Domination: Chapter 7

7. KINGDOMS AND EARLY STATES

What are Kingdoms?

Kingdoms are expanded chiefdoms. Aggrandizers love expansion and chiefs were constantly trying to improve their access to prestige, power and property. Chiefs aspired to be paramount chiefs and paramount chiefs wanted to be kings. To expand, they looked for ways to finance their selfism. Dr. Junker writes of the Philippine polities in the late-first millennium to mid-second millennium, which were complex and evolving poleconomies:
Wealth for generating, maintaining, and expanding political power came from a number of production and exchange contexts that are intimately intertwined, including foreign luxury good trade, local production of status goods by attached craft specialists, bridewealth and other status good exchanges between local elites, goods circulated through the ritual feasting system, tribute mobilization, and seizure of valuables during raids. As in the European Iron Age and the African Iron Age, the internal processes of sociopolitical evolution and interpolity competitive interactions that had little to do initially with foreign trade may have provided the complex economic infrastructure necessary for some Philippine polities greatly to expand their foreign trade interactions (1999:385).

In other words, chiefs in the early Philippines seized local opportunities to acquire prestige, power and property and when foreign trade brought new possibilities for aggrandizement they seized the moment, competing with each other to rise to the level of paramount or acquire kingly status.
Chiefdoms and kingdoms were the stepping-stones to the state. They formed interstitial stages between segmentary societies with sodalities and family headmen and the large and complex agricultural states such as Sumer, Egypt or that of the Aztecs. I am not interested in distinguishing stages, one from another, say a chiefdom from a kingdom, or a kingdom from an empire. More interesting to me is the linkage between them, the processes by which domination and hierarchy were fabricated in all.
In fact, in my writing about Africa it was very difficult to distinguish chiefs from kings. In a general sense, kings tend to have more power, rule over larger and more complex societies and their power has been materialized in more complex institutions and material manifestations e.g., monuments, palace art, etc. Also, kings frequently rule over several chiefdoms, the chiefs being his subalterns.
There is usually a great deal of pomp and ceremony revolving around a king. Furthermore kings were more likely to have well-developed temple complexes and priests to supervise the materialization of his connection to Deity. Yet again, while female chiefs existed queens were more common.
Kings and their courtiers fabricated materializations of elevation, of the high or divine status of the king e.g., sacred groves, steles and pillars, but also a materialization can be behavioral. For example, in the presence of the Swazi King of Southern Africa a commoner would be expected to speak of himself disparagingly as a “stick,” a “dog” or a “nothing.”
But with a few ad-ons of symbolism of greatness, kings acted more or less as did chiefs, creating ways to access and hold power over prestige, power and property. The difference between a chief and a king is a matter of scale: chiefs wanted to expand their hegemony and become kings, with subordinate chiefs under them. When fabrication was successful, a chief could expand his hegemonic control over more territory and people, proclaiming himself a king.

The Problem of the King’s Death

Le roi est mort. Vive le roi!—“The king is dead, long live the king” is a phrase commonly uttered following the accession of a new monarch in various European countries, particularly in the United Kingdom. It succinctly encapsulates the problem of the king’s mortality and the need to continue the office even though the man has died. If the office is a fabrication, it cannot appear to be so. It must be materialized ad infinitum. It must appear to be eternal, though the occupant is mortal, the office is undying.
The question of succession to high office plagues all centralized political systems. Some African polities settled on orderly ways of handling the death of a monarch, others did not. The Swazi had a system that worked through the queen mother. She was not allowed to have more than one son. Once she bore a son, she was not allowed to have more children. If her husband died, she was restricted from following the leviratic custom common to Swazi women. This restrictive practice was designed to prevent competition between brothers for the office of king.
The fabrication of rules of succession to high office began as little chiefs made the transition to authority chiefs and as one moves up the evolutionary ladder, the poleconomic stakes are higher and rules about who is in line to take control become more and more defined. Usually this was handled through the kinship idiom e.g., the practice of primogeniture whereby the eldest son succeeds his father. Or in matrilineal systems, such as the Asante of West Africa, office is passed from mother’s brother to sister’s son.
Preventing conflict as opportunists rose to power was a central part of the fabrication of domination. In conquest kingdoms, those formed by war, fabrication of legitimacy came after conquest. In kingdoms that evolved more slowly, ingenious devices to prevent conflict emerged e.g., among the Swazi upon his appointment, the king would enter into a blood brotherhood relationship with several tinsila (lit. “body dirt”). The bodies of the king and his age mates had incisions made into which royal attendants placed blood from the others, along with special medicines concocted by royal priests. The first two tinsila were symbolically and sociologically the most important. They were called the nation’s “twins.” They alone could touch the king’s body, wear his clothes and even eat from his dish. They protected the king from princely rivals and acted as go-betweens with people having complaints. They were drawn from commoner clans and only they could perform the routine and intimate rites associated with the person of the king. The tinsila functioned as a social shield against the competitiveness of royal family members.
 
The Risk of Despotism

The main inherent tensions in a kingdom are these:

 Between king and élite rivals

 Between king and court councilors

 Between king and the people in general

 Between king and major factions in society

 Between king and the provinces (center vs. periphery)

