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8

Elaborations I: Age Sets

WHEN DOES A COMMUNITY BECOME A ‘STATE’, OR A ‘TRIBE’ TURN into a ‘nation’? Little can be gained from arguing such matters of nomenclature, much of which is still befogged by old misunderstandings. It is more useful to see how the actual structures evolved, as it were, on the ground.

Anthropologists have drawn a broad working distinction between ‘societies with governments’ and ‘societies without governments’. By this they mean, essentially, distinction between systems which contained a central authority of some recognised sort and others which did not. Thus the aristocratic governments of the Wolof of Senegal or the Yoruba of Nigeria were clearly very different in their structure, and therefore in their mood and ethos, from the egalitarian systems of the Tallensi or Konkomba.

Seen historically, however, the range of Africa’s political systems much more resembles a continuum between extremes. At one end there were societies which stayed close to the ‘ideal formative community’ of founding ancestors during remote times: the community of pioneers consisting of a handful of nuclear families bound together by common experience, and governing themselves, while they settled and slowly grew in numbers, by more or less simple forms of gerontocracy. Developing from this there came structures of kinship whose organisation, as time went by, evolved complex and contrapuntal balances and checks upon the use and abuse of power.

Tallensi self-rule lay towards this end of the continuum. Their government embodied no king or other person with political authority, no executive service, no capital or central place of assembly, but lay in a series of arrangements deploying a pervasive influence at three levels. First, there were guiding precedents for the practical questions of everyday life. Do we hoe today, and if so whose garden? Next, at a level removed somewhat from everyday affairs, Tallensi self-rule took effect in ties within clans and between maximal lineages, imposing and defining wider obligations. Do we exact compensation from those people over there, or owe them any, and if so how much? At a third remove, Tallensi government assured a larger concept of unity and mutual obligation: the concept of a moral order upon which ‘everything’ was immanently built according to a social charter within which all Tallensi, in varying depths of awareness, always dwelt, enabling them at any time to say: This is the country we belong to, and this is why.

At the other end of the continuum there were states with very obvious and puissant forms of central government, having emperors and kings, hierarchies of wealth, executive services, administrative capitals, formidable armies. ‘We entered Kumasi at two o’clock’, a British envoy wrote of the Asante capital in 1817, where ‘upwards of five thousand people, the greater part warriors, met us with awful bursts of martial music . . . an area of nearly a mile in circumference was crowded with magnificence and novelty. The king, his tributaries, and captains, were resplendent in the distance, surrounded by attendants of every description. . . . More than a hundred bands burst out on our arrival . . . at least a hundred large umbrellas or canopies, which could shelter thirty persons, were sprung up and down by the bearers with brilliant effect.’

Yet even in such states as this the old authority of kinship remained of critical influence in deciding what was politically done or not done. With important exceptions to be discussed later, men acquired office by virtue of their positions in the kinship structure, and exercised power by sanctions whose ultimate creation depended not on any royal will, but on ancestral mandate.

After 1720 the kings and chiefs of Asante brought within their power a territory somewhat larger than Ghana. But even later, when men began to be appointed to office by merit, chiefs were seldom allowed to forget that they drew their authority from their representative status. Within the metropolitan part of the empire this status was conferred by ritual acts carrying a legal force because they emerged from the Asante social order. The culmination of these rites was the seating of the new chief upon his seat of office, his akonnua or stool. With that, a double function was fulfilled. The akonnua stood to the chief as a throne to a European king, but it also stood to chiefship as the European crown to kingship: it was a physical thing to be used on appropriate occasions, but also a supreme symbol of constituted authority.

Seated on his akonnua, the chief is considered to be absorbed by his office. ‘Appearing then before his people, he swears fidelity to them and is admonished by his senior councillors to remember, among other things, that he may never act without their advice, and must rule with justice and impartiality. It is impressed on him that he belongs to the whole chiefdom in his capacity of chief, and not to his own lineage.’ He must forget his own position in the kinship structure, must rise above family considerations, and must enlarge his boundaries of thought and judgment to include the whole complex of descent-groups over which he is called to rule. When he fails, those who have elected and installed him possess the constitutional means to depose him, and they have often used it.

Thus there is no point along the kinship continuum at which a true dividing line may be drawn between centrally ruled societies on the one hand, and ‘governmentless’ or ‘stateless’ societies on the other. It is rather that the web of kinship was spun in varying patterns and appearances. Here it might glimmer in the open sunlight of village life, or there be veiled in the awesome shades of chiefly pomp and paraphernalia. But the web of kinship was present in all these societies, the necessary underfabric of their structures.

