking, obesity, or boastfulness, which was his target. Obedi was the third young bachelor among my friends. His more mature criticism was oblique, bubbling out of his satirical caricatures. It was sharp enough not to cause offense. Obedi was ten years out of middle school and had got himself a profession. He seemed to have a political future as well. Not a fox, perhaps, but a polished pragmatist. These three youths I can only describe as having different ‘personalities’. They perceive their world differently, as if from different perches on the great tree of human knowledge Benedict seems to have had in mind. It seems to me that ‘personality’ ought to be kept, as a label, for distinguishing the differences among individuals within any given culture. Differences among cultures have many dimensions, and here we are concerned with only one, which is usually labeled ‘values’. In this broken and hilly country, how stable are character values over the generations? The grandparents of my young informants lived in armed camps and kept their independence from larger neighbour peoples by a combined reputation for witchcraft and fierce dedication to combat. Only one place, the old capital of Ukwama (Central realm), seemed to be in tune with this reputation in 1960. Ukwama had pretty well kept Christianity at bay. I met there what seemed to me manifest excess—hard drinking, abusive language, threats and perceptions of witchcraft. Nowhere else had I found women sexually bold. Perhaps a good European would have concluded that here was the very ‘pagan Kinga culture’ from which Christianity and enlightened colonialism had converted all but this stubborn core. I didn’t and don’t draw that conclusion, but I did at once begin to question my assumptions about the Kinga ethos. Were these people of the kind who grant a longterm advantage to the Apollonians among them? Could they not, in circumstances I had yet to observe, abruptly tilt the field the other way? The original German perceptions don’t bear that out, nor does the style Kinga have given their Christian communities suggest it. How much faith must I put in my personal perceptions of Ukwama? Tunginiye, dancing at 60 like an elf not a demon, had once dwelt in Ukwama and,

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returning there, sensed little of the shift of ethos which affected me. He had old friends to rely on. And isn’t friendship essentially Apollonian? I expect the moral landscape of Kingaland, like the physical, has always been hilly. The historical problem in getting back to a ‘traditional Kinga lifestyle’ is to state in probabilistic terms what the main impact of the colonial period must have been on Kinga manners and character values. The evidence of early observers is only too quickly given. But we do know something at a general level about the way the Germans and British were perceived (and how they perceived themselves and their commission), and which of their intentions actually made themselves felt. The grand centre of the Sanga political culture would have to be the place to look for ‘impact’. Ukwama and the other major courts may always have been Dionysian radiators in an otherwise Apollonian space. Human sacrifice, cruel forms of animal immolation, a torture-ordeal, and summary execution for witchcraft are all reported from the court centres. The courts were institutionally dedicated to war and rapine. If rivalry for office, distinction, and power had any real existence it must have been at the courts. What more need be said? I found in 1960 that several young, educated officials from other Kinga communities, stationed on assignment as strangers in Ukwama, experienced hostility and stress there which they couldn’t handle. The sort of discontinuity they reported amounted to an assault upon their personal moral perspectives. The effect in two quite different cases was to produce a severe, self-defeating reaction and end the man’s administrative career. This can be weighed against Tunginiye’s own success in an administrative position there, and my own sense that most of the Dionysian vibrations I received came from a few strongly hostile individuals. Even if, apart from a couple of stumbles, I’d done little to put their backs up, I was Mzungu—alien white—and these were the men whose scope would have been grander by far if we Wazungu had stayed home in Ulaya, the European world. Ukwama was the place to expect sour grapes. I don’t think the Kinga courts in the old culture were continually bathed in Apollonian sunshine. But their obvious attractions to youth had to be consistent with amity and order in the barracks life, and with a style of wit and performing art which, making light of man’s most serious concerns, didn’t hesitate to puncture egos. The longest period of license, a month’s revelry, occurred at the death of a prince: when you consider the amount of work required to supply men with beer and victuals for a month away from the fields, and the debt of work which must subsequently be paid off, it is hard to doubt the ra-

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tionality of the basic productive organization presided over by a prince and his court. What is doubly obvious is that the burden of rational moderation fell disproportionately on the heads of women. Kinga were consistently described in the early Berlin Mission reports as shy [G: schüchtern], friendly, and trusting. “The time of turning the soil in this land is—disregarding the beer drinking—a most merry one. Everywhere you hear raised in song the voices of Kinga tilling slope and ravine.” So wrote Missionary Hübner in his second year at Bulongwa. Later on he was assured (for what that is worth) that, before the eruption of warfare under Kyelelo the Fierce, most probably in the 1870s, “the country lived in peace, except when the sole enemy of Kingaland, the Ngoni, destroyed it through the raids they periodically undertook”. <<[lit] Except in the Western realm during Kyelelo’s territorial campaigns, war seems to have evolved among the Kinga toward ceremonial forms which gave the fighter prominence but effectively contained the warlike ethos. Heroism as a character value had its situs in the bachelor-male role, building on the wild period of childhood and youth. But the taming of manners at the central and subsidiary courts seems to have proceeded steadily through the third decade of life, as it later came to do at migrant labour centres. The life of the ikivaga was by all accounts orderly not rowdy. Men recalling their own formative years always stressed the disciplinary effect of the presence of elders at the other end of the hut. Kinga jural processes were as adequate then as later for dealing with torts as between persons within the court’s own community. Witchcraft? In the telling of a case the emphasis is always on the veiled threat, corroborated by witnesses: that, with the subsequent appearance of illness or misfortune, constitutes the evidence for malicious intent. This means the court’s ability to find and punish witches, if it could be a deterrent to talking violence, could have a generally taming effect on manly quarrels. The importance of this point is not to press a claim that ‘witchcraft had a positive function’ but to make clear how far witchcraft, like warfare, could be a staple of the culture without suffusing the whole with a Dionysian quality. In the hands of Apollonian courtiers would an Apollonian ‘offender’ never come to the ordeal? We don’t have the cases to answer on evidence. I would not want to hazard even a well-hedged guess on the basis of any theoretical construct of ‘Kinga core personality’ or the like. For my part, I think the whole gamut of ‘human possibilities’ is always accessible wherever a bunch of us may be gathered.

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What tempers nature in any historical case is not so much the culture of rules—the regular routines which do make life a bit predictable—as the private commitment of individuals to pursuing their own most-valued ends within the context of a culture of public thought— values. Character values, since they are pervasive, are prior to rules in respect of any particular institution, though they are derivative of rules when you take the round of institutions comprising the culture. This position lacks the charming simplicity of C. R. Hallpike’s: Values must be taken as ‘given’, in the sense that one cannot go behind them and ask, for example, why the Konso should place such emphasis on peace, or virility. The Konso just do, and there is no more to be said (1972:17).

I suppose that if the author had been willing to say more he might have argued that history has given the Konso their value system, and history is thoroughly accidental. But if this is not historicism raised to the point of annihilating the possibility of a social science, then it is only a dodge which shouldn’t be taken seriously. I think the stability of character values owes much to the fact that no single new institution can seriously challenge them. I go farther: I think if we couldn’t assume such stability we’d have no use for the concept of culture. If we can’t hope to state in principle the conditions under which character values will change in a predictable manner, a science of culture isn’t possible. Did the pax germanica come to the Kinga as the lifting of a mantle of repression? A reasonable argument to that effect could be mounted in the case of the Hehe, who had made many slaves through capture and seem to have been developing an hierarchic social system. An argument could be made in the case of the Ndendeuli, dispersed and subjugated by Ngoni invaders, though it took the Ndendeuli several decades to convince colonial authorities they deserved rulers of their own ethnic kind. But in Kingaland the kind of slavery and the kind of subjugation exercised by the Sanga were fairly popular. One ethnic group, the Wanji, was made subject to Kinga administration by the British (for administrative convenience) and chronically objected to that; but they’d earlier been freed from another (Sangu) hegemony by the Germans, and been thankful. Another ethnic group, the Magoma, were neither clearly inside or outside the Sanga frontier at Contact, being vulnerable by reason of their small population to Sangu raids and beginning to need a protective alliance with their developing Sanga neighbours. Throughout the colonial period the Magoma waged an only half-successful war of words in favour of full administrative independence from the Kinga, who were not at a loss

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for words in reply. A third ethnic group, the Mahanzi, had become deeply committed to protective alliance with one Sanga prince against another, and took the transition to colonialism with equanimity as relief from the threat of war, about which they had no romantic illusions. A small people on the shores of Lake Malawi, the Kisi, having (presumably) lost their own language and any traditions of political self-rule, continued after the pax to accept a division between Kinga and Nyakyusa overlords without recorded protest—they were a people preferring to mind their own business, the manufacture and sale of pottery. Finally, the Mawemba communities on the Sangas’ eastern frontier, owing no one allegiance, managed to get themselves switched from Kinga to Bena administration during British times; but their grievance was only logistical. On the whole, traditional Sanga rulers remained popular with the Kinga and acceptable to their European overlords. Kinga rulers made an easy transition to indirect rule and, after the Maji Maji and the 1914 wars, seldom required discipline except for inaction—collecting too little tax. Does the very success of the Sanga regime argue for its rationality? It may be rash to make the idea of reason carry such a burden. Compare the Aztecs of Mexico. Their success tells us they were well organized, not that they were given to moderation. But the Kinga under their Sanga rulers did expand and prosper on the basis of their own agricultural product, for whatever meat the raids brought in very likely did no more than compensate for the loss of a well-fed man or two on the caper. Their success implies a steady and varied round of activities, economic, domestic, and political, which served to promote prosperity; and the same argument suggests that the political religion of the Sangas was astutely designed as well (Park 1966). Though comparing Kinga and Aztec is an ethnographic absurdity, sociologically the comparison is apt enough: the difference which immediately appears is in the economy of slaughter on the side of the Kinga, who sacrificed only the rare lad, kin to no one at court but caught in the “wild,” and seem to have arranged their battles to get the most heroism at the least expense of blood. Both cultures feature spectacular theocratic tendencies, a predatory politics, and the collective organization of labour—but each of these institutions is approached in a characteristic manner. If Aztec culture defines a ‘Dionysian’ skew, the right word for Kinga public thought may after all be ‘Apollonian’. One way to put it would be that the difference between the two ‘cultures of rules’ is less significant than the difference between the ‘expressive cultures’ or ‘styles’ of the two peoples.

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Character and psyche Character is the self seen in a mirror of public morality. The psyche is the self-perceiving self, monitor of character. Both terms are wanted for a sensitive analysis of moral strategies in the context of an unfamiliar culture, if only to insure us against the illusion that an unreflective, ‘traditional’ mind reigns everywhere except in our own armchairs. Moral strategies as creatures of the psyche are as private as moralities are public. In the end, it is by pursuing a successful moral strategy that ego keeps strength, and without ego strength, of course, no one copes. No doubt, the microcultures tend to generate crowd behaviour in contexts which an outsider will perceive as custom-bound. Such public demonstrations have an obvious appeal to the film-maker, and someone who knew nothing of (say) the Masai but from the films made of them might have to be excused for ignoring the ethnographer’s interpretive comment and perceiving only ‘mindless tradition’. But the mob at a Masai marriage is no more representative of that culture than the mob at a football match is a microcosm of Britain. We have to deal here with collective dynamics not mentality as such. Masai or Kinga traditions and beliefs are instruments of the Masai or Kinga mind, but the reverse is not the case. It is when Tengeneza backs out of his misadventure in a strange woman’s hut that he reveals his character. He’s not such a brash fellow as he may have seemed, nor such a blasé cosmopolitan. Probably he’s misread ordinary friendliness on the part of a Kinga woman for the kind of boldness the same behaviour would have betokened in Dar es Salaam. But when he broods and hangs himself we are granted a glimpse, beyond character, of his psyche. We have found him deeply touched by shame. In his donning his best clothes for the event we have a measure of his psychic vulnerability and of the way exotic (European) clothes may have been his armour. Of the woman who inadvertently brought about his downfall we know only that she has faith in her neighbours and their faith in her—the ambiguities of the situation don’t have to frighten her. So far as we can know, her character was redeemed in the incident and her psyche unthreatened. Kinga are probably more inclined to let others be themselves than is the human norm. Their monadism is not extreme, but a Kinga philosopher would never have reasoned his way to the categorical imperative of Kant—for all their legal and political sophistication, Kinga are insufficiently communal. For all the seemingly easy intimacy of their sleeping patterns, they resist real incorporation into groups.

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The communication of this character value begins almost with the baby’s first breath. A woman may be in no haste to put a child on its own, though her enjoyment of the baby can be seen to diminish as its own independence grows. Fathers generally are concerned, if they are not away from home, to have the small child weaned and out of the house. Men who have taken up the new Christian style of domesticity report they’re bothered by children not yet ready to fetch and carry, preferring migrant labour to sharing house with a small child. It is as if men were saying women alone could love a baby, though under the bluster I suppose there is resentment of that all-excluding love which besets a Kinga wife with each new infant. In spite of that love, women refrain from ego-incorporative behaviour toward its impressionable little object. The constant mode of contact is the carry position, the child’s belly high on the mother’s back, skin to skin, pressed close by the carry cloth or skin. As the baby gets its strength it looks at the world over its mother’s shoulder. While she is working in the fields, it is laid on its back in the carry-cloth, under her eyes. A baby isn’t normally carried in nursing position even briefly, as the mother is accustomed to having full freedom of movement, even for hard work, with the child on her back. She doesn’t regularly become a passively sympathetic nurse while giving suck but generally keeps busy with cooking, conversation, and the like. The amount of expressive eye contact must be drastically reduced over that common in communities with contrasting customs. Both the excitements and the insecurities associated with face-to-face techniques of child-care are minimized. The child is less subject, for being kept on the back so much, to the changing moods of its mother, whether of love, distraction, or annoyance. The mutual magnification of mood, so typical of the post-bourgeois dispensation in the urban West, is mooted in this parent-child relationship. Without subscribing to one of the whole-cloth dogmas of child development, we have no secure way of knowing what happens in the child’s mind during the first year or two of its life; but it should be clear the relationship of mother and child has been firmly established on the mother’s part long before (in the fourth or fifth year) she weans this child and completes the turn toward another. Kinga women minimized precisely those contacts which my wife, who had four children with her in the field, most valued and sought to maximize in the baby period. A doting Kinga mother does not explore her child’s abilities and create situations evoking idiosyncratic behaviour, pushing the child to assert and differentiate itself as an individual up to some point of risk, then pulling it back. Conditional love is no part of her child-rearing tech-

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nique. A child’s character is not her responsibility. Once a girl is weaned she is morally on her own until she is ready for the companionate, sibling-like bond with her mother, in which moral tuition remains remarkably inexplicit. Once a boy is weaned, the extent of moral contact between the two will be up to him as much as to her. Even a motherless boy, once living and eating with his peers, is not dependent on adoption. Since a woman’s children won’t live with her they won’t be caught in the kind of emotional lock we call dependency, and if they have a warm relationship it won’t be possessive. Pursuing a possessive strategy gets the baby nowhere. For a woman to shift from the favoured pattern of dyadic withdrawal (mother and infant as an item to themselves) to an ego-incorporative involvement with it would turn both of them toward a style of domesticity which would find no resonance in the old culture, though it might eventually do in Christian Malanduku village. Can a woman nurse a child well into its fourth year without cultivating emotional dependency? The Kinga evidence suggests she can. Well before the child’s third year it is usually ‘daytime weaned’ to the care of older children and has ceased to expect nursing until its mother returns from the fields toward evening. Its final year or two of infancy is therefore one of overlap with the pattern of child life: playing with peers during the day, regressing to infantile ways in the evening. Gradually the mother’s own pattern of moral self-sufficiency, and perhaps her concomitant avoidance of deep commitment to others, is established as the underlying moral strategy of her children. It will serve them well as they establish their characters with peers. The picture I’ve been giving of the visible psyche of the very young child is quite compatible with standard theories that try to account for the private world of the young as a thing engendered by the private world of the parent(s) through directly causal events which are part of the parenting pattern. I am more inclined to take the evidence of language: it is something acquired from the child’s immediate environment; the elements do derive from the examples of others in that environment; and a very strong tendency is evident in the child toward systematization. The difference in what we might call the acquisition of a ‘private culture’ is that the environmental clues are far less precise, may be contradictory when more than one parenter is entailed, and include only clumsy sanctions on the way the child’s psyche is systematizing. Siblings often mature with virtually identical linguistic palettes, and but seldom with nicely cloned psyches. Just as

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through language new expertise or new persuasions may be acquired in sequels to childhood, so it is with private worlds. The basic pattern of social control in the isaka or ikivaga, the sleeping houses of women or men, is not repressive or ego-incorporative—there is little effort to control through the direct imposition of personal will. There is a general expectation of sensitivity to rules. Boys aren’t shamed, charmed, or henpecked into keeping tidy. If they offend too often they are subjected to a hearing, over which an elder is invited to preside, and in which an offending boy must show cause why he shouldn’t be expelled from the group. Important in the socialization of girls are their games, which have a plural structure, excluding diametric oppositions. The object, as in dance or story-telling, is to perform well and win approval not from a lofty reference figure but from one’s peers. The plural structure of peer life is not always in the foreground. The emotional life history of a typical young person of either gender must consist in a series of dyadic involvements each in its time all-important. Still peer networks are, in their special way, always finite, unbounded universes: a person knows there are other others. If things go well for you in such a context you should be able to keep a fair income of loving approval without mortgaging your psyche. But we’ve seen that the little republics of boys and girls aren’t self-sustaining and may not be the kind of groups which come to an individual’s aid when family fails. Probably the psyches which take the most stress in childhood belong to such individuals as Dugu, Doni, or Yesa, who on a parent’s death find no equivalent sponsorship. Probably the least stress falls on those who have the security of supportive parents and, especially, competent older siblings of the same sex. Probably also there is little direct correlation between psychic stress in childhood or adolescence and achievement in the realm of character, since the Kinga emphasis on self-reliance seems, on the whole, to be successful. So Dugu, as he feels, turned stress into challenge and achievement. Doni is proud to be mkiwa, friendless, but he means only to boast he has had no family to help him. To be without peer friendship would be quite another thing. So Doni tells us that the amity in close family ties is of a special and irreplaceable kind. Yesa (in a fuller account than I have reproduced) reflects on the bewilderment of boyhood dreams and the loss of a herdsman’s freedoms in the bush culture with only moderate regret: he was able to fulfil himself as a wage worker and return as a person worthy of respect. Our handful of examples proves nothing (nor could) but serves like a handful of snapshots to put a discussion of character on the fittingly broken ground of the Kinga world.

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The prevailing pattern of courtship is informed by the same character values. Romantic attachments should be delicious not anguished. There is little indulgence in passionate love or dyadic withdrawal—the best courting is done in company with your friend. The long engagements and an unhurried attitude toward marriage reflect the prevalence of self-sufficiency. The gradual dropping of the marriage age in the British years, muted as it was by the inflation of bridewealths, reflected a new level of commitment on the part of young men and women to the values of domesticity, garnished by market goods and opportunities for salaried employment at home; but Doni’s honeymoon ideals of simple dyadic self-sufficiency will give way to the building out of new peer networks through the ungovi, and a more traditional pattern of life. Kinga young men and women are more than idly attracted to one another at the phase of serious courtship, feeling the need of love-objects and responding exuberantly to being made such an object by another. One’s own-sex peers, with whom one shares comfort by night and phatic communion by day, are on the whole not (in a more than physical sense) lovers and evoke little possessiveness, while the impetus to courtship probably derives from a need for permanence as well as for the substance of the householder. Time and aging gradually affect the resonance of a world to a psyche’s inner promptings. But these new projects aren’t goals toward which one must hurry. Courtship normally continues much longer, and on a rather more hit-or-miss basis, before engagement is sealed than our autobiographers were inclined to remember. Kinga lads move very gently toward a lover’s consummation. Pretty soon after marriage they begin to think about getting away to find work again. Close cohabitation proves unexpectedly stressful, though they are inclined (as most of us are) to look away from that in giving an account of themselves. Both partners have been accustomed to the luxury of plural relationships and the easy possibility of turning to other others. Kinga practise polygyny but not often with marked success, local rulers excepted. There are few ‘domestic empires’ other than those established by men in high office. Private polygynists aren’t usually able to stabilize their positions well, though all are not so beleaguered as (ex-)Captain Nengo. Monogamous or add-on leviratic marriages, on the other hand, are generally stable contracts between two self-contained individuals. When violence occurs both the contract and the self-containment, the character ideal, have been forgotten. Both will be resumed on the restoration of tranquility. A final abandonment of cohabitation at and after menopause, still tra-

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ditional in many if not all Kinga communities in 1960, is not a breakdown of marriage but the passing on to a post-marital standing—and an expression of the meaning of a Kinga marriage as a tie without ego-incorporation or endlessly deepening interpersonal dependencies. An older man finds the company of the ikivaga most suitable, for it is there his conversation lies. His business with his wife, except for the meals she sends him and his occasional errands on her behalf, is finished. There was the engaging old man in Malanduku village had built his thus-estranged wife an admirable house in a pleasant hamlet a kilometer away from his own haunts. It was certainly a good man’s project, a kindness. But we hardly need ask why she wouldn’t move there, leaving her gender friends. The self-explanaatory reason she could give her husband was simple, though oddly unforeseen: it was her major duty as a woman to feed him—she had no young children for whom to cook or to send on errands. Had she moved, either she must carry his food a kilometer down hill, up dale every evening. Or she must leave it to him to come begging—not a tidy arrangement. So the new house remained empty, yet I saw no hint of bitterness between the two. The two genders are two solitudes, and when the mutual curiosity of courtship years is past, everyone accepts that.

The observable psyche Consider how easily Kinga slip, within a single social relationship, from one role or modality of being to another. There is the quantum jump of the “wild” lad, once caught and presented to the puberty school: and how many times in an ordinary day is the mocking lad suddenly taken by “fear” as he comes under an authority he can’t dodge? When Kinga girls have a party ilikongo the evening flies by in a flurry of fun and fantasy unrelated to their workaday worlds and quite unlikely to suggest, to a casual observer, the life-long pattern of dedication to work which will be the issue of these light-hearted years. Kapisi was fond of litigation and often exacted payment that way from a person who on one or another ground was contesting a debt. Kapisi was a formidable adversary and usually won his case if only through persistence and self-conviction. But he told me he always made it a rule to return a portion of the amount won, in the name of friendship. This was a gift signalizing the dropping of an eristic stance and its accompanying passions. ‘He’d never had a man refuse.’ I don’t know much about the way spouses recompose their relation-

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ship after a fight, but whatever the steps the surface is not left scarred: reconciliation not estrangement is the normal result. The lad, the maiden, and the old polygynist have in common the ability to take a role quite seriously, yet slip away from full identity with it. The lad does it puckishly, the maidens do it festively, the litigious old man pragmatically. They are displaying three versions of a common quality. Are Kinga aggressive? Assuming three stages in the early life cycle—childhood, youth, adulthood—for the two sexes there are six roles, and in 1960 only one called for openly aggressive activity. Youths took delight in violent games pitting group against group. Solo acts of open aggression were rare, though I had reports of individuals fond of devising petty tyrannies or showing off a chauvinistic dominance over younger boys. In the boarding schools especially I expected to find (and subsequently noted) devious techniques of psychological exploitation and a hundred other little expressions of deep, personal aggressiveness such as one knows from other communities; and this particularly because some teachers in the region (but neither Kinga or Nyakyusa) were brutally authoritarian, abreacting their own past resentments instead of adapting to local role patterns. Petty jealousies and rivalries among the boys were endemic, but the level of hostility was low and morale high. I played football (soccer) with the boys at middle school in Tandala: high spirits, no sign of the usual halfhidden, grudging rivalries among team-mates. Kinga aggressiveness therefore seems to centre in youth-role motivation and, in the old culture, the warrior role. Personal motives must support the aggressive behaviour called for in these roles; but we know enough to guess there could have been a hundred personal motives for wanting to shine in battle. We don’t have to assume an ‘aggressive personality’ to account for the behaviour. Recruitment to the ikivaga was voluntary, and other avenues to distinction than war were kept open. The quietest Kinga youth does know how to be brashly aggressive, since that is one of the main personae supplied with socialization into the role. But Kinga aren’t typically quick to perceive ambiguous situations in a frame of hostility. In sum, personal aggression may enhance but doesn’t overflow the motivation belonging to the role. In marriage when there is violence it is sure to have come in the first instance from the male. Maidens know how to compete to have their way without showing aggression—that is one of the arts in the motivational package for maidenhood. But when man and woman confront each other later in life, frustration is more likely to evoke direct action from the man, displacement behaviour from the woman.

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Still, we’ve seen that occasionally women do borrow tricks from their husband’s repertoire and turn them back on him. Do Kinga boys distrust their fathers? They generally know they may catch a beating if they aren’t wary, but isn’t the distrust prior to the cause for wariness? Motives of distrust and fear have evolved as aspects of the intractability or the freedom of youth, as this is seen from the role-position of father or son. Countless autobiographies of young married men begin with a verbal repudiation of these motives of youth, “when I lived in the bush and had no regard for my future.” The patness of the transition suggests there is not usually a deep-psychological lock upon this filial distrust—it belongs more to role than to person. Role motivation can overrule though it normally won’t fully mask the promptings of sentience. The Kinga boy who has no fear of a stick fight hasn’t lost his sentient self-interest but has seen it overruled by egoistic motives of proving valorous and role motives of supporting his side in a game. I can still hear Bruno Bettelheim saying selfdisregard amounts to self-hate and must be mothered by guilt—which must of course have been acquired in infancy. But girls in this culture really do share the infancy of boys and show no equivalent symptom. Women differ from men in important dimensions of their characteristic behaviour. Women don’t let go their aggressions in violent play, they aren’t moved to escape authority, they are assiduous and tireless workers, their wit strikes its target without a barb, they aren’t especially fond of display, and they are submissive in situations where men would not be. If you have an unshakeable faith in the tyranny of the first five years and know what “must have happened” in the private world of the child to account for symptoms you find in adulthood, you’ll probably manage to find those must-have-beens in the way the baby was handled. You could even convince yourself somehow that the first five or six years for a girl are utterly different to those of a boy. But lacking your convictions and your ironclad theory of personality development, I found no such early differences. For those of us with shaken faith in prefabricated ‘personalities’ it seems more sensible to look at the way adults are swept this way and that by fashion and fad, or transformed by the quantum shift from one job or status to another, and ask how deeply role motivation may penetrate and affect Psyche’s realm. For me, the Kinga boy’s appetite for dangerous excitement is a corollary of his having embraced the values of wildness which inform the herdboy’s role: a

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deep transformation takes place, and pain-with-glory looks good to him. Even what happens on the sentient level in a stick fight will be massively affected by his state of arousal as he approaches it, so that wounds (which a few years ago or hence might break his mettle) in the heat of this fray have no effect. The idea of a ‘core personality’ gets around some of the embarrassments of the anthropologist who would like to deal with psychological problems without cutting them off from the sociological realm. The notion is that a non-observable ‘core personality’ is acquired early in life and heavily overlaid by later experience, so that what is observed in the adult reveals only obscurely the ‘real psyche’ within. Core personality is generally closer to the surface in childhood than later on, if only because the child’s role is simply set up with respect to responsibility. Smart parents know they can tell what their baby is thinking. It hasn’t learned to internalize discursive thought—whatever goes on will show on the surface. In childhood this isn’t so. Shame, mortification, and chagrin have made their appearance. An ego has begun to function, setting up simple strategies for defense and mastery. A child’s ego wants the same privacy that an adult’s does, and only fails in this through inexperience in the art of camouflage. The overlay of role motivation is relatively transparent. What alters with maturity is not so much the private structure an ego has built up, the core personality, as its relation to the surface of behaviour open to others’ observation. Taking on mature status in society entails a process of complication in your make-up as a social actor, and this is primarily associated with the adoption of responsible reciprocal ties within a contractual network. Normally this process is pushed by selfconsciousness of sexual needs, of the kind which arise with secondary sexual characteristics and a full-sized body. In the Kinga case, especially in the old culture, we can recognize two distinct stages of social maturation, the one at adolescence and the second at marriage. The intervening decade or two is spent in the ikivaga or the isaka with own-sex peers in a sort of continuation of childhood and anticipation of adulthood—the bachelor house is a halfway station where a person may spend half a life. Peter Pan has legitimate sex relations and adult conviviality without having quite to grow up. Phenomenologically, adulthood is a social fact. It isn’t just that autonomy colours all our role-relationships or that the shaping and shading of our network ties come to be more fully our own doing, it is that we become competent to deal with the world and pursue our moral strategies through such ties, through cultivated role-relation-

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ships. Adults bear the public responsibility for their private lives: for the quality of life especially in the inner domain which children feel they have no responsibility for and no power to change. A major transformation takes place in the psyche. Consider the two failed suicides, of Captain Nengo’s wife and her son: no one found it strange that an adult’s character failures would weigh so heavily, yet no one believed a child’s could. The game of character which children play ‘for fun’ is played by adults for keeps. Because building and keeping your character as an adult is so serious a concern, personae become tactical tools. A brave face to adversity has become in itself a significant source of ego support to the widow Anyanitse, who prefers clinging to the shreds of a life she made for herself to joining a step-son (inherited as a lad from her cowife) in a strange setting: she will keep her self-sufficiency to the end. The deepening and diversifying of role motives in adulthood is its great source of complication. Kinga boys and girls at five or six begin to adapt to the separate companies they are keeping. This adaptation means the acquisition of new likes and dislikes, new criteria for judging self and other’s character, new definitions of priorities for effort, and a new sense for private and public styles of expression, verbal and non-verbal. As in all societies there are distinct style changes with transition from one age status to the next, but for Kinga maidens the changes at adolescence are exceedingly gradual as compared to other Bantu societies with female initiation ceremonies, and as compared to the later changes which will occur with marriage. The shift from the socially open, cheerful-playful style of the maiden uminza to the closed, sometimes even saturnine style of the married woman undala doesn’t happen overnight, though it is hastened by mechanical (ritual) restrictions falling on the woman with her first pregnancy. The transformation isn’t superficial. At the sentient level there has been a loss of youth’s easy well-being. The daily hard work continues, now with less and less-familiar company to lighten the burden. There has been the intense experience of withdrawal from the good company of the isaka. There is a quite new sexual adjustment. Ironically, marriage may bring a woman her first experience of solitude. In polygynous households this readjustment may be softened, in that a new wife may live for some time (until she has her own baby) with an “older sister” who married there from the same isaka. Otherwise there are visits home, and at gatherings (such as funerals or occasional dances) women sleep in company. But the status of undala is a recruitment role into which all maidens can expect to be inducted. We’ve only to ask what choice of outward careers a woman has, to appreciate

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how external the sanctioning of her character is. A woman has no choice but to accept the package of marriage with its demands and aspirations, its world of chance rewards and failures, intact.<<[lit] The shift for males from undimi [bush youth, herd or scout] to undume [established bachelor] traditionally occurred long before the lad had begun to think of marriage. In 1900 it would have been associated with the move from bush to court and the barracks life, with its greater visibility and discipline. Court youths affected the red-clay ringlets of the dandy, taking pride in their appearance and talents. They began to view fighting in terms of form and skill not only victory, sublimating the capriciousness of youth to become the effective cattle-raiders around whose well-lucked exploits the great victory celebrations of the court would be centred. The new style demanded good manners, cleanliness, and a pleasing demeanour: the “shy, friendly, trusting” Kinga of the earliest German reports. Since observable character values are motivational phenomena they evolve and take form through the full life cycle. They are creatures of the reflexive character of human experience, which increasingly with a person’s age is experience of a world preconceived in moral expectation and bound to confirm it. The process should be seen in a society like the Kinga as a double series of transformations, careers of the two genders culminating in two adult adjustments, each with its own constellation of values, its own rationale. For maidens there is courtship in which they play host and their norms prevail. Rowdy youths in 1960 must be expelled by a girl’s father or elder brother, but in the old culture the isaka itself was often so augustly established as to have the necessary authority. Duty for the maiden is focused on her garden work, invested with a sense of fun and accomplishment which is rather generous—she produces far more than her own keep and in fact works for the young men of the community who are her “sons.” This is to say, if you look at the psyche/ character dimension of her motivation, she gains moral stature by her accomplishment. If you look at the ego/role dimension, it is that she finds herself attracted to the unselfish persona she sees modeled in other maidens of the isaka. Because she can only embrace the role of maiden along with most of its rationale of character values, she’ll be sensitive to her mother’s approval and take cheer from the good humour of her peers. So if overruling values don’t intervene—sentience in the case of Singa’s chronic illness or loss of support as with Soda’s foster-sister Tusike—the prevailing mood and style of life in the isaka will be made

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her own. Is this the course she would rationally plot for herself in life, if somehow her ego were untrammeled by introjected values? When we’re committed to living with the friends we already have, they control so massive a share of the rewards and punishments in our world that we’d have to be mad to go altogether against them. But this rational aspect of moral strategy is normally only a default condition to which we fall back in moments of confusion or self-doubt. Ordinarily we are engrossed, as in a magnificent fiction, in the drama of our roles. An observer knows at once that Kinga maidens enjoy most of their work because that is what they communicate in the style and energy they give to it. There must be moments of fatigue and discouragement; these are evidently discounted in respect of the fun of turning the soil with friends, singing the songs of the field, and getting merry on a little beer. Ordinarily the companions of a grown girl are her peers, but the companion of a wee girl in the garden is her mother, and the pattern for their role relationship is reciprocity within a seniority tie. This creates a moral bridge between the married woman and the prepubescent girl which by-passes the plural and erotically charged motive pattern of the isaka. During these early years a girl’s role model is a more self-reliant person than she will herself want to be for many years after she quits gardening with her mother. Let us assume the older woman is for her own part as concerned to earn and keep her daughter’s respect as the latter is to win maternal approval. If Kinga women weren’t given to such concern could they succeed so well? In her second decade of life a girl will become economically self-sufficient (and more). Her inner life will be overwhelmingly peer-oriented. But the role she’ll take on as a married woman reverts to the single-mindedness she learned as a ‘wee adult’ not yet touched by the loving attraction of peers and their wider social world. In all this there is a considerable economy in the provision of motivational values. The bridge between mother and young daughter is possible because their worlds are radically congruent for a time, and the fondness of women for going out to the gardens in company continues the ethos of the isaka, now conjoined with the self-reliant character first practised in childhood. The principle of economy also appears in the case of Kinga male roles. For youths, courtship is a domesticating process which they allow to extend over a period of years and from which they generally manage to escape without building up intolerable emotional tensions. Although suicide isn’t rare among youths, I have no cases clearly associated with romantic disappointment. That wasn’t the problem of

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Zabroni’s brother, Tengeneza—ironically, the Swahili name he’d chosen for himself means ‘fix, put right’. Young men commonly court in company and rely on one another’s support in sanctioning the choice of a partner and interpreting ambiguous events or love messages. In good measure the style of a (domesticated) bachelor male is patterned on the style of a bachelor woman, who made the adjustment earlier in life. Admiration for women helps to draw youths away from the bush and bush values long before they are ready to marry. Settled communal living with full membership status in the ikivaga begins almost a decade after the corresponding transition for girls, for whom it comes with the springtime of sex. Until pubescence at about twelve, a girl though a junior member of the isaka remains more strongly attached to family than peers, being too sleepy to stay awake at night for activities in which she is accorded no part. Then there is erotic arousal in relations with peers and she becomes a senior isaka member, beginning a self-contained life with friends there which will only slowly open into courtship toward the end of the second decade or, as with Ame, even much later. Boys make two more severe transitions, one attending sexual, the other social maturity. At about twelve, on experiencing nocturnal emission, a boy is taken from the children’s mat “not to pollute them.” Now he sleeps with older boys, whom semen won’t pollute, while his life by day continues in the bush with goats and youngsters. He is still reckoned socially immature, undimi. The next transition won’t begin for another half decade at least, and will take as long again to complete. On the score of style and motivation it is the more profound mutation. In the old court culture the model transition to adulthood began with the arrival of a youth at the princely village prepared to test his valour against that of a proven warrior. In a duel with spears there is ample scope for displaying either bravery or cowardice. Though the lore of these duels is calculated to turn away all but the foolhardy, bloodshed was evidently less important than show. In spear-throwing, when you have only one opponent to watch you won’t be caught unaware. Any wound would stop the fight—mock-fighting was the common device of training at the court. At lesser courts proving your mettle was less explicitly through the trial at arms, membership of the ikivaga was more open, and the transition to undume status rather a matter of style and inner conversion (as everywhere in 1960) than concrete achievement. By 1960 the second transition was often a prelude to marriage. However the transition was made, for most Kinga men the change of heart was assisted by a growing appreciation of women—

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their style and the character values behind it. The final adjustment must always have entailed a juggling of values, freedom and domesticity, goats and girls. The wild period of youth is an explicit rebellion against the complex of values informing the established community, but a period which implies its own eventual reversal. Perhaps adulthood in any society must comprehend a certain polarity in moral values, ensuring some flexibility. Opposite principles don’t always emerge in contradiction but may be complementary. As Kinga women cultivate both self-reliance and co-operation, Kinga men must adapt to war and peace, the agonistic activities of the bush and the comradely evenings of the ikivaga alternating. The principle of economy applies: the wild stage isn’t wasted but prepares the man for military and political obligations in adulthood, though without subjecting him to discipline, which is only effectively provided in the final stage of socialization to adult standing. In Kinga society the important domestic establishments weren’t (as in so many neighbouring societies) ubiquitous polygynous compounds. The structuring of a child’s world wasn’t the monopoly of a family system based on generational authority and the dependency of women. The archetypal domestic establishment was the dormitory group with its peer morale and discipline, the purest form of which was the solidary group of young women in the isaka. For a girl it would contain all her role models except her true mother or guardian. A boy’s reference group was less well collected. It included older siblings who had nursed him in later infancy, and a host of “mothers” to whom he could turn for snacks. Altogether, it seems that the civility of Kinga men owes much to that of their women.

A question of style Most of the time most of us individually (and our communities collectively) are dependent on role motivation for personal stability and predictability. Certain forms of amnesia leave psyche and character intact, blanking out the roles: ego strength is normal, it seems, but finds itself in a vacuum. In the common language of today’s urban-industrial societies my “identity” derives from my roles, my “status” from my role set, the node I occupy in a structure of role-relationships. Even if, in the conditions of the folk society, we can assume a fair degree of stability in observable behaviour at the level ‘core personality’ refers to, the same inner motivational profile would support a wide range of styles and role systems. This means that ‘character’ even in the simplest societies cannot supply a sufficiently

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narrowed set of values to serve as a basis for structured social life. An assembly of good fellows with no clues about roles and rules can’t be expected to get much work done. A the same I want to deny that everything we call ‘social structure’ is embedded in role-systems and rules. That is ‘sociologism’ and locks out human creativity completely. Politically, it assumes there are no psychological sources of either stability or instability in social life. But if this brings us to an impasse I think it calls for second look at Ruth Benedict’s Patterns. I’ve argued that the ‘vast spectrum of human possibilities’ from which each culture was supposed to ‘choose’ its particular piece of the arc could not possibly be present to public thought in any society, however sophisticated. But I would have to admit that in an importance sense it is present to every individual who partakes in what we call ‘human nature’. For Benedict’s poetic diction let us substitute the simpler conception of cultural style. Styles are engendered and maintained by the expressive interaction of individuals. So are ‘fashions’, I suppose, but styles are more substantial. They endure. A style will be the mother of many fashions, and a ‘cultural style’ will be the mother of many ‘individual styles’ over many generations. Style is a function of taste—psychological in its roots and not predictable (or at least not explicable) on sociological data. Alfred Kroeber wrote, “It might be said of style that it is the manner in which creativity expresses itself; or, turning the phrase around, that creativity necessarily presupposes and produces a style.” Even in modern America, where you might say that nothing takes root for long, you can still get help in understanding American democracy by reading de Tocqueville’s account of his walkabout in the 1830s. In the Sowetan region each of the protostates has developed a style of its own, and I find that an illuminating fact about the history and nature of cultures and their regions.<<[lit] What I want to argue now, to conclude this series of folios on Kinga seen at close range, is that moral strategies comprise a universal human preoccupation and are a constant source of culture change—yet at the same time an indispensable source of social stability. Understanding style can help us to understand this apparent paradox. In brief: the key insight of Patterns of Culture was that cultural styles are rooted in the human psyche and so transcend the boundaries between peoples which have been laid down by historical— cultural—processes. Though Benedict didn’t show us more than two ‘styles’ (Nietsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian) she told us these were mere examples. To accept that point I think we have to start with the premise that there is no fixed number of ‘human styles’. There is no

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numbering them because they do not naturally fall into types. There are no ‘generic’ styles although many are surely distinctive. Even to give a name to a style, we have to be wary of stereotypes: on closer examination, Benedict’s two ‘Dionysian’ cultures may both have chosen some sort of ‘excess’ but they haven’t much in common because of it. The safest starting point may be to assume ‘one culture, one style’ and proceed to compare several which are much alike, learning about them from their differences. In the remainder of this book I review the case of the Kinga to explore this position. The next section of the book (Part Three) returns to my ‘close comparison within the region’ to detail the homologies and differences of style introduced in Part One. But first, to ground the idea of ‘style’ as it will be used here, I take a few pages to reconsider the Kinga life-cycle. Specifically, the subject is the stabilization of personal styles in Malanduku village. A bunch of personal styles don’t add up to a cultural style any more than the raw ingredients of a great bread add up to a great taste. But we can learn something about cultural styles and their stabilization by looking at individuals. Kinga married men at the migrant labour sites had a different character than at home with their wives and political responsibilities. This was a familiar pattern on a worldwide basis in the colonial era, because a plantation worker was handled rather as a military draftee than as a competent citizen. Kinga at work were more boyish and extraverted, more relaxed and direct, in the manner of bachelor youths. Moral responsibility is complicating to one’s personal life and it is minimized in the barracks life. The relapse into bachelorhood and a peer-group ethos, which migrancy offered to Kinga men, seems to have been welcome as respite from the burden of full citizenship, with its diffuse responsibilities and undercurrents of hostility and suspicion. But we see in Soda’s admiration for Bw. Ke that he, Soda, is about to take the leap into marriage and his full majority. He is taking motivational cues from a model of good citizenship. Bw. Ke had become one of those indispensable elders whose good repute is bound to live on after them. He’d have had to work his way over many years into the character which commanded such respect. If his ‘core personality’ was formed and stabilized by the time he was completing his childhood, his adult character wasn’t implicit in the personality of a lad just entering his “wild” stage. The character of an impartial arbiter of land disputes couldn’t have been easy to establish or maintain—probably Bw. Li, who has tried to step into the vacant niche in the Malanduku community, will have a tough time main-

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taining the new persona. Bw. Ke like Soda must have had high aspirations in his youth and a controlled hunger for public approval. His career was a dramatic success, as Soda judges; but as with any drama, outcome depends on uncontrollable events. What else Bw. Ke might have been—what he was to some other, closer observer than Soda—we don’t know: witch? manipulator? poor provider? Beauty of character is in the eye of the beholder. But what keeps the pursuit of character lively, and the morale of a community high, is that beholders do find beauty around them, confirming a private ideal and seeming to move them from what they are toward what they would be. When the lord of the bush, the tough survivor of the avadimi, the tousled and unkempt herdboy of the hills, begins to hear talk of a maiden’s breast as a pillow of bliss on which to rest a weary head he’s begun a long surrender. It will lead at last to a sort of style conversion. This is not just a matter of regressive mental mechanisms: with the conversion he opens himself to the character values the maiden has presented. By offering her breast and not her crotch she activates his sense of need not his drive to mastery: she pulls the thorn from the wild creature’s paw and becomes, in a moment controlled by fantasy, his mistress. In the morning he may feel he has embarked on a new career. Of course it won’t happen just from his falling for a girl. He and his friends are coming of age. The next style in the cycle is no longer off-putting to them. But each one will have to discover and invent his own way forward, as a style is no mere badge or mantle. Better see it as a radical shift of frame, not a disconfirmation of an older self but a project aiming at confirmation of a new. Say that a person moves through and beyond the accumulating gamut of roles which go with citizenship. By admiring the outfitted warrior who has sent him scurrying to the bush, by coveting the powers of the captain who has judged him in the matter of the missing goat, by catching a sense for the special style of the visiting minstrel, a youth opens his mind to values they represent. The role model all at once flowers. Call it an epiphany of style. It takes no more than a moment of symbolic mastery which, instead of alienating the youth, enlists him. There are, I suppose, a hundred moments of tentative conversion between the successive roles of undimi and undume. A style convert accepts a package of new values. His own, inwardly debated moral strategies account for his embracing a new role with more or less conviction. The role is packaged with a new set of priorities by which he will find himself guiding decisions in future. About the goodness of fit between his personality and the new role we may be able to say very little before the event. It is in the private life

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of the ego that a person becomes committed to a scheme of values he will not be willing to set aside for new. This is the subject of much learned science, and one into which we all have a certain insight. I would stress only the relativity of commitment: not all converts will find a role equally congenial. Some packages will be broken up and some roles prove defeating. But the more general experience is certainly role tension: that is, the pulling of one role against another and ego’s realization of their incongruity. Sometimes the strategy adopted will be simply to split between them, but that only rarely works out. I suppose role tension accounts for much of the goodness of fit—such as it may be—between psyches and chosen careers. Tension continues to be an experience of life even in the most conventional settings. Isn’t the orgiastic mood of the maiden’s initiators proof enough of the tensions, normally repressed, in the woman’s role which they have undertaken to advertise? Once a youth had won his place at court he’d quickly take on a court-centred view of the world, and in the measure he succeeded in establishing his character there he’d be personally confirmed in this worldview. We phrase it that he has acquired a new persona, or committed himself to new values, or undergone personality change— maybe just turned over a new leaf, depending on our impressions of the case and the wisdom we accept about human nature. But if we follow his later career as an outpost apostle of the court and its values we see him thrust into a situation where he must either abandon the style of the court or set himself up as a role model to the rustics around him. We are dealing with a career strategy in which the aristocratic model first exercises tension upon the person of the bush-bred recruit—and later the adoptive aristocrat, now personally committed to new character values and a courtly style, exercises a similar tension on the styles and inner aspirations of others. The life cycle does not turn of itself. Each style conversion entailed has its own semantic engine in the growing person. Without the continuous role tension this implies, Angst would be less. The characteristic uncertainty of human social life, and the individuality which is its expression, would fall away. Is it really credible that the Sanga political movement would have brought less tension—less discontent, less violence, less fear of witches—than bush culture knew? The protostate build-up must have brought in not just complexity but intensity of social awareness: in a word, drama. Each person in his or her own way has to convert the potentialities of a role into an egosupportive pattern of life, and as the scope of choice in a human career

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increases, so do the tensions affecting the pursuit of private reward. Role tension in this context is a basic mechanism for the stabilization of personal motives even while, with the increasing sophistication of adulthood, these are sinking deeper beneath the observable surface of behaviour. There were few cowards among Kinga men in the old culture because a boy without a taste for boldness would have little chance of surviving the years in the bush. He’d find few rewards, more likely devastating punishment, in ordinary gang activities. If (say) boys up to ten were exposed to intensive schooling in the tamer arts of kitchen and garden, as their sisters are, the wilder life of the bush would be harder to take. What may sometimes seem a relationship between an immovable personality and an irresistible role is thus to be seen in broader perspective as a more dynamic and dialectical tension. The conversion experience of embracing a new role becomes with time, as most conversions do, a hard job of work in accommodating the inner self to new motives; and the job is the harder, the greater the moral distance which has to be travelled in the process. The fierceness many Kinga fathers show toward their sons in adolescence seems to me to be owing to the difficulty men have in whole-heartedly accepting their adult domestication. They can be pulled off balance by an exhibition of the values of youth they have struggled to surmount. Evidently there is more tension on men, more crossing of purposes between personality and role in the transition they must make, than in the reversion to the self-contained life which a woman makes at marriage; and this helps to account for the woman’s greater personal stability. Stabilization of personal style takes place through the internalization of character values in general and role motives in particular by individuals as they undergo a lifelong socialization process which seems to leave them more sensitive to social expectations, and accordingly more social in the expectations they have for themselves, with each turn of the cycle. Perhaps the deepest mistake we ordinarily make in assessing human careers is to assume it is personal motives which provide the forward thrust in our lives. More often, they arm us with a subtler balance of flair and circumspection. The aspirations of the warrior, the gardener, the lover, the parent, and the power-holder belong to the motives we take on with the patterned roles furnished by a culture which would perish without the phenomenon we call drive.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER ONE

A moral universe

Qualities of an extended youth The Kinga world has fewer hard boundaries than most. Even with respect to phases of the life cycle this was the case, as Kinga were unceremonious about transitions when compared to other microcultures. For males, once the babe born in the wildwood has been accepted into society there will be no certain ritual demarcations of a shift from one phase of life to the next, though the phases are well enough known and labeled. There is no evidence that boys’ initiations ever were widespread. While some informants in 1960 could describe them, few reported having undergone the (somewhat contrived and varied) ordeals they described. Kinga men in 1960 had been spending most of their adult lives abroad and absorbing the lore of other folk. They weren’t typically reliable on the matter of which bits of lore were pure ‘Kinga’ and which the lore of neighbours. For women the series of bush schools didn’t serve to mark off youth from childhood or maturity from youth. Properly speaking, these schools weren’t rites of passage. Even the vulvar labiotomy, which I’d have expected to carry the burden of severance from things past, seems to have been conceived as no more than a preparatory or admonitory step, much as the Culwicks (1935:344-6) portray it for the riverine Bena. A Kinga girl received this attention much later, in respect to years and psychosexual development, than the Bena girl did; and the Kinga maiden would continue her erotic life with peers as before, clitoris intact, its crucial value confirmed by doctrine. In these matters the sisterhood had the say and men stood firmly aside. The sharpest turning-point in a maiden’s life would be that perfectly

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secular event which rendered her vulnerable to pregnancy and forced her to turn away forever from the isaka and its collective life. This first full act of coitus would hardly have been undertaken blindly. When a maiden gave herself to her chosen man she was not a child or adolescent but socially as mature and experienced a person as her suitor. Women, controlling the schools, determined the nubility of a maiden and seem not normally to have hurried matters. Though a lordly local ruler was entitled to assume the powers of matchmaker, there were effective countervailing restraints on arbitrary acts, and the autonomy of the women’s schools was safe from meddling. Besides, it wasn’t in the interest of the prince to marry off either his men or his maidens at an early age.<<[lit] Was marriage sometimes involuntary even for the mature bachelor woman? The bush culture tradition which allowed a man to “sell” his daughter to a wealthy and perhaps influential man applied in practice only to infant betrothals and was rarely put into practice: apart from the uncertainties of survival, the tradition was alien to court culture. The general spirit of voluntarism which informed Kinga culture in 1960 wasn’t new, but of course it didn’t exclude all acts of coercion, and it’s not unreasonable to assume there would have been more such before the pax. But allowing for exceptional circumstance I gathered most marriages would have been voluntary. The main evidence is in the prevalence of constancy. Adultery and divorce were rare, though legal bars to divorce were slight. Looking about the region one might even argue that late marriage was a well justified rule if only for blessing the union with relative permanence. Under the free tradition the effective segregation of bachelor men’s and women’s spheres was sufficient to make each a selfcontained emotional world to which the other stood more nearly as fiction than reality. The typical courtship could hardly have amounted to the achievement of real intimacy. That would be left to marriage and perhaps even there achieved only with the slow passage of years. When Kinga say peers can love each other in the sense of their word ukumanyana but only man and woman can love each other ukuganana [making love] they are making the claim that lust is for the other sex, while mutual knowledge or understanding is for gender peers. This partitioning of the human heart is basic to their moral strategies, though sometimes challenged in courtship by moments of true romance. The Kinga cut is lethal to Love as we know it in the Western world, where heterophiles won’t accept love as a part of peer friendship, and homophiles evince no lust for persons of the wrong sex.