In each of these domains, there were fabricators at work to countermand fabrication by the king. More generally, as men rose to take on the mantle of kingship, societies developed ways to prevent the king from becoming a despot. This was broadly the case throughout Africa. Political forces emanating from other élites and the common people heavily regulated African kings. That does not mean that some did not try to elevate themselves above the people and other politicos.
The rise of the king among the Edo people of Benin and the ongoing battle between his power and that of the chiefs in the kingdom provides a good case of a struggle played out in many places and times in royal history. In fact, the rise of Benin to a position of eminence was an anomaly in a region where political organization leaned toward heterarchy and acephaly. Small-scale sociopolitical formation was the norm. While the Edo were organized in kin units and sodalities like so many other stateless societies in Africa, they did have a title system and the creation and bestowal of prestigious titles by the king was a means by which he was able to rise and maintain his majesty.
In Benin’s lore, there were four phases in the rise of the kingdom. First, was a hazy phase whose rulers’ names have been lost to antiquity. Second, the Ogioso dynasty ruled the land. Established by Obagodo, this dynasty governed Benin till the thirteenth century. An atypical brutal and despotic ruler, Owodo brought this long dynasty, with 31 kings, to an inglorious end. His misrule, cruelty and highhandedness made him extremely unpopular, as was his son who followed in his forlorn footsteps.
This audacious behavior led the people to react against the power of the sovereign. Both Owado and his son were deposed and banished from the kingdom and the chiefs determined to have nothing more to do with the Ogiso family and went to a republican system of government, electing a primus inter pares from among themselves. Despotism caused these gerontocrats to assert their power and demean the grandeur that had become attached to the king.
The third era was meant to institute a nonhereditary and elective system, but it was short-lived. The fabricators went to work, though the history becomes somewhat problematic at this point. Apparently, a ruler’s son claimed succession to his father’s kinship, bringing a negative response from the chiefs. Nevertheless, they could not agree on a successor – and here is where there may have been some re-writing of history: there are two possible stories. First, some say that the deadlocked elders appealed to Oduduwa, the King of the Yoruba ritual center of Ile-Ife to send a prince of their royal house to break the stalemate. Second, prosaically, some claim that the Yoruba took advantage of the interregnum to invade and conquer Benin. In any case, prince Oranmiyan arrived from Ile-Ife to inaugurate the fourth and Yoruba era in Benin’s dynastic history.
Oranmiyan brought new concepts and methods of governance, religion, warfare and artisanship. The fourth era was a time of consolidation, a growing militarism and imperialism. Oranmiyan married an Edo woman who succeeded him as oba (king during the Yoruba era). But the Yoruba kings were still not entirely free from Edo councilors, called the uzama nihinron. They retained their power based on their ancient status as kingmakers. Obas struggled with uzama nihinron restraint but did manage to attain some degree of autonomy under the rule of the fourth oba, Ewedo.
The florescent reign of Ewedo marked the start of the amalgamation of royal paramountcy in Benin history. He moved to incorporate the regency through the fabricatory use of symbols e.g., the oba wore a scorpion pendant on his back to indicate that he too had a “sting." Little by little, he became a more forceful potentate, reducing the power of the chiefs. In other symbolic moves, the oba required his councilors and chiefs to stand in his presence, while he reclined in kingly repose. He instituted customs giving him alone the right to wield the Sword of State (Ada) and he prevented chiefs from conferring titles, reserving that right for himself. To enhance a sense of mightiness, he built an extensive new palace and created an intricate system of court organization and a hierarchy of courtier chiefs, as opposed to the traditional or town chiefs, the uzama nihinron. The oba was successful in elevating the monarchy once again, while reducing the power of those outside his inner circle.
Many new court offices were materialized. The elaborate organization of his palace officials had three facets. First and most senior was the Iwebo unit, led by the uwangue, who was in charge of the oba’s regalia and later was given responsibility for trade and finance. Second, was the Iwegue group. Headed by the esere, this unit was composed of the king’s personal attendants and intimate courtiers. Third, the Ibiwe palace component led by the osodin was allotted the responsibility for the oba’s wives and children. Each of these units had a separate residential quarter in the palace complex.
The embellishment and augmentation of the palace, architecturally and organizationally, was a finessing strategy by the oba to thwart the will of the people as expressed through their representatives, the traditional chiefs. By setting himself up as the supreme ruler, the oba could create new non-hereditary titles, give land, wealth and honors to his underlings and effectively manipulate those competing for his favor. Loyalty and service to the oba brought honor, influence and wealth. Losing the trust of the king could mean demotion, exile or even death.
No matter how elevated the oba became, the uzama nihinron still held some authority and warranted respect. A uzama nihinron who fell into disfavor with the king could only be banished, not killed, as a lesser subject might be. The uzama nihinron and the town chiefs continued to controvert the despotic tendencies of the oba when they thought his actions were contrary to their interests.
As trade increased in the region, especially when Europeans began to buy slaves, the power and wealth of the oba rose to heights that strained his relationship with the uzama nihinron and others. New opportunities stimulated new efforts to expand the king’s power.
The reign of Ewedo laid the groundwork for an expansive era. He acquired new weaponry such as horses and swords. The oba and his generals reorganized the military. Clearly, the military might of the kingdom was growing, but it was still small. That changed in the fifteenth century when an usurper took the throne – Ewuare. He stormed and burned the palace and killed the ruling Oba, violently wresting power from the rightful heirs to kingship. A class aggrandizing usurper, Ewuare saw new opportunities in the changing post-contact world and struck.
As a ruler Ewuare was said to be a “powerful, courageous and sagacious” builder and organizer, a man who led Benin into an imperial era. He became even more autocratic than former monarchs in Benin and he transformed the small state into an expansive empire. The size and grandeur of this civilization was remarkable, especially given its location in the dense forest, which made expansion and construction especially arduous.
Under Ewuare’s despotism, warfare became more frequent. Archaeologists have revealed a vast complex of walls and ditches spanning some 9,900 miles in total length and covering some 2,500 square miles! Ostensibly, Benin employed its extensive army to expand its frontiers and to subjugate provincial populations, demanding tribute from them. The earthworks surrounding the city indicate conflict with neighbors and the likelihood that royals were maintaining such battlements to defend their wealth and power.
With revenues from slaving and trading, even greater materialization took place. After securing himself on the throne, Ewuare had a new palace built and he redesigned Benin City. A dual division was established with the ogbe (palace) apart from the ore (town). A broad avenue separated them. The ore had urban quarters to house different age-graded guilds of craftsmen – diviners, physicians, bards, smiths, carpenters, executioners and weavers. Each quarter, guild and age-grade was integrated into and controlled by courtier-bureaucrats in the ogbe.
Civil unrest had marked Ewuare’s rise to power and perhaps to placate the aristocrats and citizens, he created two sets of chiefs, one based in the palace (eghaevbo n’ogbe) and town chiefs (eghaevbo n’ore). Together, these two sets of chiefs constituted an advisory council to the oba. Chiefs were given the responsibility of, and a share in, gathering taxes and tribute in the kingdoms and its provinces. This appeared to be an attempt to more effectively integrate the palace and the town and the core with the periphery.
Again, even with an aggrandizing king like Ewuare, it was difficult for a king to rise too far above the people. Subaltern chiefs became a permanent and official counterweight to the power of the oba, although the offices were supposed to be non-hereditary. The allocation of such positions gave the oba great leverage in trying to “stack” the council in his favor.
In Africa, it seems, once a king attained a certain level of power, the people would reassert their democratic rights through chiefs, councils and sometimes outright civil unrest. In Benin, led by their “chief of chiefs” – the iyase – the council of chiefs became a de facto counterbalance to royal authority. By the seventeenth century, the iyase had become the commander of the army as well as the main spokesman for the opposition, not unlike a prime minister who could censure the oba publicly. It would appear that the oba wasn’t the only fabricator at work.
There was symbolic and public recognition of the fact that the king had opponents. In Benin, the opposition between the public and king was institutionalized in ceremony. For example, when any member of the town chiefs died, the palace would send for the lower jawbone of the corpse, symbolic of the regular dispute with the oba he had conducted in life.
Perhaps as he aged Ewuare began to think of extending his domination beyond his death. He tried to enhance the Edo principle of primogeniture in the minds of the chiefs and people by giving formal recognition to a successor before his death. Oba Ewuare created a new title, edaiken (heir apparent), and made him a member of the uzama council. The king gave him a village to rule on the outskirts of the capital, sort of a fiefdom in waiting.
Kingdoms are often aggressively expansionist. As indicated by the construction of defensive walls, legend and reports by Europeans, the rulers of Benin became warlike. Ewuare himself turned to military conquest. State priests extolled his war magic and bards sang praises to his valor in battle. His propagandists advertised Ewuare as a gifted leader.
Using force Ewuare brought recalcitrant subjects under his control and expanded the frontiers of the kingdom incorporating new tributaries. To the east he moved on the stateless Igbo; to the northeast the empire incorporated the Afenmai and other small groups; to the northwest the oba extended his suzerainty over the important Yoruba kingdoms of Owo and Akure, as well as Ekiti and Ikare villages.
Ewuare’s son succeeded him and strengthened the army becoming legendary as Ozolua the Conqueror. He led his army into battle and developed a reputation as a fearless commander who would not let his soldiers retreat. He had many military successes, putting pressure on the powerful kingdom of Ijibu and stubbornly attacking the recalcitrant Ishan to a standstill “before he was assassinated by his war-wearied and exhausted army” – another way the people reasserted their authority in the face of royal excess.
However, Ozolua’s son, Esigie, continued in the military vein meeting and defeating the invading Igala army. Esigie’s son and successor, Orhoghua, successfully led his army against the Mahin and carried his military might to the coast, where he established a war camp (eko) on the island that was to become the important town of Lagos, which, as it developed, became an important vassal State of Benin and one of the first protectorates established by the British.
Benin was on the rise militarily when other strong states around them had done the same and when this organic development was about to be truncated by the Colonial Era. Benin had expanded about as far as possible without having to defeat major rivals – the Nupe Kingdom to the northeast and the Oyo Kingdom to the northwest. On its eastern flank was the river Niger and to the south was the sea.
Kings fabricate materializations of their highness, but sometimes a monarch can rise to such heights that he loses power. When an oba had been killed on a military expedition, the new king began to delegate martial duties to the iyase – the head of the council. The oba now became more of a figurehead, restricted to the palace and ceremonial duties. The militaristic side of royalty was de-emphasized and ritual dimensions of royal office were given emphasis.
With the rise in prestige and power of the iyase and council, the oba-ship declined in political authority as the king became hedged with taboos and religious duties. He became the captive of the impulses and desires of his chiefs and the power of the people once again waxed stronger. As Professor Afolayan says, seven obas of the seventeenth century were “weak, obscure and effete, hardly distinguishable from one another.”

