Medicinal Rule
Subtitle: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9781785339844
Subjects: Chiefdoms; Traditional medicine, africa; Africa, central, social conditions; Africa, politics and government; Africa, kings and rulers
Description: As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings - and found them. The resulting misunderstandings last until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine - and not the colonizer's despotic administrator, the missionary's divine king, or Vansina's big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.