14 - Land, Spiritual Power, and Gerontocracy: An Exploration of the Roots of Egalitarian Revolution in the Western Voltaic Region

Summary

The evolution of leadership at Kirikongo was extensively shaped by gerontocratic principles, ritually legitimized power, and egalitarian ideologies of land tenure. With this underlying cultural logic of three structuring principles, community members over the past two millennia interpreted, reinterpreted, invented, rejected and repurposed sources of power and their social and material manifestations.

West Africanists have long recognized that political power is frequently derived from the petition of divinities and/or ancestors by a representative of a cultural entity (e.g. community, House, etc.) (see Chapter 3). In the surveyed Voltaic societies, leadership roles are similarly centered upon individuals who maintain and sacrifice at earth shrines, ancestral shrines and sometimes more mysterious fetish shrines. These symbolic bases of power assure the well-being of the community through ritual labor. Depending upon their context and history, they can be component parts of corporate political strategies or foundational to the practice of exclusionary power. In addition, a single society can have multiple leadership roles based in different nodes of ritually legitimized power, often held by different houses or kin-groups. For example, the Bwa conceptualize two rights that sanction the community, the nyumuni with the spirits of nature as earth priest, and the tu over the ancestral cult—both rights are usually held by the village headman (Capron 1973). The Gouin combine these two rights and entrust them to a headman (hiεnmanjigantieno), who maintains the earth shrine (as earth priest) through the intercession of his ancestors (Dacher 1997a). The Gouin headman also has a role as political headman, or nelenjigantieno, that sacrifices to divinities for rain, peace, and for the protection of the community from abuses by himself.