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Abstract
As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings last until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.
“Admirably clearly written… [the volume exhibits] high scholarship, methodological ingenuity, and sound use of history.” • David Parkin, University of Oxford
Koen Stroeken is Associate Professor in Africanist anthropology at Ghent University (CARAM) and the coordinator of a long-term academic exchange with Mzumbe University, Tanzania. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Sukuma healers, his publications – including the monograph Moral Power (2012, Berghahn) – mainly deal with African cosmologies and the sensory materiality of magic.
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medicinal Rule | iii | ||
| Copyright Page | iv | ||
| Contents | v | ||
| Figures and Tables | vii | ||
| Acknowledgements | viii | ||
| Note on Language | x | ||
| Abbreviations of Referenced Works | xi | ||
| Introduction: Endogenous Kingship | 1 | ||
| Part I — Divinatory Societies | 41 | ||
| Chapter 1 — The Forest Within | 43 | ||
| Chapter 2 — Beyond Turner’s Watershed Division | 64 | ||
| Part II — Medicinal Rule | 79 | ||
| Chapter 3 — A Sukuma Chief on Medicine | 81 | ||
| Chapter 4 — Endogenizing Vansina’s Equatorial Tradition | 109 | ||
| Chapter 5 — From Cult to Dynasty: Nilotic and Niger–Congo Extensions | 131 | ||
| Illustration Gallery | 167 | ||
| Chapter 6 — Magic and the Sole Mode of Production | 173 | ||
| Chapter 7 — Tio Shrines of the Forest Maker | 191 | ||
| Part III — The Ceremonial State | 219 | ||
| Chapter 8 — Kuba, Kongo and Buganda ‘Miracles’: Reversions in Transition | 221 | ||
| Chapter 9 — From Divinatory to Ceremonial State: Narrative Proof from Rwanda | 252 | ||
| Conclusion — Reversible Traditions | 287 | ||
| References | 298 | ||
| Index | 306 |