Apparently very wasteful for the visiting expert: but what else could he have done in Bemba shoes? In contrast to what Polly Hill has called the ‘generalised nonsense’ that is often written about African economic conditions, there is the judgment of the good Bishop Mackenzie among the Chewa, neighbours of the Bemba, a hundred years ago. ‘When telling the people in England,’ he wrote, ‘what were my objects in going out to Africa, I stated that among other things I meant to teach these people agriculture; but I now see that they know far more about it than I do.’
Those who find shifting cultivation feckless must therefore show what other or different forms of cultivation could have yielded more food. They will not find it easy. Of shifting cultivation in forest areas, the soil scientists Nye and Greenland, who are among the few who have yet devoted serious attention to the matter, reply that ‘so far as we know the system is the best that could have been devised’. Even in grassland areas, such as where the Bemba live, Nye and Greenland question how far it really ‘squanders the resources of the land’. It certainly ‘checks the growth of shrubs and trees and encourages erosion on all but gentle slopes’. Yet ‘the systems of cultivation and cropping are in general well adapted to produce the means of subsistence with the minimum of labour’. And the ‘minimum of labour’, no doubt, is what all peoples have striven towards, but especially the Africans with their ethos of ‘enough is enough’.
For the ideal balance always supposed enough but not much more: enough for a given community in a given place, taking it for granted that whenever the community grew too large for local sustenance, for the achieved balance, some of its members would find new land elsewhere. This attitude may be miles away from the accumulation drive of our own industrial societies with their drumming emphasis on ‘more than enough’. But it had its own moral consistency. The Puritan fathers of the industrial revolution may have felt that God desired them to burn the candle of labour at both ends: not the Africans. The ideal for them—if with many exceptions, especially in those societies which became more acutely stratified and hierarchical, notably in West Africa—has been ‘conformity to the life led by one’s fellows, seeking little or no wealth and position’ in a carefully egalitarian world where personal gain above the level of the accepted norm would be a source of unhappiness or danger, since exceptional achievement could be only at the expense of one’s neighbours.
This is why, as we shall see, exceptional achievement could be interpreted as a sign of social malice: as the workings of destructive witchcraft. ‘Among the Bemba,’ Gluckman adds, ‘to find one beehive is good luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three is witchcraft’; and he recalls knowing a man who had given up living in a fine house he had built ‘because he believed that he had become the target of envious witches’. Whoever failed to live the good life according to the ideal balance, or became the recipient of favours beyond the average, might well be thought to have set himself against the norm. And it was the norm of the ideal balance, however battered by individual ambitions or dimmed by social stratification, that shaped morality through the years.
7
A Moral Order
BRITAIN LIVES TODAY, WE ARE TOLD BY SOCIOLOGISTS, AMIDST ‘a jumble of ethical precepts, now bereft of their significance . . . within a wasteland littered with the debris of broken convictions’. For a world where the ideal is one of personal accumulation, the good of the individual is set in opposition to the good of the community, as witness the consequences of our dominant idols, the motor car and the television set; and the good of the community goes increasingly to the wall. No matter what lip service to the general weal may continue to be paid in Sunday observances or other ritual proclamations, we become communities without any visible means of moral support. Every orthodoxy notwithstanding, we are confronted with an ever more urgent need to find a new morality, a new means of humanising man in society, a new civilisation: or else shake ourselves finally to pieces. So widely accepted are such thoughts that they must sound banal here. They will be excused, perhaps, for the contrast which they offer with the materially simple but morally not defenceless societies we are considering now. With them the situation was evidently different.
Here, of course, I am speaking mainly of those ‘stateless tribes’ who have seemed most ‘primitive’, most ‘helpless’, to observers from outside. Their characteristic ethos was consciously restrictive because it had to be so. It drew its power from a struggle for the mastery of nature formed and then enclosed by the precedents of experience. The result might be technological poverty, material backwardness, a failure to enlarge. These were its negative aspects. But it was not poverty in certain other ways, notably moral and artistic. On the contrary, the very strenuousness of their experience seems often to have given these societies an inner tension and creativeness which emerged in artistic triumphs that were morally inspired. It was as though the awareness of limits on the possible, or rather on the permissible, flowered in a sense of controlled freedom expressed most visibly by their dancing and their experiments in sculptural form: a controlled freedom which we, abandoning a community morality, may find difficult to conceive today.
This is not to say that these societies lacked a dynamism of change or failed to respond to it. But it is to say that the nature of their civilisation supposed a notion of community that was restrictive of change in certain decisive ways. With them, the difference between good and bad lay in acceptance and rejection of the mandatory precedents—everyday, practical, all-pervasive—of what had come to seem the ‘right and natural’. From this flowed their inhibitive conservatism. The Pondo of south-eastern Africa were typical of many peoples. Those very forces which have made for stability among them, Monica Wilson has observed, also tend to hamper any man who tries to adjust his life to new circumstances, while those traits of character which the modern world admires, such as pushing egotism and the desire for personal wealth or power, are precisely the qualities which used to make a Pondo disliked and even feared among his fellows.
None the less, things obviously did change. Some societies were less successful than other. And wherever the precedents—the rules of everyday life—failed to produce the necessary equilibrium, either the community fell apart or the rules had to be changed. Here there intervened, in ways which are increasingly understood by the study of oral history, a series of multivariant mechanisms of change which have caused the proliferation of a very large number of contrasts and contradictions even between neighbouring peoples.
The Amba mentioned earlier have had two basic rules. Marriages within descent-lines—effectively, within villages—are forbidden. But a man owes help to, and expects help from, his mother’s relatives in other villages as well as from his father’s relatives in his own village. This particular balance may be seen as having held Amba society together by tying each village to itself and its land, while compensating for the opposition of descent lines in separate villages by permitting a certain overall cohesion through ‘mother’s brother: sister’s son’ relationships. At the same time it also prevented the emergence of any unitary political system.
This was no doubt all right in the old days. But as Amba filled up their land, and found it harder to get more land because neighbours were doing the same, their stubborn dispersal of authority among separate descent lines led to increasing disputes and appeals to violence. ‘At the very heart of the system, with its rigid adherence to a lineage ideology, lay a fundamental contradiction which, unless new political principles were introduced, doomed the society to continual internal warfare and bloodshed no matter how much individuals within the