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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 obligation and a means ultimately to settle disputes peaceably’. Outside purely family affairs, this was the working organisation available for political action.

So it came about that all property and productive relations had to be conceived in terms of kinship relations, since it was the sum of the family groups, combined in a jural community, that was seen as having devised the saving balance with nature. This meant that political action was necessarily kinship action. But this in turn required that every individual must play an expected social role. To the ecological balance, there corresponded another in the field of human relations—an ideal balance of kinship rights and obligations, occasionally quite simple, often very complex, and nearly always structured in terms of countervailing pressures between different sections of society: between, for the most part, different lineages or groups of lineages.

This ideal balance of kinship relations, seen as essential to the ideal balance with nature that was itself the material guarantee of survival, called for specific patterns of conduct. Individuals might have rights, but they had them only by virtue of the obligations they fulfilled to the community. This explains their logic of regarding legality in terms of individual obligations, and not of individual rights. At least in their jural and moral assumptions, these communities lived at an opposite extreme from the ‘free enterprise individualism’ which supposes that the community has rights only by virtue of the obligations it fulfils to the individual.

Even the ‘simple’ forms of this ideal balance call for an imaginative effort of understanding, though they sometimes fall into fairly regular patterns. The chief complicating factor is that a ‘nuclear cluster’ of related families, enclosing a lineage or descent-line, has seldom formed or forms an isolation community. Its men and women marry the men and women of other ‘nuclear clusters’. This produces an ever changing mobility between each pair of them, and thus between them all. Anthropologists report diverse ways in which such relationships have been expressed, tensions resolved, and the balance held between descent-lines. The Amba of north-western Uganda, for example, are a farming people of about 30,000 souls living between the great Ituri rain forests and the slopes of snow-peaked Ruwenzori. In essence, their system is a simple one. All public affairs are resolved in terms of a balance between descent-lines. Every Amba can expect help from the kinsmen of his own line, but each line (and here I am simplifying) is in principle opposed to every other.

No Amba is allowed to marry within his or her own line. In anthropological terms, ‘the maximal lineage about which the [Amba] village is structured is an exogamous unit, and thus the men of the lineage must obtain wives from other lineages’. Among the Amba, as among many other peoples, this arrangement has created a special interdependence. When a woman from Village B bears a son to her husband in Village A, all the men of Village B who belong to her own generation or younger have an obligation to protect, aid and defend their ‘sister’s son’—although this son now belongs to another and opposed descent-line, the maximal lineage of Village A. In this relationship the kinsmen of Village B are called the ‘mother’s brothers’. They are expected to act together in affairs concerning their ‘sister’s sons’ in Village A.

These types of cross-relationship varied much in their detail and efficacy and so in their practical results. Generally, they have undergone many modifications over the past hundred years. But in one form or another they are part of the fundamental pattern of social and political growth which governed the peopling of Africa in remote times, and framed its dominant beliefs and ideologies.

The sequence of what actually happened was not, of course, what this kinship ideology has projected. Characteristically, the ideology has stood things on their head. What actually happened long ago was that the ecology of a given area imposed a process of trial and error which led to an understanding of certain possible forms of livelihood. These saving rules of life, discovered after much adventure, duly shaped an ideal pattern of society. But people have not seen things in this way. What they have seen is that the ideal pattern of society, given by the life-force and the ancestors, produced the possibility of an ideal balance with nature.

Where with an outsider’s objectivity we may feel sure that ecology and available techniques were the decisively formative factors in any given culture, peoples living within the ideology of traditional life have traced these factors to the ancestrally-sanctioned community. ‘Living and dead of the same lineage are in a permanent relationship with each other. . . . The living act as temporary caretakers of the prosperity, prestige and general well-being of the lineage, on behalf of the ancestors who did the same during their lives.’

This was the kinship pattern, rather than any particular aspect of farming or other economic action, which came to appear as the essential guarantee of survival. What Middleton observed of the Lugbara was of general acceptance: ‘If God made the world . . . the hero-ancestors and their descendants, the ancestors, formed Lugbara society.’ Hence, in large degree, the apparently ‘anti-scientific’ mood of yesterday’s Africa. Its innovations were many, and were the harvest of a most practical observation that was scientific in its empiricism. But these innovations, in order to become acceptable, had to be absorbed within an ancestral system which, by definition, was itself opposed to experiment or change.