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At first blush it is quaint to hear that a Kinga maiden should hold to a plighted troth for seven years—it sounds for all the world like the maiden in the English folksong, waiting for her sailor with a pure love undiminished. But if we translate the dreamy idealization into real terms we may see the absent lover as a tangible convenience for the Kinga maiden (if not for the English?), serving to exalt the idea of marriage while in fact allowing the girl to continue labouring at home, bosomed by her peers. When marriage did come the change was more profound for the woman, but she may also have been better prepared. In that respect even the climacteric (though a ‘change of life’ in the fullest sense for a woman) was a boundary softened by circumstance. As to the men, a visitor from a male-circumcising society could hardly escape feeling that Kinga institutions were remiss. Why is there no solemn rite of passage designed to put the irresponsibilities of boyhood and youth firmly into the past of a man who is preparing to take on the moral burden of warrior and, eventually, householder? By cutting a woman off, practically and symbolically, from her lesbian communion at marriage, Kinga culture commits her to a fresh erotic orientation now at least primarily focussed in the getting, bearing, and nursing of infants. Probably most women do leave peer eroticism behind, but probably the degree of comfort they achieve in their selftransformations is keenly sensitive to personality and circumstance. The fullness of the immersion in nursing and cultivation which is characteristic of young married women suggests a successful transition though not necessarily an easy one. The stable working partnerships they usually form with associates in a new community struck me as evidence of autonomy, as they seemed to avoid dependency on the one hand and compulsive self-reliance on the other. Men aren’t asked to leave peer eroticism behind and do not. Male responsibilities in the heterosexual role are fabulously demanding but practically minimal where the two enjoy normal fertility. A man is free to move out as soon as a pregnancy is established and remain away until the child is old enough to fetch and carry. Still, domesticity does suit some men. Christian teachings about family solidarity haven’t met head-on opposition. But domesticity isn’t established as a value for youth of either sex. Perhaps the simplest formula for describing the Kinga life cycle is just this: Each developmental plateau is granted maximal duration. The security of infancy, prolonged as it usually is into the fourth year of life, is cherished at a deep level of affective awareness. Some of the feeling-tones of the infant’s forgotten fight against separation from its mother are such as to be revived and relived in subsequent stages

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of life. Technically the mother of a three-year-old is only part of its life support system, since she so often leaves it in the care of its undelaji [sibling nursemaid] while she goes off to the fields, but morally the mother remains the source of life. The Freudians are probably right in teaching that there is no more replete erotic relationship known to the human condition than that of the pampered (or even the sorely tried) infant who always eventually gets what it wants from its mother. The Kinga case is special in that a woman’s libido is unambiguously fastened on her nursing baby for three or four years, and this within a system which effectively rules out not only the father but siblings too as rivals for mother love. It doesn’t seem to me unreasonable to expect such an infant to show a regressive potential later in life, a clinging to the status quo for reassurance, especially in dyadic relations of intimacy. But at least that potential is not magnified by an interloping sibling. The plural nature of the peer group experience succeeds to the dyadic structure of infancy, but the dyad does return in marriage. Just possibly, the stability and exclusiveness of the nursing stage lie behind the pattern of constancy in marriage, so little affected by prolonged absence. The ideal of boyish affection in the lifelong attachment of brothers is another dyad unaffected by distance—in no need of constant active confirmation. In a more general way, the prolonged nursing period seems to prefigure the long plateau of bachelorhood for each sex. I suppose the erotic orientation of that period should be rated genital manqué. Kinga effectively succeed in slowing down the processes of aging as such. Part of the formula is diet. Apart from specific deficiencies (iodine in certain areas) Kinga agriculture is intensive and nourishing in the variety of its produce. For women, what we might call a cult of virginity (a topic of which men claim to know nothing) puts off pregnancy for as much as a decade beyond East African norms. For men, the rarity of the dissolute career and (in spite of the Nyakyusa stereotype of Kinga as unkempt—aren’t way-weary travellers bound to be?) reasonably high standards of grooming and hygiene must be counted as extending at least the period of youthful appearance. But how much of the reality of aging is in the mind and the reflective mind’s eye? Can the will to prolong her childhood actually delay menarche in a girl? Can a man’s decision to prolong his youth—to cling to the haunts and the style proper to that stage as they are socially defined— actually delay the tell-tale signs of aging, which an observer might note? It may be worth pondering the Culwicks’ report that riverine Bena girls will pass in a few months from girlhood to nubility, marriage,

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and motherhood. Nothing of the sort is true for Kinga girls. Their mature body shape and youthful strength generally come years before menarche, and thoughts of marriage again much later. From Monica Wilson’s frequent use of “puberty” as a synonym for first menstruation, I infer that the same delay doesn’t characterize a Nyakyusa girl’s development; and as it happens she, like the Bena girl, looks forward with open enthusiasm to menarche and marriage as virtually to a single event. Since menarche and marriage happen for the Nyakyusa girl at the end of her fifteenth year after some five years of preparatory sex experience with her fiancé, we may conclude she moves directly, if gradually, from childhood to adulthood without an intervening period of moral liberation corresponding to our term “youth” [Sw: ujana]. From observation alone I’d have to say that, for intensity of experience and a sense of charity toward the world, youth is the peak period of a Kinga woman’s life cycle: can the bachelor woman herself doubt it? I should think she was personally motivated to prolong her peer life if only on that ground. What is certain is that the equation, menarche = marriage which so colours woman’s life elsewhere in the region is not in the Kinga maiden’s prospect as she comes of age.<<[lit] On detailed inquiry in the field I found I was consistently underestimating the ages of men and women in their twenties and thirties. Since only a few had mirrors the skewing is hard to attribute to artifice, except, perhaps, as peers may be mirrors. Maidens of any age when relaxing from work in a group would engage in plaiting hair, a service no one can easily supply herself. Young men had no comparable grooming service to perform but might not be averse to plaiting a girlfriend’s hair or taking over her knitting (a Scandinavian skill taught the Lutheran girls and often picked up by the boys)—sweaters were popular if rare. All the young men I knew past twenty or so had favourite shirts which, even when a little tattered, they lovingly washed and ironed. Vanity was expected, very social, and fun for both men and women before they settled down to householding. Can we say that such harmless vanity is likely to be intensified by a plural audience structure, such as a peer group, and lessened as intimates cease to be audience (or as one’s major audience ceases to comprise intimates)? The parallel between Kinga and Nyakyusa cultures is closer for men than women, since Nyakyusa young men were traditionally discouraged from early marriage “because a bachelor was thought to be a fiercer warrior” and even in the 1930s weren’t marrying before they were twenty-five or thirty. By the time of the Wilsons’ study the

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warlike rationale of the age village for bachelor men was obsolete but still talked-up. In spite of the pax, old men were taking more and younger wives under the Germans and British than in the days when youths were truly fierce. In perspective it seems to me that young men acceded in the rampant polygyny of their fathers (70% of married women in Selya had co-wives in 1934) because the system had made young men easy to handle. Brothers, who might have had countervailing power in combination, weren’t put together in the same age village. The peer group ideology of the youths’ age village gave it a strong bias toward self-sufficiency even in matters of sex. Clandestine adventures were available in quantity with the ill-served young wives of aging chiefs and headmen. More legitimately, sublimated energy could be poured into dancing up a storm and talking up a raid on the cattle of a neighbouring chiefdom. The sheer display of truculence at a funeral or “war dance,” with the flaring up of private fights and symbolic combat with invisible enemies seems in the 1930s to have served some of the safety-valve functions formerly served by external wars.<<[lit] Through their bachelor twenties Nyakyusa young men continued to work hard in their fathers’ gardens, taking pride in the work. Generally, their situation parallels that of the young men quartered in the Sanga ruler’s barracks, who constituted their own age class there and tested their mettle in cattle raiding. But Kinga men were far slower in committing themselves to heterosexuality; they were less given to adventures in adultery; and, for lack of intensive kinship loyalties, knew nothing of the funeral dance and its truculent displays. Either of these ‘friendship cultures’ (which depend on male bonding as a basic social structure for men right through their prime, warrior years) differs sharply from the case of the riverine Bena, whose initial marriages were early and who were heterosexually attuned to the point of extravagance. Chosen warriors of the Bena courts (royals and commoner recruits) married on graduating to that status from the barracks school, often as early as sixteen.<<[lit] Given that Kinga make no more age distinctions than necessary, and generally soften rather than sharpening status transitions, perhaps the same could be predicated of the male-female boundary. There must be few other societies where, on the semantic plane at least, the possession of a vagina doesn’t set a girl apart from a boy. The ambiguity of gender identities in the false-name games courting maidens play, and their great success in catching the curiosity of young men with feminine secrets, reveal a sort of desegregation at the ideal level which softens the real boundary of the gender classes,

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as laid down by anatomy. Do Kinga actually cross sex lines? Though I never heard of a female priest, I did hear much of the woman diviner Hikadiseku who made her name in the early British period. There was Kipole, the reigning queen in the initial German period: though Kinga men have treated her as anomalous and read her out of their political history, she took power and wives. There is perhaps only a single case in uKinga of a lesbian being accused in court of wife-stealing, but little girls take easily to the tomboy role, herding the goats when there’s no boy to do it. The royal eunuch was never referred to as crippled male but as transvestite: “He wears his cloth like a woman.” He appears in one of Monica Wilson’s documents from the 1930s as “a man who, though not mad, dresses as a woman” and has no sex life. Tunginiye, hesitating a little, introduced him (presumably a successor to the individual the Wilsons met) to me as a youth, though he was born early in the century and looked middle-aged. Kinga pattern as clear a division of labour (occupation cum preoccupation) by gender as their neighbours do, but with perhaps less asymmetry. I think particularly of the work party [ungovi] in the fields, where women test the mettle of the men and may outdo them. It’s idle to talk here of chauvinism in the usual sense of the word. At an ideal level the disjunction of the gender identities is less complete than in neighbouring, hard-line heterosexual societies. <<[lit] As with the conceptual categories of age and sex, so with space: boundaries are known and unchallenged but permeable. Because place names are as likely to refer to the community occupying a distinctive spot as to the spot itself, the name may move with the people should they plan to relocate jointly, as sometimes happens. A few place names were marked I and II in 1960, representing recent, incomplete moves—what in a truer lineage system might be called segmentation. Place names have a relatively short lifespan. Only a few settlements on the German maps are now (1960) readily identifiable. Except as nature has predefined them, spatial boundaries are the dependent, and actual political alignments are the independent variables in this system. In mapping the realms and domains for the historical record I’ve found it feasible to treat the interface of two realms as a ‘boundary’ in the territorial sense, but this imposes my own map-oriented thinking on what Kinga see quite differently. Wherever nature hasn’t interposed uninhabitable terrain the boundary fades out, and wherever Sanga-style warriors weren’t opposed by an equivalent kind the very concept of boundary fails to apply. In court (=centre) to bush (=periphery) relations there are only degrees of hegemony and influ-

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ence. A model made to fit the Kinga orientation to political space would show court centres radiating their influence directly and through satellite centres within an indefinite surround. Battles aren’t very decisive about boundaries when the two sides always have widely discrepant tales as to which side won. Tribute isn’t clearly decisive about loyalties when a local ruler is free to send a few animals north in June and a few more south in September—or delay sending any at all in a test of relative strength. The freedom men had to relocate and recombine constituted a real countervailing power, and since new loyalties could shift the boundary of any weak ruler’s jurisdiction without fighting, popular mobility left any boundary indefinite in time if not in space. A conclusion we should draw for a study of moral values is that local variation was a ground rule not an anomaly. Kinga expected local variation in dialect and usage, perceiving their society in pluralistic terms but without projecting localistic norms of exclusion such as would maintain the social mix in a steady state. Generally, Kinga are aware of each settlement as historically in-process rather than as a permanent landmark. In most smaller places, though the settlers claim a common surname and regard themselves as a kin-group engaged in a pursuit of the good life, that means when their outlook changes structural ties will follow. Because each generation is a fresh sortingout of friends into groups of their own, not the continuation of a lineal stem, small settlements aren’t expected to endure beyond the life stories of their founders. Throughout the region abandoned habitations revert forthwith to nameless bush. The Sanga courts, with their structures of office and ritually ensured successions to power, stood above the spatial structure generated by the bush culture and transformed it by superimposing court values, fiscal, ceremonial, and military. But here again the boundary one might expect, the clear line of class or caste between the two spheres of value, is not to be found in practice. One reason George Foster (1965) became concerned to explore the cognitive organization of traditional societies on a very general scale was that he sensed a ‘closed system’ would always entail immiserization, and effective ways of ‘opening’ communities would relieve it. As I reconstruct Kinga history, court culture came to the Livingstone Mountains at about the time localism was closing in, losing some of its important freedoms, for the bush communities which had gradually settled the country on an open-frontier basis for as long as a millennium. Court politics and ritual represented an escape, welcomed by many, from growing limitations and new insecurities of bush life in the

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final age of localism. In a somewhat analogous modern context, North American sociologists have spoken of a “new frontier” for structural rather than territorial expansion. Most Kinga continued for the most part to live under the Sanga régime in small, scattered hamlets. Our term family is reasonably descriptive for that hamlet life at least in the busy agricultural season. But their moral order was polarized and transformed by the courts.<<[lit]

A phenomenology of values? In the next seven short chapters I try to clarify, through further selective comparisons within the Sowetan region, what was distinctive in Kinga moral strategies. The series of topics retrieves and extends the seven dimensions or phases of culture discussed in Part One, Chapters Two through Eight. In an empirical study of values you don't begin by naming and defining but observing. The phenomena won't be found in thin air but clinging to the ground of social forms. By focusing on individual moral strategies I bring ‘values’ into range. What moral states does a person of either gender admire and seek to realize? Who and what will he or she pity, shun, deplore, avoid? To find out, I look at a people’s institutions as a semiotic mazeway and ask how individuals read and respond to the signs. As in Part One, to explore the Kinga I explore their differences to some close neighbours, against the larger congruences within the region as a whole. The purpose is to identify traits which fall within the broad cognitive field the Kinga share with the region, but which they have not made their own. Again as in Part One I choose to deal with just seven facets or ‘dimensions’ of the cultures, here as an alternative to approaching ‘values’ in the Aristotelian fashion of pulling abstract nouns from thin air. Monica Wilson follows that older convention in her first book on the Nyakyusa, picking out geniality, dignity, display, decency, and wisdom as key values in the culture as she knew it in the thirties. I find two troubles with this, a philosophical and a practical. The practical one is that she finds herself eclectically picking up fragments of evidence to confirm the presence of each ‘value’—you don't get a sense of depth. So under ‘dignity’ you find (1950: 77-8) that some of her women informants were disgusted by dirty cooking pots seen in Poroto (a near-Kinga bush culture) but you don’t see this in relation to the aristocratic pretensions of the Nyakyusa (court culture), nor is it altogether clear why cleanliness is not as close to decency or display

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as to dignity. In the end, after you have studied her oeuvre on the culture, and especially the last book (1977), you are in an excellent position to answer questions about Nyakyusa ‘values’—but not, I think, to say how many there are. This is the philosophical difficulty I have with the conventional study of ‘values’—I don’t see that they can properly be treated as numerable entities. I am reminded of old books in psychology which pretended to list the ‘motives’ of human action or the ‘sentiments’ comprising our claims to a distinctive human nature. I looked in vain for ‘disgust’ on those lists or even ‘amusement’—the two reactions I was experiencing. Taken as lists suggestive of the kind of thing you might mean by ‘values’ or ‘motives’ or ‘sentiments’ such offerings could do a service. But supposing a set of objects can be named and counted implies the possibility of making a definitive list of the set. My phenomenological approach is meant to finesse these problems and avoid reification. In the Sowetan region it was principally the Hehe, Bena, and Nyakyusa peoples who represented with the Kinga a “political archipelago”—a series of court-centred polities rising formally above the expanse of bush settlements, many of them never separately named by European mapmakers, filling in the settled remainder of the region. Order in these localistic bush settlements was maintained for the most part through transactional sanctioning; but their boundaries were open enough that losers in a trouble episode, finding themselves without sufficient support from kinsmen and neighbours, knew how to push on and where to move. This pattern of migratory drift depended on a person’s ability to activate a translocal network. That in turn presupposed an idea of kinship opened up to the point of overlap with friendship or even simple acquaintance. Corporate kin groups as such would find no fit in the Sowetan bush culture. Further political development was going to require the association of corporations with territories, and each culture would have to find its own way of doing this. The Kinga solution was the court centre, akin in many ways to the ‘ceremonial centre’ as best known and understood in preColumbian Middle America. We’ve seen that a Kinga court system had to be mounted on top of its “antipolitan” foundation, setting up boundaries and fixed territories within which the universalistic sanctions of a political authority could be depended on to keep order. A fairly simple premise underlies the treatment which follows: the several “court” peoples have in common the task of managing a translocal politics on similar cultural bases. Their institutions in each case display quite different architecture. A major variable reflecting and to

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some degree accounting for the differences is the particular value complex informing each of the political architectures of the region. I enter this comparative discussion, admittedly, as a partisan. I can sow some seeds for discussion, I think, for students of Hehe, Bena, and Nyakyusa values, but as I know their cultures only slightly from first-hand observation, I depend on what their several ethnographers have given us, supplemented by voluminous, low-density district files and the like. My subject is the Kinga, and if my approach through intra-regional comparison seems indirect, it springs from the method to which I subscribe for refining the knowledge constructed on direct observation. The name I put on this method is “analytical phenomenology.” It builds a methodical analysis on a pattern model of explanation (Kaplan 1964) and is my principal subject in The Flying Armchair (1990). The premise here is that the phenomenologist’s eye is wanted in the study of an institution to see it as it is, and that when that work is done theoretical understanding can begin. In the current state of our art I find that theory offers real but fragmentary insight, and for balance I rely accordingly on the kind of understandings my ‘comparative observation’ can educe.<<[lit]

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TWO

Sowetan cultures: social ties

Whereas kinship and friendship are merged among Kinga, Nyakyusa relegate them to separate spheres. In this Nyakyusa align with Bena-Hehe, and Kinga with Ndendeuli, further neighbours of the Pangwa people southeastward of Kingaland. Ndendeuli, as the only cleanly stateless society in the region which has been adequately described, will have to stand in here for all the bush cultures in my comparisons. They were as independent as Kinga of ascribed kinship priorities and loyalties, recognizing the paramount need to build up friendly relations with neighbours through willing co-operation, but imbued friendships with little conceptual weight. All acts of co-operation were ascribed to kinship as to a primum mobile. In this respect we should have to align them with BenaHehe in distinction to both Kinga and Nyakyusa, who expect men to be deeply motivated by obligations of amity arising from preferential association. Underlying these semantic differences is the regional divide in sexual orientation, grouping Kinga-Nyakyusa against the others. Still, the typical Nendeuli householder will translocate more than once during his career and, finding new ‘kinsmen’ everywhere, will have no claims on them he does not earn by acts of friendship.<<[lit] I take it we may speak of an original Sowetan regional culture, antedating the rise of political statelets, from which many of the common traits of the region derive—even elements of political style. We should picture such a culture, not uniform but generally homogeneous, as fairly well distributed over the region, particularly in hilly parts, and probably lacking unilineal ‘clan’ or ‘tribal’ organization except in a nominal sense. We can guess that its kin reckoning system would have been shallow and bilateral with a weak agnatic bias, that agriculture and hence hamlet populations would have been shifting, and that politics would have been egalitarian. We may call this hypothetical

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construct Proto-Sowetan. It can serve as a heuristic device, if we assume that the local cultures of 1900 or 1960 are variations on or from a theme—that when we compare them we are comparing cultures historically related, genetic cousins and not strangers. Alternatively we might assume that the same result could have come from mixing and cultural interchange among originally almost unrelated groups. In that case ‘Proto-Sowetan’ is a misnomer but, given that the timespan was long and regional evolution gradual, still not very misleading. It becomes a common denominator rather than a common ancestor, but has the same implications for family resemblance among the Sowetan peoples. As I currently understand the linguistic and archaeological evidence, the most recent time to have observed this hypothetical, comparatively uniform regional culture would have been early centuries of the second millennium A. D., before the rise of chiefly politics.<<[lit] One feature of proto-Sowetan culture would have been a liberal interpretation of the ties of kinship. Descent would not have been extensively bilateral but patrilineal—only weakly so. Land allocations were to men, in the first place, and to women only privately through a man as father or husband. Settlements would have been open, not closed on a kinship basis. Such matters are as dependent on a structure of sentiments as on formal rights and obligations. What is implied in the merging of kinship and friendship? Where kinship is erected into an autonomous principle, personal favouritism can have no meaning against birthright. In the gothic novel, a rigid rule of primogeniture may award property, office, or title to the illfavoured eldest son, thwarting his beautiful brother. Some African societies have an almost obsessive concern with genealogical status. In Nigeria the Tiv, though in fact they lived in mixed communities, conceived them as agnatic settlements and expected even a slave to act like a brother in his political loyalties. Yet you meet a contradiction which pretty well proves the excessive demands of the rule if you trace the slave back to source: a free Tiv for no fault of his own might be sold into slavery by his lineage but must continue loyal, observing all its taboos.<<[lit] Kinship couldn’t have merged with friendship for Kinga or Ndendeuli in the presence of a strict cult of descent. As with the Tiv, Ndendeuli expect that any two members of the society, by searching out links, could find a connection; but unlike the Tiv, Ndendeuli seldom go to the trouble. The supposition that they ‘are kin’ is enough. Gulliver shows that in any community men enlist co-operation through kin-

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neighbours. In effect, the group which forms your work party will be friends and friends-of-friends; but you will approach the task of enlisting the group through those you can best count on—those who consider themselves more closely related to you than to someone else who is recruiting help the same day. The idiom of recruitment is that of kinship, but the effective structure of local relations has to be built up in terms of actual relationships of reciprocity in co-operative work. A person’s moral reputation for reliability is crucial.<<[lit] Tight kinship systems work against the loose ties to place a wide-spreading swidden agriculture needs, especially where livestock is a secondary concern. Family herds want a familistic ethos. But a mature Ndendeuli man’s relation to his social structure is entrepreneurial. He lives with particular kin while it pays him to do so. As he is in competition with others for command over the labour of his neighbours, and eventually may find it a disadvantage to live near his own brother (who will want to rely on the same ties as himself), he is bound to think of moving away.<<[lit] It is my sense of the proto-Sowetan culture that Ndendeuli manners and Ndendeuli individualism would have fitted well. In contrast, the far-distant Tiv prescribed a man’s dependency relations within the lineage group, so that the structure of kinship was a repressive one even after you’d been conceded the wherewithal to marry. The wherewithal was in this case a ‘sister’ to give away in return for your bride That measure of kin-collectivism would be anomalous anywhere in the Sowetan region. Nendeuli, being in contact with the Ngoni (who took such repressive structures for granted) seized the opportunity of the colonial pax to flee into the bush rather than accommodate to (felt) Ngoni chauvinism. What is involved in the merging of kinship and friendship is not just a semantic shift but the introjection of voluntarism into the essential structure of community life. In a new community, the enterprising Ndendeuli householder sets about building up a new network of kinsmen. Because of the flexibility of his system he doesn’t have to build a private empire, like that of the Nyakyusa man, through the multiplication of wives and affinal connections: though most Ndendeuli are at least nominal Moslems, polygyny is uncommon. You build your world out by making friends. Kinga share with Ndendeuli, Pangwa, and Wanji a dependence on the cooperative work party for heavy gardening tasks. It is a pattern we can with some confidence call proto-Sowetan. The riverine Bena regularly organize work parties but, to judge from the casual account of the Culwicks, put less emphasis on them. Polygyny is popular with the

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Bena and creates a notable dominance gradient as between rich men and poor; the Culwicks suggest that most work parties are joined in a mercenary spirit, for the beer offered by a rich man, while only the occasional party is organized on the basis of mutuality. The popularity of adulterous affairs also distinguishes the Bena case: how shall one predicate a major institution on friendship among men who can’t trust each other?<<[lit] For Nyakyusa too the work party is a minor pattern, though “fairly common” in northern communities, whose terrain is most like the Kinga, and there organized on a pattern the Kinga would at once recognize. In quite un-Kinga style, Nyakyusa mostly depend on the labour of bachelor sons. However, they won’t work alone but bring friends, the group of them being fed together, Kinga fashion. In major gardening tasks the Nyakyusa father is expected to work with his sons as part of the family team. Though polygyny is strongly patterned and quite as conducive to stratification among Nyakyusa as elsewhere, the dominance gradient isn’t associated with class but generation, owing to the age village system. Friendship and co-operativeness are obligatory within the age village and patterned from its inception; but co-operation across the generational boundary is sponsored by kinship, the fatherson bond, which Nyakyusa feature as though it were the first key to organized life. It is evidently where Sowetan societies have moved toward a pattern of wealth accumulation and away from egalitarian norms that work comes to be organized under private and even mercenary auspices. But Nyakyusa are able to retain and even strengthen the ethic of friendship through the pattern of segregation by age villages. This community internally preserves egalitarian norms through what Kinga regard as heavy-handed sanctions. Around the world, the association of egalitarian norms with organized distrust has perhaps been emphasized so often by ethnographers that the more obvious obverse implication—the sense in which egalitarian norms depend on and preserve mutual confidence within a community—is neglected. In a community where one man is always host and others always guests, inequality has been accepted and a fiduciary nexus is implicit in the role-structure. Egos are not at risk in the collective allocation of task and privilege. On the other hand, where ‘egalitarian distrust’ prevails in such a community (that is, where rank differences aren’t conceded) there will be several ‘big men’ recognized, each with his following and each only as sure of his status

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as he is sure of his follower-guests. Public expressions of distrust in such situations are routine, representing the competitive demands men can put on a plural leadership. Complaints are part of the system, serving the underlying fiduciary structure without substantially threatening it. The classic study of such a system is Douglas Oliver’s A Solomon Island Society (1955). Although one analyst (Fried 1967) treats this as a “rank society” on a par with (for example) Polynesian Tikopia, Oliver’s Siuai publics concede only situational ascendancy to a big man, not rank—the bush is full of once-big men whose reputations are scattered with the bones of their pig feasts. Sowetan and more generally Bantu social norms don’t allow for competing leadership positions within a single community, though there is bound to be covert competition for position within the formal structure of offices. The rise of a new position of leadership in the Kinga system entailed the rise of a new jurisdiction: the contrast to Oceania is complete. Among Ndendeuli or Kinga the concession of rank, as granting the right to rule by fiat rather than persuasion, amounts to a recognition of ethnic stratification. Implying not class but caste differences, it is a countervailing thrust meant to protect the political culture of the subject community. None of the Sowetan peoples were internally organized as aristocracies, but Ndendeuli accommodated to Ngoni hegemony this way, Safwa to Sangu, and Kinga to the Europeans—in reaction to conquest, preferring political excommunication to loyalty. We see best the position of the local ruler in the Kinga moot (under the pax a semi-official court) where in the role of judge he sits opposite the defendant but takes no part in the arguments. These must be led by spokesmen from among the elders sitting on either hand of the judge. For a ruler to enter the lists and argue would not only lower him but would shatter the expectations associated with his rank. This was badly understood by the British, who felt a salaried ruler ought to be active in the court’s prosecution of a case. During my fieldwork I came to realize only gradually that a chief or subchief whom the District Officer had described in a monthly report as lazy and too fond of drink was probably deserving of praise instead. He would have been doing his best to preserve the authority of his role by staying out of the political arena. Ndendeuli, having won a degree of autonomy by siding with a dissident candidate for salaried office in the 1950s, and having persuaded him to forswear his Ngoni ethnicity, proceeded to ignore

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him . At the local and face-to-face level in both of these societies men insist on mutuality. Sangilino, the most impressive Kinga local ruler in 1960, had excellent relations with subjects, having no need to hide behind his office as he strode about to hear news and settle doubts. But he knew how to judge and could take on a majesty when aroused which I can only compare to a meteorological phenomenon.<<[lit] Politically, the Ndendeuli are better egalitarians than the Kinga. To reject the notion of official authority, or at least subject it to instant popular recall, is the essence of egalitarian policy. But ethically I think the Kinga match the Ndendeuli: though ceremonial rank was fully conceded to prince [unkuludeva] and lord [untwa] that was done without generating a strong dominance gradient within the court barracks [ikivaga] or hamlet settlement [ikikolo]. The non-segregation of royals [avapapwa] and commoners in the life of the ikivaga, and the rapid assimilation of the four kinds of Sanga to one wherever they had moved off to settle a new hamlet, are expressions of Kinga egalitarian values. Another such expression, shared with Ndendeuli, is a distaste for poly-gynous marriage. A major difference between the two peoples is that Ndendeuli look to kinship as the guarantor of trust where Kinga look to friendship directly. To use the metaphor of contract: Ndendeuli use kinsmen as their brokers in contracting to keep friendly relations within a larger neighbourhood circle; Kinga use friends as their brokers in contracting to enjoy (often largely fictive) kinship relations within a smaller residential circle. This relegation of kinship to a derivative category in Kinga thought is possible because men in the court culture invested the prime years of their lives in a modality of being for which kinship as such had little significance. Under the pax, and setting aside Kinga mission villages, a surface observer might fail to see a difference worth noting between Kinga and Ndendeuli settlement patterns. In both societies, many hamlets would be sole households. But so far as these represented able-bodied persons there’d be no implication of social isolation. These householders would be as active as others in work party organization and participation. Even disregarding sole households the modal Ndendeuli hamlet has but two, and the median and mean but three households in Gulliver’s sample. It’s hard to know how much we should conclude from exact figures referring to the survivors of a century of Ngoni, German, and British interference. Ndendeuli described themselves as reverting to tradition by 1954, but they could hardly have been quite settled back in, on the ground, whatever they were in their minds. I found Kinga conditions so varied from realm to realm, and

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communities so differentially affected by schools, churches, roads, taxes, and acculturation, that I soon abandoned efforts to get a quick and representative sample of the settlement pattern. But in areas I did sample (Eastern and Western realms, away from roadnets), the hamlet size, excluding sole households, was larger: mode, median, and mean indicate a hamlet of four or five households. To judge from my few histories, Kinga hamlets are likely to be settled for life by a group of male friends calling each other elder and younger brothers. If a spirited new settlement were to attract and absorb one or two nearby hamlets, the amalgamated settlement might (in my sample) comprise as many as fourteen households without in 1960 generating a need for formal political organization. (But I take it that in traditional times such a hamlet would always have had its captain [untsagila], acceptable to the ruler of the domain.) Any hamlet of six households or more would have a men’s house [ikivaga] to which boys from the larger neighbourhood would seek, as well as older men not sleeping with their wives. But even the largest hamlet would wane in size as its members matured and died. Almost all the sole households in my samples represent survivors, though by sampling less well-established districts I could have expected to find more young homesteaders, not yet joined by friends. My hamlet histories go back only to the early decades of this century. I couldn’t reconstruct conditions of an earlier period: the ordinary hamlet is the product of one generation, and I found no one prepared to give a strictly genealogical account of the hamlet or village where he had spent his boyhood. Everyone knew all the reciprocal terms used, the nominal kinship, but family trees were not an interest. Apart from the size of hamlets and their tendency to associate (within a larger neighbourhood) through work party networks there is the question of internal composition and structure. For Ndendeuli Gulliver found the hamlet nexus was more often than not the filial and/ or sibling bond between male household heads. For Kinga these ties within the hamlet are unusual. Granted that one son “should move back” when a woman is widowed, he’d not be expected to do so while his father lived or while commitments held him where he was. The (fictional) kinship which unites a hamlet refers to a supposed common origin not specifically to ascriptive claims of the sort which would be recognized by a court in a debt case. As regards name and ‘clan’ identity, the pure hamlets in my samples are rare, though many are comprised mainly of men with a common surname and are generally thought of as though they were actual minimal lineages of Kyawula, Ndelwa, or Mahenge (to choose a few surnames less common than Sanga).

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The Kinga incest rule taboos only heterosexual connection between (bilateral) descendants of a common great-grandparent, but it is understood by children of a given hamlet that they are one kin ikikolo and, calling each other by sibling terms, can’t become heterosexually involved. In several samples from the Eastern realm, my most ‘pagan’ samples, I have only a single case of marriage within the larger named neighbourhood. The scope of such neighbourhoods is normally about a score of hamlets, and these would comprise the home country of the young men who had grown up there. They’d expect to make their own settlements within this home country, bringing in wives from outside. It is perhaps in this context we can best see how in ordinary life Kinga men may be more secure in their wider network relations than Ndendeuli (as matters were in the 1950s) and need less support from their common agnatic/cognatic kinship ideology. The net balance of friendship and kinship may be about the same for Kinga and Nyakyusa, but for quite different reasons. Incest and exogamic taboos coincide for each of the two peoples and are identical, but Nyakyusa stress inheritance of cattle and wives from brother to brother, and covet wealth and wives so much that close agnatic ties have great political importance. Nyakyusa rituals are designed to exhibit orders of seniority and preference within lineages. No such rituals could exist among Kinga, for no such lineage structures exist. The structure of the Kinga householder’s world is epitomized in the three shrine trees at which he will propitiate the shades: one for male ancestors of his agnatic line, one for deceased women born to that line, and one for children of either sex who have died away from it. The children are asked to pass the supplicant’s greetings along to all the shade-children in their respective peer groups.<<[lit] Friendship is also politicized among Nyakyusa. A man who has been remiss in his duty of ukwangala [seeing eye-to-eye, keeping good company] soon hears his village brethren are talking of witchcraft. The same suspicion haunts Kinga friendships but isn’t used as a political instrument. I can only imagine an attempt to enforce hamlet solidarity in that fashion would be disastrous. This is partly because a (Nyakyusa) village is necessarily a more consciously political community than a (Kinga) hamlet, where mutual decisions are usually enough; and partly because Kinga have not made friendship into an ideology as Nyakyusa have. Kinga do share an ideological antipathy to witchcraft with others in the region and the Eastern Bantu peoples generally; as the betrayers of trust, secret enemies are changeling friends, and I suppose wherever friendship enjoys great honour it is haunted also by distrust.

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Setting kinship aside to favour amity as the foundation of social ties among neighbours puts the whole arrangement on a basis of short-term trust. Kinga and Ndendeuli handle this problem by letting amity ties simulate kinship. They pretend they have lifelong trust, and sometimes they do. The Nyakyusa use another strategy, laying heavy sanctions on peer amity among the men of a village. So far as I know they are the only Sowetan people who, in a region generally featuring an antipolitan ethic, actually use a form of ostracism. Of course, the procedure is (as elsewhere in the region) first to accuse a person not of offending friendship but of planning or insinuating witchcraft. But in this case the only resolution may be exile from the village. It should not surprise us that issues of distrust should arise in a village built on the premise of lifelong friendship among age-peers. It is not surprising that Kinga men, as they grow into elderhood, find trust growiing scarcer. If every human society must make some systematic use of both kinship and friendship, each must find its own way of articulating the two principles of binding association and learn to live with the consequences.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER THREE

Sowetan cultures: aggression

Kinga were intrepid warriors, if given to display and bravado not to wars of conquest. The redoubtable Rev. Mackenzie’s early account of Nyakyusa warfare has been cited before (pp. 60-61) as the nearest approximation we have to a European observer’s picture of the Kinga in battle. Reading the institutional pattern not the ethos, war was the raison d’être of the ‘political archipelago’—as central to political life for Kinga as for the world-shaking Hehe. The difference was not just a matter of scale, since Hehe beginnings were small. About deep motives I grant that nothing may be proved by behaviour in war, but for a phenomenology of aggression war is a prime setting. Though the massacres of Sangu women and children which Elton happened upon (1879: Ch. 5) reflect darkly on Hehe character as warriors, corroborating Kinga oral history, in themselves such records tell us little even about Hehe character at rest. War, unrestrained, becomes a gigantic crime of passion. What are the conditions which allow a warrior to recover from an episode of violence with his good character intact—without endangering his relations with friends, with a wife and children? When and how does the motivation of the warrior role bleed into the person itself, infecting the moral career? We want a measure of residual aggressiveness, the disposition to attack in situations which—rationally assessed—don’t call for it. We do have at least a tentative measurement of this kind for Hehe men and women, though we have none for other Sowetan peoples. Edgerton in 1962 found that Hehe were characterized by impulsive aggressiveness, an intense sensitivity to insult, and anxiety about losing self-control. A common explanation of suicide was, “He lost his temper.” The contrast between this and Kinga manners in 1960 could hardly be more complete. Is it true to conditions before the pax?<<[lit]

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It is characteristic of Kinga that they should have told German missionaries their people had left an earlier homeland (to the east) under pressure from stronger tribes. Though some informants had prouder explanations, this example of ethnic self-deprecation was freely offered. Fülleborn reports (with all the quaint presumption of his own ethnic group) about the Hehe: The aristocratic, proud and self-assured demeanour of the Wahehe is praised by all who come to know them. “He possesses more than the usual black man’s intelligence, as is readily apparent from his impressive appearance; he shows loyalty, gratefulness and attention to those who are physically and mentally superior to him; he has excellent powers of discrimination,” so Adams characterizes the Hehe, “in praise of which he cannot often enough repeat himself.” Bravery, tenacious endurance and the loyalty of the self-sacrificing vassal are qualities these uncouth highlanders have often enough demonstrated, as their history shows, so that no honest opponent can deny them his esteem (1906: 202-3).

Some of the vacuous hyperbole is easily enough dismissed as the due admiration of Europeans who, still smarting from their sharp defeat at Hehe hands, have had to push themselves to prove their own “physical and mental superiority.” The patronizing air was obligatory. But what is left when we eliminate the noise is the description of a character which won’t allow a man to set aside the burden of pride, even momentarily. As for the Kinga in 1960 I saw traces of this trait only in a half-dozen men, all among the avanyivaha. Reichard, writing before the great mortification of German national pride, the Hehe ambush of August 1891, was less inclined to hyperbole. He cites Victor Giraud to the effect that Hehe at home accept the rule of walking about unarmed “in order to prevent their getting into broils by reason of their pronounced quarrelsomeness.” Easy spontaneity and informality even in off-hours are denied: “Quiet, formal, and dignified is the conduct of this people.” “Only in their villages and in their cups are they rowdy.” “A warrior spirit prevails among the Hehe, and discipline...”. Early references of this kind are many.<<[lit] The depth of character the Europeans, yet to face the 1914 war, so greatly admire is a quality purchased at a price. Reichard’s opening gambit, after some desperate remarks on the terrain and climate, is to call the Hehe as “harsh and disagreeable” in character as the land they inhabited (Ibid.: 240). It’s a hard judgement and one some Europeans of the time would have been quick to turn back on the German. But I think we glimpse some ethical and psychological realities behind, which illuminate Hehe history and are continuous with

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those Edgerton by less informal (as less direct) means was able to establish four generations later. On the subject of character it’s vain to look for irreproachable texts. Still, nothing in these Hehe texts would or could have found analogue in anything the same generation of Europeans would write about the Kinga. The first serious missionary visitor to Kingaland (the Western realm) was Br. Schumann: ...We found everything in wild disarray. At length the shy folk were prevailed upon to come out of their hiding places, and came to meet us, armed to the teeth. We exchanged greetings and allowed them to lead us into their village. Groups of beweaponed men are standing all about, but now their own comrades are giving them the laugh. As now appears, they had mistaken us for [raiding or invading] Sangu, Merere’s crowd (BMB 1895: 471).

German military attitudes toward Nyakyusa and Kinga were luckily so disrespectful that when a belated resistance was organized in 1897 at Lubaga, the common shrine of the two peoples, German forces contented themselves with a single pre-emptive attack. It was however a brutal demonstration of the Maxim gun, which quickly put an end to the mini-mobilization. What more they might have done were it not for the missionaries’ countervailing pressures can’t be known; but in the ensuing paper-quarrels neither sort of German is to be found courting the image of a noble, proud, and self-assured savage.<<[lit] German attitudes toward Kinga and Hehe aren’t simple reflections of the two peoples’ distinct military reputations, whether among fellow Africans or Germans. This becomes clear when Nyakyusa are included, since they were well known to their German visitors as the victors in a showdown battle at Mwaya (1886) where they had faced an “invincible” combination of Sangu and Ngoni forces. Merensky, who had experienced Nyakyusa truculence toward interfering missionaries at first hand in 1891-2 , nonetheless gives this account of their character: Even in connection with feuding and warfare the mild temper of the people again makes itself felt. The open villages, too, lying well stretched out, with their houses and stalls each to itself and distributed among the banana groves, show that here calm and peace prevail. In what contrast do these open, peaceful settlements stand to the fortified cave-dwellings and stone strongholds of Mashonaland and the Transvaal, or to the tembedwellings of [Hehe and] central German East Africa! Here among the Nyakyusa, neighbour does not fear neighbour; even the small, scarcelybloody feuds are infrequent (Merensky 1894: 135-6).

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The slaughter belt, as we should term it, extended from Sanguland eastward and southward through Hehe-Benaland, into the country south of the Bena which Ngoni had found ill-defended and decided to make their own. The belt as a whole described a broad outer crescent around the northern and eastern bounds of the Livingstone mountains, always about fifty kilometers from the lakeshore. Within the comparatively safe inner zone or crescent so formed the Kinga and Nyakyusa-Ngonde proto-states stood above the rest. These were various Nyakyusa-speaking groups, the Kisi, Mahanzi, Magoma, Mawemba, and some Pangwa communities, all showing a more or less open pattern of settlement which we may suppose predates the rise of Ngoni-style raiding and the ivory-and-slave trade. Four smaller peoples, belonging by temper to the inner crescent, had been overrun by the time the pax was imposed, but retained their cultural identities: at one end Wanji and Safwa overrun by the Sangu, at the other Pangwa and Ndendeuli largely overrun by Ngoni. Some Bena communities were wholly aligned with the Hehe, some converted to Hehe-style political-military organization and scale but aligned against the Hehe, and some left marginal to the Hehe war pattern, not yet overrun but increasingly vulnerable. Along the interface of Kinga and Bena polities were scattered communities of Mawemba who seem to have survived mainly by fading into the landscape whenever History came looking for them. In 1960 they maintained a characteristic pose: they were “Bena” to Kinga inquiry and “Kinga” to Bena. European travellers, from Elton to Thompson and the Germans, never failed to notice directly the shift in temper between the inner crescent and what I’ve called the outer, slaughter belt—though their notice was usually not phrased in such categorical terms as mine. To use a naturalist’s analogy, we have browsers on the one hand and predators on the other: the difference in human tempers is subtler but as directly observable.<<[lit] Sitting as retrospective observers of this Sowetan panorama, can we explain the slaughter? It seemed obvious to early German writers like Merensky and Reichard that the more exposed Sowetan communities (Sangu, Hehe, Bena) had been pushed by roving Ngoni raiders, who had earlier been caught in the massive explosion of warfare in South Africa, representing a direct collision of native and European interests. This billiard-ball or collision model provides at least a sensible sociological framework within which one may seek more definite explanations. Of great importance for Hehe—the formation of the military protostate from a dozen-odd autonomous peoples during the nineteenth century—was the infamous slave and

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ivory trade whose routes were nearby, and about which each of those peoples would have been richly informed. Monica Wilson (1958) discusses the western segment of our region as a “corridor” for north-south movements, as though there had been chronic movement of that sort funneled up or down the Rift Valley by the presence of the two great lakes, Malawi and Tanganyika. But the evidence could be read in an almost opposite way. Migratory drift can easily account for all the prehistoric human and bovine movement from Eastern to Southern Bantu lands, and entails only an insensible social osmosis quite unlike the militaristic movements we know from other Bantu and Bantu-Sudanic regions in the nineteenth century. The “corridor” before the rise of chiefly politics can even be conceived as a typical backwater, a haven of marginal peoples doing things each in its own way, out of the mainstream and purposely so: self-selected refugees.<<[lit] When the Sanga rulers of Kingaland confess they’ve fled from stronger tribes to the east, they’re referring to a movement generations before 1840 and the Ngoni incidents. The so-called ntemi pattern of chiefship, which all the Sowetan peoples we are discussing share in some form, appears to have spread prior to the eighteenth century from centres in northwestern Tanzania, and specifically in the sequence Hehe—Bena—Kinga—Nyakyusa, making allowances for the use of modern labels in each case.<<[lit] The Sanga tradition of movement east-to-west is shared by most commoner lines among the Kinga, and by Mahanzi. While it is hard to establish the scale, there has evidently been a percolating movement of settlers from Bena and Pangwa country into Kingaland over the whole span of time we might call the Sanga dynasty; and it’s likely they have all been refugees, at least as self-conceived, from a system of greater stress to one promising less. In the very long run (on a scale of four centuries or so) there probably was a selection for tough-mindedness in the outer-crescent region, associated with the rise of political units of larger scale and perhaps with a growing unpredictability of political and particularly military circumstance. Consider that (among the less-tough peoples) Nyiha, Nyakyusa, Kinga, and some Pangwa all had multiple contacts with Ngoni raiders, without escalating to the kind of slaughter for which Sangu and Hehe became famous; and that Safwa, Wanji, and Pangwa when overrun by empire-builders survived as reeds do in a storm. One of the great safety-valves shared by all the inner-crescent peoples discussed is political nomadism: the ability sponsored by an antipolitan ethic to pick up and move away from a chief you don’t like

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to one who will welcome new support. The surest way for a chief to find ruin in such a system is to risk disaster in war. Understanding that, we can understand how Nyakyusa and Kinga can be so warlike (seen in the frame of institution and ideology) yet be so unaggressive ethically and personally. Their rulers depend on the institution of war, but the better established they become, the greater their interest in maintaining limits on the scale of slaughter. The pattern becomes that of Merensky’s “small, scarcely bloody feuds” though it may entail an impressive display of fighting potential. Within the inner crescent the Kinga are a special case, most like the Nyakyusa. Where Nyakyusa have made explicit the class distinction between chiefly (royal) and commoner villages, and have brought all settlement into the village pattern, Kinga stratification is implicit. In part they have adopted a ‘closed’ pattern, since court culture supplied the authority required to gather a domain together around a fortifiable place; and this authority is the mainstay of a military establishment which has maintained their independence while their Wanji and Pangwa neighbours have been overrun. But in part the Kinga, through their bush culture, have retained the older, open pattern of peaceful settlement near wooded areas where, in case of trouble, men, women, and children will scatter not gather for safety in the bush. With the pax, Kinga didn’t abandon their court culture or the bush pattern, but the two levels tended to integrate around new activities: migrant labour and the spreading Christian worship, a tax-and-law oriented administration, and the various enterprises which came to be associated with gradual westernization. A Sowetan people touched somewhat as the Kinga were by affairs in the slaughter belt are the Nyiha (Nyika) in the northwestern part of Wilson’s “corridor” on the Mbozi plateau. Their communities aren’t easily distinguishable by language or culture from others, some of which are known by the same ‘tribal’ name, farther north and farther south; and the Safwa are also considered to be cousins. Nyiha communities seem to have been subject historically to the same kind of pressure from Nyakyusa expansiveness that Mahanzi were from Kinga, although Wilson’s contentions to this effect are evidently unacceptable to the historian Marcia Wright. What expands in these cases is not a nation but a lifestyle, first a system of political organization and orientation, then more gradually a language. The distinctive priesthoods of the Kinga and Nyakyusa, their connection with secular authority, and their maintenance of a schooling function (Nyakyusa mainly through communal ritual, Kinga largely through barracks discipline) are institutions of proselytizing expansion not

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conquest. In any event, the unconverted Nyiha, with whom we are here concerned, remain a disunited people with a pattern of local rulership (headmanship) like that of the Pangwa or Wanji but unconquered. It’s reasonable to think this may be owing to their being more aggressive personally.<<[lit] A reader of Mariam Slater’s “anthropological adventure” (1976) won’t want to call the Nyiha unaggressive. Without claiming to have found an escape from the subjectivity of judgements derived from naturalistic observation, Slater notes (all within a very small sample) authoritarian harassment of younger siblings, severe corporal punishment by a father, wife-beatings galore, fistfights, free-for-alls among women, aggressive machismo, dog-kicking and scalding, rampant indulgence in verbal obscenity, endemic “deep distrust,” and compounds bristling with hostility, even to the visiting ghosts. Again we meet impulsive aggression, with much concern about avoiding “the temptation to fight” and the transparent excuse of drunkenness for vindictive violence. Some contrary impressions are reported by Beverly Gartrell [Brock]: Nyiha have “strong, intense, highly varied personalities” but show “warmth, hospitality, and generosity” and are characterized by “cheerfulness, vitality, and in certain situations, openness to other Nyiha.” We seem to have a coin with two sides. Gartrell goes so far as to repudiate Slater, finding a “major contradiction in our sense of the Nyiha as human beings.” The contrast between the two impressions is greater than one should normally expect as between ‘double blind’ field observations, partly because personal conviction and circumstance have a bearing on the perception of social behaviour—and happen to have been divergent here. But most of the discrepancy is owing to the fact that the two experiences were focussed in a ‘single culture’ but not a single body of data. I don’t mean to blame sampling error in the usual sense of the phrase. Some crucial psychological variables aren’t direct functions of culture. In particular I want to refer here to a dimension of social life we betoken with terms like morale and (for negative values) anomy or social disorganization. People of some cultures are predominantly cheerful and of other cultures dour. We can accept that kind of formulation if we do not read it as asserting that ‘their cultures made them so’. <<[lit] If you ask if a community can maintain its morale by clinging to its traditions you are putting culture in a more transparent mode. And when you ask if a community subject to radically changing circumstance is best served by conservatism you will quickly see that categorical answers are out of place in such discussion. Morale is a

