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7

A Moral Order

BRITAIN LIVES TODAY, WE ARE TOLD BY SOCIOLOGISTS, AMIDST ‘a jumble of ethical precepts, now bereft of their significance . . . within a wasteland littered with the debris of broken convictions’. For a world where the ideal is one of personal accumulation, the good of the individual is set in opposition to the good of the community, as witness the consequences of our dominant idols, the motor car and the television set; and the good of the community goes increasingly to the wall. No matter what lip service to the general weal may continue to be paid in Sunday observances or other ritual proclamations, we become communities without any visible means of moral support. Every orthodoxy notwithstanding, we are confronted with an ever more urgent need to find a new morality, a new means of humanising man in society, a new civilisation: or else shake ourselves finally to pieces. So widely accepted are such thoughts that they must sound banal here. They will be excused, perhaps, for the contrast which they offer with the materially simple but morally not defenceless societies we are considering now. With them the situation was evidently different.

Here, of course, I am speaking mainly of those ‘stateless tribes’ who have seemed most ‘primitive’, most ‘helpless’, to observers from outside. Their characteristic ethos was consciously restrictive because it had to be so. It drew its power from a struggle for the mastery of nature formed and then enclosed by the precedents of experience. The result might be technological poverty, material backwardness, a failure to enlarge. These were its negative aspects. But it was not poverty in certain other ways, notably moral and artistic. On the contrary, the very strenuousness of their experience seems often to have given these societies an inner tension and creativeness which emerged in artistic triumphs that were morally inspired. It was as though the awareness of limits on the possible, or rather on the permissible, flowered in a sense of controlled freedom expressed most visibly by their dancing and their experiments in sculptural form: a controlled freedom which we, abandoning a community morality, may find difficult to conceive today.

This is not to say that these societies lacked a dynamism of change or failed to respond to it. But it is to say that the nature of their civilisation supposed a notion of community that was restrictive of change in certain decisive ways. With them, the difference between good and bad lay in acceptance and rejection of the mandatory precedents—everyday, practical, all-pervasive—of what had come to seem the ‘right and natural’. From this flowed their inhibitive conservatism. The Pondo of south-eastern Africa were typical of many peoples. Those very forces which have made for stability among them, Monica Wilson has observed, also tend to hamper any man who tries to adjust his life to new circumstances, while those traits of character which the modern world admires, such as pushing egotism and the desire for personal wealth or power, are precisely the qualities which used to make a Pondo disliked and even feared among his fellows.

None the less, things obviously did change. Some societies were less successful than other. And wherever the precedents—the rules of everyday life—failed to produce the necessary equilibrium, either the community fell apart or the rules had to be changed. Here there intervened, in ways which are increasingly understood by the study of oral history, a series of multivariant mechanisms of change which have caused the proliferation of a very large number of contrasts and contradictions even between neighbouring peoples.

The Amba mentioned earlier have had two basic rules. Marriages within descent-lines—effectively, within villages—are forbidden. But a man owes help to, and expects help from, his mother’s relatives in other villages as well as from his father’s relatives in his own village. This particular balance may be seen as having held Amba society together by tying each village to itself and its land, while compensating for the opposition of descent lines in separate villages by permitting a certain overall cohesion through ‘mother’s brother: sister’s son’ relationships. At the same time it also prevented the emergence of any unitary political system.

This was no doubt all right in the old days. But as Amba filled up their land, and found it harder to get more land because neighbours were doing the same, their stubborn dispersal of authority among separate descent lines led to increasing disputes and appeals to violence. ‘At the very heart of the system, with its rigid adherence to a lineage ideology, lay a fundamental contradiction which, unless new political principles were introduced, doomed the society to continual internal warfare and bloodshed no matter how much individuals within the society might wish the situation to be otherwise.’ It was rather like the modern world and the proliferation of the motor car. The proliferation causes increasing bloodshed and a great many people wish the situation could be otherwise, but it cannot be otherwise because the proliferation lies at the heart of the system.