Lienhardt’s description of the Dinka has illumined this whole process of desired equilibrium, and its conceptually reversed ideology, with a patient sympathy and brilliant insight. Numbering today about a million souls, the Dinka belong to a Nilotic language group which has lived in the plains around the southern Nile since remote times, although its formation into peoples clearly ancestral to those of today—Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Anuak and others—is part of the history of the last thousand years and even of the last five hundred.

A century ago Samuel Baker described them as a crude and feckless crowd with no social or religious notions worth the name. One can see, up to a point, why Baker thought this. ‘Apart from imported metal and beads’. Lienhardt wrote after living with the Dinka in 1947–50, ‘there is nothing of importance in Dinka material culture which outlasts a single lifetime. The labours of one generation hence do not lighten or make a foundation for those of the next, which must again fashion by the same technological processes and from the same limited variety of raw materials a cultural environment which seems unchanging, and, until the extensive foreign contacts of modern times, was unchangeable.’

Unchangeable: because Dinkaland is an almost unfeatured plain with only occasional trees, and with a rainy season which regularly inundates the land, makes much of it temporarily useless to man or beast, and leaves no more than stray humps above sky-empaled waters where homesteads can be kept and gardens cultivated. In this country of ‘general insecurity on the margins of subsistence’, the ‘only form of wealth which can be inherited is livestock’. It took a man like Baker to feel contempt that the Dinka should lack cathedrals and machinery, or even clothes.

Living where they do, boxed in moreover by other peoples who live in much the same way, the Dinka have evolved both an ‘ideal equilibrium’ and an explanation, in terms of necessary relationships between the living and the ancestors, of how their equilibrium was formed. The essence of their balance with nature consists in a seasonal system of millet cultivation, stock breeding, and regular retreat to rainy season camps, while its main content rests in the maintenance of more or less numerous herds of cattle. It is not an easy equilibrium, and was perhaps still more difficult in the past when cattle raiding by neighbours could be frequent and material goods were even fewer. It is an equilibrium which could never have resisted any major breaking of the rules.

The rules are deeply engrained in Dinka life. Lienhardt says that most Dinka spend much of the second part of every year, the wet season after August and before December, in cattle camps ‘some two or three hundred yards square, where it has been found that drainage is good’. Such a camp will ‘usually consist of a number of slight mounds, built up higher by the accumulation of the ashes of dung smudges and the debris left by generations of herdsmen’. Here the Dinka build low shelters thatched with branches and covered with sods of earth. ‘Each shelter is surrounded by cattle-pegs, and while the herdsmen sleep and sit in the protection of the shelters, the cattle are tethered around them.’ After the worst of the rains are over, all but the very old people, who have remained in all-season homesteads elsewhere, move out with their cattle across the sodden pastures. There they live in grass shelters until April or May; then they return to permanent homesteads and gardens in places where the floods do not reach. Such is the Dinka year; and it is difficult to see how it could be, or ever could have been, very different. The Dinka have fitted themselves into their land, and the land has given them a living.

This equilibrium imposed by the land emerges, ideologically, as a construct fashioned by kinship relations and attitudes to cattle. Each ‘nuclear family’ belongs to a larger group by relationship between males. This larger group, gol, belongs in turn to a still wider one, again by relationship through males, which is called wut. The term wut is also synonymous with cattle-camp, so that a Dinka cattle-camp is in some large sense the physical configuration of the Dinka ‘jural community’, the largest grouping ‘within which there are a moral obligation and a means ultimately to settle disputes peaceably’. Over and beyond each wut there is also a sense of wider loyalty; this takes visible form when wuts, or rather wut members, come together in the spring at another sort of camp, a lively kermesse of dancing, conversation, and inter-wut gossip.

Around this political organisation there stands the guardianship of belief and custom. Each gol or group of nuclear families unites within itself two broad descent lines which are thought of as opposed and complementary. These are the bany, who provide the priests of Dinka shrines to divinity and regulate affairs with the gods and ancestors (themselves to some extent interchangeable); and the kic, whom Lienhardt describes as commoners or warriors. In this, again, one may perhaps glimpse the conceptualisation of a universe in terms of opposed but complementary forces: those making for conservation, and those that speed the onward movement of life, with both entwined in a single dialectical structure. From another point of view, law and order are promoted through group relations arranged by patrilineal ties balanced by loyalties through maternal ties. ‘Ideally, the warleaders and the priests [the kic and the bany] . . . should stand in the relationship of nephew and maternal uncle to each other, thus creating a strong nucleus of two descent-groups related through women, and with different and complementary functions for each political group.’

