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Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Jane I. Guyer  and
Samuel M. Eno Belinga
Jane I. Guyer
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Samuel M. Eno Belinga
Affiliation:
Université de Yaoundé
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Extract

The paper re-examines principles of social organization in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa, suggesting that the imagery of ‘accumulation’ of ‘wealth in people’ is not wrong, but not flexible enough to encompass the centrality of knowledge in these societies. People were singularized repositories of a differentiated and expanding repertoire of knowledge, as well as being structured kin (as in the kinship model) and generic dependents and followers (as in the wealth-in-people model). We argue that social mobilization was in part based on the mobilization of different bodies of knowledge, and leadership was the capacity to bring them together effectively, even if for a short time and specific purpose. We refer to this process as composition and distinguish it from accumulation.

The paper has three parts. The first substitutes an oral epic from southern Cameroon for an ethnography of the principles by which people pursued agendas and mobilized followings in their own political worlds. Colonial rule may have institutionalized pre-colonial political hierarchies, but it completely altered the terms for political mobilization. Hence the historical record is very limited for making inferences about how ‘wealth-in-people’ operated in action, under pre-colonial conditions. The second critiques the evolutionary assumptions about simple societies that still color the models of Equatorial societies. The third revisits the ethnography to illuminate the principles of composition. The conclusion makes inferences and suggestions with respect to aspects of pre-colonial social history.

Type
Wealth in People, Wealth in Things
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 91 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 The lineage mode of production was proposed by Rey, P-P., Colonialisme, néocolonialisme et transition au capitalisme: exemple de la Comilog au Congo Brazzaville (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar, on the basis of Congo ethnography. By the late 1970s it was being used to analyze groups as different from the Punu as Southern African pastoralists, e.g. Guy, Jeff, ‘Ecological factors in the rise of Shaka and the Zulu kingdom’, in Marks, S. and Atmore, A. (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980), 102–19Google Scholar. The concept of wealth-in-people (with or without hyphens) seems to have been first used by Miers, S. and Kopytoff, I. (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977)Google Scholar. It was applied to the Kpelle by Bledsoe, C., Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society (Stanford, 1980)Google Scholar, and brought back again to Equatorial Africa in the works of Miller, J., Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, 1988)Google Scholar, and Vansina, J., Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar. It has recently been used by Vaughan, M. and Moore, H., Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (Portsmouth NH, 1994), with respect to the Bemba.Google Scholar

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4 These thoughts are largely stimulated by Vansina's synthesis of the Equatorial history and ethnography, which both highlights the issues and also provides us – in his unification of the entire area as a single ‘tradition’ – with a rationale and excuse for using varied cases for inspiration without immediately falling into an inextricable tangle of ethnographic and historical localism. His own boldness in suggesting that there are common themes amongst the variations and innovations of Equatorial social history, of which wealth-in-people is one, gives the rest of us a window of opportunity for the kinds of speculation we pursue here.

5 Ibid. 251.

6 Ibid. 263.

7 Ibid. 257.

8 Ibid. 89, 255, emphasis added.

9 Evans-Pritchard, for example, never saw a leopard-skin chief mediation, nor major warfare, although both of these figure centrally in his path-breaking study of the Nuer political system. Of the leopard-skin chief he emphasised, ‘I repeat that I have not seen this method employed…’; Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, 1940), 164Google Scholar. His detailed descriptions of groups mobilized for warfare and feuding come entirely from oral history and not from ethnography.

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