A great many ‘small societies’ seem to have found themselves in this growing contradiction between lineage loyalty and the welfare of the community. Many of them began appointing chiefs, with increasing powers, at least ten centuries ago and sometimes more. The history of chiefs is indeed the history of efforts to solve the problem of unity in a continent where disunity within a community with slowly rising populations, and with sharpening competition for good land or trade, was found to pay a continually higher price. Even the staunchly democratic Amba, under pressures of this kind, made some attempt to get themselves a king towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Where chiefs with centralising powers were not adopted, other techniques of integration were tried. The more numerous Nuer of the southern Sudan have a basic pattern somewhat similar to that of the Amba. But they have contrived to find ways of integrating descent-lines so that relatively large numbers of Nuer can if necessary act together. They have got round the difficulty caused by exogamous marriage rules—which suppose rivalry to the point of warfare between major descent-lines—by mixing up their major lines or ‘segments’. A Nuer village or group of villages never contains only one descent-line, as generally with the Amba, but is dominated by a descent-line living in amity with members of other lines. So that while large groupings of Nuer may still be in ‘chartered opposition’ to each other, the area of peaceful cohabitation has become steadily enlarged.
The point here is that these societies, irrespective of their degree of success or rate of change, always enclosed relations between people within a moral framework of intimately binding force. These relations between people, as Fortes reports of the Tallensi of northern Ghana, were expressed in moral concepts or axioms ‘rooted in the direct experience of the inevitability of interdependence between men in society’, an intense and daily interdependence that we in our day seldom recognise except in moments of post-prandial afflatus or national catastrophe. The good of the individual was a function of the good of the community, not the reverse. The moral order was robustly collective.
Out of this came its stability, its self-completeness, its self-confidence in face of trials and tribulations. ‘These nations’, deplored an Italian description of northern Angola during the 1680s, ‘with nauseating presumption think themselves the foremost men in the world, and nothing will persuade them to the contrary. They think . . . they have not only the biggest country in the world, but also the happiest and most beautiful.’ If there were others who thought nothing of the kind, there were still many who agreed. Even when resistance to change had revealed its weakness against an outside world rapidly winning technological power, later missionaries found it hard to persuade them to the contrary.
What Fortes says of the Tallensi was true of most of these societies, perhaps of all of them in varying degree. The ‘rights and duties of individuals appear as elements of corporate rights and duties’, so that ‘the solidarity of the unit is stressed at the expense of the individual’s private interests or loyalties’. The Principle of Good was whatever made for community welfare: when acting as the Principle of Evil, it did whatever was the reverse. And it is in the light of this moral order that one needs to interpret the specific arrangements of structural abstraction—descent-lines, age sets, and the rest—which offer, for us, the only entry to an understanding of societies so different from our own. For the moral order was there even when, to the outside eye, it appeared most absent.
It appeared most absent to many Europeans, as we have seen. Catching a glimpse of what was allowed or disallowed, they found it ludicrous to apply any such term as ‘moral order’ to peoples who seemed quite without a European sense of shame. Travellers from afar found much to shock them. The Venda of the Transvaal are only one among many peoples, for example, who have considered that premarital sexual experience was morally, because socially, valuable and even necessary, provided always that it should not lead to pregnancy. Premarital pregnancy was severely discouraged because the children of unmarried parents represented an immediate problem for the community, posing the question: to whom should they belong?; so that, at least among the Southern Bantu, the stigma of illegitimacy attached to the parents and not to the offspring. Otherwise the Venda saw to it that youths and maidens after the age of puberty should be carefully instructed in the ‘facts of life’, so as to have a limited form of sexual outlet before marriage.
Among these people there was a deliberate and prophylactic use of frankness, even a forthright grasping of the nettle of maturity, and no evasion by means of that characteristically nineteenth-century construct, ‘adolescence’, which supposes capacity without expression. According to Venda accounts of traditional life collected in the 1920s, a sexually mature girl who continually ‘stays with her mother’ was ‘contemptuously called “Afraid-of men”, “Waddle-about”. . . . They do not consider her a normal human being, they call her a procrastinator.’ When a girl is grown up, she ought to have a mudavdu (a sweetheart), and she ought, but within strictly understood limits, to make love with him. This partial intercourse was called davhalu among the Venda. ‘When a man davhalu’s in the old proper way,’ Venda elders were recalling some fifty years ago, long before mechanical forms of contraception were available, ‘the girl keeps her legs together, he does not touch the pudendum, the penis being merely passed through between the legs’, while the girls were subjected to a monthly examination to make sure their ‘play’ really was according to the ‘old proper way’. If a girl allowed herself to be deflowered she was punished by a public scolding, thought to be a shameful thing; and the family of a deflowered bride would have to pay a fine in marriage compensation.
More than compensation was involved. The Zulu are another people who have believed that ‘failure to observe moral rules connected with sex’ would ‘cause evil to befall the community’, and have evolved corresponding customs. Their ukusoma, like the davhalu of the Venda, was aimed at combining ‘delayed marriage with a strong emphasis on virginity before marriage’. Involving muscular control on the girl’s part, ukusoma was thought to produce firm thighs and buttocks, features that were therefore taken as a sign of innocence, so that a Zulu girl was ‘proud to display her body as a proof of her moral uprightness’. Krige records a ceremony where girls who had clothed themselves were even criticised with the implication that they had led a loose sexual life. Nudity could thus be the reverse of obscene. So could the frankness in girl’s puberty songs, combining moral with sex instruction. ‘He mounted me on the mans veneris,’ primly sang the wise Zulu virgin, ‘because he knows very well’: respects, that is, the rules of right behaviour.
Sexual morality, like any other, was deliberately selective: it mirrored, that is, specific kinship arrangements. Among the Nyakyusa of northern Malawi, another case in point, these arrangements seem to have been keyed to an emphasis on the fear of incest within groups far wider than the nuclear family. Otherwise, Monica Wilson tells us, the Nyakyusa are very tolerant in matters of sex, even regarding homosexuality as a venial sin if committed by youths, or else as a misfortune occasioned by witchcraft. The Tallensi consider it reasonable for an impotent or sterile husband to call in a friend who acts in his stead, once again in terms of a kinship structure which has placed a prime value on succession and family alliance.
The actual rules have been as various as the kinship structures. Much is now understood about the latter, though much else remains to be explained. One chief division has been observed: into those societies which reckon descent through mothers, when mothers’ brothers become more important in matters of office and succession than fathers; and those which reckon descent through fathers and fathers’ brothers. An earlier generation of anthropologists tried to explain these matrilineal and patrilineal divisions by supposing they reflected different stages of ancient society. When early peoples were in the ‘hunting and gathering’ stage, it was argued, fathers took the lead because theirs was the crucial economic activity; but the introduction of agriculture restored authority to mothers because it was women who weeded and hoed.
This explanation has the virtue of neatness, and there may be something in it; but closer observation has shown a far more complex truth. All the Bantu-speaking peoples who inhabit the greater part of central and southern Africa