Political Affiliation

Until the 1960s, most historians relied on written sources, so most history tended to be about societies with writing. Since most African societies did not develop writing, the historical record before about 500 BCE was sparse, gleaned from accounts of non-African travelers, usually Muslims, and archaeological remains. In the past fifty years, specialists in African history have learned to use historical linguistics, oral traditions, and other sources to overcome the apparent lack of evidence and develop a far better understanding of African history.

Nevertheless, many writers of world history texts continues to treat human societies without writing as "prehistoric." This is rather ironic given that even in those complex urban-centered societies called civilizations, which have had written records for more than 5,000 years, only a small minority of people were literate, and most people did not live in cities. Certainly in Africa this prehistoric-historic distinction has little value. Most historians of Africa realize that a focus on written sources alone would mean virtually ignoring the histories of the vast majority of Africa's peoples, both those who were able to achieve -through kinship, ritual and other means- relatively orderly and just societies without centralized governments or states and those who lived in city-centered societies without writing.

In fact, until about 2,500 years ago, virtually all Africans living south of the Sahara were able to avoid relying on bureaucratic organizations or "states" to carry out the political requirements of their societies. Even large groups created social systems based on lineage (kinship) with no single center of power or authority. Under the right conditions, such systems could accomodate several million people. On the local level, lineage systems depended on a balance of power to solve political problems. People in these societies controlled conflict and resolved disputes through a balance of centers of cooperation and opposition, which appear to have been almost universal in human societies. This human ethic of cooperation was especially crucial in herding and agricultural societies that existed in the often challenging physical environments of Africa (Turnbull, 1973:233-255)

Variations of lineage systems also helped Africans resist European colonial domination. For example, colonial attempts to divide African into districts, cantons, and even "tribes" were doomed to failure when most of the continent south of the Sahara was really a kaleidoscope of lineage fragments, scattering and regrouping as the need arose. Through marriage alliances and various forms of reciprocal exchanges, these networks could expand almost indefinitely. As an example, European officials erroneously assumed that their control of an important African authority figure ensured the "pacification" of a given territory. The Africans, on the other hand, could simply turn to another member of a kinship linkage and continue their struggle against the outsiders. Africa's past demostrates the truly remarkable ability of African peoples to resist incorporation into state political and economic organizations right up to the present (Gilbert and Reynolds, 2008:58-59). This represents one of the most interesting aspects of the history of this continent's peoples. There were many African societies that have been classified by political historians as stateless or decentralized. These terms are used to describe societies that did not have well-defined and complex or centralized systems of government. Perhaps as many as a third of the people of Africa on the eve of colonial rule lived in stateless or decentralized societies. For many years, these societies were not well studied by historians both because of lack of sources and because of prejudice. Initially most historians accepted a view that only societies that are centralized were worth studying. Until the past thirty years, many historians of Africa looked at African history through the lens of European history and took the existence of states as a mark of political achievement - the bigger the state, the bigger the achievement. Most authorities now agree that this view is far from accurate.

A brief case study on the Igbo-speaking peoples show that stateless societies can be culturally and socially sophisticated. The Igbo live in the southeastern part of contemporary Nigeria. The Igbo are neighbors of the highly politically centralized Yoruba, but their political system is much different. Instead of centralized kingdoms headed by powerful "kings" and their advisers, the Igbo had no centralized system of governance. Rather they lived in politically autonomous villages. That is, each village was politically separate and was not politically connected to neighboring villages. Within the villages, there was not a system of hereditary chiefs. Village decisions were made by a headman and a council of elders that selected the headman. The absence of a centralized system of government did not mean that there was no system or institutions of governance among the Igbo. In addition to village-based councils of elders, there were religious organizations that provided regulations that governed people's lives. These organizations guaranteed that no one group or institutions gained too much power - a system of checks and balances! The absence of centralized government did not hinder the economic, social, and economic development the Igbo peoples. Indeed, just as did their Yoruba neighbors, the Igbo-speaking peoples developed a specialized and diversified economy based on agriculture, textiles and trade.

Many Africans still rely on extended family organizations and call upon kinship behavior to maintain justice and cultural and territorial integrity, not only in domestic but also in wider spheres. And as in the past, many Africans still see any state without at least some symbolic lineage-based authority as inherently tyrannical. The continuing desire to seek and find order in institutions other than the state is very understandable in the African context where failed states, military dictatorships, and "presidents for life" have become all too common in the past fifty years (Meredith, 2005).

One important aspect of persisting kinship networks, still very important in Africa, is the degree to which people within such systems could mobilize women's labor and childbearing capacities. The formation of alliances between lineages was facilitated by marriage. This does not mean that women were simply pawns. In a good number of times and locations women such as Queen Nzinga, the seventeenth-century Mbundu monarch (Miller, 1975:201-216), or the Luso-African woman in the Upper Guinea Coast (Brooks, 2003) controlled many resources and could operate almost independently of their husbands' lineage. Quite often though, especially where cattle keeping, almost always a male-dominated activity, was important, women had much of the crop-producing burdens as well as household and child-rearing duties. When colonial labor demands removed men even farther from household economies, this imbalance was often made worse (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1997; 9-20).

For those accustomed to state forms of organization, African social organization based on kindship seems chaotic, and nonstate societies are seen as less civilized or lacking in sociopolitical development. To dispel the notion that Africa lacked civilization, many dedicated Africanists have focused almost exclusively on the relatively unrepresentative centralized states when portraying Africa's past. This has sometimes obscured, however, the important role of local kinship relations in maintaining peace and harmony in most African societies. But since state societies as well as non-state societies have a long history in Africa, I examine the significance of state societies in the history of Africa next.