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function of the way experience combines in action with culturally-given values. Culture can furnish the values but not the action. Disorganization such as Slater convincingly describes isn’t a facet of a value system but a pathological condition of it. An anthropologist inquiring about that system from reasonably cheerful informants will learn little about acts of desperation and bad faith. Conversely, inquiries in communities where ‘things have fallen apart’ won’t elicit convincing pictures of truth, beauty, and goodness. But if this point be granted, what of aggressiveness? I think the culture-comparative psychologist has to deny that aggressiveness is either a transcultural (biosocial) function or a culturally patterned personality trait. Though these are the two rubrics under which some of my most respected contemporaries see fit to discuss the subject, I find their premisses mistaken. Aggressiveness is partly a function of adaptive intelligence. Other things being equal you find it where it pays off, and in some communities that is a chronic condition. There you may be foolish to meet others’ aggressiveness with none of your own. But it’s also true that in some cultures aggressive behaviour is systematically sanctioned—perhaps rewarded as desirable in a broad range of situations or, in the same situations in a different culture, penalized as improper. Even where socially internal aggression is granted moral sanction and socially encouraged, its consequences are psychologically dense: there’s not only a victim for every successful act of aggression, there’s likely a mortal enemy. The effect on cultural values of persistent, largely frustrated aggressiveness is likely to be corrosive. I find all of this virtually visible in the Nyiha case as in Kingaland. Historically the Nyiha were raided by Ngoni, Sangu, and Bemba each on several memorable occasions; and Nyiha only occasionally emerged victorious. Brock (1966) finds the evidence favours a sociological explanation: individually, Nyiha were fierce fighters, but largescale organization, discipline, and co-ordination were lacking. The war pattern wasn’t well developed, alliances were ad-hoc and brittle. That they fared reasonably well withal seems to me to reflect a regnant temper less gentle, psychologically better suited to warlike encounters, than the Kinga. I see this only derivatively as a function of culture. The important variables are not Nyiha and Kinga character values but the situational adequacy of Nyiha and Kinga modes of social and political organization. Most of the Kinga I knew in 1960 were the heritors of half a century of reasonably high morale. By all accounts, the same was the case in 1890. In 1960 the major conditioning institutions were

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Christian churches, missions, and schools; and migrant labour. In 1890 the corresponding institutions would have been the schools of martial arts and the ceremonialism of court culture. Material well-being (according to prevailing standards) was a positive facet of Kinga life at both times. Does this account for the morale? The active and prolonged realization of moral and material values on a collective scale is virtually synonymous with high morale. But food and possessions, like moral values, are the objects of action. The subjects are persons. Where Gartrell writes that Nyiha showed “in certain situations, openness to other Nyiha” I should have to write that Kinga showed, in a wide range of situations, true regard for other Kinga. Where Slater found it morally shattering to live among the Nyiha I found, on more occasions among Kinga than I could count, deep comfort and reassurance as to the dignity of man. Where Slater fled from the field for sanity’s sake I dreamt for years of getting back. Yet there was Ukwama, among Kinga communities the most ‘conservative’ I knew (in the same sense that Slater’s chosen field location was a ‘conservative’ group), where I wasn’t comfortable and probably never could have been. Ukwama contradicted my expectations, conditioned as I was by a teaching which fastened on the harmful effects of acculturation (especially in the hands of missionaries!) and honoured the pristine. But having come to this place late in my second year, after establishing a standard of expectation, I put down Ukwama as a case of low morale and social disorganization. That wasn’t subjectively a judgement of the armchair but what I perceived there. To bring the camera a little closer, here are a couple of paragraphs from field notes of my initial meeting in the royal enclosure at Ukwama, by appointment, with the Paramount Chief, last of the High Princely line, Unkuludeva Suluali Mwemutsi: His characteristic pose when seated is that of a cringing man. He sits side-on to his guests, dressed in only a cloth, elbows on knees and head resting in or on his hands. The large, once-handsome face turns upward occasionally to regard the other, but only in gestures of seeking, not in a steady gaze. The face itself is deeply engraved with doubt: the most dissipated face, beyond a doubt, in all of Ukinga. The head moves automatically forward, the great back and shoulders hunched, as soon as he sits or as soon as he has delivered himself of some defiant words... His son by Wife Three was present, very drunk, and very apt at crafty, deep, hostile “looks” in various directions. He did some drunken managing of the brief interview, initially fairly successful. Two folding chairs were produced from a locked house, thick with dust. Mwemutsi sat on a beer case, old and battered. The son...tried after a bit to kick out some male hangers-on who had sat near, as though he should prepare a private

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setting. They refused, and he backed down. Then the father became for a moment big. He swore at the onlookers over his shoulder: “You Wakinga are the spoilers around here. Beer is ruinous. You are all drunk and ruinous.” The main onlooker was a drunken youth. He stayed put. The son dragged him a few feet by his trousers. They exchanged insults. At length the local peace officer was called and successfully ordered the young man and some of the wives away. Later the son had a fight with the chief wife, who had borne only girls. He was instigator, reminding her of her failing just to hurt her. She had fixed us some rather fine potatoes with onion relish, and had become involved in some pushing with other women when the son intervened. The two now set to hitting each other with open hand. They were pulled apart, and the officer called for a rope to tie up the son—at which the latter became docile and returned to a chair, fondling his own small and scabied son just as he had been doing from time to time before. He showed a powerful sweetness in his handling of the boy, as though it had been his son who had been hit by the ‘mother’. The officer also called for a rope to tie up the woman, the chief wife of the Paramount. He ordered her down on her knees. She refused. At last they left off without further violence, but throughout there had been a great mixing and yelling of men and women taking sides. [IV 47]

I knew the community had been a great centre, the Alpha of its world, in 1890. Probably the burden of stress created by the Sanga system tended to focus there then, but certainly morale was high, at the other pole of a long oscillation from the court village I saw. Superficially the community made peace with the pax but at an ethical level it didn’t. I found the conservative core of the community living out a senescence of noisy, messy, drunken desperation. It isn’t that I’m so naive I’d try to give such a characterization absolute credit, and it is true I was able to pursue sober historical inquiries with some of the elders, including even a few with evil reputations. But as a relativistic statement about the moral difference between this and other Kinga communities I knew, there’s nothing misleading in what I’ve said. Kinga culture was fully recognizable in this version. Had it been the only version I’d a chance to see I’d have been in the same fix, I suppose, that Slater was. In this chapter I explore implications for the study of cultures in a regional context, and for comprehending the limits of culture as explanation. It isn’t only the German anthropologists who, studying the ‘slaughter belt’ cultures after the pax, have been inclined to look away from fully attested atrocities and the obvious consequences for character of a demographic system based on the rape of ‘enemy’ women and children and their incorporation as working members of the society. The history of this outer crescent has been written until now as though the half-century of upheavals prior to the pax were only inci-

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dental aberrations in the unbroken sagas of a fixed number of ethnic communities each with a separate tradition of its own. Yet a cool look at the evidence suggests that today’s labels (Sangu, Hehe, Bena) refer to what likely would have been about fifty fairly autonomous political communities in 1840. The violence entailed in these amalgamations has not been dealt with adequately by historians, though the needed evidence is or has been available enough in our time. The political reasons for this hardly need to be elaborated. What is important is to recognize that rose-coloured glasses are as inappropriate for the scholar of African as of any other histories, and accordingly set about making sense of the actual record. There is an interplay between traumatic events and character values. No human community anywhere is, by virtue of an observer’s or its own rosecoloured values, immune from brutalization. To think otherwise about culture is just thinking badly. Relativism, in short, is no license for averting one’s eyes from gore. If anthropologists from time to time allow themselves to approve of what they see in the field can they refuse when the occasion prompts them to disapprove? The question isn’t simply rhetorical. In an infamous book on the Ik of Uganda, Colin Turnbull (1973) portrayed a people who, in the final throes of starvation, seemed to be lacking in the elements of human fellow-feeling. Turnbull suggested they be disbanded, fostered out as individuals to other cultures, and (in short) brainwashed of Ik values. The same anthropologist had earlier immortalized the Mbuti pygmies in works which eloquently called for their protection. If he’d stand by his judgement in the one case (and receive no condemnations from fellow scientists) why not in the other? The root of the confusion here is the premise of cultural determinism. As a remodeler of human nature, culture is not all-powerful. The suggestion that Ik culture was reduced to the travesty being acted out, zombie-fashion, by a few survivors in the disaster-year of Turnbull’s visit is not implicit in the facts he selects and so graphically gives us, but is imposed. Perhaps this is a reflex of the observer’s private malaise as much as of his cognitive premisses. But there is a fundamental error in his concept of culture: for any culture to exist it must have been viable over a very long run against all odds. It is not a culture which turns on itself, though any human community in crisis can do so. Not I nor even Mariam Slater had as much call as observers to have summoned up ‘deep defense’ as Turnbull had: was it in order not to blame the people themselves for their moral bankruptcy that he chose to blame an abstraction called Ik culture? If he’d had the good

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fortune to find another branch of the Ik who hadn’t been pushed to the wall and were enjoying high morale, I think it likely he’d have seen the Ik he has given to us as only what I saw at Ukwama, a version of the viable culture with some crucial signs changed. That a healthy version of Ik culture does exist in spite of the troubles in their region has been confirmed by later fieldwork (Heine 1985). A culture comprises an extraordinarily varied array of ’weak forces’ always present to a people and always drifting them in characteristic directions. But action responds to stronger forces, which we most often deal with under the heading of motivation. For the Ik there was not simply dire hunger: there was on every hand the example of wretched death and survival by cruelty. There was demoralization. Once we grant that cultures run deep in mind and long in time the problems of relativism begin to shrink. It is not acceptable to call the culture responsible for cruelty, bigotry, and callousness. All these, and charity as well, are realized in action. Culture gives action some of its colour but not its impassioned substance. Whatever the majority of any particular generation are doing, there are ethical resources in every culture which will sanction an alternative. A culture is not all the behaviour which frequently recurs in a community, but the shared ideas, sentiments, and imagery which lie behind the social interaction accepted as normative there. Suicide, meanness, and masturbation recur in Kinga communities in response to knowable circumstance, but can’t be described as Kinga institutions. I suppose every culture has its underground, a place of fearful fantasy which prefigures what may happen when things really begin to go wrong. Ukwama allowed me a glimpse of that underground in Kinga life. Monica Wilson did the same for the Nyakyusa ethic of “good company” when she dealt with cases of witchcraft and “the breath of men” (1951, 1957, 1977). In the institution of witchcraft, Nyiha, Nyakyusa, and Kinga have a convenient way of routinizing indirect aggression. But the institution doesn’t create the ugly passions. I suppose what does is an accumulation of bad faith, and you may search long and hard before you hear of a culture which can prevent that. Does Hehe culture carry a heavy neurotic load from the decades of looting and slaughter before Mkwawa’s final defeat by the Germans? The hypothesis seems to me probable enough to justify special study. The laid-back Bena described by the Culwicks (1935) had their part in that turbulent history, but it was not the demiurgic part the Hehe played. Bena never set out to make themselves rich in cattle by devastating their neighbours, and local leaders among the

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Bena seem to have been content with a segmentary structure of power—like the Kinga, Bena without asking received at European hands a nominal political unity none of their leaders had dreamt of before the pax. There is at least some reason to think Bena communities and their neighbours to the north, who were to be welded together militarily as Hehe, were starting from about the same cultural baseline in 1840. If so, the differences in character values and style which ethnographers found between the two ethnic groups a century later may be largely traceable to differently coloured experience with war in what I have called the slaughter belt in the halfcentury 1840-1890. But it is also more than likely that there were as many local cultural styles as there were local peoples in what we have come to call Bena and Hehe territory. As a refugee goup, the Riverine Bena on which I must depend as my example are not necessarily representative for other Bena chiefdoms in the 1930s. Bena never were united under a strongman as Hehe were during two crucial periods of their history after 1840. Hehe were longer, more deeply, and more politically involved than any Bena communities were. Fear and aggression can generate a play of human passions on the grandest scale. Much may come together in war, but much will fall apart. If we are looking for a likely engine of culture change we may not need to look farther. For the men who became Hehe warriors, there were decades of forced dislocation and amalgamation with strangers. For their captive women the same stresses could only have been worse. Far too many local and personal continuities must have failed in a lifetime of yearly calls to war, in the collective pursuit of territorial dominance and personal wealth, to have allowed a simple synthesis of the local cultures which had to be absorbed. At the level of language and ethnic identity the amalgamation was complete in half a century. At the level of cognition where character values are sorted out, I suppose completion—the achievement of a deep and abiding basis for self confidence—would be out of the question. This is achieved, I think, by an inner process of invention which is focused on finding successful moral strategies, and an outward process of communicating expressive styles which allow a person to feel at home with neighbours. The two processes necessarily work together: you don’t pursue happiness with much success where you are contiinually misunderstood in your most spontaneous actions.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER FOUR

Sowetan cultures: arts

Do the Sowetan cultures have a style in common? Some anthropologists would suppose if not there could be little substance to the idea of a Sowetan regional culture. How do we decide such matters? Even observers who would have nothing to do with style as an analytical category will admit they recognize profound variations in what others might call ’style’ as between major ethnographic regions. In spite of historical divisions the Sowetan cultures have had a common history, do share specific linguistic and structural features peculiarly associated with the region, and have for centuries had intercourse in form of trade, migration, and ritual co-operation. But how far would that imply commonality with respect to cultural style? That they have some elements of style in common, I shall take as manifest. But to perceive those elements clearly, I judge I would have to compare the Sowetan region with another in (preferably) Eastern/Southern Bantu civilization. My focus will be on the easier, complementary question: What we should make of the differences of style to be found within the Sowetan region. It is a premise that style-formation occurs through face work among the individuals of a stable interactive community. It would then be a corollary that commonality of style sufficient to produce an easy spontaneity in the ordinary round of everyday life would occur at the level of the pedestrian community. This would correspond reasonably well, in the Kinga context, to the largely endogamous realm. Over time, the Sanga system was tending to produce a homogeneous Kinga style, as such. But stylistically the Western realm was still in 1960 more ‘Nyakyusa-like’ (for instance) than the other three realms. The most nearly objective evidence for a study of styles within the broader region is in expressive forms of art, and it may be that collected materials from about the end of the free traditional era

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eventually will provide interested scholars with a sufficient base—but there isn’t one now. This is a region in which traditional arts quickly declined under European rule (Park 1974b), and the descriptions I’m aware of from early German years are insufficient for any but an impressionistic survey. For example, it’s not clear that any firm stylistic distinctions in graphic or plastic art can be predicated of peoples in the region on the basis of published materials. With respect to the ‘applied’ art of ironworking the problem is simply that the Kinga stand so nearly aloneùand I know of no complete collections. There is one art form on which the documentary evidence is relatively complete. That is dance, as it was under free tradition. Only scattered descriptions are to be found, and while they may yet be supplemented by careful studies (with more equipment than a notebook) of dance styles as they have been continued by recent generations, dance as a spectacular art form lent itself better than some others to pen-and-paper methods of reporting. We know something about Hehe and Nyakyusa dancing early in the century, and the riverine Bena are described, with notes on recent changes, as they danced between the world wars. A question to which I think we can fix some answers is how far the style of dancing lends itself in each case to individualistic personal display, as this may be distinguished from mass effects. For information on Kinga dancing I’m dependent on retrospective interviews and my participation in dances at about the time of national independence. What we know for certain about 1900 is that there was official lionizing of the talented minstrel-dancer. His display wasn’t just narcissistic but was projected for impact on a mass audience. Dance was a distinctly participatory phenomenon, however, with no class of the population left out as mere spectators: the audience was internal to the dance, as individuals alternately participated as featured performers and as chorus. Kinga style (assuming continuity on that level over the long generation to 1960) may best be judged by comparison to Hehe and Bena on the one hand and Nyakyusa on the other. My main source for Hehe dancing is from Friedrich Fülleborn’s volume (1906) for Deutsch Ost Afrika, a series publication of research reports. In Fülleborn’s time Mkwawa, the Hehe tyrant, was dead, but the Sangu Merere, who had co-operated with the Germans, was still a power. Some of Fülleborn’s sources for Hehe and Sangu dance are first-contact descriptions.<<[lit]

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Before departure for the field, war games were held by the Hehe, Sangu, and Bena. The practice was to storm away at each other, either in long ranks or in columns with war-cries ringing out, brandishing spears or perhaps also beating a rhythm with the ramrod on a muzzle-loader. Liebert tells of such “single, pair, and group battles and dances as would have done any ballet company proud,” which he saw on a visit to Kiwanga. At these war games the preference is for dressing up in the finest and most colourful cloths available; it makes a rather unwarlike impression, in any event according to our notions, that this includes a predilection for putting up parasols. Also in peaceful circumstances the Hehe and Sangu, like all the neighbouring peoples, are great friends of the dance. As to the dance of the Hehe I cite from my diary the following sketch: “In honour of Sultan Kiwanga, their new chief, the subjugated Hehe today arranged a festive dance. The men and women danced separately, although to be sure now and again a woman did join in the men’s dance; naturally with the obligatory infant on her back, to whom however the trampling and clamour seemed to warrant only indifference.” The men stepped into the dance, one tight behind the other, forming a circle, and continued circling slowly, everyone stamping his feet with all his strength, a few making wild springs in the air, and the whole company singing a monotonous he, he, he, he; now and then one man would run to the centre and sing a few words directed to Sultan Kiwanga. The whole made a quite wild and uncivilized impression and was hidden in a thick cloud of dust. Much more conventional was the women’s dance, in which incidentally no men took part. The women arrived in a close crowd singing, and marched out to dance clapping hands, splitting then into independent groups. The ring dance resembles the men’s in that, tight behind one another, the women slowly move round in a circle with a tripping step, but the chaotic leapings in air are missing, and the stamping as well. The whole choir also sang, with coordinated handclapping, monotonous songs with various rhythms. The subject-matter of the songs throughout consisted of ‘Bwana Sakrani’ (Commander Prince), of Kiwanga, and of the subjugation of the Hehe: ‘People have come from far away to conquer our country’ or: ‘We’d like to show him off (Kiwanga), so where is he?’ and others of that sort. The text was first improvised by a song-leader stepping into the centre of the ring and then repeated by the chorus. Also now and then one woman or another would run into the centre, only soon to step back into the ring without having done anything special; so there gradually came to be more women inside the ring, a place the wives of Kiwanga were also fond of taking, if they were participating in the dance, something the Sultan evidently encouraged. Now and again the ring would stop, everyone turning toward the centre and, so to speak, dancing ‘in place’, accompanying their song with rhythmic body movements. Apart from these simple turns there were some rather more complicated: for example, dancing in two concentric circles around the songleader or the ring wheeling into a spiral as in a ‘Polonaise’.

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Musical instruments were missing, perhaps because in wartime there would be none at hand. Adams describes the dances of Sangu women and lads in quite similar terms. The wives of Sultan Merere, who performed a dance in our honour on another occasion in their best finery, were each carrying a staff in the hand: these women, incidentally, evidenced an endurance in dancing which, if possible, is even greater than that of any European woman fond of the dance. It is true that at these dances the only musical instruments employed are drums, although the Hehe (like the Bena and Sangu) also possess guitar-like stringed instruments and flutes, for they are as fond of music as any Africans. Glauning informs us of the wholly characteristic fact that Mkwawa himself when he became a fugitive took a musical instrument with him, and Arning and Adams mention professional folk- and court singers, on festive occasions by the evening fire praising the high deeds of ancestors. I myself saw a blind minstrel at the court of Merere. (Fülleborn 1906: 234-5)

MacKenzie was able to write of the Nyakyusa-Ngonde people (whom he calls Konde) with the advantage of a lifetime’s residence; but the reader soon discovers also a disadvantage, as he must deal largely with reminiscences, and they tend to be tinged with an old man’s moralisms rather than by the spirit of scientific discovery which had activated Fülleborn, and very likely MacKenzie himself, a generation earlier. Dancing is the principal relaxation of the Konde, if the violent exercise which it sometimes involves may be called relaxation. It is indulged in with great zest, and, as the night advances, with complete abandon, moral and physical. There is not much that can be called religious dancing: a children’s rain dance, a pestilence dance, and the wild leaping and shouting, with horn and drum, which young and old engage in at times of eclipse or earthquake. But anything may be made the occasion of an impromptu dance... The ordinary dance usually takes place at night. The dancers are summoned by the sound of the drum, which is an invitation to all who care to join. The general characteristics of all dances are movements and posturings of the body, usually two or more dancers, sometimes only one, advancing to the centre, making a few posturings or leaps, and retiring to give place to others, while the drums sound continuously, and the shouts of the dancers increase in vigour as the movement reaches its climax, until the noise becomes terrific and indescribable. (MacKenzie 1925: 159-60)

For Nyakyusa as for Kinga dancing is pre-eminently a celebration of youth. The point is sheer fun when children gather to a drum because moonlight and balmy weather conspire, but for Nyakyusa the point becomes the generation of erotic-aggressive energy when there is an occasion, such as a funeral, for the gathering of young men and women.

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Sometimes on the first day, and usually on the last two or three days of a burial, there is dancing as well as wailing. Dancing begins late in the morning to the accompaniment of three or four drums, in the swept courtyard of the dead man’s homestead; gradually it attracts more and more dancers, more and more of the attention of the onlookers, until the wailing is confined to the chief women mourners inside the hut, and the dance is the most conspicuous part of the proceedings. It is led by young men dressed in a special costume of ankle-bells and cloth skirts and, traditionally, bedaubed with red and white clay. All hold spears and leap wildly about, stamping down the soft earth of the grave as they dance. There is little common movement, each dances alone as if fighting a single combat. Among the men some of the women move about, singly or in twos and threes, calling the war-cry and swinging their hips in a kind of rhythmical walk. Under a tropical sun in a damp heat, with the thermometer often over 90o F. in the shade, they dance for hours. In the dust and noise and excitement there are no very apparent signs of grief; and yet if you ask the onlookers what it is all about they reply: ‘They are mourning the dead.’ (Monica Wilson 1957: 23-4)

Such dances were always occasions of license for Nyakyusa, as if a man or woman filled with the righteous emotions of bereavement should be exempt from ordinary scruples. If a man didn’t become violent he became lusty, though there was a traditional distinction between war dancing [ukukina] and dancing for sexual display [ukumoga] (Ibid.: 27). The parallel Kinga distinction is between war dancing [ukukima] and display before a potential benefactor [ukukumbela]. (Kinga also apply their verb ukukina [finding amusement with others] to the dance, but it has a broad meaning.) A Kinga youth might dance for the prince in the hope of receiving the pair of hoes wanted for a traditional bridewealth, instead of dancing directly for the maiden of his fancy—Kinga style is more given to indirection than the Nyakyusa. The dancing which the Culwicks describe for the riverine Bena could be said to combine the form of the Hehe dance with the spirit of the Kinga or Nyakyusa. As to form, all the ‘tribal’ or ‘public’ dances described for the Bena are ring dances, and all but one—a grossly farcical display—of those usually performed in connection with girls’ initiations. The exception follows the dominant Kinga pattern of blocking men and women opposite each other on the dance ground; but in their dances the Bena don’t seek to compress the participants into a massed, circling train or linked ring—Hehe style—from which the individual only leaps or licks out momentarily to express emotion. Bena dancing is more conservative of form than Nyakyusa, comparing to Kinga in giving the planning and leading of the occasion to a few dancers and musicians, who will bring drums, bells, and rasps, and wear fancy head-dresses and colobus armlets to shake. For Bena as for

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Kinga, individuals of either sex display their dancing by taking the centre-ground for a short while, then retiring in favour of others. Nyakyusa, at least on the more serious occasions, seem for the most part to abandon form in favour of the expression of feeling, so that a dance becomes a crowd of soloists.<<[lit] Where Hehe do honour to their chief through the discipline of their dancing, in keeping with their authoritarian political style, Bena are to be seen on a parallel occasion (though three decades later) throwing discipline to the winds. The Culwicks witnessed the inaugural dance for Towegale in 1932. Heroes, one at a time, took the centreground to mime their exploits in war, lunging on the spectators in a fury and “as often as not at Towegale himself,” who was prepared with a young bodyguard. This was not a true ritual of rebellion against chiefly authority, but it could be called an acting out of rebellion against society itself and all its codes—a celebration of the magnificence of the individual. At a later point, Towegale along with a dozen others formed an inner circle within the main ring, while a star soloist was performing wildly at the centre and leading them in a fresh song. Fülleborn at the beginning of my long citation (above) seems to allude to a sort of Hehe “ballet” (Liebert reporting in an 1898 retrospect) which features individual prowess; but the ethnographic reference is misleading, because of the nominal union of Bena-Hehe peoples at the time. Liebert was a general whose report refers to the lowland Bena of chief Kiwanga’s own capital, hence to Bena war dancing well before pacification, whereas Fülleborn’s diary refers to Hehe dancing at their own capital when they’d been subjugated and Kiwanga the Bena, as a staunch ally of the Germans, installed as their chief. Fülleborn’s references to Kiwanga’s wives in his account of the women’s dancing also must be referred to Bena rather than Hehe cultural style, even though the place is Heheland. Fülleborn elsewhere (1906: 215) cites Liebert to the effect that Kiwanga personally joined the war dances (done in honour of the Germans), and cites Elton to the same effect in the case of Merere, the Sangu tyrant.<<[lit] The seeming contradiction in Fülleborn between the ‘ballet’ style on the one hand and the monotonous chanting of the chorus ("he, he, he”) appears to be explained by a cultural difference persisting within the Bena-Hehe polity. Better materials on Sangu/Safwa/Nyiha dancing in free traditional times would help to define the gradients within Sowetan regional culture as a whole; trusting my own brief observations in the field, I’d expect that ring dancing predominates for Nyiha and Safwa, with the latter more given to formalism: that is, to the visual incorporation of individuals into a societal entity. Mariam

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Slater describes late-colonial pagan Nyiha informal dancing when beer |Sw: pombe| is flowing: The pombe is an arena not only for drink but for dance. The styles are curious in that they created, it seemed to me, a self-centered togetherness. Like the pombe itself, the dance expressed the sociability of a relatively antisocial group. Not all dance styles occur at every pombe. Sometimes only soloists perform. Occasionally, single dancers just gravitate to the same spot and form little circles or a moving line. But it is loosely co-ordinated. There are no virtuosos, although a few men took great leaps for my camera. (Slater 1976: 93)

Safwa in the same year were paying a good deal more attention to regalia and made a clear separation between soloist-pro-tem and chorus, though the funeral dancing I saw was less formally articulated as a ring dance than that Alan Harwood pictures (1970: Pl. IIA). It strikes me as sound on theoretical grounds to associate Terpsichorean formalism with authoritarian ways and repressive collectivism among Hehe, and to regard Nyakyusa exuberance and impetuosity as an opposite pole within the region. Whatever the inner preferences of an individual man or woman might be, Hehe had to be accommodated to a chronic war system which incorporated slaves into an hierarchic society with a martial ethos, standing armies, and big-compound polygyny. The Bena version of the same regional culture differed in fostering greater individualism and integration of the sexes in a less-hierarchic context. Bena~Hehe differences in expressive culture illuminate their unstable alliance in late pre-Contact decades. The diffidence with which Bena leaders sometimes joined with Hehe is likely to have been prompted as much by distaste for the dictatorial political style of an expanding military chiefdom as by suspicion of Hehe strategic intentions as an ally. I have elsewhere argued we shouldn’t assume Bena culture or personality would have barred their men from full participation with Hehe in rampant slaughter on the battlefield.<<[lit] Kinga dance forms tended to celebrate a mutual relationship between the sexes while resisting the seamless circle of the ring dance but holding to an open policy toward solo display and friendly pairings as described for the Bena. The extreme of closure is a ring dance, such as I witnessed among the Nyiha of Mbozi, which has participants only circulating the drums one way in single file, each facing the back of the dancer ahead. No ‘stage’ in the centre, no stars of the dance, no face work, no audience, no song or chant, only the monotonous drums. It was as though spontaneity among them was too dangerous a mood to celebrate. I wouldn’t expect to see that among

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Bena; in a Kinga community it is unthinkable. Nyakyusa, giving leash to formal anarchy to express intense emotional involvement on the part of individuals, represent a further step away from patterns of hierarchy and conformism. When all the styles we’ve seen are arrayed, the Nyakyusa offer the only unambiguously ‘Dionysian’ display; but these are the moments in that society when what is normally underground comes to the surface. It is a ‘world turned upside down’ just as war itself always tries to be. Nyakyusa ‘ceremonial anarchy’ ought to be understood in the context of the mutual sanctioning of collectivist values so characteristic of the age village, and the liberation from those sanctions which will be experienced when strange youths find themselves gathered on high occasion in a village of their fathers’ generation. But further: how could a dance master in this society express, formally and in an integrative spirit, the relation between kinship and residential collectivities? The two methods of accounting for loyalties, kinship and friendship, are fundamentally at odds among Nyakyusa though they aren’t for Kinga. Kinga present the profile of the kinship society wherein politics has come to the forefront. Though the spoken motto is, Kinship sponsors propinquity, the unspoken motto is rather, Propinquity’s the better part of kinship. The riverine Bena, where the claims of clanship were pushed aside in historical times by the integrative ‘schools’ maintained at the royal village, signalize in their partiallyemancipating dance forms the transition which is required. Some Kinga princes, namely the two warring heroes of the Western realm who led their own men in war, no doubt participated in communal dance in the fashion of the Bena Towegale or his ancestor Kiwanga, as Fülleborn describes him. The established princes of the Central and Northern Kinga realms would consider joining-in no more than Mkwawa would have, though the Kinga throne conferred on its holder little of the massive power over life and death which the Hehe sultan took as a birthright. The Sangu tyrant Merere kept by all accounts an extraverted character, and he joined in dancing though his power was nominally the rival of Mkwawa’s. In this Kinga and Hehe cultures appear to be in sympathy, while the others represent better the regional norm. Are the two principles, divine kingship and monarchic charisma, which are so utterly different in sociological meaning, only tangent here by chance, or are they after all sympathetic phenomena? For the Kinga prince, it is as if the mystical dangers associated with the

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throne were as dangerous to the ruler as to his subjects. The role of the Kinga prince in relation to dance and the other arts under free tradition was that of patron. The vigour, energy, and creativity of his people reflected the rightness of his rule, the efficacy of his medicines, and the virility of his person. For while these virtues on the practical level could be tested only on the field of battle, in the fertility of the gardens, and in the prosperity of the ikivaga, these were all places which, like the dance, the ritually withdrawn prince could not enter. On the symbolic plane I take it that dancing at the Sanga courts was a celebration of the well-being of the realm and so of the virtues of the prince. The greatest of Kinga dances were held at the prince’s death, which must be kept an open secret, and were continued unabated until a new prince was proclaimed. Dance kept the virtues of the prince alive until the old body, never allowed to be buried, had lain hidden in its bier in the sacred wood for a month, and rotted high enough for all to sense without an official announcement being made of the death—when a living prince could be consecrated to office by act of the people’s priesthood.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER FIVE

Sowetan cultures: libido

There is an interesting psychological mechanism which tends to reinforce a ‘Freudian’ view of others’ sexuality. To see it, you have to have grasped the teachings, in the culture you are observing, which serve to identify a normal motivational pattern in matters sexual. It is probably possible to construct for any society a scale of sexual orientations from most to least respected. The reaction of the Kinga court in ridiculing bestiality quite clearly puts that orientation ‘down’; and at the other end of a scale the association of princely secular standing with assiduous heterosexuality has the effect of setting that ‘above’ the ordinary sex life. Ridiculing masturbation or promiscuity, like associating abstention with solemn ritual acts, effectively puts a tag of respect on continence. In general, respect is withheld or accorded to a pattern of sexuality in proportion to its inherent difficulty. Low forms of sexuality are those one falls into all too easily out of moral weakness, high forms are those requiring moral strength. Between the high and the low is the apparently ‘normal’ sexual path, taken for granted and morally unremarkable. The ‘interesting mechanism’ I have in mind comes into play when self-conceived ‘normals’ in social intercourse come across a shocking example. A good part of being normal is resisting, as if by instinct, what others regard as morally base forms of self-indulgence. Perhaps the clearest example of this ‘as if’ scenario is the act of disgust a parent will put on in hopes of discouraging an infant from mucking about with its feces. Laughter and disgust might be called ‘spontaneous sanctions’ on others’ behaviour: on loose talk and gesture, on acts unintentionally revealing someone’s hidden motives, or on breaches of trust. In this way whatever is taken as base is taken to be inherently so, and by reflex as well this aversive reaction affirms the ‘instinctive’ character of what has been taken as normal. In sensitive matters

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such as sexual style, another person’s unfamiliar behaviour is easily perceived as ‘unnatural’—that is, the other is taken not as different by choice but deviant by nature. This is the ‘Freudian’ epiphany: the good doctor taught us it was right to see not errant intention (a common-sense interpretation) but errant nature in out-of-the-way sex. If you ignore the provocative claim that children acquire their sexual natures a year or two after acquiring their genes, it is as though sado-masochism wasn’t an esoteric sport but a mutation. So the Sanga prince in his intrepid heterosexuality occupies an order of being above that of ordinary men, and a Kinga man looking for a city prostitute who will tolerate his form of backward sex will think her a witch if she initiates another kind. Yet to the disinterested observer the relevant behaviours are governed by role motives, only indirectly conditioned by personality variables.<<[lit] But how safe is the ‘normal’ path in the best of times? It is in the nature of human sexuality to overflow channels. If the ‘normal path’ is to be securely entrenched, the motivation it prescribes must have psychic verisimilitude. Sometimes this is achieved in tortuous ways. The normal behaviour for each gender must make a near approach to the dynamics of personal motivation characteristic for the culture. But where heterosexuality is prescribed without mutuality between the sexes, an elaborate gender symbolism will be contrived to prevent psychic crossover. The prescribed role-motives are ‘naturalized’— rooted in the mystical/mythical natures of man and woman. To be found ‘womanish’ is anathema for the normal man, ‘mannish’ pretensions are discredited in woman. It’s easiest to see the warping of reality in a relatively transparent role motive like patriotism: we find it larded with regressive nurturant symbolism. A less transparent case is the symbolism entailed in structuring domestic groups. But it is easy enough, at least, to see why Kinga are not enthusiastic propitiators of ancestors, in spite of believing the ancestors demand it. We can expect ancestral religions to flourish where the exercise of domestic authority by elders is valued, since the formula for these religions is transforming personal trouble into a rite of family solidarity under the presiding elder. The symbolism recognizes the righteous claims of the ancestor upon living descendants; the sacrificial offering is a mime of the care-and-you-shall-be-cared-for variety. Logically, authority rests on ego’s willingness to waive his or her own interests in favour of the group’s. The mime of ancestor propitiation turns the ethic of surrender around, naturalizing sacrifice as self-interest.

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By the same token, we could expect that where an exploitative sexual style is prescribed for men it will be larded with fears about unclean women and impotence, sacralization of mothers and sisters to set them apart from the target population of women, and fatherin-law avoidance to do the same for a son’s wives. The most successful polygynists of the Sowetan region, the Nyakyusa, exemplify this pattern of ‘naturalizing’ a skewed system of marital privilege. If we take the simple matter of tolerance as a dimension on which to sort out the Sowetan cultures we find, as we move from art to sex, that the ethnographic polarity shifts. In our consideration of art styles the poles were Hehe and Nyakyusa. When we look at libidinal latitude as a variable the poles are Hehe and Kinga. A signal difference between Kinga and Nyakyusa is in the degree of mutuality encouraged between men and women. The two societies are most alike in their patterning of friendship among male peers. The Nyakyusa celebration of peer friendships among girls is abortive, at least as matters have been in recent times. Through the age village system this people has found a way to combine a peer ethic with rampant polygyny, something usually reserved for localized-lineage societies. One of the prices Nyakyusa had to pay was practically abandoning mutuality between the sexes. Though woman has a sheltered place in the economic life, there was “a premise of inequality between men and women ... the maturity of women was never recognized.”<<[lit] A key provision in the Nyakyusa division of labour has been the insistence that males carry the major burdens of gardening: when this rule is combined with a system of land tenure which will keep the upcoming generation of males landless until their elders are prepared to retire in their favour, and with a system of bridewealth in cattle which effectively denies the young man legal access to women, the resulting constitution allocates an extraordinary power to fathers over sons. Boys tend the cattle which their fathers are accumulating for yet another wife; young men till the fields which their mothers’ young cowives will plant and harvest. The sex life of an ordinary young man is entirely illicit: homosexuality and a certain amount of sexual communism in the age villages, stolen affairs with the frustrated wives of defaulting polygynists, even studding in secret for their own less able fathers. Nyakyusa elders subscribe to the belief that young men lose their fighting temper through sexual connections, and Freudians might agree that the truculence of young men (which used to be expressed in a genuine taste for blood) can be related to a restless sex life.

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All these points, expressed through case analysis and stated more diplomatically than I have done, constitute the thematic material of the book (1977) in which Monica Wilson argues that Nyakyusa society has always been run for the benefit of men and elders: that is, at extraordinary social cost to women and young people. One may speculate that the increase in polygyny (and the disappearance of nubile maidens) in Nyakyusaland under the pax reflects the diminished social and self importance of young men without arms: that it’s been easier for the old men to keep them on deferred sexual expectation as well as to lock up their (potential) lusty girl friends in marriage. Native informants, ignoring the logical circularity, blame the ‘undersupply’ of women on an ‘oversupply’ of cattle chasing them. I expect the main part of what we see has a socio-economic explanation—class dynamics. In an age of affluence, the common man aspires to what had been the rich man’s prerogative: every polygynist now must be a rampant one. But through the same colonial period, subject to much the same external influence, the Kinga remained modally monogamous, confirmed in their ambisexuality and the pleasures of an extended youth for both genders. A comparison of Kinga and Nyakyusa sexual orientations tends to underscore the importance of father-son relations. Sociologically, the main reason is that father-son ties are easily exploited as links in an authority system. Analytically they are like the ties of polygynous marriage, tending to be one-many in logical structure and so to pit the many (co-wives or sons) against one another in competition for favours. But whereas an old man is likely to find his reputation for potency threatened by ‘too many wives’ he is not vulnerable in the same way from having ‘too many sons’. For Nyakyusa, domestic authority is developed on a virtually political scale by exploiting both marital and paternal dominance. But for Kinga (once the son is grown) both these ties tend to be characterized by mutuality, though the public or collective status of men and women could hardly be called equivalent. In both societies under the pax, sons were expected to bank with their fathers a major part of all earnings at migrant labour. But in the Nyakyusa case the money was directly appropriated and regularly used to get the old man (only rarely the son) a new wife (Monica Wilson 1977: 87). A Nyakyusa son would typically have to wait for inheritance (after the death of the father and father’s last full brother) to get value back for his labour. Even then he would have the share due him as one of many sons, in a particular standing among brothers and halfbrothers, with no relation to individual input.<<[lit]

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In Kingaland the money remained the son’s own and inheritance a minor concern. The influx of money from abroad led to a gradual but implacable inflation of bridewealths. Though the money now passed from one old man to another, as in Nyakyusaland, it was the son who acquired the wife. A son, having borrowed at least as much again as he’d banked by the time of his marriage, would continue working for years to pay off debts and purchase the furnishings of the good life before settling down. Through those years the hard work of his wife in the fields redounded to his and her benefit. I found no sense among Kinga young men that this routine was imposed on them by their elders as a class. Granted there were some young Turks in 1960 prepared to rebel against the inflation of bridewealths, they only blamed the girl’s fathers for private greed—they didn’t think of blaming a whole generation. In our discussions I had no sense of deeply ambivalent father-son relations behind the rebellion. (It soon fizzled.) Nyakyusa boys don’t go through the same kind of open and cathartic rebellion against their fathers in a “wild” period of boyhood that Kinga experience, and can’t be declared so free of Oedipal involvement. Even their emancipation from the parental domicile is, by Kinga standards, belated. Unbroken allegiance to paternal authority, entailing identification with the father’s rampantly heterosexual persona, can account for the headstrong way a Nyakyusa youth turns from the early, undramatic peer eroticism of his age village, letting himself be drawn into a restless heterosexual life bursting with erotic-aggressive energies. By contrast the character kept by a Kinga youth is cool and Apollonian. He finds working in distant places with friends made there a sophisticating, character building experience quite on a par with marriage. But it’s palpably not to be presumed that an adamantly heterosexual youth would be so content in his sexually most active years with such an arrangement. The heterosexual rolemodel for a Kinga youth is not a father known at close quarters but a prince hardly known at all. It’s also the case that settled Nyakyusa men, in all the reports which have characterized them, have never been attributed hyper-aggressive personalities: I infer the phenomenon is role-specific. The Culwicks give us a graphic portrait of the riverine Bena as enthusiastic philanderers, copiously heterosexual in their orientation and hardly troubled by the sundry related anxieties Western observers are prone to expect. The ethnographers lack Malinowski’s flare, but one senses they’ve read and were reminded of his descriptions of Trobriand manners and mores (1929). The evidence is firm that, on the psychological plane at least, the Bena~Hehe political

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merger was far from producing an integral, common culture. Here is Edgerton writing of the Hehe: ...Not that they are to be confused with the Puritans; but, compared to the other tribes of this study, they are notable in their emphasis upon the control of sexual desire, and upon sexual sin and concealment. Both sexes repeatedly said that men and women must learn to control their desires for sexual intercourse, yet both sexes admitted to having strong desires... Proper Hehe conceal their sexual enjoyment; it is not something to be reveled in, as members of other tribes often do (Edgerton 1971: 112-3).

Euphoric eroticism (“reveling”) does imply promiscuity, since it is only in the casual relationship that serious personal concerns can be banished from the scene of heightened emotion. If the anthropology of sex offers any clear lessons, here is one. The epicurean and stoical utopias are incompatible. If the riverine Bena enjoy an emancipated sex life, and the Hehe endure a disciplined one, the Kinga should be said to strike a sort of Greek balance: eroticism is the last adjective I’d apply and repression the next-last. Kinga attitudes toward sexuality are illuminated in their own response to the Magoma, who share their highland country, set apart only by a marginally fordable river and the mists which normally enshroud Magomaland throughout the wet season. An experienced informant who served for some years as magistrate both for Magoma and for Kinga trouble cases (under the Native Authority which assigned Magoma to the Western subchiefdom of the Kinga) was scathing in his judgement. This was not out of any personal puritanism but did express a distaste for alien and, as he thought, dishonourable conduct: We say the country is going rotten these days. Our fathers would never have believed the extent of thieving and running out on debts. But that is not their problem in Magoma, no! There they bring but two kinds of case, divorce and adultery, divorce and adultery. Men there are doing a regular business in adultery now. You see the money passing back and forth before your eyes between husband and wife. What does that mean if it’s not conspiracy? He’s put her up to it in the first place, they’ve had it all arranged ahead of time to trap the poor fellow who’s come home with his money from work for a little visit. Over the space of a few months they’ll be netting a thousand shillings or more from the business. Why should they work when others will do it for them? I know Magoma men who are bitter, they fear even to marry a Magoma woman. And that is in spite of the reasonable bridewealth [cattle worth less than a thousand shillings, perhaps a fifth of the Kinga bridewealth]. Fancy putting your wife up to such filthy business!<<[lit]

Magoma courtship also earned this informant’s scorn, not because of the unsegregated dormitories as such: “Magoma and

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Ukinga are distinct. Magoma has always had its own law, completely its own, and it is as valid today as it ever was.” The scorn was for what he considered an abuse of the system, the introduction of pre-adolescent girls to coital relations. He averred the practice was against Magoma’s own customary norms and that there had been genuine efforts at reform, “but they have always failed. That is Magoma!” We are left to imagine what the intrepidly heterosexual Magoma think of Kinga morals—I gathered no testimony on that score. Kinga young men were more inclined to dwell on the physical virtues of Magoma girls than their morals. When you asked why they seemed so slow to cross the river in courtship, you’d usually get a horror story, versions of which I got from older informants as well. It was a standard tale and may tell us less about Magoma than Kinga erotic patterns. A young man is seduced by a charming Magoma wench and, after consummation, falls asleep. He awakes terrified to find she is taking his seed again, now orally. Our hero strikes the witch down and flees naked across the river to safety: what could have been meant but witchery? How could two cultures persist side by side without mutual disapproval on such fundamental matters of outlook? Yet Magoma and Mahanzi sexual styles are essentially alike, contrasting to the Kinga, and there are Kinga-Mahanzi communities where youth of the two traditions have shared the same life—where indeed the traditions are no longer separate, since intermarriage began several generations ago. Probably the best schematic model for appreciating the close ethnographic context of Kinga ambisexuality would be one which first laid down an approximation of old-time bush-Kinga sexual style by looking at recent Wanji and Mahanzi patterns. Then the ambisexual stance of the Kinga as we know it derives from the overlay of new role motives associated with the Sanga court culture. This is the style which accords equal if separate honour to own-sex and cross-sex love relations between individuals: that is, the -manyana [knowing love] of peers and the -ganana [longing love] of courtship. In the Wanji and Mahanzi cases, own-sex relations are less fully developed. The sleeping accommodations for children are segregated by sex from late childhood and there is a long “adolescence” during which the two peer cultures are separate; but the separation is amply compromised through regular visiting by boys in the girls’ chambers. Marriage normally comes (1960) for both sexes in the third decade, earlier or later as circumstance may dictate. Any ethnography of the varying sexual styles in the Wanji-KingaMahanzi-Magoma highlands may give the misleading impression of

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neat boundaries and, within them, uniform practice. But there are (1960) and long have been “mixed” communities on each of the supposed boundaries, and no one has ever thought them abominations. Uniformity is not a salient characteristic of any of these (arbitrarily) named cultures. But with those reservations I’ll try to give a picture as explicit as my information allows. Starting from Nyakyusaland one may follow a roughly spatial gradient eastward through Magoma and Mahanzi to Kinga, already discussed. (But since Wanji social life has been systematically studied, if not yet published, by the anthropologist William Garland, I forgo presenting the cursory information I have.) Selya is the dialect-community of Nyakyusa with which Magoma (and Mahanzi or Kinga) have the readiest contact. Nsyani, who was himself well along in marriage when the Germans arrived there, said the norm before the pax wasn’t child betrothal (that was a minor pattern) but marrying “grown girls.” He gives the name isaka to a house built by the men of a village for their daughters, with the suggestion that it was the competition for girls and bridewealths after the pax which led men to abandon the isaka with its freedoms in favour of tighter control. In the cases of puberty seclusion witnessed by the Wilsons in the 1930s the place was the girl’s own mother’s hut, since no special isaka was to be found, but the floor of the hut was specially strewn with leaves and prepared for an invasion by the girl, her peers in the village, and their boyfriends, all in traditional fashion. Nsyani adds, “We slept with our sisters in isaka when we were grown up,” a phrase which doesn’t imply incest but does indicate the communal (as distinct from strict kinship) basis for the festivity. For Nyakyusa this merry invasion was supposed to continue for three months or so, culminating in the marriage. The period of seclusion with friends was a period of ‘ritual license’ as well as straight ritual activity.<<[lit] Magoma in 1960 reported a tradition, still lively, not very far removed from that, only less prolonged or ritually developed. Magoma villages had each an isaka, where younger and older girls slept together and the older girls received regular visits from suitors. The puberty seclusion party was held not there but in the mother’s house. From the moment she discovered the blood of menarche a girl was expected to sit weeping until her “mothers” came to take charge. Her seclusion hut was strewn with leaves, and it was there she received puberty instruction: only an hour’s lesson in the dangers connected with menstruation and the rules for avoiding them. Then the hut was given over to a party exclusively for the unmarried girls of the neighbourhood and bachelor young men of their circle. Of their frolics I know only

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that they should be lively and would last about a week; they weren’t expected to culminate in marriage, differing in this from Nyakyusa custom at least in the 1930s. In respect of the treatment of menstruation and various other details of the handling of youth, it wouldn’t be misleading to call the Magoma a “bush culture” to the chiefly “court culture” of Selya, though I know too little of their common history (and particularly of the difference made by the coming of Fungo military rulers to Magoma from Sanguland, in the nineteenth century) to do more than suggest this as a line of study. Magoma, as seasonal transhumants up and down the escarpment, had always been in contact with the Nyakyusa, while contacts with the Kinga had been tentative before the Europeans came. Magoma elders avowed their women were cursed with “thin blood”: an affliction which translates roughly as nymphomania. There was no assumption that Magoma males were, in equivalent culturecomparative terms, oversexed. Their lively interest in girls, from an early age, was thought natural enough. But it was believed Kinga girls were more self-controlled and could for that reason afford to marry late without producing “nameless children” at home. The father of a Magoma girl would begin to worry if she were still unwed about four years after menarche, which I take to mean when she was approaching twenty. By that time her “blood would be getting very, very thin.” Magoma men weren’t traditionally expected to marry until thirty or older: my Kinga companion on this trip was 34 and rated still too young by yesteryears’ standards. This set of rules implies a predilection for polygyny and comparison with the Nyakyusa. But Magoma, reversing the pattern we saw for Nyakyusa, witnessed under the pax a recession in the relative value of bridewealths in spite of having got more cattle, a considerable drop in the marriage age for men but not for women, and a de-emphasis of polygyny, all without benefit of clergy. Magoma, like Kinga, seem to have been prepared to annihilate the very class and sexual status differences which still in the 1950s were the mainsprings of Nyakyusa organization. The Mahanzi child, like the Magoma or Kinga, begins peer life in the fourth year, “because we don’t want one kid around while we’re begetting another.” The little one will join other children of the neighbourhood, of both sexes, who will be keeping their own house jointly; but the eldest of these children will be only eight or nine, since at that age they will be getting sophisticated about sex. “Cat and mouse can’t live together” was the Mahanzi saying. Usually a children’s house will have half a dozen residents. Should there get to be many more than that there may be quarreling. Then someone will offer them another

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house, so the group may split in favour of compatibility. A boy’s next residence will be the ikivaga belonging (usually) to the petty ruler of the hamlet. There the young boys always have a mat to themselves, collectively, as Berlin Missionary Nauhaus learned on his first visit: As I lay down to sleep, eight adolescent youths disposed themselves at the other end of the hut to take their night’s rest, whilst between them and me were standing half a dozen goats. You can imagine what a lovely smell this dispensed all night. I didn’t want to estrange the folk, else they would most assuredly have had to seek out other quarters for themselves and their goats. Next morning one of my bearers expressed his surprise that they hadn’t left the hut all to me. The answer was, “We saw that all your fellows had left the place, so we thought, well, we can’t leave the master all alone” (BMB 1897: 197-8).

