is to some extent translating African concepts into another language of religious thought. God as an entity or being has been usually a distant and even indifferent figure for Africans. What has mattered for them is not the hierarchical father of Mosaic tradition, whom they may think little concerned with the affairs of men, but the ancestral channel of spiritual legitimation through which flows the life-force, or whatever other limping definition one may use, that drives the world and makes it live. In this crucial matter of legitimation, however, ‘God’ and the ‘ancestral channel of the life-force’ come to pretty much the same thing. The examples are many.
At some time around AD 1350 a people living along the north bank of the Congo river, not far from its junction with the Atlantic Ocean, underwent a familiar split in their ranks. Needing more land, a chief’s son decided to leave home. He gathered followers and went south over the wide river near the modern town of Boma. Pushing into what is now northern Angola, they came into the country of the Mbundu and Mbwela peoples. Here, the traditions say, they conquered for themselves a little homeland near their later capital of Mbanza or São Salvador.
Having won this foothold they still had to legitimate their presence; mere conquest was not enough. The traditions are careful to note that Wene, chief of the incomers, thereupon married into one of the clans of the people already settled in the area. But the clan he chose was the one whose ancestors were recognised as holding the spiritual title to the land. Kabunga, the head of this clan in Wene’s time, was priest of the shrine of the Spirit of the Earth: the shrine, in other words, at which titular legitimisation must be sought through the only ancestors who were valid for the purpose. Marrying into Kabunga’s clan, Wene could affiliate himself and his successors to this all-important line of other people’s ancestors. He could properly take over Kabunga’s title of mani and rule henceforth as Mani-Kongo, Lord of Kongo, duly accepted by the Spirit of the Earth. Even today, six centuries later, this legitimation is still recalled in annual ceremonies.
Just how strongly such conceptions were rooted in African thought was afterwards shown in the Americas. There, wherever large groups of Africans could escape from slavery and rebuild their lives in freedom, they called at once for guidance from their own cultures. In Brazil the ex-slave quilombos, and most notably of all the famous seventeenth-century republic of Palmarès, were founded in laws and customs drawn mainly from the western Bantu peoples. The candomble associations of certain Brazilian cities were, to some extent still are, thoroughly African in content, however exotic in form. Only thirty years ago Herskovits found clear evidence among the so-called ‘Bush Negroes’ of Surinam—descendants of West Africans taken to this Dutch colony after 1600 who had escaped to the forest and conserved their independence—that the spirits of the Earth were regarded as the possession of the aboriginal inhabitants, of the ‘Indians’ whose ancestors had first inhabited this land.
The model was obviously subject to much local variation; and the variations became ever more numerous as African lands were filled with the forerunners of their present societies. But essentially it was a model which held good for every situation. It consisted in the framing of a social charter sanctioned by the sense of what was ‘right and natural’, the sense of walking in the ways of life: confirmed and elaborated, as will be seen, by the most purposive ritual, by a wide range of arts, and sometimes by systematic explanations of the universe. Yet all this structure of sanctioned behaviour had its foundations firmly on the ground. And the ground was that of subsistence economy and family life.
6
The Balance with Nature
THE FORMATIVE COMMUNITY OF EARLY IRON AGE TIMES, AT ANY rate before about AD 500, was typologically a small group of related families established in a homeland they had occupied or inherited. Its immediate boundaries might be no more than a few miles wide; beyond them there might or might not be a handful of neighbours. Always, the lands of the unknown stood menacingly near, and into these a man would venture at his risk and peril. A village or a cattle-camp : one or two other villages or cattle-camps whose evening smoke climbed wispily grey in the middle distance to hills of mystery and danger: such was the outline of the world of long ago.
Within the formative community there was food and friendship, shelter from raiders whether animal or human, a sanctioned law and order. But there was more. There was also a psychological security: personal identification within a system both suprasensible and material in its terms of reference, within a society both ‘right and natural’ in that it was ‘godmade’ as well as manmade. Beyond, there stood the void in strong and ever-present contrast. Outside this ancestrally chartered system there lay no possible life, since ‘a man without lineage is a man without citizenship’: without identity, and therefore without allies. Ex ecclesia non est vita; or, as the Kongo put it, a man outside his clan is like ‘a grasshopper which has lost its wings’.
This political unit was, even more, an economic one. Having made their homeland, the cluster of families had to survive in it. They could survive only by a process of trial and error as they grappled with its ecology; with its tsetse or floods of rain, its shallow soil or towering forest trees, its slides of hillside pasture or pockets of arable amid lizard-gleaming humps of rock. This was the saving process of invention and adaptation that rounded out the group’s charter and gave, to those who were fortunate, the sanction of success.
The result was persistently ambiguous. ‘Ideally’, in Gluckman’s words, ‘a tribal situation is stationary . . . [and] any change is an injury to the social fabric.’ It is an ideal that flows from a pattern laid down by the ancestors, the paradigm of a perfect and unmoving social balance. Yet this is itself the product of experiment and innovation, and, as such, has necessarily remained subject to both. Hence an untiring resistance to disturbance or upheaval has gone hand-in-hand with an absorptive flexibility of adaptation. And hence again there has persisted in African thought an often emphatic cohabitation of the opposed principles of Fate and Supernatural Justice—as Fortes suggests, of Oedipus and Job—arising on one hand from the immovable object of ancestral rules which should not normally be changed, and, on the other, from the irresistible forces of unfolding life and human nature which nonetheless do change these rules.
The economic basis was conceived in family terms, in what Middleton and Tait have called ‘a nuclear group’. This is one of those anthropological abstractions which are convenient because they translate the exotic into the familiar, but with little real distortion. The ‘nuclear group’—the basic economic unit—may also be called an ‘extended family’. As observed in many societies which appear to have changed little in their essential structure for a long time, this ‘nuclear group’ or ‘extended family’ consisted usually of a unit of three or four generations from grandparents to grandchildren, and perhaps to greatgrandchildren.
At least in principle, this family was or is a self-supporting unit of producers and consumers ideally capable of supplying all its own requirements but, in practice, able to exist only within a community of similar families who help each other in economic and other group-defensive ways. It is under the domestic rule of a single man (or occasionally woman) who may also be the person who represents it in political councils or politico-religious ceremonies affecting several families. It has the use of a specific piece of land. It owns the produce of this land but not the land itself, which symbolically belongs to the appointed ancestors who hold it from the Spirit of the Earth. Ecology fixes an optimum size for the unit. Whenever it prospers in childbirth, and grows ‘too big’, some of its members have to move elsewhere.
Each such family might be widely separated from its relations in other homesteads or temporary camps. But more often, except in true pastoral societies, homesteads would be close together, or people would live in clusters or hamlets or in large villages or even, as time went by, in farmers’ towns such as those of the Yoruba. Yet however much the community might vary in size or in location of its family units, it provided the ‘chartered’ link between all its members and gave them ideological identity as well as ultimate security. Considered from another angle, people have ordered their affairs inside a ‘jural community’ composed of a varying number of nuclear groups: inside, that is, ‘the widest grouping within which there was a moral