Kingly Display

Kings usually developed an ideology that gave them preferential access to sumptuary goods and services. These were sumptuary rules that gave his chosen aristocrats preferential access to jewelry, fine housing, ornate clothes and other decorative symbols of high status. On the whole, kings lived more elaborate lifestyles than chiefs and part of their increased power came from an augmented and opulent standard of living, one far beyond the reach of the average member of the kingdom. Lets look at a couple of Mughal monarchs as examples.
Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar – “Akbar the Great” (1542-1605) – was a Mughal Emperor who reigned at a time when he could develop a court life that was incredibly lavish (r. 1556-1605). After completing the subjugation of the majority of the Indian subcontinent, Akbar moved to increase the revenues of his centralized state. He devided the empire into twelve provinces and established in each a provincial governor, tax collector and a religious overseer. He specified that these important posts were non-hereditary, guarding against the universal tendency of provincial governors to become independent of the centralized state. He also made needed changes in the economic sphere that improved his income and the state began to flourish under his reforms. This was an efficient system that extracted the surplus value of labor from the peasantry to support state building and the lavish lifestyles of several Mughal shahs over some three hundred years of rule.
Akbar put this wealth to use in kingly display, first in the area of monumental architecture, starting with a magnificent mausoleum in homage to his father. He built few mosques and allowed temples of other religions to stand, but he poured vast sums of money into royal construction – cities, palaces, pavilions, quadrangular courts, baths and monumental gateways. Some of this architecture was a mixture of Turkish and Indian styles.
As he seemed to want his monuments to symbolize a unified state, he made moves in social and religious areas to demonstrate at desire for harmony. He abolished Islam as a state religion and proclaimed tolerance for all faiths. He expressed a desire to become integrated with India, rather than simply being a foreign conqueror. Muslims were no longer to be privileged citizens and the discriminatory tax on non-Muslims was dropped. Furthermore, he adopted the Hindu custom of darshan, appearance at the royal window each morning by the king.
Akbar also spent much of the day meeting with petitioners in royal audiences, some public, other in private. Here he received gifts and gave out favors.
The evenings were given over to pleasure and amusement. The king was a lover of sports, song, dance and music, as well as the pictorial and plastics arts. He kept hundreds of pachyderms for his beloved elephant fights and he adored hunting, being renowned for his marksmanship.
The monarch considered artistic expression to be a “tangible testimony of his reign and of the dynasty to which he belonged.” His royal workshops turned out artwork, jewels, woodcarvings, pottery, carpets and even clothes, which the king himself liked to fashion:

Every year, a thousand costumes were made for the sovereign, and one hundred and twenty of them were laid out in protective bags, ready for his use. These clothes were stored according to the days, the months, their date of entry into the wardrobe. The same was true of lengths of cloths that were destined to be kept as they were, or else cut up. Secretaries wrote down all the information concerning the origin of the garment on a label sewn on the bag. (Berinstain 1997:59).

Although illiterate himself, Akbar attached great importance to books. He had several great libraries and employed papermakers, binders, gilders, calligraphers and painters to produce poetry collections, biographies and books of legends chosen by the emperor himself, many of which he had read to him. He also had the great Hindu epics translated from Sanskrit into Persian, the official language of the state.
He also made use of painters and artists to illuminate books and produce murals and paintings, using a variety of styles from the West, India and the East. Sculptors and jewelers produced fine art as well for the great shah, an artistic tradition that would continue after his death. For example, Shah Jihan, the Mughal ruler who had the Taj Mahal built, had a second palace, the Great Red Fort of Agra. I had the opportunity to explore the palace and was fascinated by his bedchamber. I mention this here because it illustrates the sumptuary services great monarchs could receive. The shah slept on a bed covered with pillows and cushions that were elevated above a pool of water in a large room with windows made of louvered stone to allow airflow. At each corner of the pool of scented water there was a pad for a slave to stand while he gently fanned the perfumed water to create pleasant fragrances in the air currents that wafted over the Shah as he slept, or perhaps while he played with one of the ten thousand concubines he kept, in addition to his four legal wives.
In addition to kingly display in his palaces, Shah Jihan continued the tradition of Mughal kings in traveling throughout his sovereign domains to carry the image of opulent and spectacular wealth and power to the people. When he journeyed around India he was often accompanied by thousands of courtiers, his concubines, soldiers, thousands of elephants and horses and household items and art to impress all who observed the royal procession.
This elaborate way of life, replicated by many rulers in numerous kingdoms throughout history, not only the Mughals of India, was the direct descendant of the earlier sumptuary rules of early chiefdoms. Early chiefs may have had access to less splendid goods and services, for example being carried about on a litter, or adorned in flowers or feathers, or being tattooed over their entire bodies; but even these early symbols of status were privileges that enhanced the elevated position of the chief. Kings just developed more ostentatious displays of their assumed elevated status and the Mughal emperors carried such state theater to a zenith.