In all this, except in some linguistic differences, the Magoma and Mahanzi cultures are to be distinguished only by the political centralization of Magoma under the Fungo ruler Mwenentela, who alone kept a men’s house. This place injengelo could sleep sixty, men and boys sharing opposite ends, and was a centre for the preparation and distribution of medicines. These were the Fungo specialty, including specifics for use in war and against disease. Mwenentela was a doctor-chief, who sat on his stool in the injengelo dispensing homemade medicine for pox and justice for men and women equally. Considered in regional context, the Fungo establishment was built on its own lines; but the late age of marriage fashionable for men suggests he kept, in effect, a bachelor army at his capital in good Sanga fashion; and this is indeed the boast of his descendants. The isivaga in outlying hamlets were in this case put up by the boys themselves and in that respect reminiscent of Nyakyusa. That is, these houses were less well integrated into the adult village than the Mahanzi or court-Kinga isivaga. The difference in sexual style between Magoma and Mahanzi is to be seen in the isaka. The girls’ house in the Magoma case has become an open house where older girls receive boys and younger girls are ideally recruited to the game only as they become “big enough” (they can expect several years between getting an adult body and menarche). Boys old enough to take an interest in girls maintain citizenship in the boys’ house but leave it after nightfall for the isaka of a neighbouring community, returning in early dawn. Although this is sometimes described as a recent trend, my oldest informants among the Magoma had known it themselves and didn’t hesitate discussing it openly with young men still courting in this manner. It was a pattern alien to Mahanzi informants, who evinced a Nyakusa-style concern with the technical chastity of maidens and expected older girls to

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manage the isaka with a disciplinary hand. Girls’ houses in Mahanzi tradition were communal not private, though small and sometimes shared even with wee girls “who wanted to leave their mothers” but had neither a mixed children’s house nor a grandmother nearby. The house would be built by the “fathers” of its occupants and roofed and daubed by the “mothers,” who thus retained a proprietary interest. Boys who visited must do so on the girls’ terms and often were sent packing for sauciness: “Go lie with your mother!” More like the Magoma girls’ house was the Mahanzi ingumbwe [pit-house]. This structure is often mentioned in ethnographic notices as a ‘Kinga specialty’, but I believe it was most popular in the Mahanzi-influenced Western realm. (This was the house discouraged as primitive by the Germans.) It was a roomy underground dutch oven which made an ideal retreat for a frosty night, and here underage children were not allowed (it was “bad for their health” ) but serious courtship might be. Still, technical chastity remained the rule. Regularly before menarche and monthly after each menstruation a Mahanzi girl must submit to “inspection” by her “mothers” in a sort of running initiation school which could earn her a most unceremonious set of welts about the crotch. The ladies would pinch to draw blood if they found a girl had let a boy go too far: “Stop this! Never again! Do you want to have a child at your father’s house?” They’d force a confession from her and a compact to mend her ways. But the affective colouring of the “school” seems to have been positive in spite of the occasional pinch. A girl’s “mothers” knew her heart and could help arrange marriage with her true love, ideally only a year or so after menarche. These notes comprise the elders’ (1960) retrospect on tradition, though by that year Kinga~Mahanzi differences were disappearing. The custom of child betrothal [K: ukulila], though eccentric, was known throughout the highlands, and the different attitudes of informants toward it seemed to me to bespeak their different ethnic traditions. Magoma and Mahanzi said a spur was the immediate realization of half the bridewealth by the father of a girl; Magoma and bush-Kinga regarded personal alliance as a major motive on the part of both men; and Mahanzi had also a special explanation, that some men would be so unattractive to girls that they were spurned by every one in spite of becoming rich. These were the men who could be entrapped by the canny father of a wee girl who didn’t know her own mind. After eating half the bridewealth this kind of father would never be content: “I want some fish—go get it!” “I’ll have your cow to eat!” The ugly fellow is plagued and made sport of in this way but has his will when the girl

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reaches menarche and must be delivered, most often by force and over the outraged resistance of her mother. Tales of child betrothal have a place in highland folklore like that of the bogeyman in ours. The custom seems nonetheless to have been protected by contract law, though only in the face of moral feelings which practically limited it to deals between two particularly insensitive men. Of the three highland cultures here considered, Magoma, Mahanzi, and Kinga, the one which encouraged both sexes to marry in early adulthood was Mahanzi. The association there with a heterosexual norm, predominant monogamy, relative pacifism, and mutuality in political matters is hard to miss. As a cultural tradition in its own right, bush Kinga remains a phantom, having to be distilled out of the testimony of older men and women who generally assume the universality of their own early experience. The most direct additional evidence I thought I might be able to gather would have been the testimony of Mawemba and bush (unpoliticized) Bena informants. But the Mawemba, who had succeeded in avoiding even the German missionaries, had no difficulty with me. Mysteriously, a village perched for all to see on a wide-open hilltop, in a season of short grass, would turn out to be devoid of life when I came to call. Perhaps I should have scoured the earth for the region’s last examples of the famous pithouses. The other notion also came to naught: if a bush Bena tradition did survive the Ngoni-Hehe turmoils, it also survived my inquiries. As judged by language and the history of contacts, the two other populations close enough to bush Kinga for my purpose were the Wanji and Pangwa. It seemed the presence of a likely trait in both these cultures would be prima facie confirmation of its presence in bush Kinga culture, which falls (not intrusively) between the others spatially. The Wanji I can’t deal with in satisfactory detail. Pater Hans Stirnimann found the Pangwa lineage-organized and polygynous. The difference here from the Kinga is certainly one of degree, but evidently not one of kind. Exogamous rules are modest as with Kinga, and localized descent groups (unless in the storied past) are not strictly agnatic. In common with the Kinga, Pangwa equip their communities with separate men’s and women’s houses, so the sexes receive essentially separate socialization. A child was traditionally weaned about six (!) and sent, according to gender, to the ishyengo [men’s and boys’ house] or inanda [maidens’ house] belonging to the localized lineage. “Of homosexual relations among youths of the ishyengo, as reported of the neighbouring Kinga and Nyakyusa, there is nothing to be learnt in Upangwa. Such a state of affairs would be adjudged as witchcraft and punished severely.” We are further told that marriages

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were arranged between virgin youths and maidens as soon as they were thought ready. About the difficulties such a system would generate (preventing a following pregnancy for the six years of nursing, patterning polygyny and early marriage of men, and controlling arousal among boys sleeping together for warmth) there is unfortunately nothing to be learnt in the good Father’s book. There seems to be an element of realism missing, though we may take it that certain Pangwa like to picture their past in terms their ethnographer would approve. If the bush Kinga of long ago did impose such a régime upon themselves they must have welcomed the Sanga reforms with open arms. From my own cross-border information I’d not expected to hear of doctrinaire heterosexualism among any immediate neighbours of the Kinga, even the nearer Bena communities. I should none the less expect the Kinga of court tradition to remain a unique case for their idealization of Platonic love (sex not left out) between men.<<[lit] On the question of the role of libido in relation to moral strategy, considered on the Kinga evidence, it is hard to find for the Freudians. Sexuality is a veritable fountain of sentient motivation for Kinga as for us all. But here is a force which appears to accommodate so easily to circumstance—to ego’s social situation and its role requirements—that little can be said for this libido as a driver of psyches. Narcissism (ego-libido) is balanced by object-libido, inversion by extraversion of sexual orientation. For both genders peer love is ultimately non-possessive. For women the bond with an infant is treasured on a par with any, yet the child set free of the breast is set emotionally free. It seems to me the key to understanding the Kinga libido is to start with the premise that it answers flexibly to what Freud would have called the ‘interests of the ego’. These he vaguely associated with an instinct of self-preservation or life-force. This was of course a resort to axioms by way of explanation. I prefer a model of the ego not as driven by instinct (whether sexual or otherwise practical) but responsive to sentience on the one hand and role expectation on the other. The Kinga career centres in a neverending preoccupation with personal goals meant to enhance life with others—what we once were content to call the pursuit of happiness. Sex is no less important in that pursuit because Kinga, enjoying more permissive circumstances, can afford to be a bit more laid-back about love than the Hehe or the people of Ulaya who so inspired Dr. Freud.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER SIX

Sowetan cultures: status

Privilege and its rules A Western traveler passing among peoples of the Sowetan region before German law was established might have found ‘slaves’ in almost any community, if that term refers broadly to a class of adults with deeply impaired civil rights. In almost every case such a person would have been born ‘free’ and made ‘slave’ through capture in war. The status of the ‘slave’ was a function of local war patterns. Only where war is a major institution can we expect slavery to be such; yet the one institution doesn’t necessarily beget the other. Three border peoples in the Sowetan region clearly had institutionalized adult male slavery as a sequel to capture in warfare: the Ngoni, the Hehe, and the Ngonde. (About the Sangu in this respect I have no information.) Of these three only the Ngonde seem to have waged wars whose sole and explicit purpose was marketing captives; and that practice was scarcely begun when in 1875 a European presence was established and began to combat it. Though Hehe warriors kept (or turned over to their chiefs in tribute) many captives, these ‘slaves’ were rarely grown men. Under Mkwawa in the 1880s, Hehe must have enjoyed substantial trading contacts, following the earlier Sangu pattern, with caravans dealing in guns and slaves; but Mkwawa was best known for his constant harassment of the Arab caravans, not trade with them . Hehe did establish an hereditary class of kept royal slaves, the Wafugua, as an unclean caste, assigned to peculiar duties at the capital. But for the most part the aim of Hehe in war was to capture, along with the cattle which were their great prize, women and children to swell their own ranks as an expanding nation. One does not hear that Hehe refrained from massacring men in the field in consideration of the price they might bring in trade.<<[lit]

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This particular predatory pattern stands in contrast to the pattern of Bemba and Yao to the south of the Sowetan region or the Nyamwezi to the north, whose wars had become instruments of the coastal slave trade. The Sowetan pattern seems to be an adaptation of the scenario introduced to the region by Ngoni hordes in the 1840s. Whatever political consolidation may have been achieved before that time among proto-Hehe peoples, the idea of expanding a tribe through capture was new. At the time of the pax the Ngoni had only latterly found a country and settled down to being overlords, keeping as subject peoples the remnants of defeated enemies, including notably the population now known as Ndendeuli. Since the Tanzanian people called Ngoni today belong linguistically to the Sowetan region, the conversion of ‘slave’ to Ngoni ‘citizenship’ clearly went quickly while the horde was on the move. The status of subject peoples in a settled Ngoni polity is distinct, paralleled in the region only by the Wanji and Safwa subjects of the Sangu.<<[lit] With minor exceptions, the peoples incorporated into a Hehe state during the two later generations of the nineteenth century continued to identify with it under German and British rule. Probably most Wanji or Safwa men who actually fought for the Sangu leader Merere stayed with him, also, as full citizens, as his was a thriving community in the initial German years. Though Sowetan peoples were touched into radical transformation by multiple, direct and indirect contacts with the great forces of change coursing through southern and eastern Africa in the earlymiddle decades of the nineteenth century, the resulting transformations in the heart of the region were generally constructive. There was destruction enough: by the Ngoni themselves and by the Sangu and Hehe tyrants who were able to organize their own booty-driven hordes in a period of predatory empire building. But in other parts the established ethnic boundaries held, under the rule of complex politico-ritual systems which had been evolving throughout the medieval period. The Ngonde shifted toward a more centralized authority. Nyakyusa, Kinga, and Riverine Bena, taken in that order, show a progressive concern with external threat, and a corresponding tightening of internal authority. Looking strictly at internal structure, the political bases of the tyrants themselves, the successive Mereres and Munyigumba/ Mkwawa in Heheland, must have been well and diligently built. As to commerce in slaves and ivory, which was still accelerating in the mid-nineteenth century and encroaching both from the south and the north, except for Ngonde the Sowetan peoples had not before Contact emerged from an initial period of reaction to the new forces.

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An escalating pattern of intra-regional warfare was aimed at aggressive political expansion and consolidation. Only on the western marches were there polities quite settled back down to the sedentary acquisition of wealth: the Ngonde to the south and Fipa to the north. Except (perhaps) for the Kyungu of uNgonde, Sowetan ‘sultans’ even to Merere and Mkwawa were set apart rather by protocols of deference than by a sumptuous lifestyle. In the absence of structural economic differentiation, class is a useful concept here here only in its generic sense. So Ndendeuli or Pangwa, qua subject peoples of the Ngoni in Tanganyika, may be seen as a subject (but not servile) ‘class’. Setting aside reactions to change, what evidence do we have of an ethical set in the traditional cultures either favouring or discrediting egalitarian ideas? Some evidence is to be found in looking at the men and women farthest down.<<[lit] Monica Wilson found that the institution of slavery which was a feature of the Ngonde constitution had no counterpart among Nyakyusa; and since the essential ethnographic differences between the two peoples lay in the realm of constitutional law, her distinction is telling. She argues that a Nyakyusa woman did not become a slave in being transferred against her will to a new husband in settlement of a debt between lineages. The case she does admit is the Ngonde one: captives, who may have been taken either in war or in a confiscatory raid upon a “traitor’s” compound. Here is Godfrey Wilson’s account: Not only girls but boys also were sometimes kept as slaves. One of our informants made it clear, however, that it was always possible for a rich family to redeem them later, both boys and girls, by giving one or two beasts in exchange for each... Few of these early slaves appear to have been sold outside Ngonde...nor was there any impassable barrier between slave and free. All our informants maintain that slaves were treated rather as younger sons and daughters than as chattels, with the one exception that they could be sold to another man. A woman slave married by a free man herself at once became free, and the children of two married slaves were free also (1939: 49).

I find it too subtle to hold that a woman is free who is transferred in lieu of a cow, while a woman transferred in return for a cow is a slave. But the mischief is in our language. We have only the category slave for reference and we tie it to a pure type of economic transaction. Godfrey Wilson was able to glean only vague information through the mists of time from the period before the infamous Arab traders intruded into the Ngonde region and imposed a Mediterranean institution upon it. But it is doubtful that the “sale” of a captive in traditional Ngonde society was ever an essentially economic transaction.

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The best regional analogue may be the exchange entailed in a marriage: under the form of exchange, two men are affirming an alliance. As to ‘slavery’ itself what distinguishes the Ngonde situation from the Nyakyusa is the suspension of kinship ties and rights in the former case; but Godfrey Wilson shows us that they could be reasserted, where the conflict was internal to the Ngonde polity, if the affected lineage had survived. This kind of slavery bears a family resemblance to the institution of hostage-taking, meant to force payment of an outstanding debt. All the same, Monica Wilson was right to assert the free condition of Nyakyusa women even while documenting the abridgment of their rights on account of gender. The crucial distinction is the one Sir Henry Maine called a shift from status to contract in the evolution of law. Where the main guarantor of your civil rights is an organized lineage, a rupture of kinship ties, whether by war or natural accident, may reveal you as a creature of the ‘contracts’ or special, reciprocal arrangements you can make on an individual basis. For a woman, the main opportunity in Sowetan culture was marriage; for a child, filiation by adoption; for a man, if the institution was known, service. Each arrangement is asymmetrical—the castaway is in no position to demand a full return on service—and results in a standing relationship of inequality. In some cultural contexts the ‘contractual’ status will be temporary; but it may also become institutionalized. The ‘contract’ then becomes a relationship of dominance and submission. Though evidence doesn’t permit proving the case, it does permit arguing that the origin of adult male slavery in Ngonde, and hence the institution of service, may well have been those wars with the Bemba (intruding from the west) which antedated the coming of slave and ivory traders to Ngonde in 1875. Before that, owing to earlier, massive contacts with those same traders, slaves had become common and notoriously cheap among the Bemba, who were rapidly adopting predation as a way of life. Hence it is likely even the “traditional institution” of slavery Godfrey Wilson describes for Ngonde owed more to overseas markets and Arab entrepreneurship than to a more spontaneous kind of change within Sowetan regional culture.<<[lit] What of Bena and Hehe slaves? Again we face the difficulty of glimpsing a ‘traditional’ pattern belonging to the period before Ngoni intrusions had started the chain reaction in Sangu-Hehe-Bena communities which elevated chiefs into tyrants. The pattern of slavery late in the nineteenth century was a function of the pattern of war itself. Slavery had come as a by-product of war, and was

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certainly augmented by the role motives of the seasoned warrior, who expected such benefit from his female slaves that he was inspired to battle in the hope of winning more. What is clear is that none of these peoples had developed the institution of slavery to the point where they could have handled a strong infusion of adult male captives: the pattern was extreme cruelty in the field and in sacking settlements, extending murder even to immature males. Logically we must ask if women, had they not been a politically castrated class throughout the region, would have fared any better than their men in defeat. Supposing that as furious a war pattern might have developed over the rape of cattle and corn, captured women being thought more trouble than their worth, I take it they’d have been slaughtered like men. What is certain is this: whenever Sowetan men escalated warfare to slaughter, women had no rational choice but to behave as non-combatants, and by so doing dramatically to confirm their relegation to ‘inferior’ status in the regional scheme of things. The rather high status of Kinga women must owe much to their location well away from the region’s outer-crescent ‘slaughter belt’. The status of the matured-in-captivity male slave is particularly interesting as an indication of the ethical bias in these cultures toward egalitarian norms. Our best description is in Rev. Priebusch’s answers to the Fragebogen. He was the respondent to the official questionnaire on behalf of the Bena community. Here are the main points treated in items 27-30: Slavery persists though only with individual headmen of the tribe, slaves being considered members of the family. A semi-slavery of this kind is often found. For the most part one buys the slave while it is still a child; when grown up a slave is treated like any other member of the family. Nothing is known about the origin of slavery. Many individuals are enslaved as prisoners of war; compelled by famine, some people have to sell their relatives to save them from starvation. A mature slave can find opportunities to acquire property, for example through military expeditions in which he shares the spoils, or by working diligently. Slaves are married among themselves by the owner and receive their own homesteads. What they possess belongs to them for life, but property reverts to the master at death...[and] the children belong to him. Through the death of his master an adult slave may be freed... If the slave is a child at the time he...will be awarded to an heir. Slaves can also be redeemed by relatives... The children of slaves also become slaves. However it is not unusual for the son of a slave-owner to marry the daughter of a slave, and their child will be free. Likewise the son of a slave may marry a daughter of the master. In so doing the slave becomes free. [Fragebogen]<<[lit]

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In discussing legal privilege in the same document (Item 71), Priebusch holds that slaves are equally entitled with others to enter an action, the same being true for women. Though “one cannot speak of a nobility,” there are persons distinguished in war or otherwise who are called Avatambule, a word meaning “privileged persons.” They are honoured as individuals, but their families have no share in this. Even rulers (other than the paramount chief) may be taken to law by their subjects, such cases being heard by the Paramount. We know less of Hehe law as it illuminates the problems of freedom and civil rights (or equality) within a militaristic society, but except for special customs associated directly with the tyrant’s court what we do know is not inconsistent with the Bena pattern Priebusch describes. Kinga and Nyakyusa reliance on peer socialization seem practically inconsistent with the institution of slavery, especially for males; and if we knew more of the Ngonde case we might assess what kind of resolution was found there. Both Kinga and Nyakyusa war patterns focussed on cattle and the occasional capture of women; but in both cases the woman’s status was irregular until she was either returned or properly married into the captor community. We have seen that, if in a less pronounced way, Bena ethics also were averse to regularizing disprivilege. So slavery within any line would have tended to die out, and the institution probably was maintained mostly through its new recruits—women and children freshly captured in war. Setting aside now the old German questionnaire and its premises, I expect the main issue in connection with slavery should be the way slaves were treated—and why—not simply the sense and extent to which the institution existed. For Kinga we have shown that captured women were held until they had born and weaned a child; and that these “slave” children (if the term may be so stretched) grew up as adopted members of the Sanga descent group of that locality— that is, virtually as royals. Their special status was known well enough to other royals; but to non-Sanga the distinction, if known at all, would not have been important. The Sanga melting pot operated so as to expand the personnel and influence of royal descent groups wherever they were. Royal policies of expansion created a ‘frontier’ and the motivation toward achievement which a frontier can generate. Compared to the Hehe, Nyakyusa, or especially Ngonde, the Kinga status system was open. If we now look at the status systems of the Sowetan region with an eye to this quality of openness or closure, the main division seems to lie between the inner and outer crescents, as those desig-

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nations have been outlined earlier. The Bena and Hehe are classified by Murdock (1981) as possessed of hereditary slavery and a “dual” class system—that is, an hereditary aristocracy which is significantly privileged as over against a larger commonalty. Had data been available on Sangu they would probably have fallen with Bena and Hehe on both scores. Safwa, Nyakyusa, and Ngonde are classed as possessed of institutionalized, non-hereditary slavery, but only the Ngonde among these three is regarded as having an aristocracy with hereditary privilege. With the Nyakyusa, whose aristocratic statuses are only weakly hereditary, Kinga, Wanji, and Pangwa would be classed on Murdock’s criteria as lacking stratification. In general, the ethos of the outer crescent favours stronger status distinctions, whether in relation to caste or class, while that of the inner crescent favours weaker or at least impermanent distinctions.<<[lit] Population size (of the integral polity as inferred from permanent alignments in war) correlates nicely with the strength of status distinctions. But calling the outer-crescent peoples ‘stratified’ and the inner ‘egalitarian’ is like reducing the rainbow to black and white. Strong distinctions and rigid tabus may sometimes be functionally related traits. In broad ethnographic perspective Sowetan cultures don’t have rigid tabus, unless Nyakyusa avoidances would qualify. But rites of passage may have a similar function to tabu, in sanctioning status distinctions. In the Sowetan region the Hehe practise clitoridectomy, while Pangwa, Bena, and Kinga practise a far less severe mutilation. These three regard their operation as a preparatory aid to good sex relations with men, and Kinga profess dismay when told of the Hehe operation, for they take it to be a sexual crippling of women. One of the major meanings of ‘puberty’ rites the world over is confirmation in an adult gender status; the peculiar aptness of circumcision for males or labiotomy for females lies in the implication that adulthood is an identity conferable only by organized society, not a condition which an individual achieves naturally or might unilaterally lay claim to. <<[lit] Since adulthood requires an artificial transformation of one’s visible nature, yet one which in itself is fearsome, the advent of puberty throws the growing child into a new sort of dependency on the adult community, boys upon men and girls upon women. The absence or weak development of male puberty rites in the Sowetan cultures is presumably a reflection of the nature of the male identity in each of the component cultures: the need for sanctions on ‘male solidarity’

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may be weak precisely because it is achieved by other means. The concomitant importance of female puberty rites has obverse significance: the need for sanctioning female solidarity is perceived to be greater. The background facts are the dispersal of women in marriage, on the one hand, and politicized community among men, on the other. Here, ritual sanctions (the case of the women) may be seen as an oblique equivalent to the direct political sanction of mutual loyalty (the case of the men). Yet turning to the outer crescent, what are we to think of a female sodality which insists on cutting off a young person’s erectile organ as a condition to her assumption of adult sexual privilege? Considered as a message from Hehe women to their juniors concerning the condition of their kind, the rite seems cruel however honest. To understand status you have to be clear what conditions determine where a particular status will be a confinement and where a liberation. When Maine described early Rome as a status society he had in mind the submergence of an individual (in respect to legal rights) in the group which could be said to sponsor him vis-à-vis political society: the classic model is that of the clan- or lineage society. But the peculiar situation that Maine had to consider was one of a hybrid kind of polity, in which numerous small kinship units, internally immune to legal intervention, comprised a series of gemeinschaftlich, infra-political communities joined together by law through their heads in a polity governed by gesellschaftlich norms. Were individuals confined or liberated by membership of a Roman family? Sowetan segmentary polities could be hasty amalgams like that of the Hehe or Sangu, pyramidal alliances like that of the Riverine Bena (centralized by their ‘royal school’ and by the non-segmentary loyalties of its graduates the Wenyekongo) or properly segmentary proto-states like that of the Kinga or early Ngonde. Nyakyusa, Safwa, Wanji, and Pangwa were further variants upon the segmentary theme. In each case the political scaffolding represented a superstructure consistent with the continued autonomy of local, face-to-face polities internally stabilized by consensualism. It was that basic stability which made possible the adventure in higher levels of political order.<<[lit] Turning now to truly local-level politics—in Kinga terms, the local domain of around a thousand marital households—how did consensualism work? We know that where the people (the effective cultural group) was not threatened from without, the local domains (political

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segments of the group) would be fighting among themselves. One source of stability was accordingly the solidarity of necessity. But the major source was the liberating status of manhood in each of these societies, which brought it about that the local community constituted a league of free citizens. The distinction we make between volunteers and draftees, or patriots and mercenaries, suggests something of what I mean concerning the status of the competent male adult among the Kinga, Bena, or Nyakyusa (and, to the best of my knowledge, among the other peoples of the region as well). The Ndendeuli under Ngoni hegemony lost their sense of enjoying the fullest dignity of manhood, and would not be content until they had won back independence under the British. What unimpaired adult status meant for males in the traditional cultures of the Sowetan region becomes clear when you ask what men lost who were captured and sold off as slaves. Something else appears, I believe, when you ask how much women stood to lose in the same circumstance.<<[lit] Monica Wilson reports the remark of an educated Nyakyusa man, probably in the 1930s, to the effect, “We Africans have become the women of the Europeans.” What would it have meant to a Nyakyusa man actually to wake up possessed only of a female body and status? He would have lost a bundle of privileges, large and small, comprising the very elements of his freedom. Personal freedom is not a natural or absolute condition. It doesn’t consist only in the absence of constraint but entails an indefinitely branching set of privileges linked to your social identity or status. If men and women did not compare their respective privileges I suppose they might report equal portions of freedom, however discrepant their social endowments in point of fact. Traditional societies are often supposed to approach this condition: socially engineered distinctions between the sexes are ‘naturalized’ and never questioned. This is Maine’s ‘status society’. <<[lit] We are familiar with the similar sanctions of caste distinction (drawn on racial lines) which have prevailed until recently in the West. It seems to me folly to argue custom blinds us to the privileges we enjoy any more than it does to those we envy in others: the level of our accommodation to such social realities is not the unconscious mind but that of the culturally sanctioned premise, which provides an axiomatic basis for social action. It is probably no distortion to say we all have deep in our minds the native sense for ‘natural rights’ which we evinced as children among peers. In the most conventional societies, men and women, élite folk and commoners do consciously indulge in comparisons. That each person is normally locked into the system

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which affords him his peculiar status, with all the advantages and disadvantages entailed, is not evidence of blindness. If there is a child at the back of my mind there is a rational skeptic guarding the front. The governing questions are: What do I gain by staying? What if I exit? What we know from ethnographic cases is that feelings always underlie and harden structural lines. Generally in stratified societies a difference is enjoyed within the superior status group and resented within the other, though the feelings are not the kind an observer is bound to perceive. A status system is not just a collection of technically related statuses—man, woman, child—warrior, priest, minstrel— but a complex moral balance which allocates greater ego-strength to some at the expense of others, in accordance with socially-defined distinctions. The usual lines of distinction are such as seniority, sex, local privilege, esoteric knowledge, and property. I think no actual status system is quite one-sided in respect of any social relationship. Even slavery when it approaches that limit ceases to be social. On the way to the gas chamber the guards were not cracking jokes about Jews or even secretly admiring their bodies or noticing bravery. Dominance, where it is humane, has rewards brutality banishes. There can be enrichment in a dependent relationship, even in the peculiar sort of spiritual parasytism charisma can foster. Unequal matings can be barren but don’t have to be. Human status systems are built on realities of this general order. Sociality is not a function of status equivalence, and dominance is not the only string on which to play the tune of difference. Some of the most stimulating status systems create little overall inequality, though in any major relationship the allocation of some privileges will be skewed. A Kinga woman enjoys a closer relationship to her daughter than a Kinga man to his son. Young men enjoy security in relation to a brother, where the tie is patterned as unequal, which is missing in their relations with peer-competitors. Kinga men enjoy snubbing women in the arena of the law-court, and women men in respect of certain bodies of ritual and gardening lore. The rhetorical trade-offs are many and multiplex even in the simplest status systems. I have argued that the Kinga system works better, over the long cycle of a full life, for most women than for most men, since it is typically women who achieve the greater self-sufficiency: at the level of ego they are ultimately the stronger sex. But it is equally true that men are the artists, though the same difference is not apparent

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among children. Men remain the adventurers, the dreamers, the lawyers of court and beer pot during the better years of their lives. They enjoy a less dutiful, less confined, more liberated lifestyle for as long as their egos stay strong. How shall I then say that men are the dominant sex in Kinga society, or yet say they are not? The equation is too simple to fit the facts. If for any of the Sowetan cultures one gender is to be called dominant it is doubtless the male—at least as concerns structural surfaces. But when that has been granted, there is not an end of the matter. Rainbows are not scalar. The three Sowetan cultures for which our ethnographic information permits a comparative discussion of status are the Nyakyusa, the Kinga, and the Riverine Bena; and to these I would add, so far as data permit, the Hehe. The two problems which seem to me to merit special attention are those of the status relations of men and women, and of aristocrat and commoner. They run in parallel.

Men and women The problem of the genders can be framed as a series of questions about dominance: how it is engineered and maintained, what the compensations are. But it may be simpler to ask directly how far the rewards of male dominance (male liberation) are bought at the cost of victimizing women. The implication is hard to miss, when Sowetan cultures are compared to some of the matrilineal peoples in regions to the south, that women are ill protected by an ordering of marriage and residence on the premise (which Nyakyusa make explicit) that “kinship is cattle.” That makes women pawns in a system of exchange responding to the interests of men, or at least to group interests controlled by men. In different ways the Hehe and Nyakyusa (of the four peoples we are considering) emphasize the exchange value of women. They also attach to the status of woman, particularly through the generative years, more confining ties of protocol than the Bena or, especially, the Kinga. The four cultures may be compared under four headings: their handling of sex and sex relations in the narrow sense; the apparatus of formal constraints affecting relations between the sexes; the meaning of adultery; and woman’s access to property.

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Gender and its rules There is no mortification of the male sex organs in the Sowetan region. A minor exception may be the Pangwa, who perform a token sort of nicking on the genitals of all children in the spirit of health care. Females are most severely mutilated by Hehe, least by Nyakyusa. Where Hehe excise the clitoris to ensure fertility, Bena and Kinga excise the labia minora to prepare a girl for better copulation. While there is a common premise that nature is not enough, the ends to which culture must intervene are put differently. Hehe and Bena traditionally patterned early marriage for girls. Rev. Priebusch in the Fragebogen (Item 14) gives the age for Bena girls as 10 to 12 “that is, while still children and even younger.” Nigmann gives the same information for the Hehe, adding that the seduction of little girls, being no offense, is frequently resorted to as a refuge from the difficulties adultery might bring. In both cases the girl’s initiation ought to anticipate puberty, and Brown & Hutt believed a girl must be initiated to be eligible for seduction—but as they also believed Hehe women excised a girl’s hymen and, after showing it to her, buried it under a fruit-bearing tree, we are perhaps permitted to doubt their information on female matters. Bena women throw a girl’s labia into the river, evidently as items without value). The attention of Nyakyusa elders to an immature girl’s equipment is only conservative and status-conscious: the hymen should remain intact until marriage in order to guarantee the girl’s prestige and standing, and make good the full bridewealth. But the cult of virginity in this case is no cult of chastity, since a virgin can have a busy-enough sex life.<<[lit] Is age-discrepancy in marriage a hindrance to mutually pleasant relations? To judge from the woman’s choice of partners in free love relations, a rough parity in age is generally preferred. Bena custom is most lenient in this respect, for if girls marry before puberty boys marry at its onset there. Polygyny seems not to have exploded among the Nyakyusa until after European contact was made, since until that time the young man was content with bachelorhood (supposing it to enhance his valour in war), and most older men were prepared to allow their daughters a leisurely adolescence in the isaka girls’ houses. A mercenary competition for wealth in wives and cattle began with colonial times. For Hehe a similar explosion seems to have occurred generations earlier. Nigmann found an inflated form of polygyny in which men were given wholly to war and its spoils while women (of whom a great number must have originated as captives) did all the

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productive work. Women welcomed their man’s return from a campaign with new wives to share the work, presumably at the bottom of the domestic hierarchy. By the 1930s, though Hehe values were still organized around polygyny, practice had succumbed to the realities of the pax: roughly one taxpayer in four was a bachelor still looking for cattle; as many, for the most part falling in the final phases of the normal life cycle, had set up polygynous households; while nearly half were living in forced monogamy, though girls were still fully married before menarche.<<[lit] Against all these cases, the Kinga pattern (as it had become late in the pax) of courtship in one’s early or mid twenties seems strangely ‘Western’, though it was hardly that in origin; and the tradition of court culture—extended stages of male- and female solidarity before the consideration of marriage—sets that case apart. Though the discrepancy in age may have been a decade or more in the typical Sanga-sponsored marriage, the partners were of an age to consider themselves peers in worldly experience and competence.

Formal constraints Affinal avoidances bear directly on relations between the sexes, since the burden of the taboo, falling on one sex, marks it. For Nyakyusa it is the young woman, for Bena the young man who will practise avoidance toward the parent-in-law of opposite sex. But the constraint, which is life-long for Nyakyusa, is usually soon terminated by a Bena mother-in-law with an hospitable invitation and a food exchange. For Hehe, parents-in-law on both sides are categorically worthy of “ceremonious respect” for the life of a marriage. For Kinga, this symmetrical rule is reduced to the expectation of mutually respectful behaviour.<<[lit] A Hehe marriage is formally supported by the settlement of any outstanding disputes between the families party to it, first at the betrothal and later at the wedding itself, and by the formal adjudication of petty grievances by family councils. Among Kinga, a woman’s brothers may usually be counted upon to intervene (as friends to the marriage) where she is blamed for a lapse of duty, but there is no formal frame to guide them. The same absence of firm etiquette seems to pertain for the Bena. The key to Kinga informality is a reliance on individual conscience: women are hard-working persons rather than dutiful wives, their lives seem most often to be guided by an ego-ideal of emotional self-containment. This is part of what is expressed in their exaggerated claims upon a husband’s sexual services during the (short and widely-spaced) periods when inter-

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course is wanted for achieving a new pregnancy, and with the utmost directness in the long years between, when women seem to require no services more personal than economic help. The same key scarcely applies to the Bena case, where both sexes manifestly need a running series of fresh intrigues to keep up spirits, and otherwise have their eyes and ears cocked sideways for tokens of prestige and bits of gossip. Bena marriages are notably brittle, Kinga the opposite; but the two cultures have in common the expectation that a couple will decide such matters for itself, without reliance on the intervention of kin groups. So, for example, a Kinga man may let the case of a runaway wife go unsettled for years before instituting court action to have the bridewealth returned; and it is his responsibility as the old husband to get it from the new—the kin groups as such take no formal action, as no corporate group stands to gain or lose. In spite of the high bridewealths of the post-1945 period, and the involvement of kin groups in getting and receiving them, marriage remained a contract between individuals. For Nyakyusa girls marriage begins with license. The twelve weeks traditionally spent in the isaka by a bride-to-be after menarche are a time of lazy, erotic play in the company of peers still awaiting puberty, and of casual boy friends. But with marriage formal constraints and duties descend with a vengeance. Compared to a Kinga woman the Nyakyusa does less hard work but enjoys less autonomy. Even in the case of commoners, the junior wife has to observe an elaborate routine of respect vis-à-vis the senior—the conspiratorial and “more or less communistic” ways of Bena co-wives will not work here, although the etiquette of deference in this case is said to confer no authority.<<[lit] It was otherwise in a Nyakyusa woman’s relationship to her husband: Nyakyusa women were expected to observe a pattern of deference, obedience, and service much like that of a son to his father, but continued through life, and transferred from father to husband... A wife was always expected to stoop to greet her husband; she never ate with him, and they never openly enjoyed each other’s company (Monica Wilson 1977: 135-6).

The meaning of adultery Although Monica Wilson reports a case of fatal wife-beating for refusal to allow intercourse (during lactation), and the beating of wives for seemingly small offenses runs like a leitmotif through the cases she cites, adultery in the colonial period came to be “taken for

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granted,” often led to divorce, but might easily be settled by the payment of a cow. The chief sanction upon the woman was mechanical: the mystical fear of harming her child would lead her to confess adultery whenever she considered that her husband was not the father of a child about to be delivered. The difference of attitude between Bena and Nyakyusa is instructive, for the actual rates of adulterous union may have been quite comparable as between the two societies, which share the custom of extracting confessions from women in childbed. Both cultures were studied by husband-wife teams and have been reported with sensitivity to the woman’s point of view. The Culwicks seem to have found no Bena deploring the high rate of adultery there: for both sexes, “variety and the pleasures of eating stolen fruit are the spice of life.” As to the extracted confessions there is more than a hint these are meant for the delectation of women attending a birth, not for the husband’s ears and the institution of legal remedies, as among Nyakyusa.<<[lit] The Nyakyusa may be the only people in the world who positively prescribe intercourse (without penetration) for prepubescent girls, all the while making a fetish of female virginity. A girl’s virginity at marriage evidently is to be taken as a sign of the father’s punishing authority (see especially Nsyani’s testimony in Monica Wilson 1977: 116). A similarly narrow distinction seems to be made in the case of adultery. You preserve the formalities of obedience and submission to your current husband while secretly acting out a fantasy of more egalitarian and voluntaristic union with a man you accept as lover—only at best to go to him eventually as a wife wearing only the old mantle of submission. The adulterous union, like the prepubescent one, is stolen from reality. Except for the Hehe, I know of no legal recognition of the act of rape in the Sowetan region. Fülleborn quotes Adams to the effect that adultery with rape was punished by Mkwawa with the execution of the man, or else settled by a duel, while a woman guilty of willing adultery was herself executed or cruelly whipped. We are unfortunately not in position to ask how a half-willing woman was punished; but it seems it would have been harshly done and in keeping with the unwritten Hehe law of tension-maintenance in sexual matters. Kinga seldom countenance violence in connection with adultery. Considering the chronic absence of the Kinga husband, whether traditionally or under the pax, adultery was infrequent and usually understood to have involved high passion not mere lust.<<[lit]

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Where a Nyakyusa wife’s adultery may be read as a protest against neglect, Kinga women claim the right to legitimate adulterous union when their husbands fail them in the marriage bed; yet the Kinga woman generally seeks recognition in her world through her own achievements as a gardener and reproducer, not by identity with her husband, and in this way she enjoys an autonomy which puts her above such chronic attitudes of protest. Of the four Sowetan cultures we are considering, Kinga stands apart for the chastity of its women. Brown & Hutt write that “a large majority of Hehe women commit adultery” and blame the dissatisfactions of women in polygynous households. Logically, the same position might be taken toward Bena and Nyakyusa rates of adultery, as in all three cultures there seems to be no lack of willing men, wherever a woman is moved by the sense of frustration and neglect to seek a lover. But in fact Bena women prefer polygyny for the prestige, companionship, and mutual help it offers. Where Hehe marriage is “a difficult relationship” imbued with a sense of unfulfilled obligation and frequently giving rise to litigation, Bena seem to think of marriage mainly as the routine side of the great game of sex, which otherwise ought to be “a good sport, a constant adventure, [entailing] no devastating moral conflicts.”<<[lit] Referring to the same period in the evolution of the Native Authorities under British rule, Monica Wilson writes of courts “choked with cases” of which “four out of five were concerned with marriage, divorce, inheritance, and claims for children or for cattle arising from marriage.” A chief’s comment was, “All cases are about women.” The ethical formula which runs through Nyakyusa testimony on domestic life is “that it was cattle that bound a marriage: ‘with us love is small’” (Ibid.: 166); but this seems to have suited the male view (and satisfied the male viewer) better than the female. The cases cited suggest Nyakyusa women are found in adultery not out of anger and frustration with their husbands so much as in pursuit of a kind of sexual love which their culture seems to hold out in promise, but which marriage in fact withholds. In traditional times an adulterous woman could have her crotch branded or ears cut off— facts which suggest the problem is as old as it is deep in this pleasant land. Fülleborn, who is my authority here, writes: “None the less such gruesome punishments are obviously quite rare exceptions, given the mild and harmless character of the people.” <<[lit]

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Property Women in each of the four cultures are allocated land sufficient to their agricultural needs, and generally allowed to dispose of its product as their own. Rarely do women come to own cattle or (unless in childhood) have responsibility for their care. Rarely does the question of home ownership arise: in the context of Sowetan culture it is not an issue. The question of ownership of tools and furnishings may arise, but seldom as an important focus of conflicting interests. Clothes and luxury items have become important since traditional times, and attitudes toward them have been formed by the national culture not the separate traditions. But given that clothing in a traditional community may be exiguous, chattels are few, land is allocated according to need, and housing is universally provided by the husband and maintained by a woman’s own efforts, what is the relevance of property to questions of sex and status? The clearest answer is found in the “cattle society”—where cattle are synonymous with wealth, and this wealth is the monopoly of men. Nyakyusa illustrate this well—Monica Wilson knew of only one case in which a woman had inherited cattle (“because no man in the lineage remained alive”). But Hehe women freely owned cattle. In a sample survey Brown & Hutt found nearly half the women interviewed were cattle owners (against some 80% of men). Men were always the actual guardians, but a woman could choose to entrust either her husband or a brother with her cattle. For the riverine Bena cattle are replaced by canoes, which require co-operative labour and are months in the making, last a generation if well made and cared for, and serve particularly men’s tasks<<[lit]. The other form of wealth is in crops, principally rice, the surplus of which is traded by men down river. In Bena law a man owns the crops his wife has sown and reaped: he has cleared the land and been responsible for protecting the gardens from harm, but she has invested more labour in them. Hence in Bena ethics a woman has a strong vested interest in “her” crops, and a man who ignores it cannot expect a tranquil marriage. A polygynist trading the surplus (above consumption needs) of his wives’ grain must bring a proportional return to each in cloths or luxury items, or bear the consequence of scorning a diligent worker. Property rights grant the man a broader initiative in economic decision than the woman, but the countervailing sanctions at her disposal are, for someone of forceful personality, adequate to securing her ethical claims.

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Since Kinga women have an even stronger practical standing than the Bena, in spite of a jurisdictional ‘ownership’ of land by men, it is evident that Nyakyusa represent the exception in this sample of Sowetan cultures. A Kinga woman has her “own” fields in her natal community, allocated to her as she came of age to do adult work, and continues to cultivate them after marriage: a husband can have no disposition over the fruits of these fields though he does have (in legal theory) in the case of fields allocated to her through his citizenship rights in the community of their residence. Since the hardest work in the agricultural cycle is accomplished through the work parties imigovi which men or women equally may initiate, the legal dominion of men over the land is little more than a nominal claim. Again, goats belong to the man’s sphere; but the best herd of goats hardly dignifies a man as wealthy in the eyes of his neighbours. In traditional times a commoner would not often keep more than a head or two of cattle; and the two commoner byres I saw in 1960 only played mischief with their owners’ reputations in a society prepared to set rulers apart but otherwise committed to habits of egalitarian reciprocity.

Aristocrat and commoner Nyakyusa, Kinga, Bena, and Hehe each by 1890 had developed a form of stratification. Considering slavery to have been an artifact of regional population dynamics and war, we may set it aside as a largely extra-constitutional phenomenon. The emergence of a political élite, though latterly touched by the same conditions, was a radical and effectively irreversible change in the nature and meaning of society. Given a slackening of the war pattern one could assume that slaves would have been quickly absorbed into the free societies. The institution could disappear without trace. But a political élite in good measure controls the system of meanings from which it takes its energy—an effective élite can perpetuate itself in changed circumstance. What particularly gave the Sowetan élites their viability and power was that, far from representing a form of stratification which alienated one element of society from another, they constituted an integrative initiative able to override sectional divisions by substituting a universalistic politics for the particularism of local descent groups. Our perspective of the Hehe or Sangu constitutions is inevitably warped by the signal personal power which the rival tyrants had achieved after the Ngoni invasions and the escalation of war they precipitated. But it is likely their societies, perceived from within,

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bore a stronger family resemblance to Bena or Kinga than outsiders would suppose.<<[lit] The broad qualities of such societies in East Africa are recognized in the Swahili language distinction watawala~watu rulers~people. Among the English renderings which have found favour with ethnographers the one most frequently encountered is aristocrat~commoner. There are also plentiful references to royal families or clans, chiefly families, and (as appropriate) free citizens or slaves among the ‘subjects’ of headmen and chiefs. There are ambiguities in any of these renderings, but they will not be magically resolved by our shifting to Swahili or a local language—we should only be trading one set of opacities for another, harder for a non-native-speaker to pierce. As to the privilege of rule, birthright served in this region to single out candidates for rule but hardly conferred office. The majority of those categorically grouped with the watawala would never in fact realize authority or otherwise enjoy special power over their fellow men. While ‘aristocracy’ recognizes this, the word suggests a class difference conferring powers of personal privilege: the haughty youth lording it over his commoner peers, royal wives and offspring exempt from ordinary work, positions of leadership reserved for the well-born. In fact, Sowetan culture made scanty provision for the maintenance of class lines through privilege. Apart from the royal households, which were usually set apart physically and by protocols of greeting, there were no ritually-drawn boundaries. There was no separate education for royal offspring, no elaboration of headgear, hairstyle, or other ornamentation heralding hereditary privilege. The idea of a ‘ruling clan’ is consistent with the general facts of Sowetan culture in pointing to the kind of special birthrights which do not presuppose class, but ‘clans’ do not suggest the right segmentary context. Except in the (historically accidental) cases of Sangu and Hehe tyrannies, the privilege of rule in Sowetan society was radically decentralized. Virtually every ruler in the region cited a chartering myth of ancient immigration to his locality, finding the commoners there in a comparatively primitive condition; and the myth allowed him to link and ally himself symbolically to rulers of neighbouring domains and peoples. But the same myth allowed him to claim deep roots in his local place, so that the solidarity he would claim with other rulers was not that of clanship but blood in the infinitely weaker sense of ethnic origin. In a conquest state like the Zande (per EvansPritchard 1965, 1971) or the Tutsi (per Maquet 1961) there can be a single clan or set of clans corporately engaged in the business of ruling ‘subject’ clans. In the Sowetan instance, rulers tend to be integral to

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the segmentary structure of the society, enjoying their privileges neither on a state-wide basis (the case of the Zande Avongara) nor through the extra-territorial mechanism of clientage (the Tutsi-Hutu case). It is particularly easy to dismiss the notion of a ‘ruling clan’ for Kinga, who bestowed the lineage surname Sanga so freely on unrelated individuals, and thereby provided a means by which an obscure commoner Sanga could in effect become a royal. To make it, our hero need only achieve de facto equivalence to an established prince. This would have to be done by defying him successfully at arms, then in a turnabout sending him a few animals in recognition of the direction of tribute (rank) between them. There were just four realms and four princes in the ‘official’ history of the proto-state, but further inquiries always led to new ambiguities in the ‘unofficial’ past. Not only were there further claimants whose voices had been stilled by local misfortune a generation or two before the colonial deep-freeze descended, but one of the ‘official’ four princes had never called himself Sanga before the British District Officer told him he was going to be part of the Kinga jurisdiction. It would be idle to talk of an institution of ‘perpetual kinship’ here in the usual sense (for example, compare Clyde Mitchell [1956] writing on the Yao of Malawi), since kinship for Kinga is not a hard enough concept to base so hard a fiction on. For Kinga, political realities were sui generis, and a prince’s successor who couldn’t renew his father’s claims in arms and animals lost his royal lineage pretensions as well. Setting hubris aside as inapplicable to the regional culture, the idea of aristocracy nonetheless presupposes a kind of ‘class solidarity’ running counter to the structural separatism of a segmentary system. If no such sense of fellowship among rulers had existed in the Sowetan region my choice of this term for rendering watawala (and the host of local equivalents) would be in error. I think the best heuristic model for indicating the quality of this politically-oriented class solidarity is that of a club or fraternity. Typically, local rulers chronically at war none the less exchanged daughters in marriage, engaged in serious ritual cooperation, and spoke of brotherhood. Solidarity among rulers was cultivated by Kinga priests and can be seen as a direct function of priestly solidarity; elsewhere the mechanism was genealogical politics in purer form. Wherever in the region we find the institution of aristocracy we find it associated with a court culture distinct in manners and value orientation from the unreformed culture of marginal (bush) settlements or homesteads within roughly the same linguistic province.

