anthropologists acknowledge this when they use their ‘ethnographic present tense’. With this they describe an observed situation which appears to have been largely the same in the past, and sometimes the remote past. All societies observable today or recently have changed during the past century or less, and often changed greatly. But many of their traditions have held sufficiently firm for the trained observer to spot the important points of transition, and to list to some extent the consequential changes. By taking these into account it is possible to arrive at broadly reliable assumptions about the pre-colonial situation.
These societies were never static over long periods, and seldom over short ones. They constantly evolved. The base line, then, is necessarily a blurred one. Aside from one or two written accounts with helpful clues, we cannot know except by distant inference what men thought or believed in Early Iron Age times. What can be done is to perceive the nature of the institutional process and to describe systems, symbols, and beliefs which, however modified in detail, have had essentially the same content for a long while. Having got as far as this it may then be possible to understand the reasons why things happened as they did; and why they did not happen, and no doubt could not happen, in some other way.
part two
Social Charters
I ruled with the power that comes from my forefathers, the power without beginning. . . .
Soko Risina Musoro by H. V. Chitepo
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations
Psalm XC.1
5
Founding Ancestors
THE IMPLACABLE PARSON HAD NOT IN FACT GONE THERE TO SEE FOR himself, and there was little photography in those days to help the armchair traveller. But Dean Farrar was quite sure that he understood what manner of creatures these Africans were. Their features, he was able to report in 1865, were ‘invariable and expressionless’, their minds ‘characterised by a dead and blank uniformity’. They had ‘not originated a single discovery . . . not promulgated a single thought . . . not established a single institution . . . not hit upon a single invention’.
There might be something almost frantic about this piling up of negatives. But Dean Farrar had not written of the woes of little Eric for nothing. Give the Devil an inch, he knew, and the Devil would take a mile. He was not for giving the Devil even half an inch. Among the Africans, he declared at a time when the great majority of African peoples had not so much as been glimpsed by any European eye, ‘generation hands on no torch to generation’. Left to themselves, they were beyond salvation.
This was to become the great theme song of colonialist paternalism. Taking material simplicity for proof of primitive savagery, the most commonplace of men, when raised to positions of dominion, became as suddenly convinced of their civilising mission. ‘We have in East Africa’, opined Sir Charles Eliot, Britain’s first high commissioner there, ‘the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa, an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country where we can do as we will.’ Elsewhere it was the same. When British pioneers in 1890 rode into the land which became Southern Rhodesia, they could not believe that ‘natives’ had raised the patterned walls of masonry they found there.
These ideas are among the mysteries of non-African belief that have somehow survived the colonial period. In the case of Southern Rhodesia, as it happens, more than half a century later an ethnologist began asking old men who lived in the rolling grasslands of the Mount Darwin district, north of modern Salisbury, whether they knew anything of the distant past. They hesitated and then they began telling him the history of their people and its kings. They went back to Mutota, the first of their strong rulers, who was ‘still the heart of the nation’ and whose burial ground was the hill of Chitakochangonya. They admitted that ‘we no longer talk about these matters very much, now that the Europeans have taken the place of Mutota’s sons’. But they remarked that there were elders still alive, even in the 1950s, ‘who say that if you listen carefully you can hear the roll of Kagurukute, the great drum of Mutota, at the time of the new moon, as you stand looking down upon the river Dande, beside the lofty grave’. Now Mutota had died in about 1450. The old men were recalling five centuries of statehood.
In truth the history of the Africans is nothing if not the ‘handing on of the torch’ from generation to generation. It is quintessentially concerned with the accumulation of ancestral wisdom, with the demonstration of a tabula piena of ancestral knowledge. For it is the appointed ancestors who have given peoples their identity and guaranteed the onward movement of life. They may be private ancestors or public ancestors, ‘family’ guarantees or ‘national’ guarantees, but in any case their role is crucial. They it is who have drawn up and sealed the beliefs and laws by which men reasonably live.
This statement is of course a simplification. Beliefs and laws were always subject to change, while the ancestors in their own time had themselves been men and, as such, subject to the pressures of everyday life. Yet it is a simplification which gets to the heart of the matter. Leaving aside the religious aspect for a while, I want here to consider the political and social meaning of ancestors, and especially of those ‘founding ancestors’ who, as Africans say, ‘began our life and brought us into the lands where we live’.
If the everyday thought of Early Iron Age peoples lies beyond our grasp, we can at least perceive something of their predicament. It is fairly certain, for example, that the remote ancestors of the Shona-speaking peoples, whose descendants appeared so history-less to the British pioneers of the 1890s, settled in the grasslands between the Zambezi and Limpopo more than a thousand years ago. Very typically for African history, they took shape from a mingling and eventual composition between incoming migrants and peoples already living in the land.
These were the early syntheses of cultures that contain the ‘beginning’ of the story. They must have been many, for the whole of recorded history tells repeatedly the same tale. Historians probing back through oral tradition come again and again upon the evidence for dispersal and migration as these relatively empty lands were gradually settled: dispersal of the Bantu-speaking peoples from a formative homeland that was probably the Congo savanna country; dispersal of the Luo-speaking peoples from a formative homeland in the plains to the west of the southern Nile; dispersal of other Sudanic speakers from this or that ‘initial zone’ of growth and multiplication.
As early populations grew in size, so did their reasons for dispersal. Political disputes, above all for succession to inherited authority, would cause disappointed leaders to look for a land of their own. These founding heroes would shift away with their followers, few or very few, and find their freedom in another country, by conquest if they must and were able, or else by seeking lands not yet occupied. And as the causes of dispersal became more complex and political, so also did the modes and mechanisms of social change.
But consider the predicament of these early groups in the solitudes of ancient Africa. Each is alone, or feels itself to be so. By moving away from its parent community, each has cut or weakened its ancestral lifeline, and suffers a corresponding sense of anxiety and risk. Often the group is very small, perhaps fifty or a hundred men with a few women and children. Generally it will hope to find wives where it is going; but seldom or never does it know where it is going. Having moved, the migrant group becomes separate, distinct, different from any other. Confronted with an unknown country, it must apply its narrow fund of technical knowledge in new material situations. But it must also do this in new non-material situations: in these, too, the group must invent and adapt.
Above all, each group must relieve its sense of anxiety and risk: it must reach an assurance about its new identity, rules of life, customs and beliefs. As Sangree says of the Tiriki in Kenya, its members must be enabled to supply themselves with answers to the questions: ‘Where did I come from? Who cares whether I live or die? Upon whom can I depend for food, land and shelter?’ Only a new ancestral lifeline, a new ‘system of ancestors’ for the group as a whole but