The Materialization of Maya Kingship in Cerros

The people of Cerros in what is now Belize were egalitarian people who worshipped their ancestors, but their cosmology supported ideas that enabled kings to rise up and create a political system that justified emergent stratification. These kings and their priests invented ideas that harnessed social energy by tapping into the nature of existing Maya concepts of the cosmos and the Otherworld. Kings “invented symbols that transformed and coordinated such age-old institutions as the extended family, the village, the shaman, and the patriarch into the stuff of civilized” (Schele & Freidel 1990:97). By “civilized” the authors meant kingly or hierarchical, a classical florescence dominated by the high kings (s. ahau; pl. ahauob).
As I have said chiefs and kings often arose to deal with problems in society. That was the case in Cerros, where the Maya of that community were faced with cultural tensions due to outside forces that were upsetting their egalitarian way of life. The culprit was trade with other Maya communities and their Mesoamerican neighbors, commerce that was creating wealth for some and not for all. This was an anathema in a society that regarded the accumulation of wealth as an aberration. At the same time, raised-field agriculture and extensive water management systems created a need for managers.
Kings had to be careful propagating their ideas of rulership in Cerros because the people were independent minded and not use to organizing labor pools necessary to maintain these systems. New hierarchical kingship, the institution of ahau, appeared to solve such problems. Cosmologically, the main problem was that the Maya conception of the cosmos included an egalitarian society. Kings had to somehow reconcile this concept with hierarchical leadership, to turn a negative into a positive or social good.
For the Maya, ahau became the key symbol of and rationale for the noble class. Ahau addressed the fact of inequality, not by doing away with it or denying it, but rather by embedding the contradictory nature of noble privilege into the very fabric of life itself using ritual, symbolism and monumental architecture. The kingly rites declared that the king was divine and had magical powers, acting as a pivot and pinnacle of a pyramid of people, his sovereignty extended out and embracing all person in society. He was the key conduit to the Otherworld, the means of contacting the dead and their protector against disaster and death. Having a linkage to the Otherworld, he had a hand in everything that happened in Cerros.
About 50 B.C. the village began a program of urban renewal. The people abandoned their previous dwelling and positioned themselves around a central plaza where the king started construction on a temple. This edifice was constructed according to the Maya concepts of sunrise/sunset, the east to west path of the sun and the rising of the Morningstar and the setting of the Eveningstar. Ritual and cosmology dictated the temple plan:

The front door of the temple was as wide as the stairway to enhance the dramatic effect of the king entering and leaving the space. The doorway leading into the back of the temple was not set directly behind the front door; rather, it was in the western end of the center wall. This design was intentional. It created a processional path through the temple interior that led the king along the east-west axis of the sun path to the principal north-south axis of the outer stairway.
The journey of the king inside the temple culminated (or began, depending on the ritual) in a small room built in the eastern corner of the front gallery … To enter this room, the king had to walk through the front door of the temple, circle to the west (his left), pass through the center-wall door into the rear gallery, and then circle back to the east to enter the room from the back gallery. In other words, he spiraled the inner sanctum in a clockwise direction. When he left the room he reversed the spiral, moving in a counterclockwise direction – thus emulating the movement of the sun from east to west (Schele & Freidel 1990:110-111).

The inner sanctum was thought to be a propitious spot where the film-like layer separating this world from the supernatural world was especially thin, hence the special ability of the king to communicate with Deity. In the little “holy of holies” the king carried out, alone and in darkness, rites that purported to maintain the kingdom in prosperity and safety, some of which included piercing his testicles and bloodletting. When finished, he would appear to the people in bleached white cotton garments that would clearly show the blood stains letting the people know that he had been in communication with the ancestors and the Otherworld.
The Maya had an elaborate cosmology, which most, from the highest to the humblest, knew and the design of the temple and its attendant rites were designed to connect the king to the Otherworld and reinforce his authority. Wherever he stood, he was the figurehead and centerpiece of carvings and symbols that spoke to the people. These symbols and rites said: The King of Cerros as the primary ahau existed because he was in communication with the other ahauob, the gods also protecting the community from the Otherworld (Schele & Freidel 1990:116).
This initial temple was only the beginning of the king’s building as he harnessed an enormous release of social energy in the community. Within a generation an acropolis was under construction as well as other structures, stelae, panels and art depicting the power of the king. Everywhere was the image of the severed head, the central symbol of royal power. During this zenith of Cerros kingship monarchs sacrificed highborn victims taken in war by cutting off their head in ritual fashion. Battle was the central symbol in much of the art.
In this example we see one way a king fabricated a new structure that gave him control of society, using artistic symbols, monumental architecture and rituals to set himself atop a pyramidal structure that gave him privileged access to wealth and power. Rather than attempt a completely new set of rites and symbols, he king, his priests and architects devised a system based on what the people already knew and understood. To be sure, it was tweaked somewhat, but in a way that was acceptable to the people and explained the changes that had come upon a previously sleepy, communalistic town.

The Formation of Kuba Kinship
The Kuba of Central Africa began as a loose association of chiefdoms in what is modern day nation-state of Congo. They lived south of the confluence of the Kasai and Sankuru Rivers. Their neighbors called them the Kuba, but they had no specific name for themselves. Once their polity became centralized, they called themselves simply “the people of the king.” This was a small highly centralized state in the end. It was only about two-thirds the size of Swaziland or Belgium, and historically contained between 120,000 and 160,000 inhabitants.
In the sixteenth century ancestors of the Kuba migrated southward out of Mongo-land and the Kuba Kingdom was constituted by sub-ethnicities including the ruling Bushoong, the Pyaang, Bulaang, Kayuweeng and the Kaam. When they arrived they found Twa and Kete peoples living there, who eventually became integrated into the kingdom. The height of the kingdom was during the mid-nineteenth century. Europeans first reached the area in 1884. Nsapo warriors invaded Kubaland during the late nineteenth century, and the kingdom was weakened, fracturing into its constituent chiefdoms.
The Kuba zone, to which they migrated centuries back, was a diversified environmental sector with many rivers, Savannah plains and forest, intermixed in a manner that allowed most villages access to all, although some were located on creeks rather than the larger rivers. The three original groups of the Kuba Kingdom were associated with these three zones: the Twa were forest dwellers; the Kete made their living in the Savannah; and the Kuba were said to prefer to live near large rivers and fishing was important to their way of life.
The political organization of the Kuba went from being a loose amalgam of disparate peoples and chiefdoms to a highly centralized kingdom based on Divine Kingship. Professor Vansina is not sure if Shyaam or others fabricated the centralized state, but Shyaam is given credit as being the Innovator king (see below).