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It is a matter of conjecture how far an original ethnography of the Hehe, Bena, or Nyakyusa might find those cultures governed by the same court~bush dual-culture principle I have found appropriate to the Kinga case, but secondary analysis aligns Hehe, Bena, and Kinga as one group against Nyakyusa-Ngonde peoples as another. The crucial differentiating principle is recruitment to office through ‘schools’ in the former group and hereditary ‘election’ in the latter. At the Hehe court (as known particularly for the period before Mkwawa) there were the vigendo, at the Bena the Wenyekongo , and at the Kinga the Avanyakivaga. Young males were recruited on the mixed basis of birth and promised ability, serving the needs of the court during an extended period of intensive socialization to its culture, until at maturity they were deployed as leaders and colonizers to far places where their continued loyalty to court interests was predictable. <<[lit] The Nyakyusa political system achieves a comparable capacity for rapid expansion by colonization and absorption of bush communities but in a very different fashion. There is a formal multiplication of hereditary princely offices with each generation and a system for coopting bush leaders into the office of “great commoner” olifumu with hereditary tenure both as a village headman and as a powerful member of the princely court to which the village has been attached. This complex of structures and procedural linkages is made possible by the spatial concentration of villages within a chiefdom and the reinforcement of its political consciousness through elaborate rituals lacking or less developed among the Kinga-Bena-Hehe. For Nyakyusa, court culture hardly exists as a style of life particular to chiefly lines but is coded into communal rituals centred in or emanating from the princely office. In Monica Wilson’s terms (1959) there are rituals of chieftainship, sacrifices to chiefly ancestors, cleansing (or world-renewing) rituals, rain-making, and rites assuring fertility to the individual homestead yet staged not as a domestic but a chiefly and hieratic prerogative. Wilson reserves the terminology of royalty for her “divine kings” (1959b) but treats as genuine the genealogies of the ruling houses, with their claims to descent from preternaturally chiefly though not conquering immigrants. Charsley (1969) insists on “prince” but avoids the generalization “royals.” The special feature of Nyakyusa rules, which demands terminological care, is that wherever an aristocratic line fails to produce a ruling prince (Charsley) or a chief formally installed through the Coming Out ceremony (Wilson) the aristocratic privilege of the line is considered to have died out. That is, only male siblings who are

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actual sons of a ruler, and can accordingly have realistic expectations of assuming that office or one of the two it will spawn through the Coming Out ritual, are “royal”—in short, there are no royals but princes. This principle of election is to be contrasted with the barely hidden presupposition of Kinga, Bena, and Hehe court cultures, that the charisma of rule can be handed on to as many descendants and even commoner recruits as prove themselves worthy of a prince’s trust. But the Nyakyusa do constitute a bridge to the more severely élitist constitution of the Ngonde, whose central throne was checked and controlled by an encamped nobility (the fourteen amakambala/ avangonde) whose power and special followings were of the court arena not territorially based.<<[lit] If the essential question to be asked in assessing any status system is how much your status matters there, I’d have to say the Nyakyusa-Ngonde, of all the Sowetan peoples we have considered, were the most status-bound. This is not only because they recognized aristocratic blood lines, but particularly because married women and bachelor men were systematically disprivileged. This people is also at least a near-exception in the region to the political principle I have called antipolitanism. It is hard to know how much freedom of movement there was in Ungonde before it was affected by the slave trade. But as we have seen, if the Wilsons are correct, a Nyakyusa man might be banished by his peer-village for transgressions of the code of good company [ukwangala]. In antipolitan societies the spring is on the other foot. However, there is implicit evidence that many new ‘chiefdoms’ were born to blush unseen on the expanding frontiers of Nyakyusa political society, and if that is the case bush politics there must have been a good deal freer, and loyalty more conditional, than in the system the Wilsons were describing.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER SEVEN

Sowetan cultures: freedom

The quality and measure of freedom attained in individual lives is a delicate function of the culture but reflects particularly the level of ego-strength a culture will support. Maximizing ego strength doesn't mean inflating egos nor does minimizing ego-strength mean individuals are going to be easier to live with. “Strong” in this context means not powerful but robust, healthy, stable, socially competent. For Kinga, freedom is realized in parvo by the maintenance of peer relations on the childhood pattern well into adult years. There are casualties: we hear of suicides among young men and women, almost with the first German reports. But they are not the casualties of a culture which puts strong performance demands on the ego. In comparative terms I believe we should rate Kinga culture as one which favours the cultivation of arts, spontaneity, movement, aspiration— in short, freedom. In more repressive societies freedom is harder won and, wanting a thicker skin, is harder for the cultural stranger to recognize. In particular, after childhood many ‘kinship cultures’ reserve freedom for those who have attained a ripe age, so the element of youthful spontaneity is all but lacking in the legitimate exercise of freedom there. The kinship/friendship dimension is not the only one in the Sowetan region which bears on the problem of freedom, but it is one on which a discussion can be organized which touches essential cultural differences. One dimension of difference, the quantitative, seems to me impossible to assess directly. The experience of freedom being relative, the very idea we have of it may arise from the nearly universal contrast of a morally immediate childhood with the care-burdened world which succeeds it. From one culture to another the subjective intensity with which individuals may be said to claim and cherish ‘freedom’ may actually vary inversely with those objective indices we

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usually rate as the signs of freedom from repressive institutions. The Swahili words for freedom uhuru and ungwana both refer explicitly to the contrast slave/free, as though subtler dimensions of the human condition must wait for the evolution of a merely academic language. But what we can’t assess directly needn’t elude us in this case. Freedoms of speech, movement, and career choice can be judged if not measured on evidence, and they invite cross-cultural comparison. The far more extensive and demanding ‘avoidances’ to which Nyakyusa women are subject would, in my understanding of the two cultures, be experienced by Kinga women as systematic humiliation. The constraints fall most heavily on young women, partly because the young are not inured but objectively because it will be in the earlier years of marriage that a father-in-law is most apt to be alive and active. To be sure, the themes illuminated in this practice are of the claims of consanguinity over affinity, of age over youth, of male over female; but apart from these meanings there is a major consequence for the life-cycle of woman. The easily-won peer-freedom of girls is cancelled away at marriage, particularly where that is to a polygynous elder; even where the husband is younger the taboo on social intercourse with his father (since the burden falls entirely upon the woman) serves to impose a similar constraint. The relative freedom enjoyed by women in their later years is hardly enough to restore the spontaneous joys of childhood or to liberate again the erotic energies which MacKenzie (1925: 159) so begrudgingly admired in the drum dancing and public parades of awakening maidens. Nyakyusa young women typically aren’t adequately served by their aging husbands and may feel justified in taking lovers; but if this is a kind of freedom it is one they must steal, its quality strained. As for Nyakyusa men, though there is striking continuity in their community life, the movement is from a comparatively spontaneous order in boyhood to a ritually and mystically sanctioned formal association in the adult age village. A successful elder, rich in cattle and wives, has achieved a scope and mastery of his world which young men evidently covet; but he has also to cope with the ailments and involvements of age and multiplex responsibilities—it is the freedom of the established and is, as one might expect, richer in reputation than realization. Kasitile, the Wilsons’ prominent priestly informant, enjoyed a fully established status but emerges from their pages as a veritable herdsman of cares. So it was too with the Kinga priest, not to mention the roledriven paranoia of a prince. I find that, as with the Nyakyusa, the most exuberant egotism of Kinga culture is that of warrior youths, whose

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whole capital was in their healthy bodies. But whereas young Nyakyusa were supposed to refrain from regular sex relations in order to have the strength of passion for battle, Kinga by contrast seem rank Apollonians. Peer sex, evolving as it did from sleeping in herdboy heaps before puberty over a smoky pen full of goats, should be without passion or lasting, possessive ego involvement. Heterosexual relations during the long bachelor period had the quality of fiction. Concretely, the culture-contrast is between young men for whom sexual needs are generated which (free satisfaction being reserved for elders) demand displaced expression—and young men for whom a non-possessive and largely casual sexual realization is made easy, while sexuality in the less volatile form (imaginatively) identified with the tie of marriage is held in reserve. If I had to judge which system produces the more hardened ego, I’d go for Nyakyusa. If the question is which system produces the broader spectrum of ego needs, I think it would be Kinga. But if the question becomes, which system is the more likely to produce a selfsatisfied man at the end of an active life, I think the relative freedom of Kinga men from tight-knit kin and village communities leaves them vulnerable in the long run. Information on Bena and Hehe life cycles is hardly adequate to let us appreciate the qualities of freedom enjoyed in those cultures, though we are able to see an overall difference between the two. Edgerton’s impression of Hehe farmers was that they wore their “masks” indoors and out, in public and private, until they exploded suddenly in anger: For me, the truth of this matter and the essence of this Hehe farming world was expressed by an Ngelewala man who answered my question of how I could “get to know the Hehe better” by saying this: “You cannot. We Hehe are very good with secrets. We hide everything that we are thinking. How can you get to know us? We do not even know each other.” For me, this was the last word on the Hehe of Ngelewala. The quiet of Ngelewala was the quiet of concealment, the more strongly maintained because of the explosive anger that everyone felt and feared (1971: 95).

By contrast, the same observer found (in the two pages following) Hehe pastoralists of the Pawaga area displaying “greater openness between people, and freer expression of emotions,” including both sex and aggression. While geographically these pastoralists are farther removed from the Bena homelands than the farmers of Ngelewala, still culturally the Pawaga pastoralists could be called a bridge to the open personalism the Culwicks described for the riverine Bena.

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Colonialism, whatever the evils one may choose to lay upon it, ushered in a period of comparative freedom from the petty tyrannies of local group and place which derived from the uncertainties and even obvious dangers of opting out. Brown and Hutt offer, in illustration of the limits of Hehe patriarchal power, the statement that “a father can refuse a suitor for his daughter’s hand, but he cannot force an unwanted suitor upon her.” But elsewhere Brown admits some informants told him that in traditional times a suitor had no need of the girl’s consent in marriage, as her father “disposed of her as he would,” and concludes the girl probably “had less freedom of choice than now.” <<[lit] The same reservation should very likely be applied to the freedom of movement of established householders. Brown and Hutt picture the Hehe as inveterate travellers within their broad tribal boundaries and indicate this freedom is “a privilege much appreciated by the Hehe.” But they point out that a condition of removal from the constraints of one place is being admitted elsewhere; and in traditional times we have to imagine that shopping about for a new place was hardly regular. On my reading of the available ethnographies I judge removals have always been dislocations in Hehe, Bena, Kinga, and Nyakyusa polities. Solution by flight, with passion running high, very likely accounts for most cases. A critical variable would be the objective threshhold of resistance to flight, necessarily lowered by the pax. Passions need not have run so high in 1935 as fifty years earlier, to account for an exit. For a suggestive idea of conditions in the Sowetan region before resisting threshholds ever were raised—before the evolution of chiefly politics—we may turn to Gulliver’s study of Ndendeuli. He designates their local leaders not as authorities or powers but as influential individuals, “notables,” each the focus of a small social cluster within an overall system of network relations strongly biased toward patrilateral kin ties. Ndendeuli were inclined to be somewhat cynical about the notables of their communities, perceiving that those men were operating at least partly in their own interests and to their own advantage, sometimes even at the expense of those they purported to help and advise . An individual’s capacity to lead was not enhanced by an aggressive demeanour but was mainly a function of “the interpersonal confidence he could engender.” The society is probably as turbulent as most: the settlement of disputes does not always settle an under-

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lying problem of compatibility, and movements of residence are frequent. But Gulliver is able to picture such movements as rationally motivated: In brief, a household head decided to move his residence if he considered that in his present community he was not obtaining, nor likely to obtain, the security and reliability of cooperation that he required; and if he considered that he could obtain more advantageous conditions elsewhere (1971: 340).

Ndendeuli were a people able to offer scarcely any effective resistance to the Ngoni, and at Contact were a subject people. But the virtual absence of political boundaries constituting a resistant threshhold for residential movement may be taken as representative of bush culture conditions at the margins of the Sanga sphere in Kingaland and probably in widespread bush communities throughout the Sowetan region—communities which the colonial conquerors’ perceptual biases make it difficult to identify today. Whether bush egalitarianism offered greater freedom than political superstructure in the absence of an invasive force such as the Ngoni, or contrariwise, may be difficult to judge. But it is certain that the continuing presence of a ‘bush ethos’ was felt within even the most developed systems of authority, becoming there the elemental countervailing force I’ve named ‘antipolitanism’ .

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER EIGHT

Sowetan cultures: involvements

The presence of persons to persons That a discussion of emotional involvements can require a conceptual introduction in academic discourse reflects the separation of the sequestered armchair from the world of ordinary experience. Involvements, more than the role-relationships they usually fall within or the trouble cases which may result, are the coloured stuff of experience. The reason involvements have not been central to our idea of society may be only that they aren’t instantly visible to the scanning methods we deem scientific. One kind of involvement is readily visible and has been much discussed—what sociobiologists call ‘bonding’. It is unfortunately never clear what connections there may be between bonding and affect. Is a particular affective state the source and mainstay of the bond in question? What other affective states enter in, either to strengthen or to weaken it? Without subjective content, human relationships can be made to look deceptively simple. Involvements by definition are rich in affect, and any affective state known to humankind can reach critical intensity in some human relationship. Perhaps involvements belong to an order of phenomena too ‘psychological’ for some social anthropologists. Or the subject may be too ‘sociological’ for some psychoanalytically trained anthropologists. It presupposes the deep and mutual penetration of egos among normal adults in an essentially poly-dyadic world, not the polymonadic one of Freud, and regards the nature of such penetration as a function of social structure. Involvements are between persons not roles. One of the early formulations of social structure in anthropology was that of Radcliffe-Brown (1940), who thought the object of his study should

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be a “wide network of social relations” connecting the individual human beings or persons comprising a society. But he was not slow to perceive that while the “concrete reality” of any given social structure did link particular human beings to one another, science must interest itself only in regularly recurring phenomena—as he reasoned, in the social forms which may be abstracted from concrete observations of (say) a specific kin relationship like ‘mother’s brother/sister’s son’. This led him to treat social structure in the way most since then have done—as a pattern of role-relationships which may be neatly abstracted from the smells and passions of that “certain number of individual human beings in a certain natural environment” with which he and we began. It is to re-incorporate the sensual, emotional presence of persons in a discussion of the regular-and-recurrent in human relationships that a student of society turns to involvements. This is to go a step farther toward a psychology of social structure than ‘network analysis’ does. A reading of RadcliffeBrown’s 1940 essay would prepare us reasonably well for Gulliver’s treatment of Ndendeuli social structure, but one would have to go farther back in the evolution of Radcliffe-Brown’s analytical thinking to gain sanction for the incorporation of spontaneous affect in a sociological theory: it was in Andaman Islanders that he developed the notion of social personality: The social personality depends in the first place on the social status of the individual... But the social personality of an individual also depends on his personal qualities, his strength and intelligence, his skill as a hunter, and on his moral qualities, whether he is mean or generous, quarrelsome or good-tempered, and so on, for all these things help to determine the place he occupies in the social life and the effects he has upon it. Above all, the social personality depends upon the development in the individual of those sentiments by which the social life is regulated and by which the social cohesion is preserved (1922/1948: 284).

It is striking how much good sense the author was prepared to winnow out later on. Though he turns from this passage to a psychologically dry discussion of the social functions of ritual (in this case, initiation ceremonies), his emphasis on personal or moral qualities as a conjunctive source, with status- or role-driven motives, of social personality seems to me only just. All that is social is not structure. Much arises directly in the doing of life, as substance seeking form not form finding substance. A focus on dyadic involvements allows us to explore this facet of what Radcliffe-Brown called social personality. <<[lit]

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If all the ideas of this founding father of our science were strung on a line running from the field to the sequestered armchair, this slightly developed notion would be the farthest out. It says analytical frames close to common sense are possible along with the more usual kind. True, a person changes as he or she moves from one role-relationship to another. Yet the person also remains recognizably the same. A consistent social personality can be inferred, quite apart from what is owed to a particular genetic destiny. Social role and social personality may be placed on distinct conceptual levels: Soda’s style as a (Christian) Kinga father in 1970 must have been influenced by his children—their number, their ages and sexes, their personalities—and can even be said with some confidence to have derived from his (component) role-relationships with each child. His social personality in 1980 could be said to have derived or evolved from his style as father, as husband, as colleague, citizen, litigant, sportsman, and the like. But the merging of roles into a socially stable personality is dramatic, episodic but cumulative over a very long term, a product quite as much of gut feeling as of calculated advantage. Soda is not so much a product of his roles as of what happened in the situations they cast him for. Soda in 1960, or a quarter-century later, was not so much an amalgam of his role-relationships as the survivor of all the confrontations they so unrelentingly entailed. A simpler perspective on all of this emerges from a consideration of involvements as the main dramatic bridge between the existential person and the institutional structure within which he must find his career. Involvements occur either within a structurally-given tie or with outsiders. Involvements within the tie transform it: the prince, being feared and admired, finds charisma; or the prince, being feared and envied, becomes a recluse. An involvement beyond existing ties extends your network or draws you out of it: your social identity evolves a step or radically shifts. It may be just at this point, this turn of thought, that it will be easiest to see what went wrong in social anthropology with the idea of social structure. A role system can be analysed diagrammatically. It is tempting, if only for superficial semantic reasons, to think of “structure” as something which can be “diagrammed.” But yielding to that temptation excludes everything in a social structure which gives it vitality and the competence to adapt and evolve. Ideally, all our diagrammatic imagery ought to be seen as abstracted from an historical matrix impossible to diagram. Having used a diagrammatic model to disclose a certain pattern in events, we are bound to return the

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image to its matrix, not to reify it as a ‘thing in itself’. What I take from the story of Radcliffe-Brown’s curious retreat from reality is that we can’t do without portraiture, however clumsy and difficult that holistic approach to knowledge may prove to be. Will anyone hold that families simply hold together and thrive when the several members have learned their roles properly, and fall apart when the lessons failed? No more with any human institution. What had been surgically removed from the social structures to which Radcliffe-Brown turned in his later, armchair years was human smell and warmth and fallibility. Institutions do perhaps vary from warm to cold. Some abound with feeling and some don’t. But societies do not banish the passions though they may sometimes keep them to back rooms. It may be the case (it is a logical possibility) that a society comprised entirely of “cold” structures would behave as a homeostatic system. That would vindicate the main theoretical premise of Radcliffe-Brown. But as a practical matter every social map will be found teaming with hot spots. The turbulence they create may be, in longer perspective, orderly but it is not self-limiting. Most human institutions would not function effectively, if at all, when deprived of their normal background affect: rivalries, vanities, resentments, cathexes of every sort. How do you tell whether this or that involvement between members of the parish is, taken overall, a help or hindrance either to faith or efficiency? pro-structural or anti-structural? Are the antics of Captain Nengo not valuable as a continuing formula for high comedy in the community? Then how shall we brand him merely an eccentric and a nuisance, when through laughter his character is transformed to that of a cautionary hero? We know enough of Nyakyusa, Kinga, Bena, and Hehe cultures to focus in each on a central emotional puzzle. It is perhaps not every culture which can be said to have a psychological dead centre; but exploring ought to begin with what seems most deeply characteristic. For Nyakyusa we should look at the age village in light of the prevalence of anti-structural patterns of adultery. For Kinga we should focus on family structure and affect: in particular, the kindling of eroticized loyalties within the full-brother tie, and the regular dyadic (if it is not pseudo-dyadic) withdrawal of nursing mother and child. For Bena it is difficult not to find a central focus in the freedom of sexual involvements and the absence of a chauvinistic double standard in a society which otherwise has the earmarks of a repressive social order. For Hehe culture, though our dependence on fragmentary sources remains a stumbling block, we must ask how men become friendless in a kinship society, even to the point of being strangers to themselves.

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Nyakyusa The Nyakyusa settlement is an ‘age village’ only from the viewpoint of the male. A girl will stay with her mother until she marries to the village of an older man and his peers, whose wives will vary from about the men’s own age down to hers; eventually her co-wives may include girls younger than her own first-born. But a bride is obliged to keep a rule, avoidance of her father-in-law, which engraves upon her mind the line of segregation which, from boyhood, her husband has respected—the boundary which sets apart father and son. It is that pattern of segregation which makes possible the ethical emphasis of Nyakyusa on equality (fraternity, friendship) in spite of undiminished commitment to agnatic values. It is because a man’s wives can have no share in the deeper ethic of the age village that their readiness to keep its boundaries must be forced, through the mechanical observance of taboo. Among a bride’s peers will likely be wives of her fatherin-law; but her avoidance cuts across the alliance she might form with them: her world is cramped and ill-formed by the standards of men. If Nyakyusa women act out, through adulterous affairs, half-conscious motives tending to annihilate the particularistic ethics of marriage in favour of the open ethos of mutuality, they are evidently rejecting Nyakyusa rules in favour of Nyakyusa principles. Adulterous unions are initially involvements outside the structure of legitimate relationships, participating rather in an ideal order, a kind of communitas (Turner 1969) only without the special intercession of ritual action. But as a brief encounter becomes a prolonged affair it demands the status of routine: there is a press toward legitimation. I’ve already suggested it must be rare to find an extra-marital elopement which doesn’t soon take on the outward style of the marriage the girl escaped—though I prefer to suppose the conventionalization of grand passions is never quite complete. Won’t there usually be a residue of unconventional mutuality between a man and woman who have so flaunted convention in establishing their tie? There are two great cleavages in Nyakyusa society, that between (male) age and (male) youth, and that between men and women. By securing the former, the age village makes possible the coexistence of agnatic authority patterns and a politics based squarely in peer solidarity. The institution which, above all others, diminishes the influence of women in the world of men is polygyny; and since the rate of plural marriage began to climb steeply after Contact, it is hard to know what the traditional norm would have been. What we do know is that the

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bachelor period for males was as stormy when their business was war as a generation later; and it is hard to believe Nyakyusa men would not have developed a measure of hidden resentment toward women by the time of their first marriage. The peculiar, aggressive sensitivity of bachelor youths, though it is officially linked to their (former) role as warriors, dramatically expresses their exclusion from a legitimate sex life. Nyakyusa men deny the value of eroticized peer relations among adults, and drive the discovered adulterer into exile from both kin and peers. Yet the funeral dance is an orgy of illegitimacy: it is an occasion for the exile’s return, for fighting one’s peers and openly seducing the wives of one’s ‘fathers’. True, one normally doesn’t spear a man of one’s own village or chiefdom or cuckold one’s actual pater, but the approximation is close enough. It is as though Nyakyusa youth were saying women should belong to the strongest not the eldest, and the structures making it otherwise have no place in the world of the spirit. The women who courted the young men on these high peaks of affect were evidently not in disagreement. <<[lit] In the strict view of the structural functionalist, the Nyakyusa funeral dance and its subterranean values must be anti-structural. The idea of communitas is in the air: the dancer is responding to others as fellow human beings with the mask of status removed. But there is a third frame, equally appropriate, which illuminates another facet of existence within a culture. How certain is it the Nyakyusa establishment could even continue to be (let alone function smoothly) without the subterranean affirmation of the dance, of the heroics of war, of the great game of stolen love? Unless such a question can be dismissed as quite mistaken, we should consider that Nyakyusa culture may have to be read at a deep as well as a surface level. Games of display, heroics, lusting for heightened sexuality all correspond to what Geertz has called (after Bentham) deep play. In his essay on the Balinese cockfight Geertz is concerned with the way a culture may arrange to display life as it must not be allowed to be—as people “most deeply do not want it.” The display is not simply one of barbarism against the civilization of everyday life: it is specifically a dramatization of that special form of barbarism which is at a culturally deep level uniquely incorporated by a particular human community in its pattern of familiar experience. Particularly we may ask whether for the young wife who chooses involvement with a lover the reward is not largely one of sharing the freedoms approved for men and, from the day of her marriage, denied her unless as license. <<[lit]

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The Nyakyusa case suggests that the pattern of personal involvements typical of a given human community will reflect a mind characteristically stamped by its culture but denied in the surface meanings of its institutions. The pattern of adultery smells of youthful rebellion against the iron rule of elders, but equally smells of woman’s rebellion against male domination. The two anti-structural themes find a common vehicle. Assessing the culture as one favouring men over women, elders over youth, Monica Wilson’s retrospective For Men and Elders (1977) details the dissatisfactions of the two classes disfavoured. The pattern of adulterous involvements in an otherwise well-ordered society is prime evidence for an observer who would study the emotional consequences of what we may call, with only a measure of irony, friendly repression.

Kinga The love of brothers in Kingaland is not realized as a love between equals. The elder-younger relationship carries much of the emotional burden of father-son bonds elsewhere. When a man did not risk becoming a father before his young manhood was over he had small chance of seeing even his eldest son into adulthood; the younger sons became, as it were, the emotional inheritance of the eldest. But the character of the tie was special, going beyond the intensified loyalty expected of all close kin, since brothers were supposed to be lovers. What was unthinkable between father and son, sexual intimacy, was idealized between elder and younger brother. In Western bourgeois culture the nearest analogue would perhaps be the idealization of romantic love between husband and wife in a system of early-arranged marriage. But Kinga did not expect all brothers to live together, or even that a pair who were emotionally close should stay together where either would thereby lose autonomy. Where the co-residence of brothers does occur the result is nothing like an extended family—an elder who assumed authority in daily affairs would soon drive his brother to shift away. Involvement within the tie, though it seem to strengthen it, may in fact create a perishable thing, like a fine structure in glass left unannealed. In particular, it would make no sense to think of a brother being jealous of a man’s friendships or his independence. Ndele’s elder brother wanted to dominate his career choices, in order to see him well established in life. Ndeni’s elder brother expected to be consulted on such choices but (since the two got on less well then) took a less proprietary stance in their dealings. When the role prescribes a

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generous love but the heart does not find it the scene is still played out, if without conviction. There is nothing for the good citizen to do but adopt a strategy of patience. Confrontation is wrong. Conceptually, this may be our best bridge to the other ‘deep’ relationship in Kinga society, that between mother and nursing child. Since the marriage pattern has been predominantly monogamous, polygyny among commoners usually stemming only from inheritance (and so an arrangement of convenience rather than a claim to importance), the sexual tie between man and woman can take on special affective qualities; and, as commonly occurs where the marriage grew out of courtship, the tendency can be toward mutuality. Hence we can view the period of three or four years after parturition as an interval in the marriage, coloured by a strategy of patience. The man waits for a renewal of their sexual love but commonly will not force it. The woman waits for a rekindling of her own genital needs but commonly feels no urgency. As brotherly love is seldom consummated though strongly approved, marital love is an island in time whose charms have general recognition. I heard little deprecation of individual women from the men I knew best: the category-talk (“Women know nothing of law!” and so on) may be set aside. Is it too much to imply that the nursing relationship is an eroticized one? While I don’t know how lesbian love is expresssed by Kinga maidens, they actively discourage male lovers from handling or, especially, sexually penetrating the vulva, and accordingly I find it likely maidens together cultivate arousal without aggressive genital contact. If that be so, a nursing child by shifting a woman’s erotic imagination away from her crotch would be catering to a play of mildly regressive, or nostalgic, sentiments—turning back, as it were, to the left hand with which as a maturing child her sexual life began. Since her husband at the same time will have made the same turn, the evident sympathy which is expressed in his tolerance of a long post-partum taboo is not wholly mysterious. And does the removal of the newly enlarged labia minora function for Kinga girls to prolong the period of diffuse, unconcentrated erotic sensibility, such that the right-hand path of sexuality remains the longer unlearned? It is not the case with the riverine Bena; but the ‘same’ ritual mutilation in that culture is accomplished at a much earlier age, and heterosexuality there is never in any doubt. Kinga seem to me to have adopted the moral strategy of patience to a degree which would be found foreign by either sex among the Nyakyusa or the Bena. If Nyakyusa males are slow to marry they are not slow to pick a fight or fornicate. Where Bena men are as warlike

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as they, truculence at a Bena dance seems to be better controlled, and fornication less aggressive if no less popular. What is most singular about Kinga women, comparing them to Nyakyusa or to BenaHehe, is their unguarded chastity.

Bena In the Sowetan region as it is so far described in the literature the nearest approach to free love is in the realm of the riverine Bena. Here is a typical text: The Wabena quite frankly regard sexual pleasures as the normal hobby of every normal man and woman, though in polite conversation they maintain a conventional standard which might leave the stranger with an impression of chaste women and faithful husbands (Culwick & Culwick 1935: 361).

And does near-free love make blithe spirits of them all? Bena society traditionally was tri-stratified, with a distinct ruling group set apart from the commoners in rank and ceremony, and with a sizable slave caste. Like the Hehe, Bena chiefs kept a royal class of slaves at the capital, the wakumaguru, who seem to have had a bodyguard function and to have acted as official executioners . Death or mutilation could be meted out by the chief as punishment for crime, and the poison ordeal imposed upon an accused witch. Even under the Germans Bena native authorities succeeded in seeing their ‘witches’ hanged.<<[lit] Although initiation was not emphasized in the case of the boy, a girl’s initiation did entail the use of fright and other repressive measures. As a symptom of psychological instability we have the report that miscarriages occur with high frequency (Culwick & Culwick 1935: 313), and as a mild indication of unconscious guilt and aggression there is the regular practice of elders extracting confessions from women in childbirth. On the whole, Bena seem to have taken a thick-skinned approach to war—for the most part, they were able to hold their own with the Hehe and Sangu, becoming at different times subject-allies of both but never decisively defeated by either. In spite of his ultimate defeat and withdrawal to a less-preferred riverine habitat, Mtengera (the great Bena leader of pre-colonial times) had created a fighting machine equal to any in the region: Bena military efficiency was of a high order. In short, this was a society with most of the earmarks of the taut, political solidarity which is only to be gained by repression.

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Nonetheless, a generation after the pax the Culwicks describe an easy-going society with most of the signs of sound mental health. Bena militarism appears to have been strongly individualistic at the motivational level rather than repressive. In the realms of sex and expressive culture indications abound of a tolerant, empathetic people. At a girl’s initiation the predominant mood is fun not fear. About childbirth, women are advised to be relaxed and self-contained, prepared for an ordeal but not an overwhelming one. When a young mother dies, other women long past childbearing (but not past menopause) are often able to induce lactation and save the baby. For the health of a young baby (as if to say parental quarrels endanger it) several months after delivery a couple should ceremonially compromise the post-partum taboo. Abstention from sex is regarded as a virtue but one kept in reserve, to be used only as a collective response to crisis, as for controlling an epidemic threatening the whole society. Co-wives on the whole are friendly and value one another’s company. A woman showing ill-treatment or neglect is able to initiate a divorce with impunity. In general, dancing is frequently indulged in for fun alone, as well as for ritual ends; moral reciprocity is pervasive; and on both individual and institutional levels the society has proved itself quickly adaptable to new circumstance.<<[lit] What the Bena sacrifice, from the viewpoint of Nyakyusa or Kinga, is ideal friendship; but both men and women among the Bena appear to enjoy uninhibited peer friendships on the practical plane, so we may doubt many Bena would understand this as sacrifice in any sense. If they did, they could be quick to boast the availability of consolations. It may be tempting to see the loose and flexible qualities of the Bena community as attributes of a people quickly formed from an amalgam of autonomous communities, blending even two opposite rules of descent, and so without rigid doctrine. But the Hehe correspond even better than Bena to that description, yet lack flexibility.

Hehe When we consider the evidence of Bena openness we are almost obliged to register the Hehe as a polar opposite. Where marriage for the Bena is an arrangement of convenience, Hehe marriage is a hard contract, frequently giving rise to litigation, entered as “a necessary condition to a satisfactory and dignified life” and protected by “a mass of rules governing social contacts.” If we can trust the impressions of the separate observers of the two cultures, where Bena

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women like polygyny because they enjoy the company of other women, Hehe women have the same preference because they like to have junior women to help with the work. Against Bena informality and easy spontaneity we must place Hehe formality and compulsory exchanges of politeness with familiars: Even the most superficial observation of Hehe interaction was sufficient to call into question the sincerity of these polite, deferential encounters. The Hehe themselves readily admitted that they were insincere, and said that these expressions of concern and caution in their everyday relations with each other were essential to avoid serious affront or insult. The Hehe...lived in continual dread of affront, either given or received (Edgerton 1971: 94).

Where Bena men preferred to look the other way when they risked learning something of a wife’s amours, the Hehe husband was consumed with suspicion, so that a wife dared not converse with another man even on the most public occasions. Where Bena conspired to ignore open secrets in favour of smooth social relations, Hehe at least in the farming areas Edgerton studied (and their social organization, their ‘culture of rules’, is largely comparable to that of the Culwicks’ Bena) hide each from each behind a veil of secrecy which seems to be inviolable even in private.<<[lit] I infer that the fierce, uncontrollable fights to which Hehe are prone express the intensity of affect which is suppressed in everyday, formal contacts, wherein involvements of more positive tone are tabooed. By contrast Bena, Kinga, and Nyakyusa societies seem to be imbued with the ethos of friendship, each in its own fashion but each also with signal success. For Kinga men, especially, poly-dyadic homophilic involvements gave essential colour to friendships while easing the felt intensity of the more proprietary heterosexual involvement which seems to generate so much mischief among Hehe. For Bena, and to a lesser degree Nyakyusa, tolerated philandering served as the more commonplace kind of safety-valve. Can we escape wondering how far the signal (but seemingly ahistorical) political solidarity of the Hehe is a reflex to their masculinity problems in forming ordinary ties of amity at the level of interpersonal relations? I part company with Radcliffe-Brown and take issue with the well-known views of Emile Durkheim in suggesting that a psychologically sterile description of the social institutions of any of these peoples would be profoundly incomplete at the level of explanation.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER NINE

Deepstuff: the regional routine

A polymorphous culture? Cultural regions in the folk world show a tendency to correspond spatially with ecological regions. That is to be expected, since folk groups are usually foragers or cultivators working closely with nature; but if nature can set a boundary it can’t build a culture. One ecospace may support several cultures, either layered or separated by political boundaries. Dualism takes many forms, and is often found within what the ethnographer deems to be a culturally single community, not a composite or mix. One of the tasks I undertake in a later chapter is placing the court/bush dualism of the Sanga system in comparative perspective. But a common history (whether by reason of common origin or prolonged intercourse in situ) is the decisive factor in producing what family resemblance we find among a region’s component peoples. The extent of such resemblances wanted to justify serious talk of a single regional culture is obviously a matter for judgement. Packaged in with the idea of a regional culture are a premise and a problem. The premise is that we stand to learn important truths about human history by focussing on cultures at a multi-communal, regional level. Regional cultures won’t turn out to be amorphous or impalpable. They will have coherence though not, by definition, on a par with that of the ethnographer’s typical community of study. Any regional culture will have incorporated a range of such communities, each unified by its own language and modes of being. The problem is whether we should then treat a regional culture as a residual entity, a set of traits comprised by the boolean overlap of the ‘real’ cultures contained, or as a reality of its own kind.

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I opt for the latter. I think it’s clear that the principles of cultural coherence on a regional and inter-communal level have to be distinct from those we assume in our community studies. But for reasons which will appear I don’t think we should try to comprehend a regional culture either as a mosaic (a harmonious structure of independent entities) or as some kind of polymorphous historical growth revealing its true nature in the range of its incarnations. In this final part of my study of Kinga and Sowetan culture and its history, I assume that the general relationship between region and community will have to be sought with an eye out for subtleties. One is not the whole, the other the part; one is not the system, the other a subsystem. We do better to entertain such a mathematical analogy as that of matrix to element; or Sussure’s linguistic paradigm, parole and langue, which sets actual patterns of speech in a particular community against a background of the full resources an historically given language offers. But analogy can only help us toward the understanding wanted. I venture to say that every local culture implies a regional, either living or recently died away: unless there is somewhere a Shangri-la. The implications of this for culture history seem to me immense. In my early efforts to assess the spread and coherence of usage in the Sowetan and some other East African regions, I found I must depend on institutional features of what Meyer Fortes (1958) calls “the external domain of social relations.” Less euphoniously but perhaps more descriptively he calls this the “politico-jural-ritual sphere.” These we might call the ‘hard’ as against those ‘soft parts’ of a culture which include man-woman-child relations, character values, the ideas underlying individual moral strategies, and all such personal ephemera as dreams, tantrums, and temptations. Neighbouring peoples seemed to differ profoundly and quite randomly with respect to these features of what Fortes called “the inner domain of social relations.” It was from asking myself why defining a cultural region on the basis of the ‘hard parts’ led me to override what I considered really deep differences among local cultures—their domestic arrangements, psyches, sexual orientations—that I came to want a radical distinction between the “deep stuff” of a culture and its more accessible public routines. I had to do some rethinking of the midcentury anthropology I was weaned on. It would lead me eventually to a fresh understanding of the reluctance of ‘structural’ anthropologists to embrace ‘psychological’ analysis. All the deep stuff used to be discussed under the rubric of ‘Culture and Personality’. The strongest voices in the field—I have in

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mind such studies as Abram Kardiner 1939, Cora Du Bois 1944, Gregory Bateson 1958, and Margaret Mead 1968, 1970—assumed the cultures they studied were integral wholes. Kardiner even went so far as, in effect, to derive the institutions of the external domain (his “secondary institutions”) from those of the internal domain (his “primary”). I never thought much of the argument, as it seemed to me the author’s psychoanalytic bias had led him to ignore the problem of causal circularity which has to be addressed in any model of cultural transformations. How does one decide which domain, the intimate or the public, might deserve to be called ‘primary’? Better, I think, to see them as cohabiting a cramped space, continuing an endless dialectic. The deepstuff and the institutional routine each keeps its own dynamic, though neither can simply go its own way. Without denying there are many ways of cutting a conundrum, I find the assumption of a seamless fabric in culture unacceptable. The idea that “personality” might be treated as a culture in microcosm, with “culture” to be read reciprocally as a modal ‘personality type’ in macrocosm, was wildly wrong even for the typical island cultures where, in good measure, the generative work was done. The link between ‘culture’ and ‘personality’ is real enough, but they are not simply the two sides of a möbius strip. You need a psychological dimension to understand the inner lives of any people. The study of a family system which resorts to no ‘psychological’ language at all is simply ignoring all but the institutional aspects of an inner domain. You need a structural dimension to understand what lives inside a human head. A study of myth which ignores its ‘structural’ implications ignores the historical aspect of mind. You can’t really pull these two notions apart without damaging both. But cultures have a quite different structure to personalities. Of the two ideas, as these problems were first addressed, the ‘psychological’ was most easily grasped. Our sense for individual differences among our children or friends is ‘intuitive’ and needs little proving. So matching ‘personality’ with ‘culture’ seemed to explain the more difficult term, as if to put a human face on it. If there is a match, though, it is clearly not to the ‘politico-jural-ritual sphere’ of culture. Viewed as frames for human activity, the cultures of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spheres draw upon different motivational resources. A rough equation would match ‘inner’ with ‘expressive’ and ‘outer’ with ‘instrumental’ action; but that equation wants work. From early masters like Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber, or from comparativists like Fred Eggan, we long ago learned how much of any culture is likely to be shared with peoples historically related.

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Kroeber’s “cultural and natural areas” were mainly conceived as having each a climactic centre of intensity, at any given time one richer in things, arts, and institutional elaborations than the others. But a regional culture was a ‘culture whole’ not a mosaic: We mean a regionally individualized type or specific growth of culture when we say “culture area,” much as a historian may use “the Eighteenth Century” as a short way of referring to the culture that was characteristic of eighteenth-century Europe. It would be well if there were a brief technical term for the naturally individualized growths of culture with which historical anthropology is more and more dealing. But...the general thought of our day is not yet sufficiently concerned. (1947: 2)

No more the thought of our day: but if we are content simply with ‘regional’ culture as the inclusive notion and ‘local’ or ‘component’ culture as applying to the several peoples included, we may be able to manage well enough. I am not a bit sure that Africanists should look for a ‘climax’ or ‘centre’ to associate with each naturally-defined ‘area’— certainly not in the present state of our historical and archaeological knowledge. Where regional cultures happen to fit well enough to a natural area, it is enough to note it. It may also happen otherwise, as with the Kinga-Nyakyusa ceremonial entente, bridging the Rift Valley escarpment, or the Hehe with their agricultural/pastoral split. A regional culture is the creature of history not physical geography. It is, seen from a local site, an overlay culture with its own sources of coherence and stability, of which there are various local versions. Victor Turner proposed a name for some of these sources of common inspiration (1967), “a forest of symbols,” and I think most anthropologists familiar with his Ndembu studies will take the point. Turner (pp. 32-45) also raised the question of what we may mean by ‘depth’ in the study of a culture. Ego psychology and semiotics do not readily reduce to each other. But he notes it is in ceremonially mimed emotion that psychological and symbolic modes of interpretation merge. Let us admit they merge also, if ever fleetingly and often terribly, in everyday life. Close human relations require quick and deep readings of another’s intentions and responses. The semiotics of success in close relations must reside on a deeper level than the semiotics of politics and trade. One clue is the theme of so much modern fiction, that the rational pursuit of self-interest and quid pro quo can make a holy mess of a marriage. What I have to argue here is (i) that interpersonal drama always depends on valid reading of the action by participants—psychological and symbolic modes have to merge in any emotion-laden interaction; (ii) that this means a culture of intimacy will emerge in communities of

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interpersonal dependency; and (iii) that within the broader semiotic sphere (what I have pictured as a regional ‘forest of symbols’) a plurality of such ‘deep’ cultures will normally exist, corresponding with the actual boundaries of persisting intimate contact—the component endogamous populations. Intimacy here refers to prolonged relationships of mutual emotional dependency—face-toface interaction of the kind which deeply tests and forms the character of participants.<<[lit] A special corollary of this set of premises is that a culture like that of the Sanga court centres, which for both genders tends to generate large common pools of intimacy and, through circulation, to proliferate through domain and realm a common peer culture of intimacy, can fairly dispense with a politics of kinship. That is, amity in the one society can achieve what kinship does in the other: create a semiotic world, from proxemics to worldview, in which mutual trust is spread wide. Like ‘personalities’ and ‘local cultures’, regional cultures will each have its own individuality. Thus Ndembu (Turner 1956) belong in a very different regional culture to the Sowetan. They are matrilineal and by preference uxorilocal; their marriage system makes ‘nomads’ of the men. In compensation for that, they have developed a ceremonial complex which employs dramatic symbolism to create a world with depth of meaning accessible to all. In other regions of Bantu civilization elaborate ‘segmentary lineage’ or ‘age class’ systems have evolved which make ‘brothers’ of great numbers of men and, linking each local group to others within a broader horizon, create a sense of community which makes mutual role-models of them all. In the Sowetan region it can be shown that at least the Bena, Kinga, and Nyakyusa shared a regional pattern focused in chiefly courts organized by amity in counterdistinction to kinship. If it is not rules but ties of trust which are the nexus of human intimacy; and if, on the other hand, rules are the basis of all trust in relations with strangers, the dynamics of deep culture and routine will always evince separate principles. But if so, where then is ‘depth’? In sorting out persons, a fair clue might be ‘individuality’, since we easily see crowd behaviour and peer conformism as marks of superficiality. Among families or among culturally distinct communities a comparable clue might be ‘style’—that is, pattern singularity. These words are not always used to carry such a load of meaning but I think for present analytical purposes they can. Thus what all or most Eastern Bantu cultures have in common is their ‘civilization’; this divides into ‘regional cultures’ comparable in scale to the Sowetan; and this in turn

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comprises local ‘cultures’. When strangers of unrelated civilization happen to meet, the mutual intelligibility of their behaviour is not negligible but can be conceived as ‘quantum one’. When they have their civilization in common we have ‘quantum two’. Within a regional culture there will be some confidence as to the rules they should follow to avoid misunderstanding—‘quantum three’. Within a local culture, spontaneous interaction is usually cued without significant error. But this ‘quantum four’ refers to arena behaviour not intimacy. For successful cuing in the emotional interaction of intimate relations you will want all the intelligibility human nature allows. Few of us, I think, rate better than a ‘quantum six’. But the strain toward intelligibility is the force which generates style and the refinement of communication at all these levels.

The growth of styles in the Sowetan region After the mid-century war there was a busy period in ethnography which left a legacy of parallel studies within major cultural regions, many affording sufficient depth to permit careful intraregional comparison, yet relatively free of what we might call the Boasian conservatism with respect to character values and motive, from which his two most famous students (Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead) had wanted to free us. I suggest that most of us now will admit that psychological differences among cultures, even within a fairly close-knit regional community, are not mere figments of ethnographic imagination. But we also note that just as a modern city (Rome, London, Paris; New York, New Orleans, San Francisco; Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver) has a style and a practical culture which tolerate a wide but particular range of personal quirks and characters, an ethnographic region is not rendered incoherent by the varying cultural emphases of the component peoples. Even the takeevery-culture-as-an-island school of thought has to recognize that we do not have floating islands to deal with. As a rough approximation, I’d say the kind of activity which holds a region together culturally entails the sharing of many accessible routines by its peoples. As the routines serve multiple individual and group purposes, they are not readily let to bog down. The realization of a global semiotic at this level is a prime source of cultural stability in any region, pre- or post-modern. Usually, there is a detectable flow of demographic exchange (island to island, people to people) within any stable region, facilitated by regular contacts, formal and informal, friendly or otherwise. But the actual movement of individuals into the

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domestic sphere of a neighbouring people will occur at a rate slow enough to let the host group call the shots where it comes to what is and what is not to be tolerated on the plane of intimate relations. We know the situation in a special form from our own recent past or from other peasant traditions where the young spouse imported to an extended family is put through a second prolonged schooling in morals and manners, even reduced to a childlike condition, for the purpose of “deep” resocialization. Contacts with strangers are easier in the external sphere. Rules are explicit; deeper moral and motivational differences can be kept under cloak. The two contextually sensitive meanings for the english word ‘intercourse’, social and sexual, suggest something of the difference I refer to—the two senses are so seldom really confused. The sharing of accessible routines is easier, and easier to maintain, over greater social distances than the sharing of that morally ‘deeper’ stuff which evokes the level of mutual trust wanted for durable relations of intimacy. The semiotics of social context knows no deeper divide than this. It becomes pretty obvious, when you look at culture this way, that the kind of stabilization which works in the external domain is not the kind wanted for steadying intimate relations. We move from ‘learning’ into ‘ego’ psychology here. I suppose that semiotic conformity is most easily maintained where communication is most pragmatic of purpose, and most easily lost where emotional commitment, self-other conceptions, and moral strategy are at stake. By ‘moral strategy’ I don’t want to suggest any sort of fixed moral creed or stereotyped plan of life. I mean the selfserving, constantly reworked career plan any particular individual feels he or she must pursue to achieve and defend a self-satisfying life-cycle. Most of the decisions entailed will be about personal relations and style; for Kinga, only a few touch the ‘occupational career’ which has become the bug-a-boo of the privileged classes elsewhere. Moral strategies are pursued by children, youths, and adults of both sexes, at home, at work, and in company. This concept, not ‘personality’, lies at the heart of my understanding of the deepstuff of a culture. I find no reason to suppose that individuals of either sex in any folk society simply ‘fall into’ a pre-patterned life cycle; I suppose rather that they are always deeply concerned with the optimization of structurally given opportunities, and that constant effort on their part is the engine of what we call their (and their neighbours’) “values.” It is through ego-involvement, in short, not brain training that certain values come to be deeply seated. It is a lesson I take from life that one sort of communication is evoked by pragmatic problems in practical intercourse, a different

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sort in the management of those close or intimate personal relations which bestow on another a significant leverage on one’s own ego. But if these two modalities of intercourse stand in contrast as ideal types, there is no indication they don’t mix in practice. Echoes of the pragmatic may be discovered in the bedroom, fear and anger may be Ego’s response to a stranger. Politics, social control, and religion are probably nowhere affect-free. Stylistically, the ‘hard’ institutions of a regional culture are certain to be drawn into and locally reflect the separate value spheres, the ‘soft’ cultures of each component community. The Kinga prince has a different part to play than the Nyakyusa; the uses and abuses of witchcraft rhetoric are not the same among Hehe, Bena, or Kinga; ancestor propitiation is a separate proposition—which says a different thing to the sociological observer—in each of these different countries. But to see the differences you must look closely. Each of these institutions will sound much the same throughout the region, in the answers an interviewer can expect to questions. The soft parts of a culture will only lightly affect local discourse on the rules. No more does practice dictate concept than the reverse. Sometimes it is as though the essence of what is Kinga must be what is least apparent to Kinga themselves. I’ve come to seeing the deep stuff of a culture as only so stable as the morally rewarding life cycle of a community allows, while the routines entailing brief-lived and trivial kinds of ego-involvement are those more easily standardized over a larger cultural region. Everywhere marriage circles are of great importance in defining a ‘deep’ community and its boundaries. Rarely, such circles may be constructed through rules of endogamy; more often they are constructed by rules of exogamy which give a host group resocializing leverage over a spouse brought in, and at the same time create a larger marriage league within which intimacy (with some measure of alliance) remains an option. A special interest I find in exploring this approach is discovering what aspects of life outside the domestic domain are, on these premises, to be deemed ‘deep’ in their implications. I am skeptical of dealing with the interaction of peoples within a regional culture as an ‘abstract’ or ‘mechanical’ process: the concept of diffusion seems to presuppose minute trickles of information, bit by bit, through accidental or indirect forms of encounter. For mapping the movement of artefacts, or even (as with Boas on Northwest Coast art) particulars of expressive style, ‘diffusion’ may have the right connotations; but when this mechanical notion is applied to ideas it can imply that history stands or moves the way billiard balls

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seem to do, needing no meeting of minds. Within the Eastern Bantu stream, at least, contacts are lively and based on a good acquaintance with neighbours. In most ethnographic regions it would be prudent to suppose that every ‘bamboo curtain’ is permeable, and neighbouring peoples always harbour some individuals who can claim a native’s understanding of the cross-border culture. In those circumstances the many aspects of culture which merit description as ‘routine usages’ not embedded in a ‘deep pattern’ will readily be comprehended in cross-cultural contacts; and with respect to these traits, we should not expect within the region a high index of cultural divergence over time. I have dealt extensively elsewhere (1988) with the homologies pertaining to external-domain institutions in Southwestern Tanzania. The four cultural groups in the region for which anthropologists have best documented patterns of intimate interaction are the Hehe, Bena, Kinga, and Nyakyusa. They describe, in that order, a crescent running from the cattle-rich southern highlands southward and westward through a less favoured mountain-slope zone to the lush Rift Valley lands north of Lake Malawi, where cattle and tropical plants both prosper. While the cultural differences you would observe in walking the 300-odd kilometers of that crescent would reflect habitat, the relevance of geography here bears mainly on the qualities of the three internal boundaries you would cross. The lowest threshold is the first, as you go from Hehe into Bena country; the highest is the last, as you descend from Kinga into Nyakyusaland, 1500 meters down the escarpment. Hehe and Nyakyusa, at the two ends of the crescent, were actively incorporating smaller neighbour peoples throughout the two or three generations prior to European contact a century ago. Bena and Kinga had a more settled segmentary organization; the Kinga were probably closer to forming a unified pyramidal proto-state than the Bena. With the material available it is possible to sort out the cultural affinities one might expect to find among the four peoples, on the basis of ethnographic survey information. Linguistically, Hehe and Bena are close, Kinga distant but clearly related. Nyakyusa on the other hand belong to a distinct linguistic subsection. As for the jural and political systems, Hehe-Bena-Kinga form a coherent grouping; Nyakyusa clearly belongs elsewhere. What we know of ritual and ceremonial life in the region splits it otherwise, though: here the divide is right in the middle of the crescent, Hehe & Bena on one side, Kinga & Nyakyusa on the other. Interestingly, this applies to ceremonial aspects of high political office: the english term best suiting the

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office among Bena and Hehe is ‘chief’, while Kinga and Nyakyusa rulers are quite appropriately called ‘princes’—their charisma depends more heavily on ritual. This shift on the map of cultural affinities reflects, as we shall see, the way deepstuff tends to sort out the four peoples. Another major divide, unexpected on the basis of political and linguistic affinities at least, is that between Hehe and Bena: Hehe strongly privatize women, Bena do not. Bena and Kinga are similar in this, though contrasting in their sexual orientations and the actual practice of female chastity in dealings with men. Nyakyusa, most like the Kinga in sexual orientation, are nonetheless unlike in their treatment of women. Nyakyusa girls are “liberated” before marriage, but subject to a rigid discipline afterward. Kinga girls are chaste (in the usual sense) throughout a long bachelorhood, after which they are self-disciplined members of a sisterhood of local women. The cultural affinities one might expect from the distribution of kin terms, and from the kinship systems as such, are hard to assess; but Hehe-Bena clearly form a group to which we may attach the Kinga on the ground of general similarity, with Nyakyusa again the outsider. But at least one terminological tie respecting same-sex parallel cousins links Kinga to Nyakyusa. This is readily associated with the fact that Kinga and Nyakyusa domestic arrangements are of a kind aberrant for the region—in fact, for the African world. But the exact significance of the terminological borrowing is elusive. Looking now more directly at differences in the deepstuff, sexual orientation divides in the middle of the crescent: bisexuality for Kinga and Nyakyusa, heterosexuality for Bena and Hehe. Norms of liberality in sex relations, however, divide Hehe from Bena, and Kinga from Nyakyusa. Bena girls serve no term of obligatory chastity; as wives they are not quick to put their youthful ways behind them—only, as it were, out of sight. Bena husbands seem to feel they get a fair share from this arrangement, whereas Hehe want blood revenge at the hint of wifely infidelity. Bena men, in short, are easy-going in their dealings with women and each other, Hehe up-tight. Liberality distinguishes Kinga from Nyakyusa cultures of intimacy in a different and subtler way. Nyakyusa men are (at least through the 1930s, when the field studies were done) like Hehe in pursuing multiple wives; in both cultures this is a key value in the moral strategy of a male career. But Nyakyusa do their polygyny in a coolheaded way, and lately have been much more successful as measured by the bottom line. Their secret is keeping the next generation of males out of the market for wives; they do this even better than the pastoral Masai, taking better advantage of the generational segrega-

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tion of males. What it comes to, though, is a repressive privatization of women on the one hand, collecting them in the village of the elders, and the toleration of a fugitive, devalued bisexuality on the other hand. In the youth villages, the few who are allowed wives are expected to share. This results in a moral strategy for males which features a prolonged period of ambivalence in young adulthood; the elders say, it makes them better warriors. When the youths do at last take over (in the unique “coming out” ceremony described by Monica Wilson), they put their sexual ambivalence behind them but perpetuate the intergenerational divide, getting theirs back by collecting cattle and women as their fathers had. Kinga moral strategies are quite differently structured: the main divide is between the men’s world and the women’s. Within each sphere, same-sex intimacy is free of repressive rules or privatizing competition. Heterosexuality is associated with marriage and procreation; ego-involvement in the marital relationship is relaxed. These particular examples of culture contrast within the region will suffice. They make the point that within a given region the culture of intimacy will have its own historical dynamic. The culture of formal relations is historically more predictable, spreads wider, and leaves plainer tracks. The implications are many. I find a number of them worth pursuing. There is an immense body of evidence available now for a careful study of the way the deepstuff of a local culture evolves within the somewhat harder frame of politico-jural-ritual institutions comprising the regional configuration. The problem which emerges most clearly from my proposals here is the question of fit. Specifically, I suggest that trouble can arise from bad fit as between the culture of spontaneous sentiment and the structural maze within which the intimate scenes of personal life must be played out. What we know of the Hehe suggests they may be a case in point. On the other hand, the Kinga case has seemed to me to illustrate goodness of fit. I pursue this point in the next chapters through a further examination of the way Kinga, in the pursuit of their moral strategies, have produced a typical personal style which ‘works well’ for their success in life. The goodness of fit reflects in the Kinga case a relatively long period of autonomous development, in which the ‘hard’ institutions typical of the region were gradually bent to suit new needs. The history of the Hehe, by comparison, is short. They comprise a dozen peoples pulled together by and for warlike exploits in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For present purposes I am prepared to let stand the matter of regional cultures, their inner dynamics and historical import, and turn

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to a discussion of the Kinga, seen in a more nearly global anthropological perspective. Close comparison within the Sowetan region has served the purpose of portrayal within the seven selected frames of Parts One and Three. I turn now to the more general problem of reading the drama of Kinga life with some of the analytical keys found in the ethnographic literature from other parts of the world.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TEN

Psyche and Style

Noticing style People become Kinga by using their heads. In this book I have been exploring the way Sowetan people, especially Kinga, have used their intelligence in meeting the exigencies of everyday life. I have used a method of controlled comparison within the region to bring more definition to my sketches of Kinga culture. By showing what they might have been, what they nearly were but never did become, I have thought to present a reader not with a single portrait but a series done from different angles. Most of us judge others in everyday intercourse by the ways they resemble or differ-from contemporaries in about the same walk of life. In some ways we can know them better from doing that than someone does who stands too close, or trusts instant intuition. I find that what distinguishes for me the uses of intelligence or rationality in one culture from its uses in another can be described as style. If it means anything to say all cultures are equal, it must mean they all can rely on the same qualities of intelligence and rationality, qualities we recognize as human and use to distinguish our kind from others. But such are the differences in culture from one people to another, or one class or region to another, what is a ‘rational choice’ in one may be dotty in another. Kinga style is to be seen in their special ways of coping with what we have learned to call ‘the human condition’. I pick three broad questions: What is the basis of Kinga style— (a) in coping with moral sanctions and applying them to others? (b) in the active display of self to self and others? (c) in coping with danger, despair, or the bafflement of reason?

