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Zande Blood-Brotherhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

E. E. Evans-Pritchard
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Blood-Brotherhood is a pact of alliance formed between two persons by a ritual act in which each swallows the blood of the other. The pact is one of mutual assistance and is backed by powerful sanctions. It may bind only the two participants to certain obligations, or it may also involve the social groups of which they are members. Alliances based on exchange of blood have been recorded from many parts of the world, especially from Africa where they are exceedingly common. In some tribes the participants drink one another's blood directly from incisions made on their bodies, while in other tribes the blood is swallowed on a piece of meat or ground-nut or coffee-berry. But though the actual method of consumption varies in different cultures the purpose of the rite is always the same, and there is often much similarity between the ways in which it is carried out. Blood-brotherhood is not only widespread throughout Africa but it is also a ceremony which a European may inquire into easily and may even take part in without involving himself in social difficulties. It is the more surprising therefore that descriptive records of the ceremony by which the pact is formed and of the obligations which it entails are so scanty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , October 1933 , pp. 369 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1933

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References

page 370 note 1 Acknowledgements for assistance in carrying out my field-work in Zandeland are made to the Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the Royal Society, and the Trustees of the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fund. Readers who wish to know more about the Azande are advised to read Lagae's Les Azande. References to other literature have been given in my previous papers in Africa. For some reason, doubtless for lack of space, Mgr. Lagae does not describe blood-brotherhood in his monograph on the Azande.

page 370 note 2 The word for blood-brother is bakure. The possessive suffix of the first person singular is mi when speaking of a blood-brother instead of the more usual re suffix. Lagae and Plas give gbakule as the purer form (Dictionnaire Zande-Français, 1925), being derived from gba, to cut, and kule, blood. In the Sudan bakure is the more usual form and is the one which I shall employ in this essay. Gore's dictionary, compiled in the Sudan, gives bakure (Zande and English Dictionary, 1931). The term nakurëmi, my blood-sister, is occasionally used for the wife of a blood-brother.

page 377 note 1 i.e. Spears which have not been beaten into weapons, but are being stored by a man as bride-wealth for his son's marriage.

page 377 note 2 i.e. If you meet the wife of your blood-brother carrying beer, it is correct to ask her to draw you a gourdful; but if you use this as a pretext to making advances to her, you will die from the vengeance of the blood.

page 378 note 1 i.e. Spears which you have received in ceremonial exchange at mortuary-feasts. These are not generally of unbeaten iron and you cannot refuse one of them as a gift to your blood-brother.

page 378 note 2 A man has the right to claim the head of an animal killed by his blood-brother and he establishes this claim by tying some grass round its head as soon as it has been killed.

page 378 note 3 He deceives his blood-brother by giving him the remains of old benge (strychnic poison used in oracle tests) instead of freshly gathered benge. It is not easy to tell the difference by looking at the benge.

page 378 note 4 i.e. He asks his blood-brother to give him some spears to compensate for the offence which is bringing vengeance on him.

page 379 note 1 A man was sometimes killed or mutilated for adultery, but normally compensation in spears was accepted. Here the man tells his blood-brother that their clan must accept compensation in the event of such an offence committed by one of his kin.

page 379 note 2 i.e. If you do me wrong, the only antidote by which you can escape vengeance of the blood is by cutting your meat with a firelog. This is a picturesque way of saying that there can be no escape from the blood.

page 379 note 3 Actually he says ‘May vengeance seize them here and here and here and here’ and taps various parts of his partner's body. The women will get keloids on these parts and will suffer from hernia. At the end of this address the speaker throws down a stone at his partner's feet, a dramatic act appropriate to his words.

page 379 note 4 This second ‘you’ refers to his partner's clan.

page 381 note 1 Calonne-Beaufaict, De, Les Azande, 1921, pp. 204–205.Google Scholar

page 381 note 2 Gayer-Anderson, , ‘Some tribal customs in their relation to medicine and morals of the Nyam-nyam and Gour people inhabiting the Eastern Bahr-el-Ghazel,’ Fourth Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories, vol. B, 1911, p. 253.Google Scholar

page 382 note 1 Pacts of friendship are made in other ways among the Azande. Each of two people eat one of the ground-nuts contained in a single pod. This rite is some-times performed between a man and his bride or love. Calonne-Beaufaict mentions other rites such as two people eating together a kind of yam or placing burning brands into the same water. Women also make pacts between one another by sharing a head of maize, but these are not discussed in this paper.

page 385 note 1 It is difficult to decide whether the blood is thought to remain in the stomach or to reside in some other part of the body. I think that the Zande does not feel sure about its residence. He only knows that it is somewhere inside his blood-brother.

page 396 note 1 W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, passim.

page 396 note 2 La Foi Jurée, especially Chapter I. Hartland, Sidney, The Legend of Perseus, vol. ii, pp. 237–258Google Scholar, takes the same view as Robertson Smith.

page 396 note 3 The Golden Bough: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, 3rd ed., 1911, p. 130Google Scholar, and Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, vol. ii, chap. xii.Google Scholar

page 397 note 1 The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (quoted by Davy).

page 397 note 2 The ‘kinship theory’ of blood-brotherhood is weakened by a comparative study of rites by which artificial brotherhood is created, for many of these make no use of blood. For a wide survey of evidence see Hamilton-Grierson, P. J., Art. ‘Brotherhood (Artificial)’ in Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 1909.Google Scholar