Its influence or resilience differed greatly from people to people, and was increasingly submerged or limited wherever society became deeply stratified, or kings and nobles reinforced their power. Yet even where this happened it did so as a partial process, hesitant and still profoundly moulded by the past. The influence of the kinship structure remained powerful even in defeat.

The source of this endurance lay in the power to resolve conflict or promote common action. How much any given structure did this clearly varied, since the kinship continuum ranged from very simple forms of self-rule for very small groups, such as the thirty or forty-member Bushman ‘extended family’, to structures which enclosed large numbers of people. Obviously, too, some peoples governed themselves better than others, were luckier or more inventive. Outside influences such as Islam also played their part. But the efficacy of kinship was realised repeatedly, and above all in the ability to conserve social unity: in the capacity, that is, to counterpoise the competing claims of lineages, clans, or other segments of any given people.

It is difficult to grasp this efficacy from outside. People in modern societies think of their problems in quite other terms. Yet the difference may still be one of degree, a matter of interpretation at varying levels. Caught in litigation with a neighbour, a ‘modern’ man will think first of the immediate and practical evidence: whose trespass, whose tort? A little later he may ask other questions: how do he and I stand in relation to society? How much weight can each of us pull? And then thirdly, at another level of judgement: what kind of dispute is this, how will it be judged in relation to the moral order? These might be called the personal, corporate, and socio-moral levels. But it is only in so far as the third level, the socio-moral level, may appear of small or no real relevance in our present ‘jumble of ethical precepts’ that there exists an essential difference between present and past. Otherwise a man conflicting with his neighbour in a kinship system asks the same three types of question. What is the immediate evidence in dispute? What corporate allies can each side depend on? What are the moral issues at stake? In either case the relative efficacy of the two systems, as ways of humanising man in society, is realised at successive levels of influence on behaviour: in the nature of significant evidence, in the operation of corporate alliances, and in the persuasion of the socio-moral order.

Here I want to look at a few examples on the second level, that of corporate alliances and arrangements. They illustrate some characteristic elaborations that appeared among many peoples, though by no means among all. Age sets or age grades form one of them.

The Tiriki are a people, numbering today about 40,000, whose ‘incoming ancestors’ arrived in north-western Kenya four or five centuries ago, migrating probably from Uganda. Their community embraces groups of descent-lines owing allegiance to common ancestors. These groups live in villages or related clusters of villages near the head of Lake Nyanza. But their corporate unity, as a people, has rested chiefly on their dividing of all Tiriki males into regular sets by age. Applying the ‘ethnographic present’ for the sake of convenience, although the position today is no longer what it used to be, the Tiriki have seven of these age sets.

Suppose you are Daudi Imbadu of the Tiriki. Until you are ten or so you are counted as a ‘small boy’ with minimal social duties such as the herding of cattle. Then you will expect, with some trepidation, to undergo initiation to manhood by a process of schooling which lasts about six months and is punctuated by ritual ‘examinations’. Selected groups of boys are entered for this schooling once every four or five years. ‘Life during the six months’ seclusion period’, Sangree found, ‘is characterised by strict regimentation and a focus on group activities to the exclusion of all private or individual undertakings. All the initiates of a hut eat, sleep, sing, dance, bathe, do handicrafts etc. . . . [but] only when commanded to do so by their counsellor’, who will be a man under about twenty-five.

The accent, one sees, is on social transformation. Circumcision gives it a ritual embodiment within the first month or so, after which social training continues as before until the schooling period is complete. Then come ceremonies at which elders teach and exhort, the accent now being on obedience to rules which have been learned. The Tiriki social charter is thus explained and then enshrined at the centre of a man’s life.

‘During the many evenings in the seclusion hut and at the special ceremonial meetings in the circumcision grove [the aspirant to manhood] is taught by his counsellor and by the initiation elders the host of duties, responsibilities and privileges that accompany age-group membership.’ There is inculcated a sense of respect for elders, of brotherhood among members of the age set in question, and of skill in practical matters such as the use of arms. The parallel may be wildly remote in context and content, but one is irresistibly reminded of the English public schools. Even visiting Tiriki mums are said to be like their English counterparts, alarmed for their offspring but jealously proud of their progress.

Early in his teens Daudi Imbadu has completed this initial training in behaviour, although further training for a widened scope will continue throughout his life. Now he is judged not as an adolescent but as a young adult capable of assuming some responsibility in community affairs. How much he assumes will depend on character or circumstance. But generally it will grow with time until, some fifteen years later, Daudi and his brethren are elevated to a new set, that of warriors. This is the most admired status that any man can have in Tirikiland where, as it used to be, people have been constantly preoccupied with smallscale raiding or defence against it. These are the fifteen years during which Daudi can make his name by deeds of prowess. These will mark him out for leadership when, in the next move upwards, he moves around the age of forty into the set of elder warriors.