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Any good field study should provide some approximate answers, and a Conventional Wisdom has evolved within the discipline of anthropology for proceeding with the data of direct observation. We have some theoretical models which are meant to apply generally. No one supposes they offer perfect illumination, but they do seem to offer refinements on common sense. On that basis I might have framed my earliest expectations in this fashion:

(a) Self & ethos We may expect a fair congruence between the typical self and the accepted value system in any traditional human community. Moral values are internalized to the self in the form of an ethos, a rationally integrated cluster of beliefs about right and wrong. In a traditional society new selves are formed by old processes, duplicating the selves of prior generations. Self and value system are virtually one, self and other being held to one standard. Of necessity, this standard will closely reflect the ‘design for living’ which the community’s institutions support.

(b) Instrumental and expressive action We display ourselves to others through two kinds of action, instrumental and expressive. Action of the one kind shows what we want to do and how good we are at doing it, action of the other kind shows what we want to be and how far we are what we covet being. But the two types of action do not mix well—if they are not situationally segregated they may be misread and wrongly sanctioned. We expect expressive and instrumental fields of action in a traditional society to show distinct styles, bearing a complementary and compensatory relation each to the other. We expect people cast for instrumental roles to be ‘thick skinned’ (purposive, unresponsive), people cast for expressive roles to be ‘thin skinned’ (sensitive, sympathetic).

(c) Psyche & belief We expect the religious symbolism of a traditional people to reflect its deepest concerns. The ultimate source of these concerns is shared with peoples everywhere—awareness of human mortality, fear of personal defeat, the whole compromise of ideal by real. This universality of source accounts for the universality of human religion. What accounts for the diversity is the depth of mind out of which religious practice must be generated, and the peculiar sensitivity of mind to experience. Depth psychology is invoked to explain a projective system which furnishes the community’s mythological and ritual symbolism. Reversing that, the same principles are used to extrapolate from public symbolism to a collective unconscious. We expect to find the two—inward mind and outward religion—stamped by a distinctive style, functionally paired.

On each of the three counts Kinga data can be shown to support the stated expectations only weakly. The discrepancy hardly requires

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much explanation. Kinga have simply created a non-standard culture— the models may fit the general case better. But the questions do point to three problematic features of Kinga culture which merit discussion against a wider ethnographic background than the Sowetan region. Exceptional cases can have general significance.

Self & ethos The Kinga had erected ‘Spartan’ institutions, yet there seems to be no shred of the Spartan ethos about them. Even one such case, well established, ought to show there is no reliably ‘nice fit’ between self or ethos and public routine, between the internal and external domains of a culture. We want to consider carefully the extent of parallels at one level and divergences at another. Both peoples lived in armed camps, glorified games of war, and abstained loyally from the comforts of domesticity. Kinga boys were herders and hunters, spending their days in the hills from an early age, assigned to the protection of their fathers’ animal wealth from human and other well-armed predators. They were admired for their toughness and expected to fend for themselves. They married late, taking women of the same generation, after an extended period of military service housed in barracks of cold comfort and spartan simplicity. But in spite of these parallels to Sparta, Kinga had not the ethnic chauvinism of the Spartiates, but favoured an open class system quite unlike the rigid ethnic stratification of Laconia. A de facto independence of women, in face of a jurally sanctioned pattern of male domination in the public life, is common to the two cultures. In somewhat different ways the two cultures also are notable in their regions for relaxing nominal rules of exclusiveness in the marital relationship, and Polybius indicates Spartan brothers like Kinga might easily share a woman. The matter of their ambisexuality is one which must be settled by surmise. Plato, whose admiration for Spartan conservatism and collectivist state education must place him in the camp of the apologists, puts the Spartan men down as notorious sodomites. Other sources suggest Spartan women were fearsomely demanding sexual partners. It is true that many writers ancient and modern (presumably out of especially refined sensibilities) feel that such reports of aberrant practice should be dismissed as malicious. The default position they seem to recommend is that Spartan men slept together from seven to thirty without discovering mutual sex. The main difference in that case between Spartiate and

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Kinga is a severe shortage of intelligence on the side of the ancients— a position which rather strains credulity.<<[lit] The list of homologies might be continued, and further clear differences might be mentioned as well, but even in the short list already given a serious note of ambiguity has appeared. Is non-exclusiveness in the marital relationship an aspect of institutional structure or of ethos? What of ‘toughness’ or ‘simplicity’ or ‘independence of women’? I think it is inherent in the idea of social structure that moral equations are seen to underlie every social arrangement. Looking at structure in a jural frame we speak of ‘rights and duties’; in the frame of social action we talk a little more enigmatically of ‘status and role relationships’; and in a transactional frame we dwell upon available situational strategies and options. All this terminology presupposes the existence of a web of specific, mutually recognized moral claims among individuals. Whenever a clear and coherent pattern is to be found in this moral fabric it seems to deserve the name of ethos. Can we analyse ethnic stratification in Rwanda without mentioning the ‘premise of inequality’ which lends it moral support? Or claim to comprehend Spartan history without taking some account of what the original spartanism was? It was to cope with the ambiguity as to what is properly ‘social structure’ and what more properly ‘culture’ that the notion of ‘values’ and ‘value systems’ was brought seriously into use in sociology and anthropology a long generation ago. Two different constructions of human values are of interest: in the one, values are the perceptual variables implicit in the concept of worldview; in the other, they are made the constituent elements of human personalities. The one position weds values to culture and assumes no special psychodynamic process in their formation. The other view weds values to the well-formed psyche, and implicitly holds that they will not significantly change for any population cohort once it is socialized. A major difficulty which both of these constructions pose is that they render the two original constructs, social structure and culture, practically inaccessible: it is as if light could be shifted from the old object to the new but not expanded to include both. We are left with a plurality of components, each built in its own shop: the personality shop, the institution shop, the value shop, the technical culture shop, and more. We have only amateurish devices and plans for connecting the components. The ‘Spartan problem’ poses the question why it is that a whole constellation of diverse and yet rather sensitive ‘value’ parameters may correspond for two cultures, while in a crucial area of character

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values their divergence is absolute. To vary the terms of discourse, we wonder why two unconnected communities, having independently developed what seem to be the ‘same’ institutions, have sanctioned incompatible moral ideologies. There is the old (but still essentially unreformed) convention in psychological anthropology that we must look into the typical or modal personality of a human community to explain the peculiarities of its culture. Those prolific Harvard sociologists, Sorokin (1947) and Parsons (1957), may have agreed on nothing else. I’ll call this position configuration theory—it is one I’ve sniped at before without naming. I oppose it with the position I call style theory. Style theory denies certain fundamental premises usually hidden in the concept of personality, understanding the relation between an actor and an environing culture in dialectical terms. Configuration theory builds on a gyroscopic or homeostatic model of personality. Originally malleable, the human individual in early childhood has acquired a fully formed ‘personality’ from which his or her characteristic behaviour will continue to flow for life. A great majority of the individuals in a folk society will have similar personalities; and since the typical personality, once formed, is no longer malleable, social institutions will have to evolve so as to serve its needs. Psychodynamic process is recognized at two points in configuration theory: infantile psychodynamics in the context of a given family system will account for the early-crystallized personality structure, and dream-level psycho-dynamics can (through mechanisms of projection) account for ceremonial and religious symbolism. In each case the dynamic process is masked from direct observation, and this obstacle to falsification must be accounted a major weakness of the theory. Style theory assumes a stochastic ego process which is all the same redintegrative and normally continuous through life. Since the idea of ‘personality’ is so firmly associated with the hypothesis of psycho-homeostasis, which I think wrong, I need another term—and the ‘self’ of social psychology is a logical substitute. Ego is the artist, the ‘self’ is oeuvre—the essential product, out of all the artist’s scribbles and sketches, which is to be kept. Ego is dialectically responsive to the culture of context, and the self which is continuously made and remade in this episodic process is one which may have greater or less value to ego, depending on the progress of the dialectic. To change the terms slightly, ego will be intermittently (but inescapably) involved in a game of self-validation with significant others and reference groups. The degree of success or failure crucially affects the private sense of worth.

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The redintegrative ego process here presupposed renders personal fate undetermined and undeterminable. Ego has to deal with a stochastic not a trajective career line. The major internal source of stability is a family of weak forces corresponding to the observation that things more often than not turn out as expected, and expectations are usually extrapolations of past experience. Weak forces, always operating in the same direction, are not to be discounted over the long run, as homologies in the rise and decline of civilizations show—analogies are plentiful in physics, climatology, oceanography, medicine, organic evolution, linguistics, or institutional economics. But weak forces are also responsible for a great amount of sudden change. Just as a tornado is a creature of concatenated weak forces, the most fateful electoral swings in the history of modern democracies have been owing to popular surges of the kind chaos theory is better suited than analytical science to explain. A stronger force operates for stability on most ego processes most of the time—the great mass of the environing culture, represented in the set of others to whom ego must appeal as validators. Where ego is free to appeal from one such set to a significantly different one, the freedom is not only social but, at a deep level, psychological. The great difference I perceive between the Spartan and Kinga careers lies in this kind of freedom. So far as we are able to tell, Spartans must have been able to appeal for private understanding only in very small peer combinations; and even in this the evidence suggests that the degrees of freedom a Spartan could expect to find with his best friends must have been less than what most people in most societies take for granted as a minimum. Allocated to a kleros [land allotment] as soon as the elders had granted him (new-born) the right to live, the Spartan male lived as one of a minority master-race in a tightly crowded slave state practising extreme forms of repression out of political necessity. Lacey writes that the obligation to eat in the common mess, which must be supplied from one’s own allotment, ...meant that it was impossible for a Spartan to live on his estate; this fact may account for the establishment of the krypteia, the secret police, a body formed out of the young men undergoing military training, whose duty it was from time to time to conduct a campaign of terrorism against the helots, slaying without trial any who appeared to be potential ringleaders of a revolt (1968: 197).

Members of the Spartiate citizen caste called themselves homoioi [equals] and were outnumbered three to one by the free

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commoners, non-Spartiate Laconians who lived in their own, selfgoverning villages. Other Greek states were ruled by a peaceful aristocratic regime. But that was not enough for Sparta. She had conquered the Messenians, and for centuries was compelled to hold them down by force. She could do so only by developing the whole Spartiate citizen body into an armed and trained master-class, free from the necessity of working for a living. This development doubtless started during the wars of the seventh century, and may well have been encouraged by the struggles of the demos...to extend their political rights (Jaeger 1945: 85).

It seems unnecessary to say more about pressures shaping the Spartan ethos. Character values respond to the thrust of history. If ‘personality’ refers to an empirically observable phenomenon, inductively comprehensible in behavioural terms, science will have to recognize something like a dialectical model of its relation to culture and, less directly, to historically shaped social structures. What particularly accounts for the Spartan transvaluation of Greek ideals (by which areté comes to mean something like kamikaze) is not either the Lycurgan paideia [child-rearing, education] or Laconian history but their conjunction. The same principle applies to the Kinga transvaluation of the Sowetan value system: we have to understand it by taking a long view, historically and comparatively. Why do Spartan and Kinga cultures seem to enjoy, though they are so far apart in time and space, a common schema for marriage and the family, for the balance of the sexes, and for implementing a militarist ideology? The matter must be understood in terms of historical parallelism. But why do the Kinga not share the severely repressed, robotic personality ideal of the Spartiate? Kinga enjoyed a freedom from cramping structures the Spartiate could not. Kinga courts could thrive on the wit and charm of an impudent minstrel because Kinga courts had to be attractive to bush youth and could manage it best by making a value of sophistication and (in a sense appropriate to the context) ‘theatrical’ as well as military spectacle. Kinga warfare, as Spartans would have judged it, was mainly for show; Spartan policing, as a Kinga must judge, was tyranny and ample reason for splitting. Partly, that is an expression of differences in personal make-up; partly, the two judgements reflect distinct historical situations. But personal make-up and historical situation are, on assumptions made here, dialectically related within each cultural stream. That makes all the connections stochastic, and the result of time-series evolution within the culture radically unpredictable. This seems to me to justify a q. e. d. for style theory.

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The most telling contrast between Kinga and Spartan cultures is probably the antipolitanism of the one and the iron patriotism of the other. These are in each case features of the ethos of the people but features rooted in the political/military institutions established by a regional ‘culture of rules’.

Expressive & instrumental action (I) Would it make sense to argue that Kinga warfare was more expressive than instrumental? Or to extend the same argument to the larger field of Kinga politics: the routine of the barracks, the procedures at a court hearing, the ordeal of a witch? All of this was part of the high life of court culture. All of it was meant to be impressive and had its ‘function’ or survival value to the society because it was impressive. Even gardening was something the Kinga turned into an expressive activity: traditionally, men only took part where they could make a show of collective vigour and efficiency, while women with their greater constancy perceived and displayed their gardens as extensions of self. I’m not out to confound a useful distinction. The difference between expressive and instrumental action is often plain enough, and applies as well to everyday life in Kingaland as elsewhere. But when the distinction is applied not to acts but to roles and institutions it seems to me that these complex phenomena have been attributed a transparency they don’t have. What is at issue is the psychology of human institutions. This tale talks to the point. When Ujazi fell from grace it was not because he was twisted. He was thrown into an institutional frame without being (re)socialized to the moral strategies appropriate to it. A fine scholar, after completing his school exams creditably he had been taken into an internship in administration just as colonialism was taking its final bows. In his mid-twenties he was appointed to the most responsible salaried administrative position in uKinga and took to the job with a lot of zeal and some good ideas. After only five months Ujazi was dismissed and briefly jailed for peculating. While he was later assisting me in the preparation of some language documents we had an opportunity to discuss the experience. To put it simply, he had adopted ‘old-style’ career strategies in a ‘new style’ role or office. There is a complex, multi-layered (‘laminated’) motivational package associated with any social role. Nadel (1957) may treat his ‘role attributes’ as amounting to hardly more than a ‘job descrip-

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tion’—Ujazi was doubtless better instructed than any of his predecessors had been in the duties of a chief under the newly independent government of Tanganyika. When a quick, strong Kinga bush youth took a role as apprentice warrior at a royal court he learned efficiency at numerous instrumental tasks. Exercising his intelligence, he acquired the motivational complex associated with war and barracks living, Sanga style. It was a school of hard knocks. The best men coming out of that school became the big men (avanyivaha) of a Sanga court. That kind of learning is what was wanting in the preparation of Ujazi as a ‘modern chief’. Institutions only work when there is a whole person in each of the roles entailed. The whole person gets there by pursuing, on a well rooted basis of self-concern, adaptive moral strategies in the appropriate social maze. Good fit between person and role is hard won. Clifford Geertz picked up Gilbert Ryle’s notion of ‘thick description’ and applied it to the task of distinguishing bad from less bad anthropology. Suppose we were to step out in the early morning to walk by the edge of the wood and came across two men burying the body of a child. We stand in silence to watch the procedure; later we write notes of what we saw. Are we in position to describe the act of burying a child in Kinga culture? We don’t know who is chosen for such a task—what their relationship to the child might be. Is it important the body be wrapped in a mat, or was that an accident of the case? Whose mat? Is the child too young to be accorded the full dignities of an adult burial, or is any corpse handled in this manner? Is the sex of the child a factor? We don’t know how the spot was chosen, how long the child has been dead, what treatment was given the corpse, what dangers are associated with touching it, revealing its burial place— failing to orientate the body correctly, failing to purify the tools used before turning them to use in a garden, failing to prepare the burial and follow it up with proper rituals. The best we can offer is a description wholly inadequate as ethnography. Conceivably, what we saw may have been no part of a burial but part of a body theft by witches: even the label the act deserves may be in doubt. Ethnography wants ‘thick description’—facts back of facts, the layers of socially created reality underlying the socially created surface of an action.<<[lit] How to distinguish the sheerly practical, instrumental act from one which serves its own ends? It is true enough in a superficial way that Kinga dances are expressive and trial-court procedures instrumental, the ‘symbolic aspects’ of Kinga sacrifice are expressive and the feasting instrumental. On the same level of superficial rationale a Kinga funeral is a mosaic of instrumental and expressive acts. But the dances at a Kinga court are part of the ‘dazzle’ any court must put on

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to attract young men to its barracks, and the formality of the trialcourt is part of the show by which men make sure women won’t be at ease there. Funeral manners are certainly special, but the business of finding out who your friends are is important after a death, and it does get done at a Kinga funeral. I find it hard to say in such context that the institution, taken whole, should fall this way or that. Expressive and instrumental dimensions are subtly infused in the action. It isn’t always possible to find the analytical catalyst to precipitate them. When Soda and friends would parody one of their crotchety elders the choice of a target for ridicule was a kind of back-handed compliment. The exercise as a whole, by its mixture of bite and cathartic effect on a young audience, became part of the ideological fabric which supported a certain kind of social structure in Kingaland, establishing the order of freedom within it. One of the options touched was the willingness of young men to put up the (technically illegal and unenforceable) bridewealth such an elder might demand for his daughter’s hand. Of this Soda and friends were perfectly aware. They’d launched their ‘movement’ to boycott marriage until the legal limit was accepted by the generation of their fathers—a rebellion of the young in favour of enlightened thought and the rule of law. They were sure their girlfriends were on their side, though in the event that turned out to be one of the soft spots in the plan. They finally took defeat with good grace. They had never directly used their satire in service of their ‘political’ movement—they were in touch with no ideological infrastructure which might have sponsored such a ‘revolutionary’ turn. Reform from below was not to be. But now where in the midst of this busy scene is the hard line to be drawn between expressive and instrumental acts, roles, or institutions? An act may be likened to a point or scatter of points on the grid of socio-metric space, representing the conjunction in time and social space of n curves, each commanded by a different equation. The illusion we usually manage to enjoy in the observation of familiar scenes in our own social life is that each act has one value on its ‘surface’, however many one might find on digging down. But strictly speaking what will appear to one observer as a ‘surface meaning’ may not be what another will record. All the equations are valid. They comprise a series of loosely related statements about the contextual meaning of the same act. Let’s agree that social action in the full sense can’t proceed without a consensual ‘definition of the situation’. But how narrowly is an actor hemmed in by that? Consider only how hard it can be to determine whose judgements are relevant and with what priority—or even to know when the final scene and final revision

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of a simple action has taken place. A simple model of situated action ignores the dialectic steering the actor’s moral career. Did not Soda and his friends by the gentleness of their assault guarantee their own failure—and if so, was it not in another sense their victory? By their rhetoric they induced their girlfriends to perceive marriage as choice between father and lover, something it never had been. Choosing between maiden love and marital love, bachelorhood and motherhood, timeless youth and the measured aging of the mature life phase—the traditional structuring of woman’s career—was lightly but radically challenged. And didn’t these progressive young men by including maidens in a ‘political’ movement step cleanly out of the traditional frame segregating male and female roles? At different moments and in different terms Soda and his ‘young radicals’ were aware of all these equations and, no doubt, countless others. Which is the equation that accounts for what they did? or what, in the end, they failed to do? The configurational model of person and culture, deriving ethos and worldview from a well-formed personality, constant throughout a career, derives social acts from individual motives and these motives from the same well-formed personality. A corollary is that the quality of customary acts in a homogeneous community derives from the qualities of its modal personality. We are familiar with this logic as applied to bourgeois family roles: the husband’s ‘instrumental’ role reflects a ‘masculine’ rearing, producing a male personality structure distinct from that of the woman fated to marry him. Her rearing has destined her in turn for the ‘expressive’ role of bourgeois wife and mother. The trouble with this is not that it was conceived in the fifties and doesn’t apply today but that it never was an adequate statement of the relation of personal to cultural history. It was misleading as a clue to gender and mistaken as a formulation of human nature. In our survey of the two genders in Kinga court culture we saw that each life-cycle comprised a series of stages governed each by new values. Boys and girls easily mix in childhood but begin before puberty to associate intimately only with gender peers. Boys after seven or eight become ‘wild’ human beings, girls remarkably domestic. In the stage of bachelor youth boys become adventurous but disciplined while maidens display an air of self-sufficient responsibility. Bachelorhood for both is moderately narcissistic, but this is differently styled for the two genders. After marriage men become more self-reliant and accept an ethic of individual responsibility, while women withdraw emotionally into a relationship with a nursing infant which has no precedent in the way they once undertook their childhood

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baby-tending chores. Ordinary ‘personality’ theory can’t really do justice to such ordinary facts. The case of the Kinga may be unusual but in this respect is hardly unparalleled in world ethnography. Psychological doctrine may help itself by insisting that these discontinuities are superficial, exogenous, ‘cultural’ and so not deeply psychological—the data are inconsistent with well-established theory. But some who have heard the arguments will be prepared to look at models of human nature designed to account for the facts of direct observation in the laboratory of history. It would not be smart to ask a psychologist, unaided, to account for the phenomena of customary action, social roles, and institutions. I’ve found it hard to convince a psychologist that motivation can reside in a role as its prime locus, being taken into the self or ‘personality’ only as a further development in a socialization process run (after early years) by ego on his-her own behalf. But academic quarrels over the ownership of words don’t seem to provide a reasoned basis for deciding whether motivation is a necessary feature of a social institution. If the facts don’t fit our vocabularies where should the adjustment be made? I’ve argued for the presupposition (of style theory) that a redintegrative ego process characterizes the whole of the life cycle of a normal person and entails a continuous burden of forming and reforming the self. Let me concentrate on the ‘personality changes’ (as standard theory might see the matter) which occur for men and women at marriage in the traditional setting of Sanga court culture. A man at marriage would have spent his whole youth (as much as twenty-five years) enjoying a homophilic relationship with peers in which possessiveness was always sacrificed to the maintenance of a balanced pattern of poly-dyadic network relations. Responsibility was understood within an institutionally sanctioned frame of discipline and collective decisions. His deepest concerns have been those of a barracked soldier who must shine with individual glory and thrive on the sentiments of political loyalty. How could one worse prepare a man for the next stage of his life, where he is to be a lusty begetter of children; a farmer necessarily in competition with neighbours over scarce means; and for the first time a man of property in the form of herds, houses, and granaries for the loss of which he must bear the full brunt of economic ruin and moral bafflement? It is true a price was often paid in anxiety by men in the householding stage. There could be distrust and bitterness toward former friends. But projective rejection of the old role was part of rationalizing the new. The remarkable fact is that the transition was normally successful. New homesteaders regularly took leading roles as ‘Sanga’

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in relation to the bush Kinga they had settled among. The new men might show every sign of self-confidence, even (as one gathers from anecdote) to hubris. A woman’s transformation at marriage was as profound. Like her man she must readjust from the peer life to householding, and her move was irreversible. Since marriage would take her to a new community and most often a strange one, her removal from peerfriendships could impose a stressful period of emotional readjustment. We know nursing children offered a married woman (what an outsider might take to be) an exaggerated sense of security. The barren wife is distraught, a wife wanting to conceive is sexually overwrought, but a nursing mother has no need of a man’s presence in the home. There is a suggestion here of overcompensation (whether in the quick intensity of the sex life or the tenacious nursing relationship) for loss of a long-established source of emotional security. Yet as in the case of the men, we may see in this a form of support for her new role in the projective rejection of norms disused. At this point in the argument it seems plain in principle that we have to look more closely at the way men and women, in their pursuit of rewarding lives, bend the routines of their broader, regional version of Eastern Bantu civilization to the service of their deeper needs; and how they adapt these needs to the situational givens they have to deal with. About a decade after leaving the field, after working out the theoretical basis for analysing Kinga institutions, I published a short article (1972) presenting my thoughts as a critique of the literature then current on the place of psychological and sociological models in the explanation of ordinary human behaviour in cross-culturally common social contexts. At one point I discussed three levels of motivation which must be considered. Since I want to refer to them now in application to Kinga moral strategies, and can hardly expect a reader to have the source at hand, I reproduce the necessary bits of it here, outlining ‘three levels of motivation’. I include as well some retrospective considerations, ‘a pertinent parallel’ and ‘the double dialectic’, before continuing.

The inner dialectics Level 1: sentient motivation Sentient motivation is the common property of viable specimens of a huge variety of animal species. Strictly speaking, the motive is an attribute of the behaviour rather than the animal, but we do not often speak so

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strictly. Sentient motivation has been well studied by laboratory methods, and the assumption that common principles would hold right across the vertebrate universe has been justified by experimental results. The same work has confirmed a generalizing science of human behaviour, as human subjects can be recruited to laboratory games on about the same level as rats, and because individual inscrutability evaporates for either species with the controlled replication of behavioural events. Children can respond to praise as rats to pellets. But from the fact that punishment and reward carry an explanatory burden for both species alike, we may gather that the behaviouristic study of sentient motivation has not, in elaborating common sense, overturned it. To say that a rat is rewarded by a pellet or punished by shock is tantamount to saying the cat wants milk or is afraid of the dog—anthropomorphism is only a little less explicit in the locutions of science, and the justification of the term motive really rests on empathy with a fellow sentient being. Mice and men are assumed to share a common condition. No doubt it is our duty to be sceptical and resist the explicit terms of empathy, but the hypothesis which would justify it is not disconfirmed by meticulous observation of human and rodent behaviour.

Level 2: personal motivation The study of personal motivation is subject to quite different methods. The manifest link betweeen sentient motivation and personality is learning, and it is the human being’s extraordinary learning capacity which most readily accounts for the subtlety of his motives. But when learning theory is applied to the typical linguistic and paralinguistic contexts of human intercourse the result is an embarrassment of riches in which it is hard to find a centre. The introduction of “self” or “ego” unquestionably represents a compromise of behavioural rigour, but it permits holistic treatment of the development of personality through learning. The imposition of centredness upon the developmental paradigm has been the foundation of most serious approaches to personal motivation, at least since Freud produced his theory of the infantile origin of neuroses. …Personalities appear to be self-modifying systems which positively require a sensosry input and therefore can with difficulty be held in a steady state. As the man I observe participates in the sensory order at the same level I do, he might be comprehensible to me in principle but must remain unpredictable at the level of detail (Hayek 1952). Under the rubric of sentient motivation, individuality could be referred to the category of random events which replication and statistical treatment would control. But when we undertake to study personal motivation we undertake to explain what we were content to call random, and we may find with Gordon Allport (1964: 145-50) that an idiographic approach is wanted. Within the limits of its style, every society requires ego-strength of its members—the sheer conformist is a phantasm. You do not teach someone his personality—the interaction between cultural exemplar and cultural apprentice is stochastic, allowing at each step a range of outcomes and so involving the ego as much as the passive capacity to learn. It is because persons always are ego-involved with others in reciprocally defined situa-

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tions that personal motivation provides a bridge from the sentient life, in which the ego is always partly but never wholly submerged, to the institutional. People are rarely content to pursue satisfaction as their raw senses define it, they pursue those states of being they identify with the good life—a conception which has meaning only in the light of a particular valuesystem and which cannot be passively learned. We see a familiar institution in a fresh way when we first see it in the context of a typical biography.

Level 3: role motivation The behaviour of a husband making love to his wife can be “explained” on Level 1 as reward-seeking, on Level 2 as personally characteristic (he is diffident, lusty, or kittenish), and on Level 3 as husbandly, within the limits of a culturally established role. It is easy to see that none of these explanations will be exhaustive, though in practice we are often remiss—we act as if understanding a run of behaviour on one level could make it redundant or even illogical to assess it on another. Leach (1958) was at pains to consider the logical issue in showing that a dual analysis—on Levels 2 and 3—was possible of the erotic/ vitality symbolism of hair. Role motivation is attached to a status, not to a face. Louch (1966) talks of behaviour “justified by the circumstances” and Mills (1940) showed that motive-attribution was an important, culturally patterned activity applicable to one’s own acts as well as others’. Consider the manner in which we comprehend a Biblical parable, one of Toynbee’s mythic paradigms, or the minor characters in a film. To understand the action we do not need insight at the level of personality. Why do people fight? That is as transparent on the level of role as it is inscrutable on the level of psychodynamics. …(Park 1972: 135-37)

A pertinent parallel I found a suggestive parallel to this three-level scheme in the philosopher Karl Popper’s intellectual autobiography (1976). He was always much concerned with body-mind problems, and resisted monistic theories of reality. The final three sections of Unended Quest deal with his struggle to fit what some of us would simply call ‘culture’ on a firm metaphysical basis. He offers three worlds: of things, of subjectivity, and of “facts partly produced by the human mind” (pg. 194). This last is his ‘world 3’ and though it starts with insistence on the reality of our human intellectual heritage, such as the calculus or the syllogism, it grows to include (by clear implication) human institutions, codes of law, works of art, and the like. World 3 is thus a world of emergent reality, a cultural reality which is not seen with the same eyes everywhere but is not, all the same, scientifically deniable. Popper discusses the problem thoroughly in his collection of fugitive articles (1972) on objective knowlege.

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Switching from a social-psychological to a metaphysical frame draws attention to the critical difference between the propriate self—which is ‘real’ only by the premises of world 2, which does not deny the ‘reality’ of subjective thought—and the persona, which emerges only in social interaction, as ego selectively reacts to others either in agreement or self-differentiation. I want to cite a few bits of his final paragraphs, suggesting they be read with an ear to their pertinence in social science as well as the theory of knowledge. One way of life may be incompatible with another way of life in almost the same sense in which a theory may be logically incompatible with another. These incompatibilities are there, objectively, even if we are unaware of them. And so our purposes and our aims, like our theories, may compete, and may be critically compared and discussed. Yet the subjective approach, especially the subjective theory of knowledge, treats world 3 objects—even those in the narrower sense, such as problems, theories, and critical arguments—as if they were mere utterances or expressions of the knowing subject. This approach is closely similar to the expressionist theory of art. Generally, it regards a man’s work only or mainly as the expression of his inner state; and it looks upon self-expression as an aim. I am trying to replace this view of the relation of a man to his work by a very different one. Admitting that world 3 originates with us, I stress its considerable autonomy, and its immeasurable repercussions on us. Our minds, our selves, cannot exist without it: they are anchored in world 3.… The expressionist view is that our talents, our gifts, and perhaps our upbringing, and thus “our whole personality”, determine what we do.… In opposition to this I suggest that everything depends upon the giveand-take between ourselves and our task, our work, our problems, our world 3; upon the repercussion upon us of this world; upon feedback, which can be amplified by our criticism of what we have done. …(Popper 1976: 195-96)

The double dialectic While ‘personal motivation’ does label level 2 well enough, and ‘role motivation’ level 3, discussing the way the two act upon each other calls for a change in diction. So I picture the ‘propriate self’ as the operant at level 2 and the ‘persona’ at level 3. Human development begins as the infantile ego encounters sentient experience which seems to call for an active response. The primary dialectic emerges as a propriate self is built up through episodic experience of the physical world outside and inside the infant’s body. As most parents come to realize, a great deal of an infant’s sentient experience begins in the belly and motivates him through the autonomic nervous system. The ‘objective world’ may be outside his mind; it is not all outside his body.

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There is reaction, recognition, and iteration as the infant discovers the possibility of managing sentience. Since the most effective moves will normally entail some sort of communication with its mother, the secondary dialectic soon follows, as the propriate self is brought into social relationships with pets, toys, peers, and surrogate parents. Ego at this stage will doubtless find toy animals easier to get on with than real peers or new giants, however well-meaning. But even with toys the propriate self will find it is in stochastic interplay with the outside world, and vulnerable. A rather lurid version of the primary dialectic at this stage can be had by reading through some of Freud’s cases, and an indulgently unclish version of the secondary dialectic in early childhood can be found in such non-Freudian authors as George Herbert Mead and Jean Piaget. Since my main interest here is in getting some understanding of the way individual minds feed on and affect the growth of a cultural style, I take the matter of early development no farther. The double dialectic as I picture it is one of the seminal universals in human life. In the presence of language, it accounts for the striking elaboration of role relationships and structures in human societies, as compared with other primates whose interpersonal relations carry only minimal semiotic content, and whose sentient adventures must remain forever untold. Like me, Soda tuned his persona to the company he was keeping. You don’t have a persona without having significant others, kith and kin, interaction on an intensely semiotic plane. You won’t manage such interaction successfully without taking on and taking in the ambient role motives of the company you keep. But doing this is not simply ‘adjusting’ to a social environment. Looking to our own satisfactions, sentient and social, has to preoccupy us in the long run. It is through a double dialectic, tending at once to sentient values and projected achievements, we pursue our moral careers. It is through coping with the constant give and take of everyday life that we manage to keep a sane purchase on the world, and the world in turn makes us its own— not our propriate selves, which remain a reality sui generis (cf. Popper’s world 2), but our personae, our self-made yet always socially realized selves, creatures of world 3.

Expressive and instrumental action (II) Resocialization: the gregarious maiden When a Kinga woman marries she is removed to a new community where she has to build up, through whatever painful episodes and by

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whatever moral strategies she can master, a new poly-dyadic network among new peers. The fun and freedom of her bachelor youth will have to fade away, though with good fortune she will not have to lose the strong sense for autonomy she has gained. Her own domestic situation is new to her; certain usages and common judgements in the adopting community will strike her as novel if not improper; she will find herself ‘misunderstood’—actions of hers taken at a value she did not expect. She will find her new peers subjecting her to resocialization. Out of all this she will have to build, on the right hand, a new persona, a self she can willingly present to others; and on the left hand, a new propriate self. This will be the self which proposes, puts into practice, and refines the moral strategies she will pursue as her key to success in a new career. Strictly, these will be major adaptations of the old selves she developed in her bachelor life. As she realizes that the old persona is indeed socially dead (as she visits her former isaka mates and finds the facework strange-making) her task of building a new one will be given a lift. We must suppose she will find at least some aspects of the self she lost are well lost—existential freedom is not unremittingly dreadful.<<[lit] But a person can in the nature of the human condition have no direct support in this self-reform: anxiety is only too ready to seize up the ego in the dialectic of the left hand. I call it so with apologies to my left-handed friends (knowing even they do greet each other with the right hand) to suggest that we are dealing here with matters which can’t be anything but private. So ego learns caution. A woman’s moves will be the less deliberate wherever the context is less ‘real’ to her. The style she eventually does achieve will reflect the validation of a fresh moral strategy, toward which initially she can only grope. Like an adolescent in a new school, she’ll have to endure false starts, uncertain trials, illusory confirmations. Resocialization began in her social biography with the arrangements leading to marriage, but soon set up headquarters in her propriate life and began to be felt in a hundred subtle or unsubtle ways. Notes on her sentient biography during the few weeks before and after the marriage: there is the loss of a few very close friends she has lived with since girlhood; there is the high of first coition and all the ambivalence of a new kind of relationship; there are delights, anxieties, and depressions reflecting the stops and starts of her efforts at propriate adjustment. What we call affect is sentient and acts on a person’s motivation whether (like a burn) it comes from outside or (like remorse) from within. The sense of pain or pleasure will

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instantly reinforce or curb a line of action, change its colour and style or redirect its objectives. In making her self over in marriage, a Kinga bride’s sense of luck or dismay with her sex life has to feature boldly. If she has been the beneficiary of a modern (1960), extended and rather private courtship, she may find herself able to use the validation process of marital intimacy to establish a new erotic persona, reflections of which with time may even dominate the sentient imagery of the new propriate self. But if marriage is ill-prepared with respect to intimacy and trust, and if (since not every maiden follows a beloved elder sister in marriage) her new relations with women are made awkward, the new life can’t be expected to move smoothly toward clear goals. These can be (roughly) catalogued as securing, expanding, and enhancing a new person-hood. There is a double inner dialectic involved. The propriate self must adjust to the sentient experience of begetting, bearing, and nursing a series of children to weaning age. There will be hard new work routines in the production and preparation of food, which may offer less free time and camaraderie than the routines which were shared with her bachelor friends. The old motivational patterns which made the garden a happy place will no longer be reliable. The pleasures and pains entailed in the full role of womanhood will not prove to be selfdefining. She will in the meantime be expected to produce a new persona for dealing with new friends, who will not have learned to overlook small faults. Optimizing the new relationships of intimacy with a husband and his kin, and with the women already established in her new place may prove easy or difficult or, quite likely, both. The resocialization will take time, measured in years. All this may only say in abstract language what has already been made explicit or implied in earlier chapters. But if we take the logic of this analysis we are in position to see that a fresh erotic adjustment is going to succeed or fail, as the case may be, not in relation to its continuity or discontinuity with a woman’s earlier modes of sexual expression so much as with her ability as a person to cope with her new, all-involving social situation. Once a pregnancy is established she will begin to feel the benefits of validating support from her new community of women. At parturition the validation is made explicit in ritual. Before long she will herself be one of the local ‘circumcisers’ of maidens, putting a clear boundary between her new self and that of her own maiden years. Ordinarily, a full transition is eventually made and the new person begins to feel well and well-adjusted in the new place.

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Resocialization is as important to the viability of a ‘culture of rules’ as is socialization itself, the induction of the child to personhood. It is also quite as imprecise as the first socialization in its determination of the individual character which will result. Seen, as here, in a social-psychological frame, the move from maidenhood to womanhood in Kinga culture is a private ordeal which most candidates must manage reasonably well—else the culture of rules which governs the adult life of the women could not hold. Seen in the frame of culture the same transformation is a point of close contact between the deepstuff of Kinga life and its culture of rules or routines. This public culture depends on the predictable success of women and men pursuing their moral strategies into the married estate.

Resocialization: the bachelor male When in the traditional setting of court culture a Kinga warrior married, he was also dislocated geographically and exposed to new institutional demands. If he conceived himself as a man of importance, he must live up to the image of untsagila, the prince’s deputy to some local bush people, a leader, exemplar, and judge. If his moral project in the new life of a householder was more modest, he would still be taken up with the building of a new persona, a local reputation and identity, a secure future. With each fancied success or failure of accommodation the terms of his private, reflective self-assessment would shift a little; with each visit back to the ikivaga of the court the wedge between erstwhile career and prospect would be driven a little deeper. Honour at the court is for two sorts of men: the avanyivaha [privileged retinue of the court] and the bachelor youth whose energy and grace derive from the carefree condition of being young and well. A man who at marriage knows he still possesses something of his youthful scope will yet find it warrants him only a past at the court; his future is in building family and following of his own. The new role at first will be mask, plain persona, a self of the right hand. But as it becomes (from having been a venture in self-reliance) the central preoccupation of a man’s existence the motivation of the role becomes his own in a fuller sense, that of the propriate self, the self-held-back. In our metaphor it is this ‘left handed’ or private sense of self from which reflected esteem, anxiety, and shame or doubt may arise. Although a man’s transformation at marriage was normally not as clean as a woman’s, and should have been less traumatic, psychological stress in men seems to have been greater not less. I suppose the conventional wisdom of psychology, relying upon a model of conti-

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nuity, would have predicted otherwise. But if you suppose the problem is not so much one of changing ingrained habit as of finding validation for current aspirations, women have the better of this style-shift in adult life. Is it because the solidarity of womenfolk is here reinforced by cult? or because a woman’s libido is quiescently structured by her concern for a series of infants and her close bond to a daughter? I should think: for all the reasons I have tried to touch upon, and more. <<[lit] Only the ideal untsagila, the pioneer who gains a following and comes to be recognized as a new local ruler with several healthy wives and a court of his own, has unambiguous support for his shift to a heterosexual adjustment. More usually, men find themselves continuing an old and comfortable sexual adjustment in uncertain balance with a new and perhaps intractable one. The non-possessive ethic of the men’s house minimizes the burden of personal demands, in the erotic and more generally in the expressive sphere, upon a friend. But householding with a single partner entails the clear allocation of approval and disapproval, as things go well or badly, among only two persons; there are new buildings to be fashioned and new fields chosen and tried—much to go either badly or well. Polydyadic relations of intimacy in their bachelor peer-groups will have produced a mature man and woman, but will have prepared them for a diffuse form of responsibility, a small world but one in which no individual need stand alone. The new husband who was found to have been urinating on his wife instead of ejaculating in congress may have been a lone case of unwitting impotence, but the fascination of that tale for elders, who often told it, suggested familiarity with problems of the left hand on the marriage mat. In the crowded men’s house, ego may enjoy an order of immunity from self-knowledge he won’t enjoy in marriage. For Kinga men the culture of rules calls for a change of estate more drastic even than that facing the maidens they will marry, and at an even later stage of adult life than theirs. The Sanga system depends as utterly on a man’s taking well to marriage as on his bachelor service at court. What makes the success of his transformation predictable is a massive compromise with respect to the extent of his commitment to the new domesticity. A woman leaves her isaka and never, by the rules, looks back. But men keep their ties to the barracks life. Their husbandly duties are many but do not require leaving behind an old life with all its social and sentient rewards.

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Resocialization: rationality and style Is a man’s role ‘instrumental’ and a woman’s ‘expressive’ in Kinga culture? A small case could be made for the reverse, since women do more steady work than men, dealing with the production of staples where men (as hunters, raiders, migrant workers) turn to adventuring after luxuries. But the question is misconceived. Instrumental action has the form of rationality, expressive action normally does not. But men and women everywhere through ordinary, everyday actions pursue private moral strategies which deeply inform but do not lie on the surface of their lives. Let a young man seek glory by raiding Nyakyusa cattle, let an older man seek respect by attending the wordy debates at court. If both forgo other moral values in the pursuit of these goals, we seem to be dealing with a rational assessment of means and ends in any case. The moral of La Fontaine is not the only reading one could give to La Cigale et la Fourmi. A fabulist of another age, rejecting the formidable style of the Ant, would give us another tale. Are we dealing with rationality or style values? Behind our code, the distinction of instrumental and expressive modalities of being refers to rational pursuit of ends on the one hand and activity as end-in-itself on the other. Was it unpredictable that a U. S. male sociologist in the 1950s (read Talcott Parsons 1955: 3-33) would propound a theory associating his own sex with rationality and the other with its absence? The Kinga ordeal, which by all reports might end by executing an innocent man or woman, in 1900 would have been described by honest informants in soberly instrumental terms; but a woman’s devotion to the work of her fields, which we might be inclined to see that way, a Kinga man will paint as a deep-rooted virtue in the women of his country, to be expected so long as they have not acquired the corrupting ethics of certain neighbouring peoples. Her work is an expression of her good character. The time women spend in their fields is often spent by older men around a beerpot. Kinga men don’t often get ‘fighting drunk’—I heard of it but never saw or heard it. Men can usually trust each other to respect them when their guards are down. There are no Kinga alcoholics (though some would say there are few of the older men who are not). There is not the compulsion to drink which you may find where men are desperate for expressive acts of support and seek them from buddies in beer. Conversation at beer is pursued as an end in itself, the moral equivalent of the newspaper a middleclass Londoner requires every day. The Londoner knows if he fails to keep a paper or even to keep the right one he’ll be at a disadvantage, slight but real enough, in

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getting on with the practical business of the day. It is the same with Kinga and the beerpot. It is by exercising reason in the pursuit of moral strategies that Kinga men and women come to master practical and interpersonal roles. They take on the motivational patterns associated with them, coming gradually and in characteristic ways to identify with some. Role motives are transmuted to propriate motives. Instrumental and expressive values, reason and affective adequacy, come in this process into subtle combination. The clues to meaning are many and may be hidden. An observer becomes accustomed to standard situations and the ‘rational’ (adaptive, accommodative, assertive, exploitative) responses one can expect from men and women in such circumstance. These actions are called by Allport (1955) ‘opportunistic’ and are made to stand in opposition to any acts governed by propriate motives. This is the distinction between ‘what I am doing’ and ‘what I am like’—situation and self. But what most complicates meaning is the Ant. She took an instrumental ethos into herself. Was she not expressing herself in her industry? More often than not, men and women get into standard situations with their eyes open, pursuing longer-term moral advantage: the backdrop to (opportunistic) situational action is a moral strategy, a policy, a characteristic style of participation which—if we could read the clues—expresses the full complexity and intelligence of a person’s moral career. The simplest ‘opportunistic’ act may deserve a description which counts no corner of the culture irrelevant and no antecedent episode quite lost. What makes culture possible is our sensitivity to style. Without it social life would be a wearisome, jumbled book of familiar words without clear meaning. Adopting a new role entails mastering the style of performance it requires, making the style one’s own. Let us review the story of the bush youth who became a Sanga ruler. At court the new recruit from the hills has to drop his uncouth ways. From playing the bullying boss among younger peers he becomes the one hazed. The new style at first is abrasive and the new persona faulty. It is refined and naturalized by degrees over the initial years. Apprenticeship done, the young warrior begins to take pride in his exploits as servant of the court. The new role is appropriated to the self. He is an old hand. In all this there has been a transformation from bush youth to court brave which is profound and, given its context sensitivity, irreversible.

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The infatuation of a bush youth for a prestigeful style (ochred ringlets, daringly filed teeth, swagger of the court guards) gave birth to a long-term moral strategy of pursuing the good life at court. The glamour then became central to a bachelor’s existence for a decade or more. At length a new aspiration for greater maturity and autonomy as an individual began to form and attach itself to the style of the untsagila, the married man representing the culture of the court and its power among lesser men farther down the valley. Such, so far as we now can reconstruct it, was the subjective career of many a Kinga male a century ago. A minority became commoner rulers of note. Style values by their nature deal in epitomes not in probabilities. People are drawn into their culture by sensitivity to style and the values it comes to embody for them. It is not all a matter of royal pomp and dazzle. The efficient, judicious Bw. Ke, whom Soda painted with unstinting praise, had struck a style Soda would eventually make his own. There are other men whose style in public life he will shun. So much we know from the way he reports his fellow villagers and himself. The Kinga culture Soda has embraced is not a system of uniform usages, rigid customs, or blind habits but a deep complexity of idiosyncratic styles and meanings into which children, youths, and mature adults are continuously drawn as a child may be drawn to a game, a man to the hunt, a woman to conceiving another child. There is a logic, a structure of meanings, a small world of values to be won or lost in every case, which attracts us. Any reduction of this deep complexity to terms which suggest a one-to-one correspondence between a typical mind or personality and a typical configuration of values or culture can only serve to deny the fundamental voluntarism of human life wherever it flourishes. The Ant at heart is vain as the Grasshopper. A woman’s hard work in the fields is possible because it communicates not just what she is doing but what she is. If Kinga women had no friends, if they went off at dawn each day to separate fields, never showing off their gardening prowess or sharing their produce with the brash young men who call them ‘mother’; if they didn’t sing the songs of maidenhood or sing out the formal greetings of women to elders on the paths coming home in the evening—could they possibly be so industrious? Rationality communicates a self to the world. Conviviality communicates the world to a self. Instrumental and expressive styles lie on the surface of action, not at its heart. It is the sense of my analysis that resocialization works because in each case new life circumstances impose a new structure of opportunity, affecting the sentient as well as the social career, to

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which individuals find they want to adjust their moral strategies. It is because resocialization in the cases we have considered occurs in adulthood that it allows us a window into the inner dialectic which is the source of depth and of lamination in everyday human behaviour, wherever culture has developed to the point of exhibiting a distinctive ‘style’. Style in the meaning taken here is always woven of expressive and instrumental threads in subtle mixes and patterns. Style grows most abundantly in the inner domains of the social life, where every instrumental act carries an excess burden of expressive meaning, and even the simplest things can’t be done without revealing something of the actor’s propriate self. The hard culture of rules, the explicitly sanctioned complex of institutions built up by the Sanga courts, comprises a framework of reciprocal rights and obligations without which the ordered life of the Kinga would fall away, if not to chaos, at least to confusion. Ignoring what we may call simply ‘the human factor’, there was a social anthropology at mid-century which argued that such a framework must be self-equilibrating. If instrumental action and the role-motivation which serves it were all we needed to take into account, the argument could be appealing. But I think that is rather like supposing the shucked-off exoskeleton of a lobster could repair itself and enjoy a life of its own. It is rather the soft parts which can. We can best understand human action and social structure in that light.