A great many ‘small societies’ seem to have found themselves in this growing contradiction between lineage loyalty and the welfare of the community. Many of them began appointing chiefs, with increasing powers, at least ten centuries ago and sometimes more. The history of chiefs is indeed the history of efforts to solve the problem of unity in a continent where disunity within a community with slowly rising populations, and with sharpening competition for good land or trade, was found to pay a continually higher price. Even the staunchly democratic Amba, under pressures of this kind, made some attempt to get themselves a king towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Where chiefs with centralising powers were not adopted, other techniques of integration were tried. The more numerous Nuer of the southern Sudan have a basic pattern somewhat similar to that of the Amba. But they have contrived to find ways of integrating descent-lines so that relatively large numbers of Nuer can if necessary act together. They have got round the difficulty caused by exogamous marriage rules—which suppose rivalry to the point of warfare between major descent-lines—by mixing up their major lines or ‘segments’. A Nuer village or group of villages never contains only one descent-line, as generally with the Amba, but is dominated by a descent-line living in amity with members of other lines. So that while large groupings of Nuer may still be in ‘chartered opposition’ to each other, the area of peaceful cohabitation has become steadily enlarged.

The point here is that these societies, irrespective of their degree of success or rate of change, always enclosed relations between people within a moral framework of intimately binding force. These relations between people, as Fortes reports of the Tallensi of northern Ghana, were expressed in moral concepts or axioms ‘rooted in the direct experience of the inevitability of interdependence between men in society’, an intense and daily interdependence that we in our day seldom recognise except in moments of post-prandial afflatus or national catastrophe. The good of the individual was a function of the good of the community, not the reverse. The moral order was robustly collective.

Out of this came its stability, its self-completeness, its self-confidence in face of trials and tribulations. ‘These nations’, deplored an Italian description of northern Angola during the 1680s, ‘with nauseating presumption think themselves the foremost men in the world, and nothing will persuade them to the contrary. They think . . . they have not only the biggest country in the world, but also the happiest and most beautiful.’ If there were others who thought nothing of the kind, there were still many who agreed. Even when resistance to change had revealed its weakness against an outside world rapidly winning technological power, later missionaries found it hard to persuade them to the contrary.

What Fortes says of the Tallensi was true of most of these societies, perhaps of all of them in varying degree. The ‘rights and duties of individuals appear as elements of corporate rights and duties’, so that ‘the solidarity of the unit is stressed at the expense of the individual’s private interests or loyalties’. The Principle of Good was whatever made for community welfare: when acting as the Principle of Evil, it did whatever was the reverse. And it is in the light of this moral order that one needs to interpret the specific arrangements of structural abstraction—descent-lines, age sets, and the rest—which offer, for us, the only entry to an understanding of societies so different from our own. For the moral order was there even when, to the outside eye, it appeared most absent.

It appeared most absent to many Europeans, as we have seen. Catching a glimpse of what was allowed or disallowed, they found it ludicrous to apply any such term as ‘moral order’ to peoples who seemed quite without a European sense of shame. Travellers from afar found much to shock them. The Venda of the Transvaal are only one among many peoples, for example, who have considered that premarital sexual experience was morally, because socially, valuable and even necessary, provided always that it should not lead to pregnancy. Premarital pregnancy was severely discouraged because the children of unmarried parents represented an immediate problem for the community, posing the question: to whom should they belong?; so that, at least among the Southern Bantu, the stigma of illegitimacy attached to the parents and not to the offspring. Otherwise the Venda saw to it that youths and maidens after the age of puberty should be carefully instructed in the ‘facts of life’, so as to have a limited form of sexual outlet before marriage.

Among these people there was a deliberate and prophylactic use of frankness, even a forthright grasping of the nettle of maturity, and no evasion by means of that characteristically nineteenth-century construct, ‘adolescence’, which supposes capacity without expression. According to Venda accounts of traditional life collected in the 1920s, a sexually mature girl who continually ‘stays with her mother’ was ‘contemptuously called “Afraid-of men”, “Waddle-about”. . . . They do not consider her a normal human being, they call her a procrastinator.’ When a girl is grown up, she ought to have a mudavdu (a sweetheart), and she ought, but within strictly understood limits, to make love with him. This partial intercourse was called davhalu among the Venda. ‘When a man davhalu’s in the old proper way,’ Venda elders were recalling some fifty years ago, long before mechanical forms of contraception were available, ‘the girl keeps her legs together, he does not touch the pudendum, the penis being merely passed through between the legs’, while the girls were subjected to a monthly examination to make sure their ‘play’ really was according to the ‘old proper way’. If a girl allowed herself to be deflowered she was punished by a public scolding, thought to be a shameful thing; and the family of a deflowered bride would have to pay a fine in marriage compensation.

