How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (review)

Jan Vansina's most recent monograph presents the first regional history of West Central African societies (the Herero, Lunda, and Ovimbundu, inter alia) before their entrance into the wider Atlantic world. Vansina musters an impressive variety of sources—linguistic, archaeological, ethnographic, biological, written, and oral—to uncover how these societies were born from largely independent autochthonous forager communities through the development of institutions of governance. Cultural innovation and borrowing restricted the paths of historical change in West Central African societies to three regional variants. Briefly, societies in the drier southern region valued cattle, organizing their social, political, and economic lives to facilitate the keeping of large herds. Simultaneously, people in middle Angola recognized leaders for their skills in arbitration and the management of fertility. These societies focused on sacralized leaders and the spectacle of the court, whose elaborate title system provided even modest local notables a means of participation in courtly life. Finally, in the Kalahari Sands region to the east, the environment required settlement in small villages along the fertile riverbanks. Collective ideas about society as an interplay of statuses, roles, and individual distinction led to a variety of local elaborations on a shared institutional foundation of villages, vicinages (collectivities of villages), and sodalities based on age and gender.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 describes the emergence of food production and the reorganization of forager communities into societies by means of overarching institutions of governance that tied communities together for economic and social cooperation. Vansina initially depicts West Central Africa as a region divided into northern and southern zones, based on rainfall patterns. By the ninth century, the introduction and spread of cereal agriculture, cattle keeping, matrilineality, and Bantu languages broke down the north/south ecological divide and established West Central Africa as a distinct cultural unit. In part 2, the main catalysts of historical change shift from processes of convergence (through borrowing and spreading innovations from outside the region) to processes of divergence, as societies innovated the three developmental paths described above from the shared cultural heritage that had emerged by the ninth century. Vansina acknowledges the influence of environmental opportunities and constraints on historical developments but contends that the collective imagination of populations played a far more important role in the emergence and elaboration of the three different developmental paths.

In How Societies Are Born, Vansina returns to the idea of "tradition," refining his understanding of what is at stake in arguing for a single, ancestral western Bantu tradition. The idea is problematic because it obscures the input of foragers who, in West Central Africa and elsewhere, participated in the shift to food production and sedentarism, processes that supported the development of societies out of independent communities. In this book, Vansina emphasizes the concept of the "collective imagination" as "the link between tradition and the ideas, aspirations, and activities of individuals" to account for the influence of multiple groups and traditions. Collective imaginations are "the underlying dynamic processes that account for the gradual crystallization of traditions and for their maintenance over considerable periods of time" (272).

Specialists will note that Vansina has rejected glottochronology, based on both the Tervuren team's demonstration that different statistical processes yield different results and therefore different chronologies, and on more general concerns over whether the rate of replacement of core vocabulary in various languages is standard. Vansina recognizes Christopher Ehret's defense of glottochronology, although he could have better served the reader with reference to a more thorough statement of Ehret's position (see "Testing the Expectations of Glottochronology against the Correlations of Language and Archaeology in Africa," in Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, ed. C. Renfrew, A. McMahon, & L. Trask [Cambridge, 2000]). Significantly, this book offers a new method for dating linguistic developments by directly associating the reconstructed words for cultural innovations like goat keeping, metalworking, and cereal agriculture with the dates for the first...