Psyche & belief Kinga religious belief doesn’t form a single, coherent system. Should we conclude from this that the Kinga psyche is a jumble? The question follows from a model of religion which descends from Sigmund Freud but has found implicit acceptance far beyond his circle. As dreams are to the individual unconscious, religions must be to the collective. But Kinga, before the addition of another from Germany, had three organized religions: an ancestor cult, the women’s cult, and the Lwembe cult. The symbolism, underlying reasoning, and outward style of each is distinct. If we are expecting delivery of a deep Kinga psyche, which cult is named in the manifest? Again the mischief comes of adopting a simple scheme of person-culture relations. Assume that, in the psychological sense, a person ordinarily may ‘need’ (stand in crucial ways to profit from) a religion. In the conception of human nature I favour, religious symbolism is an established code lending meaning to certain acts,

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especially of the kinds we label ritual, ceremonial, or solemn and symbolic. The meanings attached give these acts a special charm to motivate popular participation. The structures comprising the psyche, persona, and propriate self have their sources of stability in a ‘generic’ relationship to culture—a term wanting some discussion. Whereas the ego is spatio-temporally local, confined to a focussed here-and-now, the self is comprised of semiotic resources whose context is a fabric of meanings situated ‘generically’ in time and space. Ordinarily we refer to this fabric of meanings as a culture; but Kinga are not limited to understanding their fellow ethnics, and Western culture has developed specialized institutions (history, anthropology) for extending its scope beyond the traditional bounds of experience. Cult symbolism is ‘good to think with’ and can be conceived by the ethnographer as “giving access to the mechanism of thought” (Levi-Strauss 1963: 104). Specifically, the Kinga cults afford a set of mechanisms for self-stabilizing thought. Women, older men, and members of the court have their religions to think with. Children and wild youths have different needs and are left largely without religion. The familiar notion that religion must everywhere be in the service of ‘social solidarity’ need not be wholly rejected, but would have to be applied here to at least three different congregations. What interests me more is the way religious observances can serve to frame a person’s world—which is almost to say, to generate social structures. The ancestor cult does little directly for women, though it helps a man relate to women in a society which lends a special problematic to that. For Kinga there is no vigorous lineage frame, dominating the organization of social life, wanting symbolic reinforcement in the ancestor cult and validation in the massings of branched-out lineage representatives at a feast of solidarity (and segmentary differentiation). That classic picture of the African patrilineal ancestor religion doesn’t apply. A man’s offering to ancestors places him in a network not a corporate relation to others. The feast is shared by whoever is present. The ghosts of children are asked to communicate greetings to all their ghostly peers; and this is to say a man is not encouraged to take possessive pride in his own children but to emphasize the open networks of childhood and his own sympathetic relation to them, deriving as much from remembrance of his own early life with peers who died young, as his experience with fatherhood seen from either end. The practitioner of the ancestral religion is a private person, a male household head with offspring and no father or father’s brother.

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A presupposition of the ancestors’ interest in ego is that ego identifies with a patriline in the Kinga sense of the term. This means the ancestor cult is a male elder’s institution and reflects the worldview of men who have worked that transformation in their being which makes the idea of a patriline relevant, generating a personal concern ‘downward’ along a line of descent. For the consistent ‘bush’ dweller (say, a smith) this transformation occurs only gradually, as it does for most people living in a sedentary world. But for the ‘court’ recruit the change of persona and propriate orientation after leaving the barracks life will have happened at a forced pace and will for that reason have to be the more consciously purposeful. The Kinga ancestral cult is voluntary in a sense most religions are not. Ancestral religion in the classic African community, as a student reading the literature would likely suppose, is so firmly established that neglect of regular offerings is noticed and sanctioned, while the guest list for feasts on a lineage scale is firmly prescribed. For Kinga none of this applies. When I asked if a Kinga bride’s father, accompanying his ‘marriage tax’ goat to the court, would be allowed to make a ritual sacrifice of it I found the suggestion was taken for nonsense. The short answer was it would be his own affair—he might do as he liked if he fancied carrying a bit of the liver off to the woods. The real answer was that only a very confused person would think an offering appropriate. What rights the man still had in his goat he was in the act of (not altogether freely) transferring to the court. Kinga take a man’s relations with ancestors to be no business of theirs, and the cult in some measure sanctions that attitude toward others’ business generally: it is not an atmosphere of forced autonomy which prevails but even less one of forced heteronomy. The psychological condition for the success of a society grounded so firmly as the Kinga in amity is respect for the self from which any bond of friendship would have to spring. Faith in the moral worth of another becomes crucial in the contract of co-operation on which the small settlements are founded which Kinga call isikolo, residential groups of (fictional) kinsmen. The stage of life to which this particularly applies is that of the householder, for the first time obliged to pursue the moral strategies of an individual. He finds himself in relatively unstructured competition with his fellows and in voluntary but carefully structured relations of cooperation with some of them. The psychological qualities the ancestor cult has acquired among Kinga refer mainly to this phase of the male life cycle and to the ‘dialectic of the left hand’ through which the major personal adjustments of that phase must be made. Now a man’s

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identity ceases to be with his peers so much as with an ancestral line extending into the past beyond his birth and into the future beyond his death. It is a line which, until middle age, has had little significance for him or for the way he was socially perceived by significant others. Now with a house and a place of his own, depending after years of the collective life on his own land and produce, he must know he is his own man. He must be living with others likewise perceived. He may usefully turn to the long forgotten ancestors and an onward-branching model of descent to validate such a perception. I know little of the inner dialectic which might lead a man to turn to his ancestors in crisis, but I reckon the rewards of the collective life in the ikivaga must wear thin for some from a decade of seeing themselves supplanted by younger (foolhardy) and bolder recruits. In their sleeping patterns these recruits will have begun to avoid the older crowd, as of an ascending generation. Family ties are weak for Kinga in the structural sense but not necessarily at the level of sentiment. An ancestral cult, when the real parents have long been dead, could evoke a brightening mood of filial piety for which little direct expression had been found when they were alive. That wives of the agnatic ancestors are mentioned in the offering formula reflects the closer sentimental ties a lad has to mother, the less certain relationship of son to father. The women’s ritual complex so directly celebrates and valorizes the sexual adjustment of marriage that a straightforward, structural-functional view of the cult is hard to set aside. I know less about activities of Kinga women on the occasion of a bush school than the Culwicks (1935) tell us about the riverine Bena or, particularly, Audrey Richards (1956) reports for the Bemba of Zambia. But as clues to style and general inspiration, neither of those examples would mislead. Kinga women don’t suffer the kind of spiritual deprivation at the hands of men which would beget the kind of ecstatic cult I. M. Lewis describes as an almost open protest movement against the opposite sex; but they do boldly approach their moralistic task of teaching the young in the style of those spirits he calls amoral (1971: 31). They are mischievous, abusive, unmotherly; yet in a back-handed way they honour the girl with their attention. What teaching does for the girl is not to ‘initiate’ her into the status group of her teachers; she is delivered back to the company of peers after each of the schools in a ritually altered state but to an unaltered style of life. It is what the schools do for the teacher that I think explains their strength. The women in the crowd of teachers are lifetime citizens of the community in which the girl has grown up, though none may have grown

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up there herself. Only the odd pair will have grown up together in the isaka of some neighbouring place. They’ve developed neighbourly networks of co-operation in the fields, to which their social identities are tied. The imigowi work parties are at once voluntary and obligatory, co-operative and competitive, since reciprocity is the rule, and a wanted partner is not always free. A woman already well established will have so many reciprocal commitments she hardly can add another to please a newcomer. The friendships expressed by women who fall in together on the path to work each morning are at once spontaneous and planned: if it is to be a close relationship, fields must be chosen which adjoin, and the days for working them set aside. Many such plans are made privately under four eyes. The preferred, polydyadic structure of friendships constitutes a virtual rule against exclusivity; yet exclusions must often be felt even where they are not intended to be. The schools allow women to act out the main concerns of their sexual and social identities. The civility of everyday life is turned upside down; modesty is thrown to the winds; aggression is shown toward one of their kind. Each of these reversals carries a ‘backlash’ message: incivility is ridiculed, immodesty made to seem crude, sisterly belligerency shown up as transgression. In the many-one structure of the school the gulf which separates isaka ways from married is made plain, the relative security of marriage is advertised. The noise and clamour of the naked parade may be taken as parody of the solemn horn and drum in processions of the men’s royal cult. But all the noise, clamour, and spectacle serve to draw men out on the path and extract from them an unmistakable signing of woman’s worth. Whereas the women’s cult reinforces the character values which govern their married status, the process by which those values come to stabilize a restructured self is not cultural osmosis. The release of tension, plain enough in the boisterous character of the teaching mob, reflects the extent of self-denial entailed in mastering the married role. Its personal style has not the ease and grace or the extraverted demeanour of the maidens’ way. It can’t be easy to internalize the motive patterns of the role into new modalities of personal aspiration and self-appraisal. The dialectic of the right hand must hold ego, through a period of self-transformation, in a delicate balance between hypocrisy and heroics. If I can act this way, exhibit a persona so unfamiliar to myself, where are the limits to what I may be or do? Ego knows existential freedom at the very time she knows the tyranny of a role destined to annihilate the neatly ordered propriate self of her maiden years. Time will innervate a new dialectic of the left. It is

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because the restructuring of the self in such circumstance is dialectical that a dramatization by value-reversal is effective: ego surrenders to what-I-am-not, bedevils what-I-am-no-more, and catches in the aftermath of the drama what-I-now-must-be. The political cult of the men celebrates the reliance of the land— as in mythic times Lwembe would have walked it—upon the Sanga godling’s goodwill. By demonstrating through public drama the power of the Sanga court system (mutual hostilities suspended for the season) to intercede with cosmic forces, the cult builds the power of priests who conduct its elaborate ceremonies. The priests represent the presence of ‘bush’ or autochthonous learning in the power system of the courts, and their dramatic cooling of Lwembe’s anger embodies the dialectic of bush and court. Commoner hoes cool the royal godling’s anger. The anger of Lwembe is the danger at the centre of a Sanga world. The High Prince at Ukwama figures in myth as a faithless elder brother. The ritual danger which reigns while smith and priest prepare the required piacular rites represents the majesty of the court, refracted and magnified. The whole institution, if seen as the court’s response to unrest (mystical grievances reported from the bush) and as a pledge of service from centre to periphery, encapsulates the constitution of the Sanga segmentary state.<<[lit] But from the viewpoint of the Kinga life-cycle this is a men’s cult and it particularly applies to the dignification of the princely court as ceremonial centre. As a disciplined and ‘collectivized’ procedure it stands opposite the unruly cult of women, representing the need for compliance, compromise, and heed. These are informing values of the court culture: of isaka and the great royal isivaga, houses of maidens and men at arms, where the bachelor stage of life is so prolonged. The values of the men’s cult apply particularly to the self-transformation a youth must make when he comes in from the wild life of the hills to apprentice himself as warrior. The taboo of warfare through the weeks dedicated to pacifying Lwembe’s just wrath falls as a discipline directly on such a youth, and the myth of the wild boy god’s extravagant powers speaks directly to the socially dangerous imagination of the young. For Kinga, there is no religion for boys in their ‘wild’ time, only magic and random lore. The taming of Lwembe’s magic is retold in the myth underlying the royal cult, re-enacted in the procession to his shrine and the thorny intercession there by a regional conclave of priests, always bearing lessons that culture must override nature, polity override passion. These are lessons which can help to deepen ego’s mastery of the role-requirements of barracks life, and facilitate his appropriation of the role motivation he first puts on as mask.

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Gordon Allport found that rigid personalities came from something like ‘arrested development’ in early socialization, while with ‘normal’ socialization the personality should remain flexible. Deeply irrational psyches can’t be held responsible for all of religion unless we assume the ‘normal’ is all but unattainable. Sociological theories of religion are generally of a functional or semiotic variety, and carry the implication that normally responsible minds are mainstays of ritualism as of the main secular institutions. Robert W. White (1948) suggests normality depends on a sort of psychic housekeeping which he calls protective organization. If people are to understand each other (if White and his many fellow thinkers are right) they should defend their propriate identities in established, not wholly inscrutable ways. Religions can help lay down rules. Carl Rogers found personal stress associated with reliance on facing life with false fronts, masks, badly assimilated roles (personae)—so losing a sense of (propriate) self through hiding it distrustfully. Religion very often projects an image of human vulnerability which can naturalize some of our more particularistic concerns with the self. In small ways such notions can throw light on the way Kinga religions work. But they do not seem to add up to a model of religion as an encrypted chart of the deep Kinga mind. Better say that the cults, in touch with the moral careers of men and women as they are, have been able to shape and solemnize certain key features of the social structure—bending and turning Sowetan rules, as bequeathed by a generic regional culture, to the celebration of a quite specifically Kinga style of life.<<[lit] It is right, in any event, to speak of cults, avoiding any more pompous terms which might have proposed themselves. Ceremonialism is not absent. There is much of it in the form of ‘political religion’ favoured at the Sanga courts; but the grand procession to Lwembe is busied all the way with bickering. It was not the sort of performance which must be kept to exacting theatrical standards. Of the two occasions of high seriousness at court, royal succession and the execution of a witch, only the latter was dramatically produced. Solidarity could hardly have been the point of religion in an antipolitan society. Kinga looked for the good life, even at barracks, in a personal network of friends; their ties to bush culture were never broken. Most men had grown up in scattered hamlets and expected to settle back into the same style later in life. Court and bush were the wellconnected poles of a single society, remaining in balance.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER ELEVEN

Style and strategy

Reading a style Doing fieldwork with Kinga confirmed a suspicion from my student days that microcultures would vary in much the way national cultures do with respect to inherent stability. Some African cultures seem to be as pertinaciously conservative as ancient Egypt, others as naturally flexible as Sumer or as inherently divisive and variable as Greece. Kinga seem to be a people prone to change. I’d be hard put (supposing I wanted) to describe a ‘modal personality’ without differentiating by gender and age, and these are just the easiest categories to choose. I’ve argued that Kinga of either gender are required to make themselves over in adulthood, and that sort of thing makes for obvious personal differences. The custom of allowing individuals to change personal names at will, the popularity of pseudonyms and secret names, and the importance of ambisexuality in forming the social identity all constitute evidence that Kinga themselves are aware of an existential freedom which standard social theory fails to recognize. When a single culture is shared as a mode of life by many distinct social types there will be strains toward change even when external sources are not evident. When it occurs, change may constitute increased variability or consolidation, qualitative innovation of surprising kinds, or simply growth or decline. Nevertheless I think openness to diversity and a broad spectrum of moral strategies is in itself no certain harbinger of change. Transformations of self do not ‘happen to’ a person, they have to be achieved, generally through prolonged effort applied over a period of years. The motive for change is usually a fresh set of moral strategies conceived in a new life-situation. Ego is the active agent of change, but has to operate through a double dialectic with all of its frictions and subterfuge. While the one hand is presenting a self to the

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world for confirmation of its worth, the other is groping for an unexposed self, safe from capricious sanction, which can continue as an inner source of ego strength and moral confidence. Longterm results are never easily predicted, and even the governing moral values may lose much of their transparency for ego when standing moral strategies begin to fail. I’ve argued that, owing to the doubly stochastic process of normal adjustment to life-situations, there is no simple relationship between outward behaviour and (Aristotle’s) states of the soul—between surface mood and deep psyche, persona and propriate self. An observer never knows the person behind the mask on direct evidence. There lies the importance of recognizing style. Style plays an essential part in everyday social diagnostics. I like to defend the proposition that we are less attracted to other persons than to their styles. The attraction to style seems to me primary, the consequent expression in personal bonding and ‘physical attraction’ are both secondary. When we see beauty in another, even when we train our eye on body parts, what we have seen is a style we like, a style we would appropriate. Improbable as it might seem to a highly intelligent gastropod, human nature can even prompt us to seek such appropriation through acts of sexual congress. It was when Kinga youths began to marvel over the beauty of a particular maiden’s breast that I knew they were seeing what they had missed before, conceiving acts they’d not conceived before. It was not surprising, when I heard good things about a maiden’s beauty, that I also heard good things about her personal style: the way she kept herself and did her gardening, the way she kept house, the friends she chose, her wit, her cooking, her understanding. Associating all these attractions with her gender and physical otherness, a young man didn’t try to coopt them to his own persona—there was no burden of masculinity which he might need to shrug off. But a lad would gradually begin to picture marriage in attractive terms. Even if falling in love sometimes seemed to begin with small items, my questions would evoke a Gestalt every time, and I would name that simply ‘personal style’. The wholeness of the stimulus appears when love spoils: it was hard for a youth even to rescue the sense of physical beauty when that happened. Having discovered he was ready to marry, though, he could soon be courting another maiden whom an outsider might find half the beauty the first had been. Style-sensitivity accounts for pattern-learning, which I suppose is most of what has generally been discussed as imitation. Culture is not such that we may expect a one-to-one relationship

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between styles and values. What makes a style attractive or repulsive to me can be called its meaning; or we can say a certain style bespeaks a certain value, as a well-wrought label might bespeak fine marmalade or lend fresh charm to camomile tea. But below the surface of style and the observable uniformities to which it refers, there is in any particular culture far less uniformity. This follows from the way the persona masks the propriate self from others. If we can imagine a society with pocket electronic mind-readers we can imagine a society without the kind of existential freedom which today we take for granted. (What would happen to the incidence of paranoia, I can’t say.) But if, to turn the matter around, everyone did try to achieve total hypocrisy just for a day our social machinery could surely grind to a halt. The requirement of a fiduciary nexus makes society dependent on a reasonably high style-to-value correspondence. We’ve remarked that one of the mechanisms through which correspondence is maintained by Kinga is religion. Satire is another and the court of law, however cumbersome, is a third. Gossip is not the major mechanism it is in other cultures, but peer friendships promote the kind of conversation which may be all-important. I suppose Kinga might be accused of serial schizophrenia—having their multiple personalities in successive phases of the life cycle. But this would be a calumny, suggesting a deeply troubled psyche never at peace. Considering the radical changes in lifestyle which traditional culture demanded, and which contemporary (1960) culture in some measure continues to demand, we might expect psychiatric problems. There are some, but the frequency is not high. I can’t prove it untrue that some microcultures do produce a very stable ‘personality’ early in life, which individuals are able to maintain with minimal adaptations through each phase of life. In such case the problem of ‘deviance’ is not misnamed. But the Kinga pattern is polymorphic. Is it in the strait culture or among Kinga we should expect to find greater depth of character? My intuition says, among the Kinga. By depth of character I mean the kind of moral resourcefulness which allows a person to be coherent, sensitive, and purposeful in challenging circumstance. Because a Kinga woman has had to reconstruct her character as a mature person, to the extent she succeeds she ought to achieve greater moral depth than a person moving directly from girlhood to womanhood. Because a Kinga man enters so late in life into his marriage and householding, and must balance this new life still with a remnant of the old ways with peers, I should expect a more complex and not infrequently a deeper character to form than would otherwise be the case. Greater individual variability at the propriate

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level does not in itself create depth of character; but where this is combined with a communicative and, on the whole, dispassionate spirit of civility one might expect the equation to hold. Compared to configuration theory, style theory approaches the psychology of cultures with skepticism and reservation, anticipating the need for a model of greater human complexity. For me, the receptivity of an individual to culturally patterned values lies primarily on the level of style and persona. There is no instant introjection of values from one propriate self to another. Patterns easily pass from right hand to right hand but not from left to left. This means ego must build private moral strategies to cope with the deeper world of experience which I have metaphorically referred to the left hand, the level 2 dialectic. I may know my friend well and have a keen sense for what may please or dismay him; my insight may (rarely!) astound him. What I am unable to do is transplant from my friend to myself or from me to my friend any aspect of self but style. The deeper mechanisms have to be fashioned by the work of my own propriate self: my joy and suffering, my games of being and becoming, my mansions of hope and despair. Here is a part of myself made, episode by episode, in a story of my invention meant only for me. Observers will know of it only from my style. I myself will most vividly know it from the puzzles which come to haunt me in a dream state. Describing any culture as though it supported one-dimensional lives is opting for superficiality. I think the polymorphic regional pattern I have sketched in this book is decidedly widespread though not, as such, widely reported. What is often reported, if not always quite explicitly, is stylistic dualism and, in some instances, pluralism. For Kinga, particularly men, bush and court styles represent alternative moral standards. It will be worth looking at some other cases. Dualism always exposes individuals to more than one role-motivational model, and can’t avoid offering some individuals the choice. Kinga men or women may be more or less adventurous, more or less ambitious or industrious. The court-bush continuum provided a latitude for lifestyle choices lacking for politically less-developed neighbour peoples: Magoma, Wanji, Pangwa, Mawemba, Ndendeuli. In the following section I briefly consider style dualisms in other ethnographic regions of the world. My point in doing so is to show that they are not so much complex as compound, and that what they tell us about social structure needs to be understood in humanistic terms.

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Style dualisms in three classic studies Tepoztlán When Oscar Lewis reviewed his data on social stratification in the small Mexican village of Tepoztlán, he rejected what Robert Redfield had written on the subject a generation earlier. One lesson of any restudy seems to be that there will be objective change: “You never step on the same Bushman twice.” Another lesson is that our schools won’t stamp out the same anthropologist twice—observers will differ. But the main lesson I draw from comparing Lewis and Redfield on stratification in Tepoztlán is that we can all too easily talk by one another.<<[lit] Redfield said Tepoztecans might be tontos or correctos. These are his terms for designating (in my terms) two styles native to the village. He used the words “not in their original Spanish meanings, but merely to designate two groups in Tepoztlán that are sometimes so designated by the people themselves, and that lack other convenient names” (1930: 68n). Shoes and dark trousers were the signs of correcto style, sandals and white trousers were tonto. Redfield talked of ‘groups’ but made clear he meant by that ‘subcultural communities’. Lewis (1951) took the styles (the one being humbler, the other better off) for hypothetical social classes and rejected the hypothesis he was thus attributing to Redfield. Finding that one brother might dress tonto and another correcto, that a man’s style of dress was unreliable as an indicator of his wealth or occupation, and more along the same lines, Lewis concluded Redfield had been mistaken. He’d failed to see or direct attention to the realities of life in a Mexican village. What was most deeply wrong was the assumption that persona and person are the same. Technically this is reification or misplaced concreteness. Where everyone has a Hitler haircut no one is Hitler. The idea of el correcto is the kind of abstraction from reality which alters reality. To align yourself with a patron in the way you dress doesn’t instantly bestow all the patron’s qualities upon you. Probably when Redfield was there (1926) only a man who dressed correcto was making a deliberate choice, while dressing tonto was the default style. I say this because, in historical perspective, the correcto style was the newer and suggested identity with the ‘urban’ or ‘colonizing’ elements then affecting the Mexican peasantry. Still, the idea that style makes the man is less than a half truth. Notice the positivistic

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bias in the way we are explaining people. The prime presupposition is you are whatever you have stylistically become—the way you’ll respond to a new situation is in principle predictable as a function of what you seem to have learned to be. What this leaves out is the tentativeness in what we are, the endless revocability of becoming, the seductiveness of the world. Tepoztecans in 1926 had the choice of two styles of dress. They all read these styles in about the same way, impressionistically ascribing qualities which differentiate the two ‘kinds of person’ they represent. The incautious villager, like the incautious anthropologist, may identify persona and person in his observation of other villagers. Style is the objectification of social imagery, a formulaic approach to modalities of being. To believe you can be what you want to be you have to reify style, read the surface as deep. What the villager is ignoring as he does so is all that he knows about the disconcerting differences between one correcto and another, one tonto and another. Responding to style differentiation, for the moment he sees no other difference— it is as if people were tontos or correctos. A moment later (his attention shifted to some other of the variables either Lewis or Redfield would have inquired about) the whole population of the village will be re-assorted into other categories. Around election time it may be party, at fiesta time piety. Politics and piety have their various styles as well. Why was there not a single Tepoztecan style of dress? (Why were there court and bush styles among Kinga?) The reason is that a spectrum of lifestyle choices was open to villagers, and the choices took their meaning from two deeply alternative opportunity structures. Look at the options as Lewis did (in 1946) under the rubric of social class and you perceive they are not ‘free choices’ but are bundled. Symbols are tied to values, styles to career lines offering different rewards and demanding different skills and expenditures of wealth and effort. Style of clothing can be a trivial choice—a matter of taste. Still, the idea of ‘class’ will lead the observer to two clusters of variables, two kinds of career, and they will probably correspond in a rough way (in 1926 or 1946) to tonto or correcto styles. For many Tepoztecans the choice is open, since careers are not foreordained. In a Mexican village, people scramble for a living the best way they can. In the short run, the choice can be as simple as putting on new clothes. It just means trying out a new persona. This will most often be done in early adult years, when the new opportunity structure begins to feature in your plans and you are adopting new moral strategies.

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Redfield’s study was done a short generation after the 1910-12 revolution, which saw Tepoztlán abandoned. Some (tontos) took to the hills, some (correctos) to the towns (Redfield 1930: 207-9). They returned confirmed in their difference, tontos holding to the one folk culture and correctos bi-culturally combining it with what they could of the metropolitan Mexican lifestyle. Fifteen years after their return the two communities (call them ‘conservative and progressive’ or ‘traditional and acculturated’ or even analogically ‘indio and ladino’) remained fairly distinct, though after another generation they would be more mixed. Still, Lewis had no trouble tagging individuals to match them with local records (1951: 431). The two styles were still there, and individuals seem to have elected one or the other consistent with their own moral strategies. Can it have baffled the anthropologist that you can’t read those strategies from the stereotypical style of a man’s shoes and pants? Tepoztlán through the whole of the twentieth century has been balanced between alternative schemes of value: folk ~ urban tonto ~ correcto indigenous ~ cosmopolitan local ~ national indio ~ ladino spiritual ~ material traditional ~ modern iglesia ~ mercado santos ~ veteranos apartados ~ politicos

For every human society offering something beyond what households can provide for themselves we can list such parameters of moral choice. The more specific and concrete variables life may present to individual experience are beyond listing. They take their meaning from the general sets of equations we call values or, in their most abstract expression, worldview. But there are private equations to be satisfied as well, as experience is incorporated into an individual’s moral strategies and comes to be driven by them. There may never have been a single household in Tepoztlán which would align fully left or right, on the table above, with respect to style values. It is diagrammatic thinking about social structure which makes an observer suppose that households ‘ought to be’ so predictably aligned. But the other, the ethnographic, genius of a social science demurs, preferring portraiture—interpretation from direct observation.

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Highland Burma The best-known case of lifestyle choice in a ‘traditional’ society is Sir Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma, published in 1954. For all the freshness of the book then and now, it was a product of the time when a single anthropologist on a single trip to the field was expected to return with a definitive description of a culture. It was also a time of paradigmatic thinking in British social anthropology. Leach found two systems of politics among Kachin and decided they must be the two faces of Kachin social structure. Communities could be organized by gumsa (hierarchic) or gumlao (republican) principles. Thus it came to be said in high professional circles that Kachin society represented the case of a social structure in “oscillating equilibrium.” It was one of the more grotesque conclusions anthropologists have reached, unappealing to any mind not possessed by the ‘structural functional’ paradigm of the 1950s. The reasoning was as follows: (a) Assume you can’t have ‘structure’ without ‘equilibrium’— (b) Only further grant that Kachin society boasts two social structures conforming to polar-opposed models— (c) Then it must be possible to have an ‘equilibrium’ which embraces an oscillation between two fixed poles.

Now reification has gone farther than it went in Tepoztlán. There, the style-labels correcto and tonto became first ‘groups’ (Redfield) and then putative ‘classes’ (Lewis) even though in the original statement it was pretty clear the two labels were explicitly put upon styles, with less visible traits secondarily associated. But Lewis, trying to find a correcto class and a tonto class in Tepoztlán, discovered they didn’t exist and so rejected the reified models of classes he had found in his head at the start of the search. In highland Burma two systems of politics, identified by the labels gumsa and gumlao, are able to operate with greater or lesser influence among the same poly-ethnic people. Although they are simply two ‘cultures of rules’, two rough models for acceptable procedures among Kachin and some of their neighbours, they are taken by a newly-fledged social anthropologist, a student of Malinowski’s, to comprise two full-bodied ‘social structures’. Finding more and less hierarchic villages, it seems the observer has taken the ‘more’ for a would-be ‘gumsa’ community, the ‘less’ for would-be ‘gumlao’. Instead of seeing two codes of political manners, toward one or the other of

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which men may gravitate in a given situation, or simply two political styles which they may sometimes briefly vacillate between, the observer has found himself asking which set of rules is the real one. There seems to be a rather ‘British’ premise at work, that rules go very deep indeed.<<[lit] In ethnographic fact what Leach has found are two ideas (models, protocols, cognitive structures). If the ethnographer had not had to abandon his detailed field notes to get out of a war zone, or if he’d been able to return to the scene undisturbed after the peace, or if only the canonical confession of his academic calling had allowed him to send a good student/colleague to restudy, we can expect he would have found about what Lewis found in Mexico, only with a certain highland Burmese flair added. Real communities correspond less well to the two (desktop) polarities of egalitarianism and hierarchy than to almost any of the unmarked patches between. Models are not structures, even when one can suppose the models are in their heads as well as our own. Do Kachins enjoy playing off two social structures, the one against the other? They have two manner-codes for political communication, only one of which a person can expect to validate in any one social situation. It is easy to argue that this phenomenon is more “structural” than (say) diglossia, though linguists will probably not warm to that reading. But the idea of social structure has been abandoned when—replaced by structuralisme—it is identified with ideal-typical models and has lost its reference to the hard-wired social maze within which the members of a human community must pursue their moral careers. Kachin, like Kinga or the folk of Ulaya, may vacillate (find it hard to choose) in some situations, but there is no need to suppose that puzzled individuals or whole communities ‘oscillate’ according to vaguely conceived ‘laws of equilibrium’ inherent in the nature of certain social systems. It happens that Kachins are a polyglot and in origins poly-ethnic assemblage of highlanders with many lifestyle alternatives. Nominally they are agricultural, but the circulation of trade goods (legitimate and otherwise) is important, alliances are to be made by exploiting a wide range of marital contracts, and many Kachins are always ready to relocate, seeking opportunities to get ahead in life. Among the many turns a highlander may learn in his competitive pursuit of the good life are some which entail tinkering with his persona, accommodating through a shift of style. Unlike the postcolonial Tepoztecan, the polyglot population called Kachin has a deep history of thriving on personal enterprise. Marriage, residence,

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and loyalty all are counters to be played in the pursuit of a successful career. If there is no way forward through ingratiation with power (gumsa) the more open lifestyle alternative (gumlao) may beckon. Kachin have their court and bush cultures, as so many peoples do. <<[lit]

Trobriand islanders The source of the idea of equilibrium, of social structure as an organic system, was the tight-little-island model of the ‘savage society’ best exemplified in Bronislaw Malinowski’s publications of the 1920s and 1930s on the Trobriand islanders of Papua New Guinea (Southwestern Melanesia). What remains hidden in Malinowski’s island culture becomes boldly obvious in highland Burma. A culture is not a frame people have to live within, it is a rich set of ideas (rather more than will fit on a desktop) about what is worth having, doing, and being. Kachins, by reason of their long and interesting history at a crossroads of trade and brigandry, have accumulated more disparate ideas (more obvious style alternatives) than the Trobrianders. But does that make a difference in kind between highland and island cultures? Do Trobrianders live in the ‘fixed frame’ of an ‘organic equilibrium structure’? No more than Kachins live in an oscillating one: we have the benefit again of restudy. It will be worth our laying this ghost, as it has haunted anthropology too long. Malinowski was much exercised in his time to explain the way ‘mother right’ and ‘father love’ were pitted against one another in Trobriand culture. His notion was that matrilineal inheritance laws awarded a son to his mother’s side of the family (personified in the mother’s brother) while virilocal residence laws and stable marriage meant the father socialized the boy and would naturally become fond of him though the feelings were unsanctioned by what Malinowski took to be the ‘structural’ rights and obligations of Trobriand culture. The father had no right to be close to his son because in a matrilineal society they were no kinsmen. So we have ‘structure’ against ‘nature’, ‘custom law’ against ‘spontaneous human sentiment’. But there is ample evidence in Malinowski’s ethnography, amply reconfirmed by later observers (compare Young 1976 and Weiner 1988), that Trobrianders naturalize both kin and affinal ties—they are equally ‘structural’. The reification of Law (or rules) as Structure parallels that of Persona (personal style) as Personality. These are radical errors

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which tend to pervade our thinking about the way society works. The matter comes out so clearly in the case of the Trobriand restudy as to make it worth pursuing. The principle to be vindicated is that every adult man and woman has been deeply motivated by experience; that the relevant social experience normally occurs within situationally patterned role relationships; and that the ‘social structure’ they will know has taken its framing substance from the role motives incorporated through a lifetime of situated action. The main technical point to understand is that ‘situated action’ has to be conceived as egoinvolving. Where your course is foregone before you encounter a situation (like getting on an escalator) there is no stochastic interaction and no ego-involved learning. My point of view here is the dead opposite to that of William Graham Sumner (1906), who supposed the social maze (of a ‘traditional’ society) was iron-clad with no stochastic dimension. Obviously, individual moral strategies in such a society would be so confined as to have no significance as generators of the culture. Malinowski was so sure that ‘kinship’ was ‘structural’ and ‘love’ could not be so, that he discounted or actually disbelieved the evidence against him. He thought a woman’s brother supported her family through the urigubu institution, which he usually translated “harvest gift.” This institution revealed “the real constitution of Trobriand kinship grouping” (1935 v. 1: 207). The “patrilocal” (virilocal) household which received the annual harvest gift of yams was acknowledged, with the father as its head. But the “legal” position of the father was the result of a virtual contract with the woman’s brother: “he leases his sister’s procreative life as well as her offspring to her husband” (Idem). To put it crudely, Malinowski seems to have thought, as Levi-Strauss did later, that a marriage system had to be built around the ‘exchange of women’ by their masters (men of their lineage). Whereas for patrilineages the marketing of these prime goods was straightforward, since women could simply be transferred, in a matrilineal system the best a man could manage was a leasing system. Weiner’s restudy shows that the yams of the ‘harvest gift’ (and the many other similar prestations a couple receives of patrilineal kin) are not given or taken as food for the family which receives them but stored by the couple for use in ceremonial exchange. A woman owns the yams of the ‘harvest gift’ even while they are growing in the garden her brother has made for her—if a brother has decided to make such a garden. But the motive which will prompt him is not matrilineal obliga-

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tion, it is political (social) ambition. Here is my one-two-three summary of the relevant facts as Annette Weiner gives them: (1) A brother does little more than token work for the growing family of his sister until after a decade or more her husband is becoming politically big as a potential friend-and-ally. A husband of no importance may go through life without having a yam house built for him. He can’t do it for himself. The foundation of a man’s political career is the interest taken by his wife’s brother. (2) During the initial period of the family, the new husband has most of his outside help (yams for ceremonial exchange) from his own father—not a ‘kinsman’ at all. Most of the actual food for family and children is provided by the husband’s own taro gardens. His own yam gardening will be on a reduced scale because he will be working for his father—as a return obligation for nurturance in childhood. Yams are a feast food grown for others. They are the currency of alliance across clan lines. (3) It is only as the young man becomes better established that he can begin to think of making yam gardens on a substantial scale for his sister’s husband. Getting established means building up a network of personal allies by strategic, credit-building transfers of valuables— building up a network of debtors. Every hamlet has its politician. His base is the matrilineal land, but the success of his hamlet will depend on his ability to draw yams, men, and other valuables to him. The only ‘true’ (matrilineal) kinsman living there is likely to be his understudy— next in line of inheritance. The list of emendations to the original study could be made as lengthy as Malinowski’s own probing reports. The role motives which move men to produce and ally themselves with others are the stuff of which ‘thick descriptions’ are made. Motives are not always seen the same way by observer and man-on-the-spot, whether the observer be native or visitor. The same ethnographer, revisiting after some years of working over notes, will have a lot of resizing and revising to do. Normally, this entails amplification not simple rejection of older views. <<[lit] Probably if Malinowski had asked whether Trobriand hamlets were formed on the basis of kinship or friendship he would have been assured (and so re-assured) that they were all matrilineal kinsmen. Let us say, only a little playfully, that native informants are all structuralists, believing their own stereotypic pictures of their world. Ironically, what fooled Malinowski may have been the very conspicuousness of the ‘debt-builder style’ (my term) Trobriand men

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use in forging alliances. He took the style for the inner personality and attributed their behaviour to the inherent vanity of Trobriand males. In Malinowski’s own world, vanity is not acceptable as a cloak for ambition. The moral strategies which may carry an ambitious Trobriander along the paths of success can work in their culture but probably would fail in another. The architecture of their social maze is coeval with Trobriand style. Yet again there really are two culture patterns to deal with: a culture of ambition, power, and magnificence on the one hand, and on the other a more laid-back plebeianism of the sort we have seen so fully realized in films and in much of Malinowski’s prose. One of the ethnographer’s now obvious errors was failing to make a census of hamlets. From it he would have learned that men don’t generally live with their matrilineal brothers, cousins, and uncles in spite of all the importance they attach (in talk) to kinship. The unity of a matrilineage is motivated by the rules of land tenure and the strategies these rules engender. A man who wants to be politically important has his rivals among his matrikin and must find his allies in the network of affinal contacts to which he has access. Within his matrilineage he can’t openly pursue special favours—the style is constrained and consensual, a sort of ‘bureaucratic’ ethos prevailing. But fathers and sons, and in-laws, can openly thump their own drums together. They are not rivals for land, the ultimate source of wealth and importance. The ‘debt-builder style’ of the ambitious Trobriand man entails putting himself forward in obvious, boastful ways—‘showing them who he is’. When you present yams to your brother-in-law you try to outdo his expectations. You want to ‘shame’ him perhaps, but only by way of putting him in your debt for an indefinite but substantial return. Malinowski dealt with the exchange of goods and services as “reciprocity”—fair trade, interpersonally sanctioned. What he didn’t see was that prestations which can’t be exactly recompensed are the stuff reputational alliances are made of. A measure of debt, of binding obligation, and with it a build-up of credit is always left between the two partners. Malinowski’s idea of social structure allowed him to see that rivalry for control of an inheritance might be built into a Melanesian kinship structure but not that friendly rivalry for social renown might be built into the structure of a ‘traditional’ community. It is an irony of our intellectual history that, although Malinowski should have most of the credit for showing us the poverty of the stereotype of (what he called) “savage societies” as simply custom bound, he was unable to shake the stereotype in the way he himself perceived the islanders he was making famous.

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But the larger lesson is one about style and intelligibility: even the ‘diagrammatic’ scheme of rules for the pursuit of a masculine career in the Trobriands, after it has finally been worked out, is hardly comprehensible to an outsider who has not learned to read Trobriand style. I recall a lecture at Cambridge where Leach himself covered a chalkboard with diagrams in perhaps eight colours in an effort to explain the complexities of an Australian kinship system. After losing all of us along the way, the Professor himself got lost and painfully erased the whole. Without knowing the culture, without the needed clues to its intelligibility as a moral universe, how on earth will any of us succeed in explaining the technical complexities of any great civilization? Structural dualism, where we find it, should not surprise. Moral choice in human lilfe is inescapable, and ‘dual societies’ only make that a bit more obvious to an outside observer. My position has been that the ‘presocial’ competition within a species, which we see as the creative thrust of animal evolution, persists within the social roles into which men and women are cast, and is everywhere manifested in the pursuit of private moral strategies. I have suggested quite ordinary careers are radically creative and should be understood as essential contributions to social persistence as often as to social change.

Moral strategies Style theory as I represent it holds that significant moral alternatives are present in all human cultures, created or communicated principally through style. In village Mexico men are deeply concerned with making a living. George Foster (1965) has shown that the poorest peasants (tontos) are jealous of any sign that one of their fellows wants to put himself ahead of them. Electing a townsman (correcto) style, by getting you out of the circle of envy, may get you out of what looks like a closed circle of poverty. Another strategy is bearing the financial burden of ritual service on a feast day: a man trades off economic security for honour in a transaction which the (secular-materialist) stranger finds hard to fathom. The institutions of Tepoztlán are built from and for the realization of choice in the pursuit of alternative moral strategies, which are conceived in light of popular ideas about right and wrong, the fine and the mean, grace and disgrace.

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Trobriand lifestyle has no use for tontos and correctos. Styles which attract a Trobriander are quite other. Display, dalliance, extravagance of expression are favoured features of Trobriand manners as Malinowski described them and as we see them in films. But the same culture also patterns extremes of formal respect (fear) toward ranking chiefs and toward sexuality in relations with matrilineal kin. The two styles are contrary alternatives but equally structural, and neither is the face of Trobriand deep personality. The social system is energized by the dialectic these two opposite styles generate. Trobriand culture can’t work without both. Kachin men by contrast are privately political beings, looking for alliances whether as patrons or clients, affines or republican comrades, dealing across ethnic lines, pawning their women in the service of longterm masculine strategies. The major style alternatives we find in the ethnography are the political-ritual left and right, though closer restudy would (still perhaps will) show much more. What distinguishes Kinga moral strategies on this broad canvas is the way they centre on enduring friendships. Because the love of men in the ikivaga or women in the isaka cannot be possessive it rests on developments in the longer term. Petty factionalism is avoided as a reflex of avoiding possessive alliance. Traditionally, men and women relocated after an extended youth and must be prepared for that. Men would generally move out with friends to form a new ikikolo hamlet, often as a pseudo-kingroup of Sanga. Women might go out with such colonizing groups as brides, royal princesses awarded to the men for service to the court. It is likely the young women would have had some scope of choice in such pairings, and likely also that going out with friends was more important in the longer term than freely choosing a husband, but we have no cases to examine. For the women who did marry as friendless strangers into a new community, romance would have been an important support in the initial adjustment. But with pregnancy and the long nursing period the initial intimacy of marriage would be ended. With acceptance into the women’s cult group new peer alliances would be formed, expressed in the bright, informal fellowship of women’s work and the absolute obligation of formal greeting, a form of communion, on every encounter during the day. Except for the wild period of youth for men, the styles of court and bush were never incompatible. Bush women came in small parties, finely arrayed, with festive beerpots, to the court on feast days. Countrymen took their beer with courtiers touring the domain to hear cases and settle tax accounts. Everyone was accustomed to work

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with the hoe, every man to the multiple uses of bush-hook and spear. The two styles, bush and court, remained viable alternatives in 1960. Most men knew them both, but a few lived their lives through at court, and a few in the hills or in hidden valleys. There were currents of change among men and women, among school-educated youth, in cashcrop agriculture, and particularly in government. A longer study would have discovered more complexity. By standards anthropology properly should set for itself, restudies are overdue as I write. I don’t expect anyone to show off a monolithic Kinga culture, as I think there never was one and I suppose the nationalist policy of assimilation will hold. Thirty or fifty years of change even under the conditions of a free tradition may be enough to make a culture almost unrecognizable at first glance. It is only gradually one perceives it as a new version of a world one has known before. That kind of recognition by family resemblance should be possible for the Kinga lifestyle even a generation or two from now, long after fresh reconstructive work on the old culture has finally lost feasibility. The deepstuff will change according to its own inner workings, and the culture of rules of the region will be drawn into a global stream of events along, perhaps, with all the Eastern Bantu communities known to this century’s ethnography. I have tried to suggest in the way I have reported and elaborated on my field observations that change has always been the rule for the Kinga and would have been continuing today if the European intrusion had still not taken place. I devoted most of my African studies during the three and more decades since fieldwork to acquiring what I regard as an historically defensible portrait of Kinga life. When I left the field I was convinced I knew almost nothing about Kinga history and must turn to that study through archival and comparative exploration. It was an essential part of my plan to publish a broad historical and comparative survey before completing the works more specifically devoted to the Kinga. This began to look possible, though, in spite of a near-total dearth of archaeological work in the region, only when I had completed my own necessary archival work and as the general field of African history developed on the basis of new archival and oral-historical enquiries. The project finally became feasible when I managed to join forces with a glottochronologist who could provide a time-sensitive linguistic map of the Sowetan region (cf. three references under Nurse and Park for 1988). I had learned in the field that a straight description of Kinga life in 1960 couldn’t satisfy my scholarly goals. I had known from the start that, however valuable I had found the existing work of Afri-

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canists I had studied or worked with at Cambridge, my own curiosities were taking me off the recommended path. It was partly that I had come to ‘British social anthropology’ by a different route than most, having done graduate work in behavioural and social sciences before a doctorate in anthropology at Chicago. The mid-century psychology I still prefer had distinctively humanistic pretensions. But more important than my broader-than-most ‘training’ was an interest in human history which had led me to look for fieldwork which could touch hands with the full sweep of pre-urban civilization from Africa’s simpler to its most intricate forms. Of course, I had neither the omniscience or the logistical autonomy just to ‘choose’ a people for study who would provide me the window I wanted on the past and on the processes of political development which can lead to state formation. When I did finally get to pack my family on a ship bound for East Africa, I had no notion how lucky my lot would be. That Kinga themselves would be so open to choice and keen on the observation of differences was something I hadn’t expected on the basis of the ethnographic literature then available. It is good news that a more humanistic bent has since developed in the profession. I regret that its time only came after the serious scientific thrust of anthropology had virtually ceased to find financial and institutional backing in my parts of ‘world 3’. For me, the only properly scientific attitude to take toward the study of a civilization is humanistic. One has to be prepared to forswear certainty. Diagrammatic thinking comes easier but can be less than helpful when its dangers are not respected.

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TWIN SHADOWS, BOOK TWO, CHAPTER TWELVE

Twin shadows

Through the combination of its altitude, which accounts for the cold brilliance of the night sky in the dry season kiangazi, and a tropical latitude Kingaland is one of those rare places which allow the human form twin sharp shadows. In times of the full moon the setting sun will be matched for a few minutes by its own reflected glory, and a person returning home late from the fields is pursued by shadow selves on either hand. I find this twinned image a suitable one with which to open a final discussion of Kinga moral strategies. The winning strategy must take light equally from friends and family, though each may seem to lead a different way. My task of reporting on the ‘inner domains’ of Kinga life has not obliged me to deal with sexual orientation as a problematic code of conduct, requiring special explanation in psychological terms. I have been content to assume that the special significance for Kinga men and women of their twinned orientations toward gender intimacy has always been the twinning of their social lives which is a natural consequence of a Kinga childhood. Friendships can’t forever ‘run on their own meltings’—like Robert Frost’s icecube on a stovetop, the normal run of a casual dyadic tie between age-mates is to extinction. Family provides a safe anchorage when friendship fails; and the obverse is equally true. Though Kinga do seem at first view to minimize the family as an institution, it remains the focus of their most important personal responsibilities and the locus of their belonging. Peer amity, coming first in experience and most spontaneously, corresponds to what I have been calling the ‘right hand’ self for either a girl or a boy. Heterosexual and filial ties (symbolized by the less spontaneous ‘left hand’) follow less easily but achieve more certain depths. Only marriage will generate maximal claim relationships, and only these will have a lifelong term. I have found no sure basis for claiming that ‘our’

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arrangements for human intimacy are more balanced than theirs. Perhaps we should take heed of Kinga manners in a formal greeting: it is done with both arms separately extended to clasp the other’s, left to right and right to left, held through many repetitions of proper phrases, and only gradually released. For reasons given earlier, the concern of this book has not been with personality differences among Kinga or with cataloguing Kinga values. The range of personal differences among individuals compares with the range you would find anywhere, as I hope some of my specimen portraits and anecdotes from Malanduku have suggested. Enumerating Kinga ethical beliefs is a project I simply chose to finesse. Of all the features of culture prone to reification, ‘values’ are second only to ‘mores’. My purpose has been to focus on pragmatic aspects of character formation in a social system sufficiently unlike most others to challenge the conventional wisdom. I’ve wanted to explore the moral career options Kinga were accorded in the days of their free tradition, and the way they chose among them. It has been important to show that scope for choice and individual responsibility for career adjustment are generic to the microcultures just as they are to more complex social environments. If you assume that the choices we make make us, you are halfway to understanding the importance of style. You get the other half of the way when you see that our style as a medium of communication is never simply our own but is that aspect of our persona which is always being shared. I can still be cheered up today by remembering a little Kinga maid telling her favorite tale or her older sister singing her way home from gardening. A very few decisions will always seem, in retrospect, to have been crucial for a personal career. But the small, undramatic situational choices which set up the terms of decision are not easily recaptured. Drama can enter every life and seldom waits for an invitation. But if, as Aristotle argued in the Poetics, each turn of the drama reveals character, the character must have been building long before the drama began. This didn’t happen in the cradle but began with the child’s discovery of the social uses of a persona. Then it continued to happen through all the adventures of daily life, dramatic and routine, which offered scope for the kind of moral choice by which we tell ourselves what we are and where we are bound. The idea of personality is confused in the current literature not only by the assumption of fixity but by the partial compromise of its original meaning. The inventors of personality meant it to mean individual differences in characteristic behaviour. In anthropology by treating ‘personality’ and ‘culture’ as mirrors of each other we got

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round to thinking more about what the people of an exotic community may have in common than about personal differences. It is a legitimate scientific question how far and in what respects—ultimately, for what reasons—Kinga persons growing up within the tradition come to differ from one another. As an anthropologist, I only know that they do. I find it easy enough to suppose that the reasons in Kingaland are much like the reasons for individual differences wherever they have been professionally studied. But as an anthropologist, this is not one of my problems. I content myself with these simplilfying assumptions: The main burden of ego psychology is to explain how individuals exploit the latitude allowed by the roles they are cast for. The observation of social behaviour without adequate understanding of the way social roles package motivation can only lead to confusion. The observation of social behaviour without adequate understanding of the presence of sentience in every human act can only be confusing. The ethical values evoked by any culture are best discovered through study of the moral strategies pursued by representative men and women in pursuit of life’s rewards.