More than compensation was involved. The Zulu are another people who have believed that ‘failure to observe moral rules connected with sex’ would ‘cause evil to befall the community’, and have evolved corresponding customs. Their ukusoma, like the davhalu of the Venda, was aimed at combining ‘delayed marriage with a strong emphasis on virginity before marriage’. Involving muscular control on the girl’s part, ukusoma was thought to produce firm thighs and buttocks, features that were therefore taken as a sign of innocence, so that a Zulu girl was ‘proud to display her body as a proof of her moral uprightness’. Krige records a ceremony where girls who had clothed themselves were even criticised with the implication that they had led a loose sexual life. Nudity could thus be the reverse of obscene. So could the frankness in girl’s puberty songs, combining moral with sex instruction. ‘He mounted me on the mans veneris,’ primly sang the wise Zulu virgin, ‘because he knows very well’: respects, that is, the rules of right behaviour.

Sexual morality, like any other, was deliberately selective: it mirrored, that is, specific kinship arrangements. Among the Nyakyusa of northern Malawi, another case in point, these arrangements seem to have been keyed to an emphasis on the fear of incest within groups far wider than the nuclear family. Otherwise, Monica Wilson tells us, the Nyakyusa are very tolerant in matters of sex, even regarding homosexuality as a venial sin if committed by youths, or else as a misfortune occasioned by witchcraft. The Tallensi consider it reasonable for an impotent or sterile husband to call in a friend who acts in his stead, once again in terms of a kinship structure which has placed a prime value on succession and family alliance.

The actual rules have been as various as the kinship structures. Much is now understood about the latter, though much else remains to be explained. One chief division has been observed: into those societies which reckon descent through mothers, when mothers’ brothers become more important in matters of office and succession than fathers; and those which reckon descent through fathers and fathers’ brothers. An earlier generation of anthropologists tried to explain these matrilineal and patrilineal divisions by supposing they reflected different stages of ancient society. When early peoples were in the ‘hunting and gathering’ stage, it was argued, fathers took the lead because theirs was the crucial economic activity; but the introduction of agriculture restored authority to mothers because it was women who weeded and hoed.

This explanation has the virtue of neatness, and there may be something in it; but closer observation has shown a far more complex truth. All the Bantu-speaking peoples who inhabit the greater part of central and southern Africa are farming peoples. They hunt and keep cattle, but much of their food comes from cultivation. Yet the Central Bantu peoples reckon descent matrilineally, and so confirm the old explanation, while Southern Bantu peoples often refute it by doing the reverse.

Laying such obscurities aside, one is left with kinship structures which form a unity of basic pattern diversified by local variation. The interest lies in the arrangement. Thus the Tallensi jural community was a clan which consisted of two or more maximal lineages. A maximal lineage is defined as ‘the most extensive grouping of people of both sexes all of whom are related to one another by common patrilineal descent’—a descent which is ‘traced from one known (or accepted (founding ancestor through known agnatic [father-related] antecedents’. In this society it followed that men were supreme. Women were obliged by the moral order to marry outside their own lineages, and normally lived away from their male relatives.

This balance between clan ties and maximal lineage ties formed the central feature of the Tallensi political system, and promoted its stability. Invisible to early observers, it worked by a subtle conjunction of checks and balances. Not seeing it, these observers reasonably concluded that Tallensi had no government at all, since they had no chiefs with central authority nor any other palpable means of keeping law and order, or of administering rewards and punishments. In fact, however, Tallensi were and in some measure still are greatly concerned with the uses and abuses of political power. They have carefully allowed for the exercise of the first and the discouragement of the second.

Like the Amba, this people of about half a million souls have lived in villages, but, unlike the Amba, they have tied their villages intimately together. Tallensi clans and lineages have been composed of men living in different villages, the disintegrating force of geographical separation being balanced by the integrating force of kinship. Their social charter has thus had a two-way pattern of pressures. At any given moment, there is in Taleland ‘a system of mutually balancing segments in which are vested the rights and duties through which the structural equilibrium is sustained. This tendency towards an equilibrium is characteristic of every phase of the social structure. . . . Loyalty to the local clan is balanced by a contrary loyalty to a component unit or a neighbouring clan.’