From this there derived a corresponding morality and set of legal norms. No Dinka should get or keep more than enough, because anyone who does so will imperil the precarious balance with nature. Crimes should be settled by acts of compensation so as to conserve, rather than disturb, the relative strength of gols and wuts.

None of this should be taken to suggest that Dinka were some kind of moral or legal automata bound blindly to their rules. As in every human community, individuals could exploit or try to bend the rules to personal or joint advantage. This actual variety of choice is reflected in many and perhaps all African societies by the often contradictory advice of proverbial wisdom; and it helps to explain how individual wit or ambition, working within new pressures or conditions, could repeatedly modify these systems. Yet the variety of choice of action had to remain, or at least appear to remain, always within the limits of the ideal equilibrium: outside them, choice could only be antisocial and condemned. Political and religious theory, in short, arose from a specific adaptation to ecology.

But the ideology has seen things the other way round: it has seen the adaptation as a product of the theory. Among the Dinka this comes out emphatically in attitudes to cattle. The cattle are there because of the people. Yet the very predominance of cattle in Dinka life has given them an ideological status which can often appear to suggest the reverse. ‘All important relationships between members of different agnatic [father-related] descent groups, and all important acquisitions for any particular group, may be expressed in terms of cattle.’ Cattle are the subject of a capacious imagery, often subtle and imaginative, poetic and allusive, which refers to every aspect of Dinka thought about what life is and what life should be.

The Dinka carry this very far, and reveal in doing so how closely their system fits them. Thus the proud owner of a black ox may not be content, in singing with his friends, to be called by the basic name for such a beast, ma car, ‘but will be known by one or more other names, all explained ultimately by deriving from the blackness of his ox when seen in relation to darkness in other things. He may therefore be known as tim atiep, “the shade of a tree”; or kor acom, “seeks for snails,” after the black ibis which seeks for snails; or bun anyeer, “thicket of the buffalo”, which suggests the darkness of the forest in which the dark buffalo rests; or akiu yak thok, “cries out in the spring drought,” after a small black bird which gives its characteristic cry at this time of year; or arec luk “spoils the meeting”, after the dark clouds which accompany a downpour of rain and send the Dinka running for shelter.’

Diagram of Dinka distribution of a sacrificial beast.

Obsessed by cattle? The familiar remark of travellers who have passed this way has substance. But it happens to be a logical obsession. The Dinka have become obsessed by cattle as the ‘modern man’ by money, and for comparable reasons. The one, like the other, confers status as well as livelihood, and is thought of as unique in doing so. Wander through any modern conurbation, and you will be able to describe the houseowners by income group, or simply by the things that only money can provide. In the case of the Dinka and their cattle, however, a good deal of the ‘obsession’ is the optical illusion of observer’s ignorance. An example from a country further to the south, offering in some ways an environment still more difficult, makes the point.

The Karimojong are a cattle-raising people who live in northern Uganda. They inhabit about 4,000 square miles of grassland parched by frequent drought, and number some 60,000 souls. Karimojong behaviour, like Dinka behaviour, is closely geared to cattle which form the mainstay of their livelihood. Reputedly a difficult and unpredictable population during colonial times, they have followed rules of their own. Sometimes these rules have seemed perverse or pointless. Imperial authority clashed often with these restless drovers.

Many of these clashes arose because the Karimojong would insist on moving into a certain area of grazing that lies to the east of their main homeland. There ‘they encounter and often fight with other tribes who are exploiting the same general region’. Logically from its own point of view, colonial government wanted the ‘cattle obsessed’ Karimojong to move not east but west, where they would avoid trouble with neighbours. Just as logically from theirs, the Karimojong insistently refused. But the logic of their refusal emerged only in 1958 when a government agronomist demonstrated what the Karimojong, it is now accepted, knew already: that ‘the grasses of the west are deficient in minerals . . . and stock herded there lose condition’.