Kuba Economy
In addition to fishing, the Kuba economy was based mainly on agriculture and hunting, as well as fishing. Until the nineteenth century they remained more or less peripheral to long-distance trade. Their products included yams, millet and sorghum. Later plantains and bananas came in from the east, while from the Americas they received maize, sweet potatoes, eggplant, beans, peanuts, cassava and tobacco. The introduction of maize transformed their economy, allowing two crops and in some cases three crops a year. This economic development, which began in the reign of King Shyaam, created higher yields and more surplus to siphon by the king and his élite cohort. At that point, the kingdom grew and became more centralized.
The major trade route, the Mbunun-Kongo circuit to the Atlantic Coast, marginally affected the Kuba. The absence of many trade words in their language indicates that involvement was slight and came late, probably around 1750. This is also evidenced by the fact that they did not use the major currency of that trade route, the Olivancillaria nana or cowrie shells. Cowrie shells arrived in Kuba country in the eighteenth century and must have become plentiful, as they eventually replaced traditional gifts and bridewealth payments even in the villages.
Mainly, however, the shells were thought to have magical qualities and were embedded into sword handles, artwork and ritual objects. More commonly, the Kuba used squares of raffia cloth (mbal) as currency. Ostensibly, the Kuba were also marginal to the Atlantic Slave Trade, buying more slaves than they sold, which reflects their position in the interior and their labor-short economy. Unlike the mani kongo the Kuba King (nyim) did not grow powerful by participating in the European slave trade.
The Kuba King did give passing traders protection and some believe that the innovator king, Shyaam, was himself a trader. In any case, there was a political need to establish market peace, protect traders and maintain the infrastructure of marketplaces and roads. The king undertook this and he also employed his own buyers, traders who regularly made purchasing forays. The king also taxed trade, though this was only part of his income.
Trade somewhat influenced Kuba social organization. The European lust for ivory may have contributed to the formation of a group known as Itwiimy, an elephant hunting association. As one can imagine, hunting elephants with spears was a dangerous operation and the association had many rituals and magical charms to thwart injury and death for its hunters. By the 1950s, when Vansina was doing his work there, the association had evolved into a semi-secret society with vague religious overtones.
In their migration to their eventual homeland, the remnants that finally coalesced to become the Kuba formulated rules of governance. Some migrants started as a military operation, coming as they did from the Lunda-Chokwe Kingdom, where the king presided over a militaristic polity based on disciplined war camps (kilombo) inhabited by regiments of initiated soldiers whose lives were based on a militaristic way of life, not kinship.
Military ventures based on the logic of predatory accumulation were not uncommon in Africa. This fact not withstanding, the Kuba were less militaristic than many. They developed formal rules for conflict resolution and war was the result in the breakdown of arbitration or a defense against the attacks of others.
But war was put to use when the Kuba scored a victory. The king would use the occasion for royal display. Military victories were followed by the symbolic fabrication of domination, the royal ideology demonstrated through song, dance, ceremony, art and other symbolic means to reinforce the idea of kingly power.

Kuba Stratification
Labor was always in short supply and warfare brought the Kuba slaves, which they also acquired through trade. Prisoners of war were placed in slave villages, while most purchased slaves worked as domestic servants or entered the king’s militia. Those slaves working for patricians and royals were given new names and had more or less privileged status vis-à-vis captured slaves.
Children of slaves (even if married to another slave) could become free, although it was difficult for the first generation to completely throw off the stigma of slavery and the Kuba were known to say, “only the grandchildren became truly free.” A slave who gained the respect of his master could be manumitted or sometimes could buy his freedom, some even receiving titles in the aristocracy. In 1892, the king had over five hundred personal slaves, plus many slave villages. An industrious slave could even be given a noble title. A female slave could be manumitted if she married her master, but most were kept as concubines. In 1892 the Kuba King had over five hundred personal slaves, plus many slave villages (matoon). Thus, a significant portion of kingly income was based on slave labor.
The king also required corvée labor from free villages, which was less onerous than slave villages provided. Required free labor was used to build vine-suspension bridges, walls, roads and for general upkeep and repairs. Any village could fall into slave status for insubordination or due to any grave offense against the state. One of the officers residing at the capital, the kubol matoon, was responsible for organizing the slave labor and tribute. In general, slave villages were required to provide more tribute, more labor and were given the most onerous tasks.
Clearly, Kuba society was a highly stratified class-based society (see Box 7.3). In addition to slaves, there was a class of persons known as ngady. They were pawns or serfs, virtual slaves, but persons who were able to keep their kinship status and they had the opportunity to work their way out of bondage. Ngady worked in the capital under the direction of the wives of the king or patricians, performing hard labor, although their kin status prevented arbitrary abuse in most cases. Slaves and even free villages revolted at times under the weight of extraction, but the Kuba state used severe repression and terror as instruments of rule.
 
Fabrication of Kuba Kingship
Kingship formed the core of this stratified society. The origin myth of kingship indicates that long ago there was war on the Iyool plain (a Savannah between two forest regions), with a member of the victorious Bushoong clan becoming the first nyim. Legend says that somewhere in the seventeenth century (1620?) the great culture hero, Nyim Shyaam established the Kuba state.
With the rise of such aggrandizers, kingship trumped kinship. As anyone familiar with Africa knows, village life is the focus of traditional African life and that elders are to be respected. It is for this reason that Shyaam was fond of saying, “I am the oldest of all villages,” implying that as a senior, he would protect all villages beneath him in rank. The king had to demonstrate that he was above the common throng. The untouchable status of the Kuba King was materialized in an installation rite. In it, the king committed an act of incest to show that he was not bound by kinship rules, being more powerful than clans.
Myths are sometimes about confirming continuity. For instance, the truth-tale is told about King Shyaam, the founder-hero. He is said to have been a foreigner and the son of a slave who did not have a legitimate right to rule the Bushoong clan or the Kuba as a whole. But he was cunning. He knew that the way a Bushoong chief passed his authority to his heir was to spit on him. Therefore, he hid by a Bushoong rubbish heap and when the chief passed, he spat, accidentally hitting Shyaam. Such a legend establishes a linkage between the Bushoong Chiefdom and the rule established by Shyaam. In reality, he was a foreigner who reorganized Kuba society according to new symbols of authority, expanding the Bushoong clan-chiefdom into the mightier federated Kuba Kingdom.
Kuba mytho-history is mooy ma walawal (“words of yore”). Lacking writing, theirs was an oral history, which formed a body of tradition that existed, but which was not supposed to flow or change beyond what we might call homeostatic flux. Mooy ma walawal validated the sociopolitical structure.
Neither Western history nor oral traditions in faraway lands are static. They are formed and reformed according to the dictates of living agents. That was the case with mooy ma walawal. For instance, the anthropologist Jan Vansina noted that tobacco showed up in seventeenth century Kuba myths. In later versions, the Biblical Genesis story appeared, beginning in the 1950s. Tradition is a living, growing entity because it is a poleconomic device. It is put to work by agents. Such agents have goals in mind, ones that will afford them more prestige, power and property.
Vansina notes that the fact that Kuba myth has many versions does not invalidate its “truth” in the minds of the Kuba. Anthropologists know that myth is a “just-so” story, a truth that is difficult to counter with logic. Vansina indicates that the Kuba pattern of thought is more additive than oriented toward creating exclusive categories of knowledge. Unlike Western thought, which strives to establish discrete categories; philosophical speculation is inherent in the Kuba thought mode.
For instance, the Kuba have at least seven major creation myths. I will only give one short version: Nyony aMboom (the otiose High God, so common in Africa) created the world and humankind, either by vomiting or by giving names in thought or utterance. Eighteen such children appeared, including Heaven, Earth, Sand of the River, Sword, Stone and the River Kasai.
In general terms, these myths and their various elements explained why the Kuba world is the way it is. For instance, in one version the first man and his sister were living alone in the forest and committed incest and the animals of the jungle reprimanded them and the incest taboo came into being. In another version, the sister, while going through the forest, accidentally brushed up against something and discovered salt. Such myths explain why the River Kasai is there, why the king rules and who is senior to whom. They explain who controls whom.
In Kuba mytho-history, chronology does not matter. The telling is usually non-linear and made up of selected points from myth and embellished with anecdotes to make a point within an overall framework of mythological acceptance by the listeners. Their history is not a string of events, but rather a patchwork quilt, the patches of which can be moved around to form different patterns within the overall concept of an historical quilt. Each muyum (court storyteller) may tell a myth slightly differently, with glosses that give it a special quality he wishes to convey. Glossing and embellishing a tale is admired and acceptable in Kuba oratory. In the fluidity of Kuba mytho-history, it was easy for kings aspiring to garner more power to embellish and expand on current versions of myths to sacralize the office of king, to make themselves into Divine Kings.
Kingship among the Kuba was their cynosure, the ultimate prize in both access to material goods and in a sense of éclat. Establishing divinity for the king was necessary in the context of a society where notables vigorously competed for power. Kuba aggrandizers competed for material goods, prestige and offices in the power structure. While the Kuba had an elaborate administrative and judicial system – the authority structure – power struggles largely took place “behind the scenes” of Divine Kingship. It involved power politics, the use of sorcery and, at times, open warfare.

