This equilibrium imposed by the land emerges, ideologically, as a construct fashioned by kinship relations and attitudes to cattle. Each ‘nuclear family’ belongs to a larger group by relationship between males. This larger group, gol, belongs in turn to a still wider one, again by relationship through males, which is called wut. The term wut is also synonymous with cattle-camp, so that a Dinka cattle-camp is in some large sense the physical configuration of the Dinka ‘jural community’, the largest grouping ‘within which there are a moral obligation and a means ultimately to settle disputes peaceably’. Over and beyond each wut there is also a sense of wider loyalty; this takes visible form when wuts, or rather wut members, come together in the spring at another sort of camp, a lively kermesse of dancing, conversation, and inter-wut gossip.
Around this political organisation there stands the guardianship of belief and custom. Each gol or group of nuclear families unites within itself two broad descent lines which are thought of as opposed and complementary. These are the bany, who provide the priests of Dinka shrines to divinity and regulate affairs with the gods and ancestors (themselves to some extent interchangeable); and the kic, whom Lienhardt describes as commoners or warriors. In this, again, one may perhaps glimpse the conceptualisation of a universe in terms of opposed but complementary forces: those making for conservation, and those that speed the onward movement of life, with both entwined in a single dialectical structure. From another point of view, law and order are promoted through group relations arranged by patrilineal ties balanced by loyalties through maternal ties. ‘Ideally, the warleaders and the priests [the kic and the bany] . . . should stand in the relationship of nephew and maternal uncle to each other, thus creating a strong nucleus of two descent-groups related through women, and with different and complementary functions for each political group.’
From this there derived a corresponding morality and set of legal norms. No Dinka should get or keep more than enough, because anyone who does so will imperil the precarious balance with nature. Crimes should be settled by acts of compensation so as to conserve, rather than disturb, the relative strength of gols and wuts.
None of this should be taken to suggest that Dinka were some kind of moral or legal automata bound blindly to their rules. As in every human community, individuals could exploit or try to bend the rules to personal or joint advantage. This actual variety of choice is reflected in many and perhaps all African societies by the often contradictory advice of proverbial wisdom; and it helps to explain how individual wit or ambition, working within new pressures or conditions, could repeatedly modify these systems. Yet the variety of choice of action had to remain, or at least appear to remain, always within the limits of the ideal equilibrium: outside them, choice could only be antisocial and condemned. Political and religious theory, in short, arose from a specific adaptation to ecology.
But the ideology has seen things the other way round: it has seen the adaptation as a product of the theory. Among the Dinka this comes out emphatically in attitudes to cattle. The cattle are there because of the people. Yet the very predominance of cattle in Dinka life has given them an ideological status which can often appear to suggest the reverse. ‘All important relationships between members of different agnatic [father-related] descent groups, and all important acquisitions for any particular group, may be expressed in terms of cattle.’ Cattle are the subject of a capacious imagery, often subtle and imaginative, poetic and allusive, which refers to every aspect of Dinka thought about what life is and what life should be.
The Dinka carry this very far, and reveal in doing so how closely their system fits them. Thus the proud owner of a black ox may not be content, in singing with his friends, to be called by the basic name for such a beast, ma car, ‘but will be known by one or more other names, all explained ultimately by deriving from the blackness of his ox when seen in relation to darkness in other things. He may therefore be known as tim atiep, “the shade of a tree”; or kor acom, “seeks for snails,” after the black ibis which seeks for snails; or bun anyeer, “thicket of the buffalo”, which suggests the darkness of the forest in which the dark buffalo rests; or akiu yak thok, “cries out in the spring drought,” after a small black bird which gives its characteristic cry at this time of year; or arec luk “spoils the meeting”, after the dark clouds which accompany a downpour of rain and send the Dinka running for shelter.’
Diagram of Dinka distribution of a sacrificial beast.
Obsessed by cattle? The familiar remark of travellers who have passed this way has substance. But it happens to be a logical obsession. The Dinka have become obsessed by cattle as the ‘modern man’ by money, and for comparable reasons. The one, like the other, confers status as well as livelihood, and is thought of as unique in doing so. Wander through any modern conurbation, and you will be able to describe the houseowners by income group, or simply by the things that only money can provide. In the case of the Dinka and their cattle, however, a good deal of the ‘obsession’ is the optical illusion of observer’s ignorance. An example from a country further to the south, offering in some ways an environment still more difficult, makes the point.
The Karimojong are a cattle-raising people who live in northern Uganda. They inhabit about 4,000 square miles of grassland parched by frequent drought, and number some 60,000 souls. Karimojong behaviour, like Dinka behaviour, is closely geared to cattle which form the mainstay of their livelihood. Reputedly a difficult and unpredictable population during colonial times, they have followed rules of their own. Sometimes these rules have seemed perverse or pointless. Imperial authority clashed often with these restless drovers.
Many of these clashes arose because the Karimojong would insist on moving into a certain area of grazing that lies to the east of their main homeland. There ‘they encounter and often fight with other tribes who are exploiting the same general region’. Logically from its own point of view, colonial government wanted the ‘cattle obsessed’ Karimojong to move not east but west, where they would avoid trouble with neighbours. Just as logically from theirs, the Karimojong insistently refused. But the logic of their refusal emerged only in 1958 when a government agronomist demonstrated what the Karimojong, it is now accepted, knew already: that ‘the grasses of the west are deficient in minerals . . . and stock herded there lose condition’.
Often, it is argued, the cattle are too many. But too many for whom? Colonial administration, looking at the problem from outside, saw only that a given square mileage could support a given density of stock. The Karimojong possessed more than this desirable maximum. Some cattle ought therefore to be culled. But the Karimojong looked at the problem from inside, from their own balance with nature, and disagreed. Thus a Karimojong herd large enough to feed a family in the rains may not be adequate in time of drought. ‘In the rainy season a cow may give four or five pints of milk a day and still rear a healthy calf; in the dry season it is often possible to take only a quarter of a pint or so a day without risk of losing the calf.’ Then the Karimojong, like other pastoral folk, use ox blood as a food. They know that ‘a large ox will yield seven pints at a single bleeding in the rains, and five months later will be fit for bleeding again’; yet ‘to take a similar amount in the dry season would be to risk losing the animal altogether’. An adequate herd at one season might undoubtedly be more than enough at another. But this, with Karimojong experience of drought, was clearly no reason for culling it.
I make these points only to demonstrate that peoples such as these could have logical and meditated reasons for doing what the uninstructed observer must regard as unnecessary or plain foolish. No doubt, like other peoples, they often behaved foolishly. But judgment should wait upon information. Where the logic seems to fail it may only be because the observer has insufficiently observed. One can make the same kind of point about African farmers who have practised what has been called ‘shifting cultivation’ or, more contemptuously, ‘slash and burn’.
This shifting cultivation has been widely condemned by visitors to Africa, but