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Untitled "Peoples of Africa" Paper

Fall 2005
Peoples of Africa
1616 words

  The Western view of Africa and Africans has long been a skewed and incorrect one. Westerners have a long history of viewing and evaluating other cultures in comparison to Western ones, and then finding them inadequate by their standards. Westerners often ignorantly assume that anything that is not similar to their idea of “civilized” culture is thus barbaric, primitive, and savage. This is obviously untrue; if one looks at the facts from African people themselves, not through a Western lens, it becomes obvious that African peoples are not primitive and anarchic – rather, they have extremely complicated structures of government, kinship, religion, etc. Westerners also often tend to view Africans as particularly violent people due to their numerous wars and revolutions. By evaluating evidence provided by studies of peoples such as the Nuer, the Igbo, and the Shona, one can see for oneself the complexity of African culture and the reasons for the “violence” that Westerners look down on Africans for.

  E.E. Evans-Pritchard was hired by the British to write up a report on the Nuer people of the Sudan. Although his report, intended for an ethnocentric eye, is biased and often contradictory – claiming that the Nuer are anarchic and then providing examples of the exact opposite – one can glean much information to prove the latter. Evans-Pritchard states in the very beginning of his ethnography that “the Nuer have no government, and their state might be described as ordered anarchy. Likewise they lack law, if we understand by this term judgments delivered by an independent and impartial authority.” (Evans-Pritchard 1969:5)

  The word “anarchy” brings to our minds an image of people running about lawless, doing whatever they wise, with no morals to keep them in mind. This is certainly not the case with the Nuer. The Nuer may not have government in the way that we would think of it, with a leader who rules over them all, but they certainly are not running about doing anything they feel like doing. The Nuer have a strict “to-do” list which they follow year after year, which involves caring for their cattle, tending their crops (when applicable), and migrating for the change of seasons. And although they might not have a written list of official laws, the Nuer are certainly not lawless. The Nuer have a complex system of cattle payments made for homicides whose payment amount depends on the type of person killed. Although homicide is unfortunate, it does not happen without reason. Fights may break out for reasons that are important to the Nuer: “A dispute about a cow; a cow or goat eats a man’s millet and he strikes it; a man strikes another’s little son; adultery; watering rights in the dry season; pasturage rights; a man borrows an object, particularly a dance ornament, without asking its owner’s permission.” (Evans-Pritchard 1969:151) In the course of a fight, someone may get killed. If this does indeed happen, a feud may break out between lineages, but this is something that the Nuer wish to avoid at all costs. “Blood feuds are a tribal institution, for they can only occur where a breach of law is recognized since they are the way in which reparation is obtained. Fear of incurring a blood feud is, in fact, the most important legal sanction within a tribe and the main guarantee of an individual’s life and property.” (Evans-Pritchard 1969:150) To prevent a feud, the person who has committed the act will seek refuge at the house of the leopard-skin chief, who will mediate between parties. Evans-Pritchard says that the leopard-skin chiefs are politically powerless because they do not play the Western role of a leader – they do not fit the image that the word “chief” conjures in the Western mind. Evans-Pritchard states that the leopard-skin chief “is a sacred person without political authority,” but then soon after says that “leopard-skin chiefs and prophets are the only ritual specialists who, in our opinion, have any political importance.” (Evans-Pritchard 1969:5) The leopard-skin chief, however, does play a very important role which Evans-Pritchard later acknowledges. “He is the machinery which enables groups to bring about a normal state of affairs when they desire to achieve this end.” (Evans-Pritchard 1969:175) After a homicide has taken place, the leopard-skin chief will usually help the two parties negotiate the cattle payment. These payments discourage the blood feuds. So the leopard-skin chiefs do wield power after all, although not in the way a Westerner would usually think, and evidence shows that the Nuer are not living in complete lawless “ordered anarchy.”

