So it came about that all property and productive relations had to be conceived in terms of kinship relations, since it was the sum of the family groups, combined in a jural community, that was seen as having devised the saving balance with nature. This meant that political action was necessarily kinship action. But this in turn required that every individual must play an expected social role. To the ecological balance, there corresponded another in the field of human relations—an ideal balance of kinship rights and obligations, occasionally quite simple, often very complex, and nearly always structured in terms of countervailing pressures between different sections of society: between, for the most part, different lineages or groups of lineages.
This ideal balance of kinship relations, seen as essential to the ideal balance with nature that was itself the material guarantee of survival, called for specific patterns of conduct. Individuals might have rights, but they had them only by virtue of the obligations they fulfilled to the community. This explains their logic of regarding legality in terms of individual obligations, and not of individual rights. At least in their jural and moral assumptions, these communities lived at an opposite extreme from the ‘free enterprise individualism’ which supposes that the community has rights only by virtue of the obligations it fulfils to the individual.
Even the ‘simple’ forms of this ideal balance call for an imaginative effort of understanding, though they sometimes fall into fairly regular patterns. The chief complicating factor is that a ‘nuclear cluster’ of related families, enclosing a lineage or descent-line, has seldom formed or forms an isolation community. Its men and women marry the men and women of other ‘nuclear clusters’. This produces an ever changing mobility between each pair of them, and thus between them all. Anthropologists report diverse ways in which such relationships have been expressed, tensions resolved, and the balance held between descent-lines. The Amba of north-western Uganda, for example, are a farming people of about 30,000 souls living between the great Ituri rain forests and the slopes of snow-peaked Ruwenzori. In essence, their system is a simple one. All public affairs are resolved in terms of a balance between descent-lines. Every Amba can expect help from the kinsmen of his own line, but each line (and here I am simplifying) is in principle opposed to every other.
No Amba is allowed to marry within his or her own line. In anthropological terms, ‘the maximal lineage about which the [Amba] village is structured is an exogamous unit, and thus the men of the lineage must obtain wives from other lineages’. Among the Amba, as among many other peoples, this arrangement has created a special interdependence. When a woman from Village B bears a son to her husband in Village A, all the men of Village B who belong to her own generation or younger have an obligation to protect, aid and defend their ‘sister’s son’—although this son now belongs to another and opposed descent-line, the maximal lineage of Village A. In this relationship the kinsmen of Village B are called the ‘mother’s brothers’. They are expected to act together in affairs concerning their ‘sister’s sons’ in Village A.
These types of cross-relationship varied much in their detail and efficacy and so in their practical results. Generally, they have undergone many modifications over the past hundred years. But in one form or another they are part of the fundamental pattern of social and political growth which governed the peopling of Africa in remote times, and framed its dominant beliefs and ideologies.
The sequence of what actually happened was not, of course, what this kinship ideology has projected. Characteristically, the ideology has stood things on their head. What actually happened long ago was that the ecology of a given area imposed a process of trial and error which led to an understanding of certain possible forms of livelihood. These saving rules of life, discovered after much adventure, duly shaped an ideal pattern of society. But people have not seen things in this way. What they have seen is that the ideal pattern of society, given by the life-force and the ancestors, produced the possibility of an ideal balance with nature.
Where with an outsider’s objectivity we may feel sure that ecology and available techniques were the decisively formative factors in any given culture, peoples living within the ideology of traditional life have traced these factors to the ancestrally-sanctioned community. ‘Living and dead of the same lineage are in a permanent relationship with each other. . . . The living act as temporary caretakers of the prosperity, prestige and general well-being of the lineage, on behalf of the ancestors who did the same during their lives.’
This was the kinship pattern, rather than any particular aspect of farming or other economic action, which came to appear as the essential guarantee of survival. What Middleton observed of the Lugbara was of general acceptance: ‘If God made the world . . . the hero-ancestors and their descendants, the ancestors, formed Lugbara society.’ Hence, in large degree, the apparently ‘anti-scientific’ mood of yesterday’s Africa. Its innovations were many, and were the harvest of a most practical observation that was scientific in its empiricism. But these innovations, in order to become acceptable, had to be absorbed within an ancestral system which, by definition, was itself opposed to experiment or change.
Lienhardt’s description of the Dinka has illumined this whole process of desired equilibrium, and its conceptually reversed ideology, with a patient sympathy and brilliant insight. Numbering today about a million souls, the Dinka belong to a Nilotic language group which has lived in the plains around the southern Nile since remote times, although its formation into peoples clearly ancestral to those of today—Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Anuak and others—is part of the history of the last thousand years and even of the last five hundred.
A century ago Samuel Baker described them as a crude and feckless crowd with no social or religious notions worth the name. One can see, up to a point, why Baker thought this. ‘Apart from imported metal and beads’. Lienhardt wrote after living with the Dinka in 1947–50, ‘there is nothing of importance in Dinka material culture which outlasts a single lifetime. The labours of one generation hence do not lighten or make a foundation for those of the next, which must again fashion by the same technological processes and from the same limited variety of raw materials a cultural environment which seems unchanging, and, until the extensive foreign contacts of modern times, was unchangeable.’
Unchangeable: because Dinkaland is an almost unfeatured plain with only occasional trees, and with a rainy season which regularly inundates the land, makes much of it temporarily useless to man or beast, and leaves no more than stray humps above sky-empaled waters where homesteads can be kept and gardens cultivated. In this country of ‘general insecurity on the margins of subsistence’, the ‘only form of wealth which can be inherited is livestock’. It took a man like Baker to feel contempt that the Dinka should lack cathedrals and machinery, or even clothes.
Living where they do, boxed in moreover by other peoples who live in much the same way, the Dinka have evolved both an ‘ideal equilibrium’ and an explanation, in terms of necessary relationships between the living and the ancestors, of how their equilibrium was formed. The essence of their balance with nature consists in a seasonal system of millet cultivation, stock breeding, and regular retreat to rainy season camps, while its main content rests in the maintenance of more or less numerous herds of cattle. It is not an easy equilibrium, and was perhaps still more difficult in the past when cattle raiding by neighbours could be frequent and material goods were even fewer. It is an equilibrium which could never have resisted any major breaking of the rules.
The rules are deeply engrained in Dinka life. Lienhardt says that most Dinka spend much of the second part of every year, the wet season after August and before December, in cattle camps ‘some two or three hundred yards square, where it has been found that drainage is good’. Such a camp will ‘usually consist of a number of slight mounds, built up higher by the accumulation of the ashes of dung smudges and the debris left by generations of herdsmen’. Here the Dinka build low shelters thatched with branches and covered with sods of earth. ‘Each shelter is surrounded by cattle-pegs, and while the herdsmen sleep and sit in the protection of the shelters, the cattle are tethered around them.’ After the worst of the rains are over, all but the very old people, who have remained in all-season homesteads elsewhere, move out with their cattle across the sodden pastures. There they live in grass shelters until April or May; then they return to permanent homesteads