The Resulting Kingship Structure & Stratification

It would seem that it was Shyaam who fabricated the hierarchical nature of the kingly system. Vansina writes:

Shyaam took over a unified chiefdom, which had some titled offices. He and his successors made a bureaucracy out of those by creating new titles that complemented the existing offices and by developing the idea that all titles together formed a single, overarching system. In doing this the rulers developed not merely a territorial organization but a set of coherent, central institutions at the capital. They were so successful that in time the bureaucrats, the kolm, formed a power bloc in their own right and became the backbone of a new social class, the patricians. The pattern of social stratification was profoundly altered and social-class formation became more pronounced (1978:128).

This hierarchical system was bolstered by a series of military victories by Shyaam and his successors. Vansina says, “Royal power grew so fast that by the middle of the eighteen century king Kot aNce could exile and execute eagle-feather chiefs with impunity… .”
In this highly stratified system, élites were members of a leisure class intent on conspicuous consumption. As such, they were the main patrons of the artists, who produced some of Africa’s more spectacular artwork. Their displays of status were manifested through ostentatious feasts, wearing finely embroidered clothing, especially the finely woven velvety textiles that were also exported as a signatory trade item of the Kuba. Cloth type was indicative of rank, measured in the novelty of pattern, the skill of craftsmanship in its making and the labor invested in its production.
Investment in the arts was one means to higher status. Another was developing an intricate knowledge of the complex mytho-history of the Kuba kingdom. In a more general sense, status was displayed through conspicuous consumption, demonstrated leisure, wearing finery, living in luxurious accommodations, outshining others by lavish feasting and gift giving and through participation in royal ceremonies. It was the king named Mboong aLeeng that formalized this leisurely life for capital residents, forbidding them to farm.
Such personal striving (dyaash) was allowed and encouraged by the king, but it had to remain within the bounds of kingship. Kolm had to strive, but the nyim did not, as he was the Divine King, on top of the hierarchy and close to Deity (Ncyeem). In fact, he alone was Nyceem Nkwoonc, “God on Earth.” Indeed, an abyss lay between the king and all nobles.
 
Box 7.1 Kuba Stratification (After Vansina 1978)
King (Nyim)
Notables Group 1: Kikaam – a single individual, acting as the
representative of all kolm (notables) living at the capital.
Named by the ngwoom incyaam (Crown Council), not by the king.
Notables Group 2: kolm matuk mabol – literally, “notables of the
corners of the village.” Group of four top officers of the state.
Notables First Rank:
kum ashin
1. cikl
2. ipaancl
3. nyimishoong
4. nyaang “chiefs of the Lands” or provincial
governors
1. chief of three lands (provinces)
2. chief of two lands
3. chief of one land
4. chief of one land
Notables Second Rank:
no special name
1. mwaaddy
2. nyoom
3. kaan angel abol
4. ipaacl ikikaam 1. Representative of royal children &
grandchildren
2. Representative of potential successors
to the king
3. Representative of the government of
of the capital city as a town
4. Deputy of the kikaan angel abol
Notables Third Rank: no
special name
mbyeemy

seven different titles Ritual specialist, named by the ngwoom
incyaam; a member of the Muyum’s clan.
Each title was ranked by seniority of
nomination
Notables Fourth Rank:
no special name
1. mbeem

2. mbyeeng

3. shesh
4. iyol
5. katyeen
6. mbaan

various deputies for the
male titles of this
rank 1. “Father of the king” or the
representative of one half of the capital
(one moiety)
2. “Father of the capital” or the
representative of the other half
of the capital (the opposite moiety)
3. chief military officer of the
mbeem moiety
4. chief military officer of the
mbyeeng moiety
5. Female representative of the women
of the mbeem moiety
6. Female representative of the women of
the mbyeeng moiety
Notables Group 3: kolm
bukwemy
12 top-ranked kolm The kolm were the bailiffs responsible for collecting tribute and organizing corvée
labor. Each was ranked by seniority of
nomination
Notables Group 4: no special
Name

60 or more kolm Each kolm was ranked by seniority of
nomination
Commoners
Pawns (ngady)
Slaves

To live in the capital city near the nyim was prestigious and to be one of his courtiers even more so. Life at court was considered the center of civilization. The privileged residents of the Kuba capital referred to villagers as bakon or “country bumpkins.” Most notables aspired to be as close to the king as possible. Patrician life was a dream by comparison to that lived by workers. Élites formed a leisure class, living in walled compounds, served by slaves and pawns and entertained at night by snake charmers and performing artists. Peripheral villages and provinces were seen as less desirable than “city lights.” Furthermore, to sustain a lavish lifestyle, those in the center siphoned wealth and labor from the common folk and slaves in outlying villages and provinces.
In a politco-legal sense, women were considered inferior to men. Even royal wives worked and held no special status. The only women who led a more or less leisurely life were the mother and sisters of the king and perhaps their female offspring.

