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3 Healing the Land and Harming the Land Kilindi chiefs were not the only rainmakers in precolonial Shambaai. In the kingdom's early years local descent-group leaders held important rain medicines. Throughout the kingdom's history alternative nonroyal practitioners appeared, claiming the power to bring crops in their proper season. The dominance of Kilindi rainmaking was the outcome of a contest, often a violent one. Nor did people accept without question that rainmaking was the key to prosperity and satiety. During the last half-century of the kingdom's existence, from the early 1840s, a small but growing number of chiefs began to violate their obligations to provide refuge to dependents and began to treat slaves as commodities. It would have been possible to argue , as some peasants did at the time, that limiting the chiefly power to take slaves was the best way to guarantee survival- that rainmaking was secondary. The peasant priority on controlling slavery rather than rain ought to have become increasingly clear in the 1870s and 1880s, when the most powerful chief in Shambaai, a trader named Semboja, had no claims to rain medicine. Through all these struggles, the language of rain medicine continued, nevertheless, to occupy an important place in Shambaai, and the Kilindi continued to be the most important rainmakers. Peasants interpreted the political struggle as bringing an alternation of drought and rich rains. Royal ritual also imposed a rhythm on the passage of time. It did not suppress the discussion of violent events and disastrous changes, but placed them within the context of a seemingly eternal rhythmed alternation. Even though the peasantry elaborated an alternative discourse based on local descent, discussion of rhythmed alternation was effective in defining many of the issues of nineteenth-century politics. This chapter explores the terms in which rhythmed alternation was expressed- terms which form a seamless web. The following chapter explores the competition among precolonial intellectuals, which was also conflict over the definition of the most basic political issues. Neither in the kingdom's early years nor in its final decades did the centrality of the royal rhythms go unchallenged. 69 70 Healing the Land and Harming the Land The Rhythmed Time of Royal Rule If Adam had not eaten the fruit in Eden, we would die like the moon. Mdoe Loti, 1967. The moon has died. The morning star shines. But it is not the morning star; it is the moon. From the royal accession rite, second half of the nineteenth century. Royal ritual was rich in verbal and visual images: of the king as a lion that kills people and takes cattle, the king as a deadly buffalo, alone facing his hunters who were the courtiers, or the king as a patriarch governing his subjects as he would wives and children. The central organizing principle in the culturally ordered experience of the king as bringer of fertility was neither a metaphor, nor a metonym, nor was it any other figure of speech, nor was it a visual image. It was the experience of time's passage as rhythmed, regular, and life-bringing, or as random, irregular, and deadly. The double rite of passage in which a king was buried and a new king installed was organized so as to impose a rhythm on the passage of time, a rhythm of the inexorable alternation of peaceful royal rule, followed by disorder and death, and then again peace and hierachy. The rites on which this statement is based are the ones which took place between 1862 and 1895.1 After the drum was beaten announcing the death of one king and the accession of another, death and disorder came to Shambaai. For the entire duration of the moon under which the old king had died, anyone who walked along the four main paths from Vugha- to the north, south, east, or west-was liable to be executed (LangHeinrich 1903:251; P. Wohlrab 1918:172; Dupre n.d.). The mshangi, of the lineage which performed ritual murders for the king, went to a spot at Kwe Mishihwi where the path separates to pass above and below a large boulder. At this spot he strangled a passerby.2 Acts of violence were permitted; men walked the paths only in groups. The king's men struck especially against strangers. In 1853 outsiders within the kingdom, hearing unfounded rumors of the king's impending death, fled while there was still time. During the mourning period, until the new king sacrificed...

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