  Ifi Amadiume published a study of the role of women in Igbo society, a culture in which women can become very powerful. If an Igbo woman is very prosperous, she is seen as being in the favor of the goddess Idemili and is then nominated to become an ekwe. An ekwe is one of the most powerful people in Igbo society, as being an ekwe includes a woman in the inyam nnobi women’s council, the highest court in the land, in which “leadership was based on achievement and personality.” (Amadiume 1987:66) The woman’s council is “answerable to no one, for at the head was the Agba Ekwe, who held the most honored title in Nnobi. She carried her staff of authority and had the final word in public gatherings and assemblies. She was the favoured one of the goddess Idemili and her earthly manifestation.” (Amadiume 1987:67) The leader of the ekwe (the oldest among them) is also the leader of all the women in her area. Other women who are not ekwe can still be very powerful as well. The umu okpu, or “lineage daughters,” are in charge of funeral services and can threaten to withhold a burial in order to get their way. The inyom di, women who marry into a lineage, are in charge of rituals of fertility, birth, and marriage, and can threaten to withhold these. Inyom di women can go on sex strikes as well, withholding sex in order to make their point. These women also settle disputes. Igbo women can induce riots such as was the case when a foreign man killed a python sacred to the goddess Idemili. “When news reached the women, they demonstrated their anger by bypassing the local court... and marching half naked to the provincial headquarters... to besiege the resident’s office.” (Amadiume 1987:122) This ended in the women razing the snake-killer’s house to the ground. Even after the colonists came and put men in positions of power (by only educating and hiring men), the women still held power by their ability to induce riots. However, the onset of colonialism changed the Igbo’s system for the worse, as it “banned the... Ekwe title. In a short space of time, the focal systems of women’s self-esteem were shattered.” (Amadiume 1987:123) The Igbo were only one of many people whose cultural systems were destroyed by colonialism.

  David Lan’s publication “Guns and Rain” discusses the role of Shona spirit mediums of the Dande valley in the revolution in Zimbabwe. The Shona mediums were said to be possessed by the spirits of the ancestors of the chief, who would then assert that the current chief was of the royal lineage. These mediums were part of a very complex reciprocal system. The mediums had and have a great deal of “unacknowledged political power” because “statements made by the mediums in trance are experienced by their listeners as if they were the truth as it was known and practised in the past.” (Lan 1985:138) After British colonization, the people began to have less faith in the chiefs as the chiefs began to help the British, becoming “minor civil servants with the powers of constables.” (Lan 1985:138) The chiefs left their old duties and began collecting taxes. They were forbidden from holding witchcraft trials; the mediums took over that aspect as well as many of the others they had left behind. Because of this, “the people of Dande shifted their political allegiance from the chiefs of the present to the chiefs of the past, the mhondoro, who could, of course, only be made available to them by their mediums” (Lan 1985:140) When the revolutionary guerrillas came to the Dande valley, the people only agreed to support them because the mediums allowed them to fill the niche left by the chiefs. The mediums imposed a set of taboos on the guerillas which kept them in order, and in turn the guerillas were legitimized by the support of the mediums. Because of the support of the mediums, “peasants and guerillas felt themselves in the presences and under the protection of their ancestors.” (Lan 1985:134) In this manner a position that most Westerners would view as hocus-pocus actually legitimized a whole revolution to the people of the Dande valley – a revolution which allowed the people of Zimbabwe to take back their country, allowing colonial Rhodesia to become African Zimbabwe.

  These three examples from the cultures of the Nuer, the Igbo, and the Shona give use evidence enough to prove that Africans do not fit the stereotypes of the barbaric, primitive people that Westerners try to pin them as. Nor are they any more violent than people from any other culture. It is hypocritical of Westerners to look down on Africans as violent barbarians because of their wars, either intertribal or for independence. Many Western nations came to be in the state they are today by way of revolutionary activities. Why is it that a Westerner’s fight for independence is patriotic and yet an African’s is a violent act of barbarism? The West cannot repair its relations with Africa until Westerners learn not to view Africans with an ethnocentric eye.

Works Cited

Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1969 [1940] The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lan, David. 1985. Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. Berkeley: University of California Press.