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4 Alternative Paths to Social Health in the Precolonial Kingdom When the people of Vugha stood before their new king to shout of their need for food some of them called out a single word over and over: Nkaviongwa! Nkaviongwa! "It is not mentioned! It is not mentioned!" According to an old court official, the meaning of this was that "the things done at Vugha are not mentioned because . . . they are cunning acts of domination," deadly plots against individuals, planned in the night. In a broader sense Kilindi attempted to exclude from public debate, to render unmentionable, alternative visions of political organization . Among peasants interested in food and rain, peace and justice, the Kilindi-dominated vision of the world assigned a central place to dynastic relations. As we have seen, popular interpretation held that conflict between king and chiefs, between royal half-brothers, led to famine and war; a king's unchallenged dominance over dynastic rivals led to peace and satiety. Within these terms of discourse a peasant worked to achieve social health by giving allegiance to a powerful Kilindi chief. Supporting a chief was not, however, the only possible path to social health within the larger society. In the early reigns, local descent group leaders held their own fertility medicines. Throughout the kingdom's history , withdrawal from under chiefly rule, a return to descent-group rule, was an imaginable possibility. It was, in fact, the strategy of people among the Bondei in the eastern part of the kingdom in about 1870 when enslavement by chiefs reached intolerable levels. The eastern peasantry threw out their chiefs and went over to government by local elders. Their rebellion shows that while the discourse on healing the land directed attention away from non-Kilindi alternatives, it did not fully eliminate either the possibility or the consciousness of those alternatives. The question of whether there was to be one theory of government or two (or perhaps more) was itself an issue open to struggle. Serious obstacles stand in the way of understanding nineteenth-century debates. The obvious obstacle is the fragmentary character of the sources for reconstructing the thought and speech of nonliterate peasants who 94 Alternative Paths to Social Health in the Precolonial Kingdom 95 lived a hundred years ago, or more. In the case of Shambaai, however, some elements of a partial reconstruction are possible. We have a body of recorded oral traditions as told from the points of view of a great many local descent groups. These are complemented by scattered but important written sources from the 1840s onwards. An additional obstacle to the attempt to move beyond a Kilindidominated vision is the tendency in anthropological thought to privilege a society's most central and most coherently organized conceptions, categories, and symbols. On this issue the classic French sociology of the Annee Sociologique has had a profound influence on students of African cosmology. Attention to "social facts" and to "collective representations," as in Emile Durkheim's sociology, makes the relationship between society and received representation the subject of study. Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (1963) argued that cosmology originates in the organization of society. The most important problem in the current context is not with the general study of society and of representations, but with the picture conveyed by most works in the Durkheimian tradition of each African society as discrete and clearly bounded, and each society's central terms of discourse as unified and coherent. The scholar's search for coherence overlaps with the drive by those who hold power within society to silence all heterodox ideas. In the case of nineteenth-century Shambaa discourse, the scholar who simplifies, who finds unity and coherence, portrays the world as the Kilindi themselves would have liked to see it- a world in which Kilindi action in healing the land and harming the land was the sole relevant action for achieving social well-being. The way out of this unintended alliance between ethnographers and elites is to complement the study of core culture with a search for heterodox forms of discourse and practice , or at the very least a search for the patterns of social organization within which those forms grew. Alternative Medicines In searching the record for alternatives to Kilindi dominance it is important to make a sharp distinction between the general cultural principle underlying healing the land and the narrow application of that principle to the Kilindi dynasty. As we have seen, the underlying principle was deeply rooted in the precolonial culture...

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