I was thinking of a question someone asked on the Ship of Fools a while back, Why is South Africa more liberal?, which was originally about gay marriage (but this being The Ship Of Fools) drifted into talking about churches, with some obligatory evangelical-bashing from the ex-Anglicans and the liberal high-church Tories - it goes the other way on most Internet forums)
The obvious reply to the question is another question: "why do people expect different African societies to be like each other?" There is no real reason why the Christian churches (or anything else) in Nigeria, South Africa, and, say, Kenya, should resemble each other any more than the churches in England, Greece and India. The distances are about the same, as are the differences in language and traditional culture. The underlying religions were different in different parts of Africa, the climate is different, the material basis of society, the history of colonialism, their missionary experience, all different.
OK there are political reasons to for people say that they should be the same, to stress the similarities. From the left we had Pan-Africanism and Negritude, and liberation and anti-colonial movements, and we still have black political movements in mainly white EuroAmerican countries, who might want to claim a common African identity. From the right we have the unthinking "all wogs look the same" attitude. But these are political claims, not scientific descriptions. African societies are very different from each other.
So my thoughts drifted to the common misperception of African traditional ways as "tribal" and as governed in all things by "chiefs". And I was composing a little story in my head about it, using bits of African history to illustrate the idea of a stateless society or a functioning anarchy, comparing the Igbo with the Yoruba, or the Kikuyu with the Baganda, or the Nuer with the Dinka and Shilluk.
In the immediately precolonial period the Igbo mostly lived in small towns run by oligarchies or even by popular assemblies. Little Athenses all over Africa. The Yoruba had larger city-states ruled by priest kings, with walled cities and standing armies. The Baganda had their great Kabaka, the Kikuyu didn't even have words in their language for "king" or "chief", they had to borrow the English ones when we imposed chiefs on them. The Nuer are the archetypical stateless society, anarchists to a man (apparently women didn't get to join in), completely without social class or political hierarchy, not even priests. Yet the next-door Dinka who seem to outsiders to have lived in an almost identical way had a stereotypical decentralised set-up with clans and vaguely hereditary chiefs and so on. And the Shilluk up the river have full blown divine monarchy with a King who embodies the spirit of the founder of the nation, which gets sick when he gets sick and is reborn when his successor is enthroned in a week-long ceremony with sacrifices of bulls and goats, a sacred marriage to a beautiful maiden (ideally his own half sister), and the re-enactment of ancient battles.
Then it occurred to me that all three of those stories are very accessible to English speakers in what must be three of the best-known books about Africa in the language. Chinua Achebe's trilogy things fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease are the best-known African novels in English, a standard, taught in schools all over the continent (I've taught classes on it in Kenya myself) and easily available in Britain. They are probably the main source of information about pre-colonial Igbo life for just about everyone in the world who isn't either an ethnographer or an Igbo (or both). Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta is the first popular ethnography of an African people in English written by an African with anthropological training, and one of the foundational documents of Kenyan nationalism. Evans-Pritchard's Nuer is a bit more specialised, but was one of the three or four Big Books of the English style of social anthropology that anyone who studied it would have been expected to at least have pretended to have read
All three of those books are political books. They are all arguing a case. None of them are in any way unbiased, they are all deliberatly mythologising the people they describe to achieve political ends (OK, OK, all books do that, but most do it unconsciously - these three are all deliberate and self-reflective.
Facing Mount Kenya is the most obvious. Kenyatta is inventing the Kikuyu as he describes them, deliberatly writing a people into being, trying to persuade diverse families and villages that they are all part of the same people even though many of them might never have thought of themselves as Agikuyu, or if they did they looked on it as a language identity, not a political identity. And at the same time trying to pull off the apparently contradictory trick of laying the ground for Kenyan nation-building which over-rides the "tribal" system (though the more self-defined Agikuyu there were in Kenya, the wider the boundaries of the group, the more potential supporters Kenyatta had)
"Deliberatly writing a people into being"? That's a cool phrase! There's a lot of it about. Is there a word for it - one word to name the literary side of ethnogenesis, the rhetorical and mythical aspect of the definition of a new ethnic group? I could call it "ethnopoesis" I thought. I like that. Its a pun as well.
Ands then I searched for the word on Google. And there are twenty-one hits. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! I am beaten to it!
And what's more, there is already a disagreement about what the word means.There is at least one site that uses the word to mean the study of folk poetry.
And what's even more, nearly all of them that use it in the sense I wanted to seem to be written by die-hard brain-dead bigoted American neocons who are making stupid comparisons between Arabs today and the "barbarians" who invaded the Roman Empire. Apparently 9/11 is our equivalent of the sack of Rome in 410, and the Arabs and Muslims are the new barbarians. That way they get to compare themselves to St. Augustine. Prats.
And they seem to think that its new and trendy to realise that the Goths who sacked Rome or the Vandals who took Carthage were not necessarily entirely the biological descendents of the "tribes" who had entered the empire a couple of generations earlier, just as they were not necessarily entirely the biological descendents of the Baltic shore kingdoms a few centuries before that. It wasn't a case of self-sufficient little hordes wandering around the Empire so much as of groups which merged and split, lost members and recruited new members, that re-defined themselves in all sorts of ways. That the Goths at least were a lot more Roman than some people made out. That Jordanes and Gregory of Tours might have been making some of it up - or at least reporting self-serving myths. That some political forces among both the barbarians and the Romans found it useful to stress the distinction between the groups.
Well. What a novelty. No-one ever though of that one before did they?
Someone should hit those neocons over the head with a Naomi Mitchison novel.