How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600

by Jan Vansina

Overview

Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years?

Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history of African societies before European contact in How Societies Are Born. In this complement to his previous study Paths in the Rainforests, Vansina employs a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly focus to governance, studying the creation of relatively large societies extending beyond the foraging groups that characterized west central Africa from the beginning of human habitation to around 500 BCE, and the institutions that bridged their constituent local communities and made large-scale cooperation possible.

The increasing reliance on cereal crops, iron tools, large herds of cattle, and overarching institutions such as corporate matrilineages and dispersed matriclans lead up to the developments treated in the second part of the book. From about 900 BCE until European contact, different societies chose different developmental paths. Interestingly, these proceeded well beyond environmental constraints and were characterized by "major differences in the subjects which enthralled people," whether these were cattle, initiations and social position, or "the splendors of sacralized leaders and the possibilities of participating in them."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813922805
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	07/06/2005
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jan Vansina, Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was named the "Distinguished Africanist" of 1986 and awarded the Herskovits Prize for Kingdoms of the Savanna in 1967, garnering the two top honors given by the African Studies Association. Vansina is the author of more than twenty books, including Living with Africa and Paths in the Rainforests.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgments	xi
	Conventions on Spelling and Citing Dates	xiii
	Introduction	1
	Sources	4
	Constructing a History	11
	The Stage	14
Part 123
1	Preludes	25
	Late-Stone Age Foragers	26
	Of Pots, Fields, and Flocks	33
	Proto-Njila Speakers and Their Society	41
	The Dissemination of the Njila Languages and Its Consequences	52
	Metallurgy	60
	Toward the Formation of West Central Africa	67
2	Early Village Societies, 700-1000	69
	Divuyu	69
	Agriculture	74
	Bovine Cattle	81
	Overarching Institutions: Corporate Matrilineages and Dispersed Matriclans	88
	Becoming Food Producers	98
Part 2101
3	Of Water, Cattle, and Kings	107
	Nqoma	108
	Cattle Nomads and Their Societies	117
	Agropastoralists	132
	Networks	153
	History, Environment, and Collective Imagination	156
4	Of Courts and Titleholders	160
	Feti: An Angolan Zimbabwe?	170
	Principalities on the Planalto	174
	An Inner African Frontier	182
	In and Around the Lower Cuanza Basin	186
	Jaga Marauders and Their Government	196
	Ladders of Power and the Dynamics of Centralization	201
5	Of Masks and Governance	206
	Villages, Vicinages, and Sodalities	210
	Collective Government	226
	Local Leaders, Chiefs, and Palavers	234
	From Vicinage to Dynastic Web	244
	The Rund Kingdom and the Lunda Commonwealth	255
	Environment and Collective Imagination	259
6	A Coming Together	261
	Collective Imagination, Tradition, and the Dynamics of History	265
Appendix	The Njila Group of Languages	273
I.	The Njila Group of Languages	273
II.	Composition and Internal Structure	275
III.	Links to Other Units and Points of Origin	278
IV.	Later Language History	279
V.	Chronology	279
	References	285
	Index	311

What People are Saying About This

David Schoenbrun

"How Societies Are Born represents a political and agrarian history of a period and region for which absolutely no scholarly histories have been written, and Vansina possesses rare and unmatched skills in marshaling a recalcitrant and multilingual body of historical sources.

David SchoenbrunNorthwestern University

"How Societies Are Born represents a political and agrarian history of a period and region for which absolutely no scholarly histories have been written, and Vansina possesses rare and unmatched skills in marshaling a recalcitrant and multilingual body of historical sources.

James DenbowUniversity of TexasAustin

"How Societies Are Born is an extremely valuable contribution to western African history and prehistory. I was impressed by the depth and variety of Vansina’s historical and anthropological sources, and found his use of historical linguistics to construct arguments about systems of governance, marriage, and inheritance patterns and other details fascinating.

James Denbow

"How Societies Are Born is an extremely valuable contribution to western African history and prehistory. I was impressed by the depth and variety of Vansina’s historical and anthropological sources, and found his use of historical linguistics to construct arguments about systems of governance, marriage, and inheritance patterns and other details fascinating.

Editorial Reviews

"How Societies Are Born is an extremely valuable contribution to western African history and prehistory. I was impressed by the depth and variety of Vansina’s historical and anthropological sources, and found his use of historical linguistics to construct arguments about systems of governance, marriage, and inheritance patterns and other details fascinating.

James Denbow

"How Societies Are Born represents a political and agrarian history of a period and region for which absolutely no scholarly histories have been written, and Vansina possesses rare and unmatched skills in marshaling a recalcitrant and multilingual body of historical sources.

David Schoenbrun

Even scholars who know better tend assume without thinking that the people the Portuguese found had been the same since time began.

Inc. Book News

"Even scholars who know better tend assume without thinking that the people the Portuguese found had been the same since time began. "—author of Book News, Inc.

"How Societies Are Born represents a political and agrarian history of a period and region for which absolutely no scholarly histories have been written, and Vansina possesses rare and unmatched skills in marshaling a recalcitrant and multilingual body of historical sources. "—David SchoenbrunNorthwestern University, author of A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity between the Great Lakes to the 15th Century

"How Societies Are Born is an extremely valuable contribution to western African history and prehistory. I was impressed by the depth and variety of Vansina’s historical and anthropological sources, and found his use of historical linguistics to construct arguments about systems of governance, marriage, and inheritance patterns and other details fascinating. "—James DenbowUniversity of TexasAustin, author of Uncovering Botswana’s Past

From the Publisher

"How Societies Are Born represents a political and agrarian history of a period and region for which absolutely no scholarly histories have been written, and Vansina possesses rare and unmatched skills in marshaling a recalcitrant and multilingual body of historical sources.

David SchoenbrunNorthwestern University

"How Societies Are Born is an extremely valuable contribution to western African history and prehistory. I was impressed by the depth and variety of Vansina’s historical and anthropological sources, and found his use of historical linguistics to construct arguments about systems of governance, marriage, and inheritance patterns and other details fascinating.

James DenbowUniversity of TexasAustin