Often, it is argued, the cattle are too many. But too many for whom? Colonial administration, looking at the problem from outside, saw only that a given square mileage could support a given density of stock. The Karimojong possessed more than this desirable maximum. Some cattle ought therefore to be culled. But the Karimojong looked at the problem from inside, from their own balance with nature, and disagreed. Thus a Karimojong herd large enough to feed a family in the rains may not be adequate in time of drought. ‘In the rainy season a cow may give four or five pints of milk a day and still rear a healthy calf; in the dry season it is often possible to take only a quarter of a pint or so a day without risk of losing the calf.’ Then the Karimojong, like other pastoral folk, use ox blood as a food. They know that ‘a large ox will yield seven pints at a single bleeding in the rains, and five months later will be fit for bleeding again’; yet ‘to take a similar amount in the dry season would be to risk losing the animal altogether’. An adequate herd at one season might undoubtedly be more than enough at another. But this, with Karimojong experience of drought, was clearly no reason for culling it.

I make these points only to demonstrate that peoples such as these could have logical and meditated reasons for doing what the uninstructed observer must regard as unnecessary or plain foolish. No doubt, like other peoples, they often behaved foolishly. But judgment should wait upon information. Where the logic seems to fail it may only be because the observer has insufficiently observed. One can make the same kind of point about African farmers who have practised what has been called ‘shifting cultivation’ or, more contemptuously, ‘slash and burn’.

This shifting cultivation has been widely condemned by visitors to Africa, but not always, it would seem, from knowledge of what it was they were condemning. More usually, this was and is in truth ‘recurrent cultivation’ which had and has a sense and logic of its own. As, for example, with the Bemba. This people began farming in the grasslands of north-eastern Zambia soon after 1650. These grasslands are poor in soil fertility and other resources. Bemba farming equilibrium has required them to move a garden every four to six years at best; even then the yield capacity of the land may support no more than about ten people to a square mile. Another reason why they have had to move their gardens every few years is that they could cultivate successfully only if they fertilised with wood-ash. Their habit, consequently, has been to lop and burn trees around their gardens. Once the trees are cut the possibilities of fertiliser will be exhausted for a decade or more, and the garden must be left fallow.

Apparently very wasteful for the visiting expert: but what else could he have done in Bemba shoes? In contrast to what Polly Hill has called the ‘generalised nonsense’ that is often written about African economic conditions, there is the judgment of the good Bishop Mackenzie among the Chewa, neighbours of the Bemba, a hundred years ago. ‘When telling the people in England,’ he wrote, ‘what were my objects in going out to Africa, I stated that among other things I meant to teach these people agriculture; but I now see that they know far more about it than I do.’

Those who find shifting cultivation feckless must therefore show what other or different forms of cultivation could have yielded more food. They will not find it easy. Of shifting cultivation in forest areas, the soil scientists Nye and Greenland, who are among the few who have yet devoted serious attention to the matter, reply that ‘so far as we know the system is the best that could have been devised’. Even in grassland areas, such as where the Bemba live, Nye and Greenland question how far it really ‘squanders the resources of the land’. It certainly ‘checks the growth of shrubs and trees and encourages erosion on all but gentle slopes’. Yet ‘the systems of cultivation and cropping are in general well adapted to produce the means of subsistence with the minimum of labour’. And the ‘minimum of labour’, no doubt, is what all peoples have striven towards, but especially the Africans with their ethos of ‘enough is enough’.

For the ideal balance always supposed enough but not much more: enough for a given community in a given place, taking it for granted that whenever the community grew too large for local sustenance, for the achieved balance, some of its members would find new land elsewhere. This attitude may be miles away from the accumulation drive of our own industrial societies with their drumming emphasis on ‘more than enough’. But it had its own moral consistency. The Puritan fathers of the industrial revolution may have felt that God desired them to burn the candle of labour at both ends: not the Africans. The ideal for them—if with many exceptions, especially in those societies which became more acutely stratified and hierarchical, notably in West Africa—has been ‘conformity to the life led by one’s fellows, seeking little or no wealth and position’ in a carefully egalitarian world where personal gain above the level of the accepted norm would be a source of unhappiness or danger, since exceptional achievement could be only at the expense of one’s neighbours.

This is why, as we shall see, exceptional achievement could be interpreted as a sign of social malice: as the workings of destructive witchcraft. ‘Among the Bemba,’ Gluckman adds, ‘to find one beehive is good luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three is witchcraft’; and he recalls knowing a man who had given up living in a fine house he had built ‘because he believed that he had become the target of envious witches’. Whoever failed to live the good life according to the ideal balance, or became the recipient of favours beyond the average, might well be thought to have set himself against the norm. And it was the norm of the ideal balance, however battered by individual ambitions or dimmed by social stratification, that shaped morality through the years.