The balance, of course, was imperfect. The ideal was not achieved by Tallensi any more than by others. The very conditions of fixed village settlement in this ecologically hazardous savanna made stability repeatedly difficult. Droughts, swarms of locusts or other pests, the constant need for fission or fusion among village units faced with populations which varied in size according to the fortunes of the day: all such trials were factors of upheaval. Yet the pressures of Tallensi moral order worked steadily for resolution. Quarrels were many, but fights apparently few. And they were few precisely because the Tallensi were much of Lord Acton’s opinion on the corrupting influence of power. They regarded power, and therefore the effort to obtain it, with profound distrust.

Others thought the same. A majority of African societies have been like the Lozi of western Zambia who are ‘apparently terrified of giving away power, even power to protect, for once a man is elevated it is feared he will stand against those he ought to care for’. Even societies with chiefs and kings seldom deprived themselves of the right of deposition, at least up to the nineteenth century; and the founding notion of England’s Magna Carta, that you could justly act against an unjust ruler, was deeply rooted here. Since offensive warfare is nothing if not a violent exercise of power, the Tallensi were against it. They stressed peace and non-provocation ‘as the ideal relationships between neighbours’.

Clasped in their community structure of morally sanctioned checks and balances, the Tallensi thought it sinful to instigate warfare, since warfare could gravely damage their equilibrium. Warfare might be unavoidable now and then, but they deplored it as exchanging a possible immediate gain for a probable later loss. ‘War occurred when members of one clan committed a grave injury (e.g. murder) against members of another, from which theirs was divided by social barriers more powerful than any ties uniting them.’ Within a given grouping, an act of violence could be settled by compensation according to the rules. Outside the grouping, it would call for remedial action beyond the rules. So warfare was not ‘an instrument of policy, but an act of reprisal. Punishment, not conquest, was its purpose. Territorial annexation was incompatible with the social structure’—would upset, that is, the intervillage equilibrium—‘nor could captives or booty be taken. It was a stern taboo to retain any of the foodstuffs or livestock pillaged in war. All had to be destroyed or immediately consumed.’ In other words, to take cattle from neighbours and graze them would call for more land, and thus disturb the pattern of community settlement.

But this concept of community was more than a political device limited to relationships between people living at any given time. Had it been only that, it could scarcely have survived the human appetite for power and privilege. Far more, it was rooted in Tallensi notions about how their society had come into existence, and by what right it could continue to exist. Here we are back to the legitimating relationship between ancestors and living men, and between ancestors and land. What advantaged living men was whatever lay along the grain of ancestral precedent, and this was conceived ideally : as flowing from the ‘bargain’ which the ancestors had struck with the Spirit of the Earth. Unless living men kept to the bargain, the ancestors would not do so either. Then chaos would come.

It is of course doubtful whether Tallensi ever thought of all this in abstract terms of clans and lineages. For them, the kinship structure was self-evident from earliest childhood. But they took good care that people should remember its crucial loyalties. They celebrated annual festivals designed to perpetuate these loyalties, festivals that were both a confirmation of the existing order and a reaffirmation of its supreme validity.

For these and similar constitutional purposes they had two contrapuntal sets of functionaries, chiefs and Earth-priests, neither of whom had any directly political powers. The chiefs were thought of as representing the ancestors who had ‘come into the land’, while the Earth-priests spoke for those already settled there. As with other examples, a compact had been established between the two groups, immigrant and already-settled, so that both should live ‘for ever in amity side by side’. Tallensi therefore ‘believe that the common good of the whole tribe depends on the faithful ritual collaboration of chiefs and Earth-priests, after the fashion, as they put it, of husband and wife. If this breaks down, famine, war, disease or some other catastrophe will descend upon them.’ Again one sees the deliberate emphasis on the ideal dual balance: of men in community, and of men with nature.

It followed that the office was carefully distinguished from the person who occupied it. For the person had power only by virtue of the office, since it was the office alone which conveyed the saving power of conservation. This distinction between the person and the office, the profane and the sacred, defines a central aspect of belief and action. Little can be understood without keeping it in mind. ‘The Zande cult of ancestors is centred round shrines erected in the middle of their courtyards, and offerings are placed in these shrines on ceremonial, and sometimes other, occasions; but when not in ritual use, so to speak, Azande use them as convenient props to rest their spears against, and pay no attention to them whatsoever.’ The casual construction and everyday insignificance of African shrines make repeatedly the same point. What is important is not the contingent object but the immanent power which will be vested in the object on ritual occasions.