The elder warriors are the men who really govern Tirikiland in so far as any corporate government exists there. By this time the brethren in this set have been able to show their worth. Some take the lead; others merely enjoy the title. All are in any case expected to retire from what may be called ‘executive duties’ around fifty-five; then they become eligible for initiation into the next set, that of judicial elders ripe and wise enough to preside over courts of law. This age set of fifty-five to seventy may also be regarded as in some sense executive, since it is the next one upwards again which presides over the shrines where Tiriki laws are sanctioned and, at need, made or modified by ancestral order or advice. From about seventy to eighty-five, if he lives that long and is recognised as having the requisite qualities of character and intelligence, Daudi belongs to the chosen few whose experience and wisdom give them the final and legislative say in major Tiriki affairs. At last, near eighty-six or so, Daudi will be elevated to the ranks of very old men no longer fit for active life.

Theoretically these seven periods mark a revolving cycle of 105 years. If Daudi should survive to that age, unlikely but possible, he will have completed all stages from small-boyhood to retired eldership. In practice, of course, these arrangements have been geared to the easy-going habits of rural life, and each grade has overlapped to some extent with the grade above and the grade below. ‘This does not mean, however, that every Tiriki [has not had] a clear picture of the sorts of activities commonly regarded as most suitable for each age group during its occupancy of any given age grade.’ Even today ‘the concept of fixed progression by the age groups through successive social statuses is an openly expressed part of the way the Tiriki conceptualise their own society both past and present’.

Other peoples near and far—the neighbouring Kipsigi and Nandi of Kenya, the Bantu of southern Africa, many in western Africa—have comparable age systems. They vary in detail, as one would expect, for each is the product of local evolution. The Karimojong of Uganda think of their history in terms of four age groups, each consisting of a generation reckoned as about twenty-five years. These have ‘always’ succeeded each other in time, and are named respectively after the zebra, mountains, the gazelle and the lion. But at any given moment only two of these generation sets are recognised as being in active existence: a senior one, which is closed to recruitment, and a junior one which is still acquiring its full complement of men. Each of these Karimojong generation sets consists in turn of five serially recruited age-groups with different statuses and obligations.

As a whole, the active male population of the Karimojong, reckoned as lying between about ten years old and sixty, are thus divided into two sorts of people, ‘those in authority and those in obedience, the leaders and the led’, and then again subdivided into groups with varying rights and duties. What this really means needs to be looked at in the light of Karimojong realities. A large part of any man’s life is passed in isolated cattle camps far from home, in driving cattle from one reach of pastures to another, or in small home-hamlets scattered through the bush. It is age set training which gives these people their structure of behaviour. Only this can overcome the social isolation of long and difficult seasons when a man may never see more than a dozen or so of his neighbours. Otherwise ‘there is often no tie of kinship or neighbourhood or even [descent-line] section between the groups of herders who meet, mingle for a while, and then disperse to reform in other fortuitous combinations’, as they shift with their beasts across the land.

This extreme disaggregation, ever renewed with every season, means that each small group is at the mercy of internal quarrels brought about by rivalry for scarce pasture and water, or of raids by similarly hard-pressed neighbours along the borders of Karimoja. ‘It is here that age-set affiliation has its greatest utility, for it immediately allocates to any individual in any collection of persons, however transient, a niche in a universal ranking system. Every individual has, accordingly, a pattern of response already roughly created, and needing only application to the context in which he finds himself. . . . Provided only that a man is both Karimojong and adult then he can be automatically grouped and ranked by age, whatever his company or whatever the circumstances. By these means, any aggregate of Karimojong in any place at any time can be structured to take common action.’

But it is the ‘third level’ of awareness which makes this system work by providing the guides and sanctions of a universally accepted moral order. Like other ‘stateless societies’, the Karimojong have no police force or body of men with physical authority to act against offenders. Their age group training would go for little, either in emergencies or the common run of daily life, were it not for moral assumptions—the psychosocial formation—on which it rests and which frame and fortify its rules.

Ultimately, it is the elders who guard and impose these rules. ‘Whether individually or collectively, Karimojong consider obedience and respect for elders to bring good fortune through their beneficence; and equally, disobedience and disrespect to bring individual punishment and suffering, or collective calamity.’ The attributed ability of elders ‘to intercede with deity on the community’s (or individual’s) behalf, or to refuse to do so in time of need, or positively to curse, provides a graduated range of supernatural sanctions with which to back their decisions’.