Kingship & Access to Wealth
During the Age of chiefs (before the beginning of the seventeenth century) all of the Mongo and Kuba chiefdoms had to fight against two tendencies: internal factionalism and the desire of aggrandizing élites to displace the chief or succeed him; and the threat from other chiefs and usurpers from neighboring ethnic groups. This competition never went away in the Kuba Kingdom that emerged from such struggles, but it was sublimated, pushed down in the hierarchy below the Divine King.
Clever kings instituted court offices that gave aggrandizing rivals a slice of power. The king was assisted by three very important court figures. The muyum was the head ritualist and court historian, a pundit who kept the royal genealogies and chronicles. The mwaaddy was the eldest son of the king. The third figure and gender counterpart to the males of court was the female who taught royal songs of the nature spirits to the royal wives. Here, we see the linkage between nature and the forest, on one hand, and the political system on the other (a very similar relationship to what we saw in the Kongo Kingdom).
The elaborate nature of the political life of the Kuba people of the Congo was so impressive to the first missionary into the region, a Black American named William Sheppard, that he theorized that they must have descended from Pharaonic Egypt. Most Western visitors were dazzled by the Kuba’s elaborate court ritual, the stately nature of the royals, ubiquitous royal art, the pomp of court, the etiquette of the courtiers, the intricate nature of the political system and its sophisticated legal procedures.
The Kuba system was extremely hierarchical and authority was centralized with the nyim. No office at any level was a miniature of any other. All officers reported to the king. This despotic authority came slowly. In the seventeenth century the crown council (ngwoom incyaam) could rebuke the nyim, but by the eighteenth century the king came to stand outside the legal system, becoming more absolute in authority. He could arbitrarily fine, arrest, torture and kill opponents.
Nevertheless, the king needed officers. There were many different kinds of officials, serving the king as at-large bureaucrats, carrying out specific tasks e.g., collecting taxes, fines, tribute, spying and the administration of justice. Each administrator’s function was distinguished by the wearing of a different kind of feather. Kolms each had their own praise name, emblem, installation ritual, burial rite and ideology. There were about one hundred and eighty of these officers and with the passage of time kolms proliferated to the point where almost any man over forty was considered a kolm.
Kolms holding office were called “feather officers,” as they were given a feather of office. Such office-holders used their calling as “feather chiefs” to become wealthy. Nevertheless, the king was the wealthiest. By 1880, the riches of the Kuba King far exceeded that of any member of the patrician class, who themselves were much wealthier than the average Kuba citizen. The nyim held absolute power. His right to arbitrary decision-making was praised in oratory, song, proverbs and art, being backed, as it was, by the power of the forest spirits and Deity.
 
Manufacturing Divine Kingship

Kuba royal power was created and maintained symbolically. Divine Kingship was based on the doctrine that the king and Deity were to be considered one and the same. The king held an important hoard of supernatural charms. This “Basket of Charms” was kept in the forest by the muyum (chief priest). His shrine included the skull attributed to a founder politico, a kaolin egg which could kill any tyrant king (this from a previous reign) and the remnants of a huge iron double bell – the bell of Woot, as well as a paddle on which the definitive markings of all ethnic groups within the kingdom were carved.
Great care was taken to manufacture royal adornment and ritual. The substantial and extraordinary costume of the king weighed nearly a hundred and fifty pounds and was worn at his enthronement and burial. Each stitched or painted decoration had a specific message. Collectively, they indicated that the king was “beyond normal,” the embodiment of both the patricians and the people. Moreover, the costume contained a feather for each of the royal offices in the king’s bureaucracy. Each officer wore one feather, but the nyim wore them all.
Vansina believes that such symbolism of Divinity developed over a very long time, perhaps beginning with the reign of “Shyaam the Magician.” The aim of the royal garb, its message patches and regal pageantry was intended to create awe in the followers of the nyim.
When the royal bureaucracy was created, Shyaam was likely the one who created the mwaandaan, a special royal belt worn by the king and also given by him to members of his eighteen titled crown councilors (ngwoom incyaam). This belt symbolized royal power. When the king and his councilors met, any belt-holder could veto any proposal by the nyim by holding up the belt and moving it up and down. Over time, however, successive king’s whittled away at the power of the councilors as the nyim became more and more absolute and Divine. A councilor thought to be a traitor to the king could have his entire lineage relegated to slave status by the breaking of his mwaandaan belt. This could be applied even to the entire council, should the nyim be displeased with them.
The use of symbolism in the royal bureaucracy is instructive. Each officer had a feather as a material insignia of office. Office-holders were distinguished by different types of feathers. Furthermore, feathers were grouped in sets. Significantly, birds of prey represented officers attached directly to the nyim. Moreover, the nature of the office was delineated by the position of the feather on the body of the office-holder. Vansina notes that the system allowed the Kuba to become so enamored with political organization, and above all with public honors, insignia, and pageantry, that the “mirage of the feather” had become the main emphasis of the political culture. Each titled office had its own ideology, praise name, emblems and the more important ones even had their own funeral and installation rites. Vansina records the case of one titleholder to indicate the extreme intricacy of the symbolism connected to office:
At the capital, the nyaang, a provincial governor, had to be from an aristocratic clan. He commanded the region Ncol, just as other governors commanded other regions. He wore a white oxpecker feather, as did two of the three other governors and as did the king when he wore the hat of his grand costume…Nyaang wore a special hat, as did the other governors, and carried a wooden staff like the staffs of the ngwoom incyaam, although his staff was of a lower rank. He wore a red copper hat needle, which only two other notables were entitled to wear. An adze was worn over his shoulder, and two tiny bows were worn under his shoulders, as they were by other governors; other kolm wore bowstrings, as did the king, who wore hippopotamus tusks on his shoulders. Nyaang’s belt of bark belonged to a set that included the higher-ranked mwaandaan of the ngwoom incyaam, and a lower-ranked embroidered belt worn by lesser kolm. The back ornament he shared with all the main kolm and the king. Rings worn around the wrists and ankles recall sets of rings and baldics of different metals and of raffia, sometimes studded with cowries, all varying according to rank.
Nyaang’s insignia were identical to those of one other governor, the nyimishoong, who preceded nyaang in rank: he was placed before him in the public processions and just after him in the speaking order at councils. Nyimishoong’s iron staff and the blades of his adze indicated the difference between them: nyaang’s adze resembled a rake with four teeth; nyimishoong’s had two entwined blades of different shape. One look at the adze told the observer where nyaang ranked among the provincial governors (1978:32-33)

