9 - Elaborations II: Secret Societies

Summary

IF DEMOCRACY MEANS PARTICIPATION, THESE SOCIETIES WERE democratic, even extremely so. Ingeniously, coherently, they resisted the alienation of the individual from the springs of community action. Their very patterns of self-rule supposed an ever present awareness of exactly where the power lines ran, and through whose hands and precisely for what purposes. Their politics were intimate, immediate, always close at hand, not faceless or remote. Much more than with the exercise of power these systems were concerned with its everyday control. Even the label sometimes given them by modern research, 'segmentary societies’ speaks loud in this sense. Essentially they were composed of counterpoised ‘segments’ or lineage groupings of a given whole, each contained within itself but dependent on the others.

This kind of government was possible for small or fairly small communities. One may even regard it as the major political instrument evolved by Africans for populating their continent with its sparse ancestral communities. Even when small communities became transformed into large ones, minor governments into major governments, village states into farspread empires, these foundations in segmentary self-rule were never entirely lost.

Today they may perhaps be seen in their ‘purest’ condition among peoples who have remained numerically few in lands beyond the skyline of the beaten track. Yet it would be a mistake to think that only numerically small peoples continued to practise segmentary self-rule, or those who least felt the influence of change. Nobody has shown this better than the Ibo. They live in fertile and densely populated country east of the lower Niger, and must have numbered several millions long before the general explosion of population which has occurred in modern times. These peoples have always enjoyed a reputation for restless enterprise in trade. They have combined a positively Athenian eagerness for any new thing with a corresponding distrust of authority; and their many village governments have reflected this.

In a typical Ibo forest village, deep in the tall timber east of Onitsha, there would be fifteen or twenty ‘extended’ or ‘nuclear’ families. Government was by council of elders, the ama-ala, whose permanent members were the fifteen or twenty recognised family heads. ‘However, any adult male held the right to sit on the council.