20 - The Nature of Kingship

Summary

IF LITTLE CAN BE SAID IN DETAIL ABOUT THE EMERGENCE OF KINGS and kingships, much can be inferred about the nature of these persons and institutions. One conclusion is that like circumstances in different places repeatedly produced like results. Diffusion of ideas from the Nile Valley or North Africa may have played some distant part in shaping tropical developments. But diffusion of ideas, even where it really happened, was always less important than processes internal to a given region.

Some of these can be defined. Ogot and others argue that kingships evolved most regularly wherever an incoming minority, marching for new land, had to extend their rule over settled people who lived within different lineage frameworks. So the dynasties which appeared in the wake of Luo intrusion into Uganda ‘evolved as a result of a small, well-organised group successfully imposing its rule over a disorganised majority’. In these circumstances, ‘any political set-up based upon kinship ties cannot work. The minority group, in order to maintain its rule over what is usually a hostile majority, must present a united front’. Their means of doing this is kingship. Thus at one end of the spectrum the Nuer, remaining a unitary society composed only of Nuer, evolved no centralising institutions because they needed none; while at the other end, in the ‘conquest kingdoms’, there emerged a plural society consisting of dominant Hima and subject Iru, of dominant Tutsi and subject Hutu, and of other but comparable pluralities.

A second conclusion is that the trend towards centralisation of power—away from segmentary government in favour of kingship or its equivalent—seems always to have taken the same broad line of advance. All these historical monarchies, whether great or small, very old or quite new, belong to the same basic type. This type used to be called ‘divine’; more knowledge has suggested that ‘ritual’ would be a better adjective. They were first and foremost repositories of ritual power. Their authority rested mainly and consistently upon its place in a given people's beliefs about themselves and the world. Kings were ritual specialists who had accumulated power in societies which had passed beyond the early subsistence level and had developed, whether in isolation or by the stimulus of migrant-resident accommodation, the need as well as the possibility of centralising institutions.