Clearly, then, these peoples were not astray in a mystical fog. On the contrary, they had a farmer’s hard-headedness about life and the world. Tallensi ideas of right and wrong derived from their convictions about the constitutional relationships which bound them together; and in this respect they were as logical and realistic as British constitutional lawyers who speak of ‘the Crown’ as the supreme arbiter of British right and wrong. However mystical ‘the Crown’ might sound to an uninstructed Tallensi visitor—he would find that he could easily see the Crown jewels, but never ‘the Crown’—quite a few British natives would be able to tell him that its powers were drawn from precedents subject to logical explanation. The validity of the logic in terms of commonsense behaviour might be questioned, but not the logic itself.

Some near neighbours of the Tallensi, the Konkomba who number about 80,000 and farm a reach of land about seventy miles wide that is ‘alternatively a swamp and a dust bowl’, can be called in here to illustrate the chain of logical legitimation. The Konkomba do not know when they first came to their land, though it was probably in the sixteenth century. They have no consciousness of history as a sequence of experiential cause and effect that goes beyond the naming of ancestors for half a dozen generations. If they live according to a strictly defined pattern of behaviour and belief, this is because the pattern is built into the daily fabric of their lives, and corresponds to a balance conceived by ancestral wisdom in ‘a time that has no time’.

This does not mean that the Konkomba have not innovated or changed. They have done both. But they have done so by modifications of a pattern seen as mandatory in its underlying principles. These principles are governed by their habitat. Like Dinkaland, their country is flooded for several months every year; but the Konkomba use their land differently from the Dinka. They are primarily cultivators, their crops today consisting chiefly of yams, rice, millet and sorghum. These they farm in ways that can admit of few experiments within a pre-industrial economy. Yet the Konkomba do not think of their pattern as being shaped by ecological necessity and the range of available tools. Of course they see both these conditions, not being farmers for nothing, but they see them in terms of a timeless contract between their founding ancestors and the spirits of the Earth. This contract between the living and the dead represents their social charter, their unwritten constitution.

Any alteration within the structure of Konkomba society requires, accordingly, to be fitted into the total structure by appropriate rituals. Otherwise there is bound to be trouble with the authorities—with the spirits of the Earth and their attendant ancestors who guard the ideal balance. Kinsmen who want to shift their homesteads have to be sure of ancestral approval. ‘When a man or group of men wish to move and settle in a stretch of unoccupied bush, they consult a diviner who discovers from them whether it is advisable to move and, if the answer be positive, the location of the shrines, commonly groves of trees, in the new area they propose to occupy. Thus a new relationship is established from the beginning between a group of kinsmen and the territory they occupy’, and between this new group and the rest of Konkomba society. With this, they have ‘connected themselves with their ancestors’ and adjusted their new settlement to the ideal balance. Now they can face life safely on their own.

In any familiar sense of the word this manner of explaining life is not scientific. Although the outcome of practical observation and of trial and error over many years, it is in large part seen as ‘given’ and not open to question. It continues, however, to be very directly concerned with effects which flow from causes: in its farming context, much more often than not with material effects which flow from material causes. This is where descriptions go wrong whenever they suggest that these societies were dominated by a preoccupation with spiritual or mystical effects and causes. It is indeed very doubtful how any farming community could survive if that were the case. The ‘fetish-ridden superstition’ of the Africans is an illusion raised by the difficulty of understanding these beliefs and actions without inquiring into what they actually mean and do.

All the modern evidence shows that these societies were and are minutely aware of their natural and material environment, and insistently concerned with it. Flora, fauna, soil properties, water and mineral resources, climatic regularities: these are the things that have chiefly occupied their attention. All observers who have made lengthy firsthand studies of these peoples are agreed, writes Evans-Pritchard, that ‘they are for the most part interested in practical affairs, which they conduct in an empirical manner, either without the least reference to suprasensible forces, influences, and actions, or in a way in which these have a subordinate and auxiliary role’.

Karimojong cattle classification by hide markings.

The truth appears to be that they have thought and acted on two different but related levels. It is the second level, concerning suprasensible effects and causes, which has proved the stumbling block to seeing them as rational and logical. Without the key to understanding, their beliefs and actions must often seem perversely irrational and ghost-ridden. Between old and new views of the Africans the real difference is that the key is now available in a number of cases sufficient to portray the whole, at least in general outline. This key rests in a comprehension of their moral order.