Cursing by elders is the major punitive sanction, applied in varying degrees of doom, just as good behaviour is rewarded by appropriate blessings. Mild cursing may cause barrenness in wives or cattle, failure of crops, early death. More serious forms of curse, collectively expressed, may drastically generalise such woes. Offending Karimojong are, it appears, deeply and immediately concerned to avert the wrath of retribution. They must plead or pray for remission in words which Dyson-Hudson, who records them, found were no less binding for being stylised in form:

Offender: Father, father, let me be. Help me. Leave me alone. I will not do these things again, truly. I will not repeat them.

Elder: Very well. Have you believed?

Offender: I have.

Elder: Do you still argue?

Offender: No, I have believed.

The moral basis is repeatedly emphasised by the meaning which Karimojong attach to this pleading before elders. Every form of pleading takes place within the structure of Karimojong belief, and ‘connotes someone struggling with a force greater than himself that may only be removed at its behest rather than his own’. So an offender’s remission depends upon forgiveness by the powers that underpin society. But this comes only when the forces of good are enabled by appropriate individual action and voluntary acceptance to overcome the forces of evil. Then the offender can not only be relieved of further accusation but can also shed his own sense of guilt—and in this pattern of consciousness, as we shall see, there lies much of the value of traditional psychotherapy, especially in cases of mental depression.

Other forms of ‘separation by age’ suggest a resolution of specific problems, as with the Nyakyusa. They carry separation to an extreme. They divide their male population not only socially into age sets which cut across descent-line loyalties, but geographically into age villages as well. In its actual place of dwelling each male generation is physically separated from others, so that ‘the local unit consists not of a group of kinsmen . . . but of a group of age-mates with their wives and young children’. Boys beyond infancy must form generation villages in the same way as men.

Why should the Nyakyusa do this? For themselves it is ‘right and natural’ and requires no validation other than in terms of what is ‘right and natural’, a circular explanation which gets us nowhere. But Monica Wilson, who has studied their system of life, suggests that Nyakyusa patterns of sexual morality may lie at its base. She notes that Nyakyusa have no ceremonies to mark the threshold of maturity and circumscribe behaviour: ‘Therefore any young man past puberty is a potential mate for a woman of his own age.’ This might not matter very much if it were not that Nyakyusa men customarily marry late while girls marry early, with the result that there are ‘many bachelors and very few girls available to them’, a shortage rendered the more acute by Nyakyusa attitudes which favour a man’s marrying as many wives as he can afford. Moreover, Nyakusa social rules also suppose the inheritance of a father’s widow by his son, except for his own mother or her kinswomen. ‘So it is scarcely surprising that the seduction of the young wives of an aging father is a common theme for scandal, and that a father’s jealous fears are matched by those of his son.’ Out of all this, Wilson argues, there has come a social anxiety about incest between step-son and step-mother on the one hand, and between father-in-law and daughter-in-law on the other; and Nyakyusa accordingly separate sons from fathers by making them live in different villages.

But with active males thus divided, physically and emotionally, how does Nyakyusa society hold together? The answer lies in a range of values likewise inherent to the system. Nyakyusa have evolved a compensatory mechanism by stressing what they call ukwangela, ‘the enjoyment of good company and, by extension, the mutual aid and sympathy which spring from personal friendship’. This ‘implies urbane manners and a friendliness which expresses itself in eating and drinking together; not only merry conversation, but also discussion between equals which the Nyakyusa regard as the principal form of education’, an attitude which modern educationists, one feels, may incidentally well approve. They place, it seems, a tremendous emphasis on the good fellowship of ukwangela within a given village and across the whole network of kinship relations.

These attitudes are more than platonic. Like other Africans—like all predominantly rural peoples?—Nyakyusa are down-to-earth about the frailties of human nature. They may think that a man should have ukwangela out of sheer good will. But they do not count upon it. They expect him to have it out of self-interest, failure to have it being the path to ruin by witchcraft. It is fear of this retribution by witchcraft that ‘compels generosity and conformity with public opinion in the village and thus creates a sense of mutual dependence between neighbours’, while by the same token ‘the disapproval of neighbours spells ill-health’.

As so often, that part of the moral order which has been conceived in terms of witchcraft is thus to be seen in a dual light. Witchcraft stands for Evil in the sense that it strikes at men and women who fail in their social duties and who, in so doing, open the gate to Evil. In another light it operates as a belief restraining Evil, or punishing anyone who harbours Evil, with troubles that we should usually regard as mere misfortune. Either way, to see witchcraft belief as an extraneous and arbitrary element is to misread the nature of this civilisation. Having supposed Good in the form of a given moral order, Africans have been obliged to suppose Evil in whatever undermines it. God without the Devil is what no people have yet been able to imagine.