As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings - and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted 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.
Product code: 9781785339844
| ISBN |
9781785339844 |
| Dimensions (HxWxD in mm) |
H229xW152 |
| Series |
Methodology & History in Anthropology |
| No. Of Pages |
328 |
| Publisher |
Berghahn Books |