8 - Elaborations I: Age Sets

Summary

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.