Such elaboration of costume, insignia and processional placement indicates that in the Kuba context prestige was emblematically doled out by the nyim to status-seeking aristocrats.
Other lore became important. The king and his lineal descendants were thought to have special royal blood, which entitled them to kingly authority. This blood was said to have spiritual power. Ceremonies were held periodically to materialize this lore e.g., priests sang nature songs (ncyeem ingesh), recited proverbs (nkwoon), shouted praise names (shoosh) and, more generally, narrated and reshaped Kuba political history, all in support of kingship and the king of the present.
Beginning with King Shyaam, who was said to be a great magician, the office of nyim became associated with extraterrestrial forces and theking was thought to channel those forces through official war magicians, royal diviners and medicine men. Shyaam appears to have been a major architect of the concept of a Divine King. He was the first to claim that “the king was a nature spirit, ngesh.” Based on the idea that nature is impossible for normal beings to control, its management through control of the ngesh or nature spirits was a powerful tool in the hands of the king. In the broader religious beliefs of the Kuba the ngesh played an active role in fertility, fecundity, war, hunting and the curing of illness – almost everything important in Kuba life. Obviously anyone controlling the ngesh would have great strength in Kuba society.
This belief in the king as Divine was bolstered by anecdotes about Shyaam’s madness, which Africans generally equate with being possessed by the spirits of the wild. But Shyaam was not exactly like the ngesh priestesses who would go into the bush, claim possession and return to teach commoners songs and proverbs they had been taught by the spirits. He was thought to be a spirit.
In the non-African context, it is more common for a Divine King to be connected with a high God, not forest-dwelling spirits. But in Africa, the Creator God is a distant Deity, not intricately involved in the day-to-day affairs of Humankind. Thus, for the Kuba mind, the linkage of the Monarch to the ngesh would have had greater weight.

Increasing Power & Wealth-Access under Divine Kingship

So what did this “greater weight” earn the nyim? Essentially, everything an aggrandizer dreams of – the most prestige, power and property in the kingdom. He was able to drain the surplus off of every household in the land. Matrilineages only maintained a corporate hold on communally-created fish ponds, while each individual family worked the fields and stored their own crops. It was this household unit that had to supply corvée labor and taxes to the local representatives of the king, the Feather chiefs. Those near the capital also had to work on the king’s fields (shash anyim).
Professor Vansina has noted that the Kuba had a strong work ethic, villagers laboring in the fields from 6 a.m. till 8 p.m. In this work orientation, laziness was so frowned upon as to be equated with witchcraft, certainly anti-social. We do not know whether this was always the case as they migrated southward into their final place in the rainforest, or whether this ethic developed in Shyaam’s times and beyond as the centralized polity extracted more and more to support the ten percent of the population who did not work – the capital-based leisure class.
Tribute collected by each provincial governor was then brought to the capital city and presented to the king at an annual durbar. In 1892, it lasted two weeks, while tribute was presented and tabulated. At the same time, a census was taken to ensure proper payments by provincial governors. Kuba tribute was paid in farm products, bush meat, raffia cloth, ivory, salt, hides, iron, knives, hoes, pottery, baskets, camwood, carved objects or clay for pottery (specific items depended on local supplies and the economic specialization of certain villages).
The king also had access to virtually any women in the kingdom he desired. King Shyaam expanded his harem by requiring each clan to supply him with a wife, thus taking his private bordello from less than twenty to hundreds, expanding the royal enclosure so much that royal builders had to construct a larger capital.
Even though these women were informal lovers of the king, they lived in a special place. Living in the royal enclosure was a sign of Kuba élite status e.g., only eagle-feather chiefs and the king did so among the Kuba. As a singular place, the capital city was enclosed with a wall and the palace of the king with yet another wall. These officers of the state were set apart by place of residence and by unique costumes e.g., the wearing of feathers and clothing with special insignias. Some of the more trivial privileges of the king were:
only the king could keep sheep;

only the king could wear brass & this metal was used in the manufacture of the royal drums (pel ambish);

only the king could wear the royal costume, which weighed one- hundred and fifty pounds, being laden with imported prestige items e.g., cowries, brass and copper. It was also covered with numerous talismans and symbols of office;

only the king could wear hippopotamus tusks on his shoulders.

Trivial or not, privileges and insignias of office served as elements of display, materializing the king’s authority, along with the whole set of symbols that presented the king to the world as a Deified being.
Once Shyaam had proclaimed himself to be a nature spirit, history records that royal symbols and etiquette followed, with many praise names and songs acclaiming the king’s power. These fabrications “give the impression of an increasing wealth of symbolic material attached to kingship.” Vansina says pageantry stresses the king’s unique position not only as head of the bureaucracy but as one deriving his legitimacy from Deity. Shyaam in legend says, “My kingship stems from Nyony aMboom (God). This kingship, God gave it in my hand.”
The almighty nature of kingship was demonstrated in the rites accompanying the burial of the king and the installation of a new one. By the end of the nineteenth century these ceremonies lasted a full year and included every segment of society.
Shyaam is remembered as the “magic king,” and likely was responsible for creating symbolic linkages between the ndol statue and kingship. The ndol statue was a materialization of the continuity of the king’s divinity. Upon the monarch’s death, a personal statue was carved, which was thought to receive his Divinity. The king’s successor would sleep by the statue, the power infusing his body so as to enable him to take up the mantle of leadership. Part of the relic archive of the king included all the statues of previous kings together with the “Royal Basket of Charms.”

Abuse of Kingship
As with many Divine Kings, the nyim became increasingly cruel from the seventeenth century onward. By the nineteenth century he used terror in warfare against non-Bushoong peoples and imposed arbitrary judicial sentences on his own subjects. If the nyim was divine, it was not the divinity for which the people would have wished.
In time, the kingdom went into decline and in the late nineteenth century was invaded by the Nsapo people and broke up into its constituent chiefdoms.

SOURCES – CHAPTER 7: KINGDOMS

Afolayan, Funso. 2000. Kingdoms of West Africa: Benin, Oyo and Asante. In: Falola, Toyin (Ed.) Africa: African history before 1885 (Volume 1). Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Berinstain, Valerie. 1997. India and the Mughal Dynasty. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers.

Cavazzi, Giovanni. 2001 (1732). Queen Anna Nzinga, 1654. In: Collin, Robert O (Ed.). Documents from the African past. Princeton: Markus Wiener.

Egharevba, J. U. 1968. A short history of Benin. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press.

Goody, Jack (Ed.). 1966. Succession to high office. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hilton, Anne. 1985. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Junker, Laura Lee. 1999. Raiding, trading and feasting: The political economy of Philippine chiefdoms. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Kuba people. http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Kuba.html

Kuper, Hilda. 1963. The Swazi: A South African kingdom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mendonsa, Eugene L. 2002. West Africa. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking.

Schneider, David M. & Kathleen Gough (Eds.). Matrilineal kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir. 1970 (1873). Religion in primitive culture (Introduction by Paul Radin). Gloucester, MA: P. Smith.

Uzoigwe, G. 1977. The warrior and the state in pre-colonial Africa, Journal of Modern African Studies 13:3:469-481.

Vansina, Jan. 1968. Kingdoms of the Savanna. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Vansina, Jan. 1978. The Children of Woot: A history of the Kuba peoples. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.