A project of this book has been to suggest how it is that the deepstuff of one culture comes to differ from that of another within the same regional culture. This problem of style differentiation is an anthropological problem. Style—cultural style—is manifest in role behaviour not ’personality’. The standardizing force in culture is role motivation, and it is not possible to deal with motivation at an interpretive level with a culture-blind psychology. To meet that problem, I have centred my discussion of Kinga style on an individual’s pursuit of a moral strategy which, in face of his or her special circumstance, bids fair to pay off. I do assume intelligence, though I recognize how imprudent that may seem to the wisemen of other persuasions. I will grant that ego is sure to take bad advice from time to time, but I have noted that most of us take care not to fall in the same trap twice. I am even willing to put that forward as a provisional definition of autonomy. This means we have to give special importance to human intelligence in the generation of cultures. It does not mean “man makes himself” in the rough sense of that phrase given by the utopian philosophies. The implication is rather that, because the process is stochastic and involves a multitude of minds, the result of style generation is not predictable. The stage at which predictability does come in (and chaos theory can be set aside) is the stage of programmatic political expansion from a nuclear community which has achieved an effective synthesis of deepstuff and routine culture

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giving it a political advantage over its neighbours. I have in mind not expansion by subjugation, like that of ancient Sparta, but by a process of annexation, some forms of which (other than the Sanga) have been identified in examples used earlier. Most of the African protostates we know show evidence that a technique of annexation which once begins to work will be refined and repeated until, like a spider’s fine web, a whole cluster of local communities has been brought in to the sort of open alliance we call a segmentary polity. On the strength of the Kinga evidence and what else I know, I propose it is with the dawn of politics we ought to expect the genesis and eventual spread and consolidation of many distinct local styles within a regional culture. The prime reason is that intimate facework is what deepens a preliterate and pedestrian culture, and that deepening of a style has to happen first on a local scale. The most obvious part of the process will be the bending and shaping of the local culture of rules to match the deeper needs which are beginning to control the moral strategies men and women can profit by choosing. At a point when the generative process has produced a vigorous style of life on the local level there is a good chance it may stabilize through political escalation. This is likely when peaceful expansion is cut off by neighbours sharing the regional culture of rules, and inter-communal competition is in the air. It is at such times politicization and a local pattern of (involutional) annexation is apt to develop. If the style is then to spread, it must be done by concerted political action. This presupposes a fair measure of political sophistication in the regional culture. The kind of politics which can extend the boundaries of a culture beyond its home locality requires both the right deepstuff and a sophisticated culture of rules. I have proposed that the former must be home-grown, and the latter must be given in the first instance as a feature of the regional culture. The parts played by settlement patterns, mobility, extended kinship, landholding rules, petty war patterns, and ritual organization in the slow development of a regional culture will tend to be a different mix in each region. The Sowetan regional culture is in several ways unusual for Eastern Bantu regions: kinship fictions have been politically less important, and (not unrelated to that) possessive heterosexual ideologies have been allowed to subside.<<[lit] Amity in and of itself is not as strong a basis for solidarity as kinship. The Nyakyusa age-village pattern appears to have been strong enough to survive for a generation or two after the colonial take-over; but we are told it was abused by the older men who, no longer needing protection for their herds, felt no need to earmark cattle for the

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marriages of their sons; and we are further told, at least anecdotally, that the age village itself is now a thing of the past. It is replaced, of course, by a re-emphasis of kinship as the basis of personal alliances and by nuclearization—the money economy favours the interests of the young and educated men over their elders, breaking the exaggerated pattern of ever-bigger polygynous families which had developed under the pax. Seen in retrospect, we will have to reassess the Nyakyusa value system which, for Monica Wilson writing about the 1930s, centred in ‘the breath of men’ and tolerated a ready accusation of witchcraft (tantamount to ostracism) against any unpopular behaviour in a village mate. This was a value system linked to an extreme adaptation of the regional culture of rules regarding residence; the adaptation itself was associated with an expansive political system in which warlike cattle-raiding played a crucial part. Boys were segregated from women before puberty and maintained in bachelor status during young adulthood: contact with women, it was said, would make cowards of the men a chiefdom needed to protect its own cattle and bring in others by raiding. As long as the young men were taking cattle this way, they were independent of their elders for marriage cattle. But this broke down when cattle raiding was outlawed by the new European rulers. A similar transparency attaches to the Sanga barrack system for extending bachelorhood, though in the case of Kinga the bachelor warriors were honoured guests of the prince, and young women could also enjoy a bachelor phase, since older men generally took little interest in multiple marriages. We would have to say in both these cases that the deepstuff of the culture was integrally adapted to political ends. Ironically, a culture of amity was serving a culture of war. Delayed marriage or extended bachelorhood requires a special motivational basis. In some kinship societies the arrangement is such as to encourage covert heterosexuality by allowing technically illicit relationships between young men and their young cousins, who are kin too close for marriage. It is easy enough to see how that kind of game might evolve, and how it might work to maintain a useful, non-explosive tension between the bachelor youth and his elders as long as a reasonably permissive style was maintained. The two Sowetan peoples who pattern delayed marriage for men depend on same-sex relationships. Ordinary ethnographies are unlikely to inform us well on sexuality as a feature of the inner lives of a people. Of the two remaining Sowetan communities for which we have some intimate information, the Riverine Bena are said to allow sexuality an easy progress from boygirl explorations to adult infidelities. As nothing in the culture of rules appears to require abstinence or deviation from the heterosexual

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path, whatever occurs off that path is evidently extra-processual. Though they favour plural marriage, the prevailing ethos of voluntarism suggests their communities usually find a balance between the demands of youth and those of age. The male-female population ratios are low, allowing for a good many spare women, and Bena tolerance of private infidelities presumably serves to further comfort the younger men for whom there actually are no brides available. For the Hehe, on the other hand, neither infidelity of any kind or homosexual relations are psychologically tolerable. Without a better understanding of the deepstuff in that community and the way the Hehe style has been maintained in this century, I can only suppose that their nineteenthcentury adventure in empire building by way of rape and plunder gave men a taste for dominating great herds and households—an egoinvolved taste which men managed to transmit down the generations in spite of a radically changing political and economic situation. Yet the culture of rules governing responsibilities and rights of men and women in marriage, and the guarantees of protection by a woman’s natal kin group, read very much like those of Kinga and Bena law. Kinga sexuality had certainly held true to style until the time my fieldwork and Edgerton’s study of the Hehe (on which I must rely) were done. Most of the men knew that some of their regional neighbours were prepared to condemn out of hand a freedom Kinga take as a natural right. Particularly at the migrant labour sites in 1960, where the selection of associates was daily forced on them, the choice was acutely conscious. But the tenacity of sexual postures can hardly be surprising. It may be true a sexual orientation which isn’t affirmed doesn’t exist, but Freud has taught us it may be affirmed in darkly displaced ways. We see the dark side of peer love for Kinga in their witchcraft fears, so often focussed on intimates. Suspicions arise as “rational” fears for the most part, provoked by sudden illness or private catastrophe. We see the same dark side, if not the same malevolent power, in the myth of male potency which puts a man forever in sexual debt to his wife in spite of the endless holidays from coition which, in the name of children, she herself imposes on the marriage. The double lives of men or women, like parallel lines, may never really cross. Gender is a universal form of style dualism in culture. For Nyakyusa, special and rigid constraints on the freedom of married women in the presence of men serve to keep the lines apart; for Hehe, men and women shall not dine together; for Kinga before the softening brought by the missions it was the women themselves who by binding so together held their lives apart from the mens’, and even the missions have not greatly changed that.

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Flight is a favoured metaphor for human freedom. Intelligence gives us wings: from the time we leave infancy behind if we are clever we are creatures of the air. One day is tranquil, another turbulent. Culture, that coherent mixture of meanings which allows our intelligence to rest on substance, is for us what air is to the bird, a transparent medium without which wings—our powers of speech and judgement—would be no better suited to flight than a seal’s flippers. Our freedom, far from opposing custom, exists in the medium a deep scheme of meanings will create. Moral strategies emerge in the world created by the intrusion of wilful individuals into a cultural space. The extended childhood of man, characterized by a chrysalid condition of the sex organs, allows time for a discriminating internalization of the culture at an apprentice level. Sexual maturation begets, in the presence of incest taboos, the extension of intimate contacts beyond the range of mere apprenticeship to an adult. Gradually, the arena of new-adult contact is enlarged and events within it become radically less predictable. The individual, exposed to hazard, develops new protective and assertive moral strategies to control events at the levels of persona and propriate self. For Kinga the first fact of cultural space is the absence of family structure with respect, particularly, to sexual identity. The standard heterosexual incest taboos are there, but do not affect the bachelor’s erotic life. Even erotic closure in dyadic withdrawal is not tabooed but allowed to run its ephemeral course subject to the merriment of friends. If romance demands the scope of eternity, for Kinga peer relationships it is an eternal now. Their concession of sexual inadequacy in relations with women is a basic moral strategy of Kinga men, but it is not done wholesale. There is no concession of rank or explicitly of spiritual superiority. Men have both personal and categorical relations with their wives. When they run into rough going on the personal level the relationship easily defaults to the categorical. A man perceives his wife as possessed of a stronger erotic nature than his own—implicitly, he is able to concede his own natural inadequacy. If he can’t serve her he allows that his wife may rightfully turn to a lover. In the culture of rules she has the right to a pregnancy, and without an erotically satisfactory coital relationship this is known to be impossible. The moral bargain is one which releases a man from the extreme demands of his marriage and a woman from the tyranny of an inattentive or actually impotent mate, all without sharply alienating the pair. In an ambisexual world the human stud is not every man’s ego-ideal, but having a wife and children may be important for other reasons. A widower who takes a new and

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younger wife may lose his power to beget before the sixth or seventh decade. For him, at least, Kinga have made a deep retreat available from sexual impasse, finding a socially stabilizing strategy as well as a face-saving one. It is the moral equivalent of the Nyakyusa elder’s resort to using the generative powers of his son, except that for Kinga the privilege goes to the wife to choose. The bargain is freely made—the categorical doesn’t bind the personal relationship. We can perhaps distinguish here the bargain made licit by lore (a default procedure for handling a fairly predictable breakdown in the system) from the lighter air of tradition we call ethos or belief. A fundamental condition of the Kinga marital strategy is a male homophilic morality which never should compromise a man’s autonomy. When men find there is no cause to seek separate sleeping places, they have in effect agreed to offer mutual comfort through sexual congress. There can be no question of demand rights in this, since merely to invoke the question of rights is to express distrust, begetting separation. The dominating social paradigm in the homophilic life of a Kinga male is not the dyad but the plurality, going back to the collective life of herdboys huddled together for warmth, perhaps on a covered platform they’ve constructed over the heads of their goats, and to the subsequent, more civil and less maculate life of the men’s houses. Even when with social maturity dyadic sexual relations become an important means of affirming and re-affirming peer friendships, the overall structure of this peer world is polydyadic: the person finds himself at the centre of a network of indefinite extent, not in a narrow corner or enclosure. The same kind of structure can’t contain heterosexual love where offspring will result, a division of responsibilities, and the need to share. Men have no obligation to feed one another, nor do women on their side. My information about the sexual communion of women is less secure, for reasons explained. The main features appear to be neartransformations of those which pertain to the male life cycle. Maidens sleep together, traditionally in groups of fair size. The explicit moral ground for sleeping in heaps instead of separately is the need for warmth and the principle of fellowship expressed in all the cooperative institutions in which a bachelor girl takes part. Favouredfriend dyads form within the group, languish, and form anew: they are the subjects of much mirthful speculation among peers, and no doubt of heartbreaks too. But the moral climate is against grand passion between maidens. It can hardly be irrelevant here to adduce the importance which women (and through them, men) attach to leaving the

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clitoris intact at the maiden’s adulthood ceremony. It occurs well after menarche and long after pubescence. Although their groups were of more stable composition than the men’s, both seasonally and over the years, since maidens didn’t translocate until marriage took them out of the isaka for good—and although the government of the isaka was more consensual than (especially) that of the court barracks—the differences were mainly of degree not kind. The social contract of the maidens’ communal life was dominated by the temporary condition of its mandate. The rule of eventual separation by marriage knew of no exception but through premature death. More constantly than among the bachelor men the moral strategy of the isaka member focussed on fellowship—maintenance of community. Men, to confirm their combative function as warriors and raiders, had to adopt a competitive strategy. I don’t suggest women knew nothing of that among themselves, but their institutions didn’t celebrate individual prowess through victory in fierce confrontation. Maidens’ games had a characteristic plural structure, contrasting to the two sides of the herdboys’ bao game, the stick fights of youths, and the royal war games. (Their bao game was usually played with pebbles which would be styled as goats or oxen, the object being to appropriate your opponent’s herd.) The freedom an individual had as a maiden was to hide her light or let it shine in the games of riddling, story-telling, and teasing guess-who fictions. The freedom a boy had was to ride upon the offense or hold to his defense, reading each confrontation as an opportunity to score upon the other or a threat to be turned aside. If there hadn’t been enough boys prepared to join combat with a will, or enough girls prepared to shine in their games without giving themselves unpopular airs, the institutions must have eroded and changed. I have no doubt that in the very long run such change is continual, effected through shifts of strategy and style preference. There are strong directive forces internal to the most traditional human society. They arise from the order of reality we call culture, a ceaseless interaction of minds. Man makes himself? Men, women, and children take their parts in a drama without script. They can’t read ahead. Most children in some societies may suppose they are following in a parent’s footsteps, though I have never seen that proven. Kinga children, whose homes are not with their elders, are not prone to that illusion. They know they are on their own.

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It is not that as adults Kinga do not expect to have families; it is that they still must have their friends. A long-term aim of all their moral strategies is the cultivation of a network which will endure the assaults of time and wicked turns of fortune. Loss, feared loss, or alienation of a friend is traumatic. Yet passion, prone to turn, could never be the conscious rationale of a man’s or a woman’s dealing with a peer. Friendship in the regional culture of rules is a creature of the left hand, supposed to follow not to command. For men, there was never any doubt in our discussions that kinship was the commanding tie. Everyone consciously conceived the rules so. For women that commanding tie was marriage. But we have seen that both genders were deeply concerned with the quiet inversion of the moral laws they had erected.

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TWIN SHADOWS: SOURCE NOTES

Source Notes: Book One Introductions 1-2 The prime source for Eggan’s version of ‘the comparative method’ is his 1954 article. The historical background to his thinking is informatively elaborated in his 1955 chapter—see References. 2-3 Malinowski’s three ethnographies: (1922, 1929, 1935). His two interpretives studies: (1926, 1927). 5-6 My ‘analytical’ phenomenology is a variant form of ‘grounded theory’ applied to the comparative study of institutions. The game is to illuminate the meaningful nature of (say) Kinga bridewealth by placing it accurately in one or more morphological series with the ‘same’ institution in other ethnic contexts. Where does it fit in an ordered series of gifts? payments? insurance schemes? special taxes? private alliances? always drawing on open cross-cultural sources and ordering them in light of ‘family resemblance’ not historical connection. On the contextual approach to the meaning of historical facts my prime model is R. G. Collingwood (1946). On the other count, since I favour analytical phenomenology, it will be obvious I have departed from example. The method is propounded through application to a range of problems in The Flying Armchair (1990), available in a few libraries. A revised edition, Hard Cases in Anthropology (2000), is currently in PDF format. 7 For the Corridor region see Monica Wilson (1958). For the SW Tanzania [Sowetan] region and its prehistory, so far as I know it, see Nurse & Park (1988), Nurse (1988), Park (1988). Each of these publications is contributory rather than definitive. Further scholarship will doubtless improve on them. 10 For the use of bridewealth as a ‘banking system’ see Park (1994a). 11-12 The ‘lurid narratives’ are in Berndt (1962).

Chapter One 33-34 For priestly responses to pestilence: (Park 1966). 34 The early missionary was prefacing his Grammar for a home readership: (Wolff 1905:viii).

Chapter Two 43-4 In spite of the ultimate evolutionary advantage of ‘straight’ political systems of order, kinship offers a distinct advantage at an early stage of political evolution. A kinship system, once its rules gain universal

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standing, can self-replicate with minimal reliance on leadership—it is relatively accident proof, but depends on the comparative occupational uniformity of pre-industrial society for political effectiveness. Kinship is to politics in the polarization of social loyalties what ritualism is to moralism in the polarization of ideological allegiance. The crowning weakness of political systems is dependence on ‘leadership’. That is the basis of their well-known instability. The use of a sturdier kinship logic in building a mixedpolitical system can help to stabilize it, partly because leadership status becomes nominal whenever the incumbent is weak. The same game is played, though, by Kinga priests in case their local ruler is weak. 45-6 It appears that earlier, in traditional times, the court's avanyivaha could from time to time, with dazzle and fanfare but no show of offensive force, make the rounds of the bush communities they might hope to pull into their net, offering in ritual form the authority needed to keep the peace. They had almost the advantage of the ‘foreign prophet’. For a review of ‘self-help’ as a sanctioning system: (Park 1974: 316-319). 47 The fact that Kinga and Wanji were ‘enemies’ doesn’t in itself say Wanji were regarded as ‘non-Kinga’ before Contact. Kinga realms fought each other, raiding herds. It was a major mechanism in the Sanga expansion. Where the colonization process is gradual there can be no single test of ethnic difference, and it’s clear that Sanga court-colonization if started had not got far before (about 1860?) the Wanji had been swept into the lowland Sangu camp by the more massive and insistent expansionist wars in the region’s outer crescent. I don’t know if Wanji tell tales of raiding Kinga cattle as Kinga do of Wanji—Kinga denied the tables were ever turned. In any event the herds involved above the escarpment were small by comparison to Nyakyusa or Sangu. Above, only western Wanjiland is well suited to cattle, and remained for that reason so long under Plains Sangu military domination. In 1960 (as in testimony to the British in 1926) the Sanga royals all claimed Wanji were Kinga, though language, history and popular stereotypes belied that. My special interest here relates to a past time when the broad labels Wanji and Kinga, in a world without hard borders, wouldn’t have had hard political meaning. 48-9 The Sowetan region has hardly been touched by archaeologists. The evidence of historical linguistics, supported by the archaeology of the Eastern Bantu considered as an Iron Age civilization, has been reviewed in Park & Nurse (1988) and forms my basis for judgement here. 49-50 On ‘arranged incest’ see Monica Wilson (1977: 94). 51 On Hehe as herders see Nigmann (1908: 36). 51-2 For clarity: this doesn’t translate into Leach’s terms (1964: xiii), though Kinship and residential Community are doubtless important “verbal categories” for Nyakyusa and affect the “structure” of their lives. The trouble is that the rituals of Kinship and Community can’t easily be taken as belonging to a “system of ideas” which imposes its structure on the “system on the ground.” What you see is rather political theatre-in-the-round seizing the public mind in order to introject ideas. If Leach can justly be accused of idealism it is not for denying us a lot of unwished-for structure at the empirical level but for denying us unwished-

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for confusion at the level of ideas. His “system of ideas” should be seen to decay into chaos as readily as his admittedly confused “system on the ground.” Ritual in its various manifestations is the semiotic aspect of the endless dialectic by which entropy is checked and institutional forms refreshed in any human society. What best distinguishes the ritual an ethnographer sees in the field from that he finds around home is the measure of coherence and universality. 52 For disaffirmation of a neglected friendship see Park (1974a: 204). For Monica Wilson on the targeting of Nyakyusa ‘witches’: (1951: Appendix 8). For Hehe distrust: Edgerton (1971: 324-5). 53 Edgerton (1971: 143ff.): these further notes on distrust. 55 On Nyakyusa decamping: (Godfrey Wilson 1938: 32).

Chapter Three 57-8 See Monica Wilson (1959) and S. R. Charsley (1969: 75-93) for their different interpretations of the Coming Out ceremony. For the ethnographer’s account of truculence at funerals see Monica Wilson (1957: 24-7). 58 Compare the special structural frame with which war was staged with the ‘escapade’ frame of rustling. Cattle raids were by stealth and never intended to break down into violence—they were analogous to burglary not armed robbery. Women like cattle might be taken in war when borders were overrun, but should never be subject to violence. For the Germans’ early contacts with Kinga: (BMB 1897: 497). For the structural import of Nuer pugnacity: Southall (1976). 59 How far Sanga ‘staged’ their wars is made clear by comparing the theatrical war (Park 1994b) with the shattering experience of warfare with Mahanzi (and some Kinga) warriors when these forces were led by German mercenaries, see the essay ‘War of the redlocks’ (in Park 1990a). 59-60 For sources on Nuer pugnacity: (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 152); for Nyakyusa: (Godfrey Wilson 1951: 283-5; Monica Wilson 1951: 45). Arguments in favour of the translations ‘prince’ and ‘princedom’ for Nyakyusa terms are to be found in Charsley 1969: 45-46. Kinga rulers ranged from the fiercely warlike chief to the reclusive prince. I use the latter term as the more general one wherever an hereditary mystique is invoked. 60 For the myth of ‘first fire’ from Kingaland: (Monica Wilson 1959a: 53).

Chapter Four 67 On ‘primary creativity’: A. H. Maslow (1968: 141-4). For Toda song: Emeneau (1971). The technical intricacy of their song form is matched only by the romantic aura of events memorialized.

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71 For Coopersmith’s unsurprising findings: (1967: 249-50). As for Sartre, I mean only to suggest he knew his dramatic fictions—his art if not his ‘poetry’—brought us closer to his meaning than all his didactic inventions.

Chapter Five 72-3 For uBena: Culwick (1935:343-5). 75-6 Nigmann is my source for Hehe views of pederasty: (1908: 49). For ‘Hehe psychology’ consult Edgerton (1971: 94-7, 110-12, 112-14).

Chapter Six 80 For details of this quite un-modern constitutional balance and its Sowetan permutations see Park (1988: 171-186). 82 For countervailing power in a Nyakyusa chiefdom: Monica Wilson (1951: 45; 1959a: 67, 13, 25).

Chapter Seven 86 For the idea of a ‘rank society’: Fried (1967: 109). 88 ‘Thick description’ was adopted in anthropology by Clifford Geertz (1973: 3-30, especially 6-10) from papers (which he identifies on his pg. 6) by Gilbert Ryle. Geertz employs the concept to explore the difficulties of givng a definitive description of human action, particularly when the honest ethnographer has to work without trading in inside information. 89 For rules which establish rank: Fried (1967: 107).

Chapter Eight 91 It is the maximal-claim tie, essentially unconditional, which distinguishes closeness within a family from the conditional ties of friendship, which have not the same immunities to emotional cooling or rupture. The tie of marriage itself is in most cultures deniable, and is universally known for symptoms of role-strain—it is not a maximal-claim tie, but where a marriage is close it bears an emotional stress quite like that a close ‘blood tie’ must. Local law often supports similar claims for the two kinds of family tie, but never confuses them. The classic source of role-strain is ‘involvement within the tie’. It is often seen between adult siblings. These implications of social structure are explored in Idea: (Park 1974a). 92-3 For notes on ‘cool’ passion see Christopher Lasch (1979). 93 For axiomatic ties: (Park 1974a: 201-3).

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Source Notes: The Folios First Folio 96 I don’t know a pertinent epidemiological study of age as a factor in the general health of women at first pregnancy. If there is a place where young women show themselves healthier and happier I’ve not been there. We have a case where women enter the child-bearing phase in good health, space pregnancies well, and do not risk late pregnancies. 100 The bracketed reference is to my field notes. I try to offer such references where I cite opinions another informant might question. The text (here and in following citations of this kind) is a distillation which elides the actual flow of question and answer—an ‘explanatory translation’ of my fieldnotes. These were normally written in Swahili with kiKinga terms at key points. Interviews with men normally proceeded in just this way, all speaking Swahili except where the local term was needed for clarity, or I asked for it. Interviews with women were normally done in kiKinga, always helped by an assistant (Nehemiya Mahenge, Geofrey Ndelwa, or Tunginiye Sanga) or friends. Much more could have been done to explore the women’s culture if a female assistant had been available even for a few weeks. In the course of this chapter I present the best evidence I have. 108 “Merry songs”: (Fülleborn 1906: 448) 110 Fülleborn: (1906: 447). Foster on chronic envy: (1965, 1972). 111-112 The cited German source is as above. Had the Western courts adopted Nyakyusa manners toward century’s end? I think it more likely Fülleborn was simply unaware how far fertililty was a woman’s project in this rather special culture, and only a duty for men. This German’s local reference would have been the Western realm, and his observations at second hand. Nyakyusa influence and the presence of their women especially around the mission station, could have affected his assessment of local Kinga manners. At any rate, I picked up no hint of special father-in-law avoidance and none of fully ‘crouching’ as Nyakyusa women still did in 1960 on meeting a man on the path. In other Kinga realms, the show of obeisance around a royal court was said to have been the other way around, a man yielding the path to a royal wife or maiden. As for men of the Western realm, by 1960 they were in advance of others in taking to agriculture for the market, in place of poorly paid plantation labour. Several young women there were similarly ahead in maintaining (through continued membership in the Lutheran church sodalities) the conspicuous mantle of youthful independence in association with peers.

Second Folio 118 Anthropologists born after me may wish to know that the dry copy machine was not available in 1960. I managed to make a copy of Wolff’s Grammatik much later. The first copier I saw was in Kampala after my field-

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work, a machine (supplied by the Ford Foundation to help set up a library for Uganda) taking up a good-sized room. I’ve already noted that the portable reel-to-reel tape recorder was available, though not in a ‘field-proof’ model. I had managed, in any event, only a wee supply of batteries and tapes. 119-20 For ‘trilling’ Janeth has used vigelegele, the Swahili term, for the women’s ululations. The Kinga term ikilulu denotes the ululation of women in danger but I’m unable to confirm it applies like the Swahili word to the triumph over danger as well. Needless to say, the two forms of ululation, expressing opposite emotions, have no middle ground and are never confused. 127 On Nyakyusa ‘decency’ rules: Monica Wilson (1951:82-9). 133 I got wind of just two raids during my seven months in the Western realm. As far as I knew there were no other parts of Kingaland from which raiding would have been feasible then, though the Independent Tanzanian government felt it must crack down after 1963. As a pink visitor I was illinformed about these and other sensitive matters and not encouraged to push questions. 136 On the stiffening of Nyakyusa chiefship under British rule: (Monica Wilson 1959a: 209). 137 Tunginiye’s only written history comprised some two thousand words in Swahili concerning Kinga origins from mythical times. Of the history some fifteen hundred words survive, which I was lucky enough to spy fallen behind a radiator at the Boma in Njombe, after the British had left, destroying most useful records in their usual manner as they went. An earlier District Officer (Mr. Lee) had borrowed, seen typed, and subsequently mislaid the original ms. The citations from interview I give here and elsewhere are recomposed from notes, eliding my own promptings. This applies to all citations of oral history. I never discussed any institution with a new informant without coming to doubt prior information on some small point. But of all my older Kinga friends, if I am wrong on something it is most likely Tunginiye who was right

Third Folio 152 Involvements have been discussed above (pg. 82, Notes). 164-5 Benedict’s model for her Patterns was Nietsche. But the nineteenth-century distinction can be rendered less visionary. Start with the premise of a normal, bell-curve distribution as between passion and reason (frenzy and formality, the spontaneous and the deliberate) in collective styles of self-expression. Then to characterize the distribution of expressive styles for a chosen culture you may only need to add a just measure of skew toward one pole or the other, or in some more appropriate manner reshape the bell curve. 166 For what is known from documentary evidence of the Maji Maji uprising of 1905: (Iliffe 1979: 168-202).

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166-7 But in fact I don’t know what future there may be for the kind of local autonomy and responsiveness to milieu which I knew, and which had been the essence of the Kinga free tradition even in the thick of the Sanga ascendancy. Tanzania’s famous, grandly mislucked Villagization programme, imposed in the seventies, was designed to submerge that kind of freedom, which was seen as the handmaid of ethnic separatism, the great bugaboo of new African nations. Which of the nation’s 112 officially recognized peoples were thought big and solidary enough to threaten the new State was never clear. 168-9 Again this critical point in my analysis of Kinga culture—the volatility of friendship—has to be referred back to Idea: (Park 1974a). Freedom of association is as dear in Kinga culture as in the urban West, and comes at the same price.

Fourth Folio 186 See Polanyi’s Logic (1951:154-68). 187 The source for ‘sanctions’ is again Idea: (Park 1974a). 188 In local theory a witch is always in league with others, though in practice a Kinga witch would never be required to reveal their identities. Perhaps witches only know each other out of body. In any event, the witch one must infer from practice is self-employed. The witch myth does raise the spectre of antisocial individualism, but the coven or league always lurking in the background frames the whole in a collectivist world. The court culture was certainly prepared to treat a witch as scapegoat, but I think he was most often and deeply a straw man in a world wanting vivid imagery for sin. 191-2 The full rationale for this division of social structures into ‘internal’ and ‘external’ domains was set out by Meyer Fortes in a book which amply displayed its applicability: (1958).

Fifth Folio 214 Sources for the citations from Hübner: (BMB 1897:225) and (BMB 1900:25). 226-7 A ‘recruitment’ role is identified with a standing niche or social status meant to accommodate persons on a categorical not an optional basis. Thus: woman, elder, dependent child, slave, indigent, orphan. Nadel (1957: 35-41) sets these roles apart from ‘achievement’ roles: acrobat, scholar, thief, sailor. The fact that one person might actually play a handful of roles of both kinds does not trouble his logic. But what, for example, is a ‘shopper’? It is neither at one end of the other of the continuum Nadel sets up. Another morphological series, cutting at a different angle, would be ‘formative’...’notional’. So far as being a woman or a shopper is allowed to shape your existence—control your moral strategies—the role is ‘formative’. So far as you resist the role as prescribed and manage to make it your own, it is ‘notional’. This gets at the question of ‘seriousness’ and ‘neurotic load’: are major features of your motivation laid on by your role as priest, as mother, as student? It will be hard to take the role lightly. Where I speak of

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a ‘general spirit of voluntarism’ I refer to a community which minimizes role strain—the standard burdens are fit to be carried lightly. I found this the quality of life for Kinga women even after marriage. Monica Wilson (1977) found it otherwise for Nyakyusa women. 231 The source for Kroeber’s comment on the origins of style: (1963: 68).

Source Notes: Book Two Chapter One 236-7 For Bena maidens’ puberty rite: Culwick (1935:344-6). It was far too late even in 1960 to have dug for ‘hard’ facts on the age of marriage for bachelor women of the isaka. In the bush culture there was little need for delay after menarche, but at the more important court centres the contribution of young women to the gross local product was of immense importance—with a surplus of bachelor men to feed, there were both calendrical and occasional feasts to brew for. 239-40 For Bena girls: Culwick. (1935:343) For Nyakyusa girls’ development: Monica Wilson (1977:113). 240-41 For observations of the Nyakyusa girl’s caareer see Monica Wilson (1951:80,151; 1977: 115; 1957:34-6.) The declining age of marriage for girls is an ambiguous point if Wilson is right that marriage had always been supposed to follow straight upon menarche. For what it is worth, Kinga reports on Nyakyusa maidens are at variance with Wilson’s. Perhaps the main change is loss of sexual freedom before a girl leaves home: years now of sterile faux-marriage before menarche. 241 Truculence at funerals: Monica Wilson 1977:30-2; 1957:25). Precocious marriage of Bena: Culwick & Culwick (1935:159,360). 242 Monica Wilson’s information on a Kinga transvestite was presented to her as un-Nyakyusa: (1951:197). 243-4 For the Kinga in an ‘age of localism’: Park (1988). 246 For the pattern model of explanation see Kaplan (1964). The Flying Armchair was the pilot (print) version of Hard Cases. Currently the final version is available only in electronic (pdf) form.

Chapter Two 247 My source on the Ndendeuli is P.H.Gulliver’s Neighbours and Networks (1971). See in particular his p. 351. 248 In fact, as far back in time as the methods of historical linguistics allow us to peer, there would have been a discernible linguistic boundary within the Sowetan region, probably in parallel with lifestyle differences,

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Hehe-Bena-Kinga-Pangwa ancestral communities would have fallen on the one side, Nyakyusa-related ancestral communities on the other. See Nurse & Park (1988). For consanguineal slavery among Tiv of central Nigeria: Laura Bohannan (1958) 248-9 For (1971:69-73).

amity-based

cooperation

among

Ndendeuli:

Gulliver

249 On ‘brother avoidance’ among Ndendeuli see Gulliver (1971: 307-8). A similar logic pertains to the Nyakyusa custom of allocating brothers to distinct age-villages. Kinga sons rarely have great expectations and do not generally gravitate to family in their adult residence choices. 249-50 For Ndendeuli, Pangwa, and Bena work groups based in amity: Gulliver (1971: 304n), Stirnimann (1976: 91), Culwick (1935: 252-3). In each case the ‘same’ regional institution is nicely adapted to the local culture. For Nyakyusa: Monica Wilson (1951: 50-1). 251-2 For Ndendeuli dissidence & hamlet sizesee Gulliver (1971: 34-5, 132-3, & 59). 254 Obviously, the extra-local rule for heterosexual relations within an extended kin group could not apply to homophilic ties, as in Kinga circumstances a taboo of sexual contacts between ‘brothers’ or between ‘sisters’ would only undermine local solidarity. The institutions of ikivaga and isaka would be forfeit. On the politics of kinship and ritual among Nyakyusa, & their ‘friendship ideology’: Monica Wilson (1951: 14-5; 1957: 224-5; & 1951: 66-76).

Chapter Three 256 The citation from Edgerton: (1971a: 111-12). 257 For Kinga self-deprecation: Fülleborn (1906: 442). For the citation of Giraud: Reichard (1892: 242-4). For Reichard’s own view: the same (p. 240]. 258 For the paper-quarrels: Marcia Wright (1971: 61-3). For her further notes on Nyakyusa battle-readiness in 1886 and later during missionary contacts: same source, pp.39, 47. 259 Details concerning the separate Bena-, Nyakyusa-speaking, and other bush communities are scanty in District records and largely lost to history. The reason lies in the prevailing interests, attitudes, and preoccupations of the class of European officials and academics who might have decided such records worth time and effort. The sociologist of knowledge will recognize that among them the odd anthropologist with the scholarly record in mind was not well appreciated or encouraged by colleagues. How many historically distinct ‘peuplades’ might have been put on record in the Sowetan region about 1900? I suppose less than a hundred, since the political integration of the proto-states would have merged or submerged

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the more prosperous communities of both the inner and outer crescents, to the point that separate identities and traditions of origin were lost. The total population of the whole region, court and bush cultures included, can be (very roughly) estimated at a million. This is justified on the premise (reasonable if tenuous) that population figures by the middle of the twentieth century had rebounded to pre-colonial levels after an initial, massive mortality from (European) contagious diseases. I further suppose less than half the pre-colonial population would have been living under the localist régimes of a bush culture in 1900. Supposing we could confirm this estimate, our sense for the context and demography of protostate politics throughout the region would be much improved. Then we might come to see the Sangu and Hehe stories as informed by a spirit of ‘conquest’, triggered by rigorous encounters with contact phenomena. Especially the Hehe, I think, quite fully absorbed the local bush communities, propelling a hitherto localist population with a vastly scattered geographic spread into a life suddenly sanctioned by militant authority. In this view, the less exposed communities, Kinga and Nyakyusa, continued operating with a court-bush balance supporting a more gradual growth of ‘statelike’ institutions. The metaphor of the ‘political archipelago’ is particularly apt just there, as the two political arenas within which Kinga and Nyakyusa princes operated were mutually buffered. 259-60 For migratory drift in this context: Park (1988: 150-155). 260 For the somewhat hoary tale of the spread of ntemi chiefship: Roland Oliver (1963: 191-9). His discussion wants further detailed assessment against local migratory traditions, linguistic clues, and archaeology. A keen sense for the political process associated with the later periods of migratory settlement in western Tanganyika needs developing. The question is not so much ‘how did chiefship spread?’ as how it operated in respect to (a) the intensification of agriculture which accompanied the increased production and distribution of effective hoes and associated iron tools; and (b) the maintenance of order as hunting gave way to herding, the protection of stock, and fighting —defensive and predatory. 261-2 The kind of expansion I predicate for the Sowetan political archipelago is more like franchising a new political model than conquest. Marcia Wright (1971: 24) appears to have in mind ethnic expansion by dint of arms. Neither of these type-concepts could be expected to correspond in detail to the historical reallity, which is always more complex (compound) than our models of it. My sense for the rightness of ‘my model’ is certainly owing to my perception of parallels between Kinga politics and their neighbours’. For me, I prefer to say ‘the Sanga system was expanding’ than to say ‘the Kinga were expanding’. The latter phrase strikes me as misled and amply misleading for any of the communities under study. 262 For the controversy on the character values of Nyiha consult Slater (1976: 198-9,304-6, 314-15, 323) and Gartrell (1979: 429). They did not observe the same communities but were in the field about the same time. I give ‘morale’ a major role. Gartrell’s community had been successfully missionized, Slater’s had not. Slater’s highly skilled assistant seemed to share her judgement of a ‘backward’ and ‘disorganized’ locale within his own ethnic community. If I had spent all my Kinga field time in the onceparamount community of Ukwama I’d surely have more ‘low morale’ to

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report. What needs to be said is that all human communities have darker and lighter phases over time, and morale varies with locale. No human culture breeds only happy young families and adults devoted to good deeds. There are mites in both eyes of any beholder. But the important lesson may just be that we should train those eyes not on the light or the dark but both, in the simple interest of probity.

Chapter Four 270 But to avoid being misled in the following long citation it’s important to note that Kiwanga, the ‘Sultan’ Fülleborn himself saw being installed over the Hehe, was Bena and would have had his own courtly following with him—I sort this out later on. 273-4 For Bena dance observed in the thirties: Cullwick (1935: 401-12). For the 1932 occasion: the same, pg. 408. 274 For placing General Liebert: John Iliffe (1979: 113). The citations of Liebert and Elton on participation in the dance by Hehe and Sangu chieftains: Fülleborn (1906: 215). 275 My demonstration of the inherent incapacity of culture to prevent genocidal massacres was originally worked out in light of a Kinga-Mahanzi encounter during the Maji Maji crisis: (1990a: 240-252).

Chapter Five 279 On ‘back-forward sex’ from an urban prostitute my evidence is hearsay. I was instructed: Offer her the fire-end of a cigaret to smoke. If she takes the fire in her mouth she is supposed to know what you want. But what am I to make of the fact that to me the symbolism has transparent reference to oral sex, which Kinga mortally fear? I think my Kinga informant may have misunderstood his urban informants and never put the matter to a test. 280 For Monica Wilson on peer friendships among girls and the premise of gender inequality in uNyakyusa: (1977: 115-16, 135). 281 Monica Wilson on a Nyakyusa father’s appropriation of a son’s earnings: (1977: 87). 282-3 My source on Bena eroticism is the Culwicks (1935: 360-2). The sharp contrast between Bena and Hehe speaks for the historical importance of style differences of culture, since Bena were politically amalgamated with Hehe during the culminating decades of the nineteenth century, and engaged with them in the same wars of rapine. 283 But have in mind that only men are fined for adultery, and payment is to the aggrieved husband, who will have to pay off his wife, according to their private bargain. She wants her share ‘on the spot’ to forestall welching. It would take just four of these sexual safaris to net a thousand shillings.

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285 Source for the termination of the isaka in favour of much earlier marriage for girls: Monica Wilson (1977: 116). 289-90 A brief source for Pangwa social organization is in Stirnimann (1979: 123-30). Stirnimann’s two books are my source for all data on the Pangwa, and are more fully discussed in Four Realms and A Politics of Fear. The cited denial of homophilia is on pg. 126 of Die Pangwa. Translations are always my own.

Chapter Six 291 A definitive account of slavery in its many permutations is overdue for all of East Africa. Godfrey Wilson’s (early) assessment for uNgonde: (1939:29). See Redmayne (1968) on Hehe trading. On the Wafugua: Nigmann1908: 41-2; also Brown & Hutt 1935: 35). 292 What best distinguishes a ‘subject people’ from a population of slaves is the persistence of that people’s culture. For Ndeneuli: Gulliver (1971: 28-32). 293 For the condition of Ngonde and Fipa at and after colonial contact: Kalinga (1985) and Willis (1981). For Monica Wilson on Ngonde-Nyakyusa constitutional differences: (1977:10). 294 For slavery and the cheapening of life among the Bemba: Jan Vansina (1966: 243-4). Bemba were the dominant (and dominating) people of northeastern Zambia, well known to the Nyakyusa-speaking Ngonde of Malawi. For an introduction see Audrey Richards (1951). 295-6 The Fragebogen comprises an early German survey of native law. My translation is from the Reichsdruckerei pamphlet of 1910. For an anthropologist’s account of this survey and itis availability see Redmayne 1983: 40. Four questionnaires were filed by missionaries from the Sowetan region, and of these the one I cite on the Bena was by far the most ample. Yet like the other respondents, Rev. Priebusch disappoints a later-born ethnographer by his dependence on interview and hearsay. 297 Murdock (1981) remains the most reliable single source for crosscultural data, owing to a careful methodology and a prodigious input of labour. As with any global source, the specialist confronting the Atlas will have complaints. Mine have been sidestepped here. A slightly altered set of categories might have provided a different grouping, and correction for the time of observations of each society would have required subtler techniques, but the same ‘inner vs. outer’ differentiation would remain. Hehe clitoridectomy (Edgerton 1971: 73) and Pangwa or Bena less severe mutilations (Stirnimann 1979: 166; Culwick & Culwick 1935: 344) represent variations on an otherwise germane regional pattern. Only the Kinga variant, so far as I know, is ‘officially’ explained as friendly to the woman’s sexual needs. 298 For the Bena Wenyekongo see Culwick & Culwick ( 1935: 154).

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299 Ironically, the mightier European colonial power did not, having settled for a rigid cultural gap between the ‘political’ Ngoni and the ‘apolitical’ Ndendeuli, significantly impair the self-conceived civil status of Ndendeuli when formally placing them under Ngoni rulers in the period of indirect rule. It left the subject people to despise Ngoni arrogance, freely utter contempt for authority, and live by their own egalitarian rules. Sometimes benign neglect is the fitting attitude for a government to strike toward a people it is baffled by. The close-hand feel of Kinga social life in 1960 was, despite their own Sanga courts and colonial over-rule, more like the feel of Ndendeuli life than Hehe. The difference is the way men sort out spontaneously on the basis of amity. Monica Wilson’s informant (1977: 136) saw Europeans demanding rankconcession from African men—and recognized the syndrome. For the phenomenology of rank concession see Martin Orans (1965: Ch. 3). For Maine’s well-known ‘movement of progressive societies from Status to Contract’ see Ancient Law (1931: 141). 302 Source for Nigmann: (1908: 50-1). Brown & Hutt (1935: 184-6). Bena information: Culwick & Culwick (1935: 344). 302-3 Bena marriage age: Culwick & Culwick (1935: 193). Nigmann on inflated polygyny: (1908: 59). Hehe in the 1930s: Brown & Hutt (1935: 107, 263-4). 303 Lifelong avoidance taboo for Nyakyusa daughter-in-law (vs. Bena): Monica Wilson (1957: 101). Hehe parents-in-law and wedding contracts: Brown & Hutt (1935: 112, 102, 116). 304-5 Monica Wilson on prepubescent eroticism: (1957: 80-101) & on her distinction of deference from obeisance: (1951: 138) & on adultery cases: (1951: 141). Culwicks on chummy Bena co-wives: (1935:379) & on Bena tolerance of adultery: (1935: 364, 371).. 305 Fülleborn’s quote: (1906: 229). 306 Citations from Brown & Hutt: (1935: 112, 115) & from the Culwicks: (1935: 377, 415). Monica Wilson on court cases & the focus on marriage cattle: (1977: 52 & 166). On Nyakyusa mild and harmless character: Fülleborn (1906: 307). 307 Monica Wilson’s rare case: (1977: 139). That in contrast Hehe women freely own cattle: Brown & Hutt (1935: 143). 308-9 I don’t suggest that developed local descent groups were common in the region in some earlier period, only that the two major alternatives for growth beyond localism are the particularistic (corporate kin groups) and the universalistic (political-territorial) modes of recruitment. 311 For the barracks schools of Hehe & Bena which compare with Kinga avanyakivaga : Brown & Hutt (1935: 35-6) & Culwicks (1935: 153 ff.). 312 Ngonde nobility: Godfr ey Wilson (1939: 11-15).

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Chapter Seven 316 The statement of a Hehe girl’s limited freedom in marrying: Brown & Hutt (1935: 85). For the qualification see Brown (1934: 29n). For the freedom of nomadism: (1935: 79). For Ndendeuli political attitudes: Gulliver (1971: 245, 247, 249).

Chapter Eight 319 I wrote elsewhere: “It is the very recurrent involvements that most endanger the social structure, which provoke fresh forms and evoke renewed vitality” (1974a: 292). Radcliffe-Brown eventually decided to leave ‘psychology’ out of his ‘natural science of society’. It is hard to see how he could have made serious use of his ‘social personality’ since he did not subscribe to a ‘conceptualist’ view of human action, in the sense of Henry Murray (1938: 8). For those who do, motivation is a central concern, and many think holistically of personality as a system of motives idiosyncratically shaped in the individual by social experience. My more complex model, in which personal is layered interactively between sentient and role motivation, was first outlined in an essay on the motivational interpretation of institutions (Park 1972). 323 For the release of normally-repressed affect by bachelor Nyakyusa males: Monica Wilson 1957: 25-30). For Geertz on the Balinese cockfight: (1973: 446, 452n). 326 On Bena court slaves & miscarriages: Culwick & Culwick (1935: 135 & 313). On witch hangings in German times: Raum (1965: 183). 327 References on the easy-going Bena: (Culwick & Culwick 1935: 216, 221, 309, 313, 357, 360, 376-7, 382, 390-2). 327-8 Hehe references are to Brown & Hutt (1935: 105) and Edgerton (1971: 94-5).

Chapter Nine 332-3 For the reader who senses a relevance here to Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974), a few further distinctions can be made. A ‘culture of intimacy’ provides for any community, from the scale of a domestic group to that of a nation, a default ‘structure of experience’. For populations within a modern nation-state the ‘culture’ implied is obviously as dilute as the ‘intimacy’ achieved within the community of reference. But Goffman’s ‘primary framework for guided doings’ would be a frame without which a person’s social world would be unintelligible. A ‘culture of intimacy’ normally offers a user-friendly laminated package: you find yourself adjusting language and gesture from ‘fully licensed’ to ‘fully constrained’ depending on the scene and scenario; clashes of interest, differences of class or regional background, gender mix, and other such matters are always considerations. But even at the ‘fully constrained’ level of interaction, we’ll be quick to notice the true stranger who does not ‘read us’ well and whose intentions we cannot comfortably read. At that point, our ‘culture of intimacy’

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offers no guidance at all, and we must grope for a more suitable frame. Bringing a ‘true stranger’ into your household can put a strain on it, and introduce new potentialities. The spread of Sanga court culture through the Livingstone Mountain communities must have entailed endless individual crises and a wholesale restructuring of experience.

Chapter Ten 343-4 Reference for Polybius on intimacy of Spartan brothers: Lacey (1968: 319 n64). 349 For Geertz on Ryle see note to Chapter Seven of Part One. 358 See Gordon Allport’s discussion (1962: 40-41, 62-65) of the “propriate aspects of personality” and some of the ways they are discussed (whether as “self” or “ego”) in the psychological literature. 360-1 See, in particular, the argument of I. M. Lewis (1986: 43) that the jural treatment of women as ‘peripheral creatures’ flies in the face of a natural reality which men can’t keep buried with their rhetoric. 370 Is this an Hegelian dialectic? It is certainly not about the overthrow of tyranny or the dissolution of coercive power. Compare my earlier exposition (Park 1966) of the priests’ demeanour in their confrontation with Lwembe at Lubaga. 371 Gordon Allport (1955; 1960: 265); Carl Rogers (1961: 109).

Chapter Eleven 376 Adrian Tanner offered the Heraclitean quip in a Queens College seminar at St. John’s. Apologies to the San and, in the profession, our own possibly humourless Correctos. 379-80 A detailed critique of the sociological premises of Leach’s ethnographic masterpiece appears in Park 1990a: 101-139. 380-81 I resist the idea that the court/bush structure is in itself a pyramidal phenomenon. As you move out from centre (court) to periphery (bush) your personal autonomy increases. The political pyramid is otherwise. Personal commitment to the power and glory of political eminence is in the modern demotic known as joining the ratrace. To one degree or another everyone does. 383 The source for this summation: Weiner (1988: 91-6, 120-22). For the importance of thick description in anthropology I believe we should look beyond Geertz (1973) and the problem of divining action, to implications for the subjective ‘definition of the situation’ by the actor. Frame analysis, and Goffman’s ideas about laminated settings for social action, throw fresh and different light on the same matter. I have elsewhere argued the importance of frame analysis for the ethnographic comprehension of religion (Park 1990b). The more general implication of the premise of multiply ‘laminated’ action

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states is that a reliable formulation of the motivational basis for explaining an ordinary human act will seldom be either simple or complete. The phenomenology of moral blame seems to turn about this point, and the virtual impossibility of ‘objectifying’ moral strategies is a further implication. In the background, of course, there is Sartre’s ‘bad faith’.

Chapter Twelve 392 Today, even the Hehe suitor negotiates first with his intended for her consent, then with her two parents; polygyny is much admired, but men with more than two wives were already rare in 1930; most divorces are initiated by women; and so on (see Brown and Hutt 1935: 97-115 and references). So far as I can judge, the legitimacy of rules making pawns of women has always and everywhere been challenged in the regional culture. As is clearlly the case for Nyakyusa women, sisterhood and elopement from marriage can put a positive sign on what is otherwise fruitless dissent. What we have to admit is that unproblematic legitimacy disappears from the world wherever translocal politics has taken hold. To that please add: legitimacy everywhere presents itself in shades of grey.

Archival sources District and Provincial Books for the region were examined on scene, and studied as available elsewhere on microfilm. The main use I made of these and other Boma records was for background understanding of the British period. (But for the present volume this period was not my concern.) In general, the Boma records are superficial with respect to the history of the region before 1900, but useful in corroborating much later interview materials on a particular subject such as the name of a ‘headman’ or ‘chief’ at a given spot in a given time frame. Published mission documents are more valuable as reflecting the daily scene in (especially) quite early years, but they are not usually so robust that one would want to hang one’s analysis of the culture on the scene as missionaries perceived it. They were engaged in understanding principally as a means to remodeling.

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