The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (36 page)

When we examine the underlying principles of rank society in Panama, we see many parallels to the concepts of mana, toa, and tohunga in Polynesia. For example, the Panamanians believed in
purba,
an individual’s invisible, immortal essence. Purba was inherited by chiefs, who nurtured it through their monopoly of esoteric knowledge. Purba was reflected in a special chiefly language that the queví used during ceremonies.

Then there was
niga,
an aura of power that was generated by acts of bravery in battle and public works in the interests of society. Chiefs had more niga than commoners, but all had enough niga to improve their position if they worked to do so.

Finally there was
kurgin,
the innate talent for a craft. Kurgin varied from individual to individual and could be enhanced with training. We are struck by how similar these Panamanian principles of life force, bravery, and expertise were to those displayed by rank societies elsewhere in the world.

Panama did not have priests as powerful as those of the Cauca Valley, but it did have ritual specialists called
tequinas
who, through the use of strong tobacco or corn beer, could enter into trances. While in these trances they could communicate with the spirit world, predict the future, control the weather, and cause crops to flourish.

Let us now consider a significant difference between chiefly behavior in Tikopia and Panama. We have already suggested that many aspects of rank in Tikopia would be hard for archaeologists to detect. The behavior of Tikopian chiefs was not flamboyant. The chiefs did not make lavish use of sumptuary goods; they expected to be shown deference but were not carried around on litters; and no slaves or servants were sacrificed at their funerals.

The flamboyance of Panamanian chiefs, in contrast, was an archaeologist’s dream. The chief’s lineage had a distinct emblem that was carved on both houses and tools, much like a Tlingit chief’s heraldic crest. Chiefs accumulated gold jewelry and were buried with it. Their funerals were elaborate because chiefs were thought to have eternal life, while dead commoners were merely converted to air. In addition, any wife, concubine, servant, or slave buried with the chief shared in his eternal life. The result was that many individuals volunteered to be sacrificed at the chief’s funeral, making his grave easier for archaeologists to identify.

In the Darién region of eastern Panama, the chief’s desiccated corpse was preserved in a special house where his remains, and those of his chiefly ancestors, were set in chronological order along the wall. In the realm of chief Comogre on the Caribbean coast, the dried and richly attired corpses of past chiefs were kept in the innermost chamber of the bohío, suspended by ropes in order of rank.

Parita, a deceased paramount chief of the Azuero Peninsula on the Pacific coast of Panama, was discovered in 1519 by the Spaniard Gaspar de Espinosa. Parita’s corpse had been dried by the heat of a fire and dressed in a gold helmet, four or five gold necklaces, gold tubes for his arms and legs, gold breastplates, and a gold belt with bells that tinkled when he walked. With him in the charnel room were the corpses of three previous chiefs, each wrapped in a cloth bundle and suspended in a hammock. At Parita’s head was one sacrificed woman; at his feet lay another. Both were adorned with gold. In an adjacent room the Spaniards found 20 living warriors from enemy chiefdoms, bound and awaiting sacrifice at Parita’s funeral.

A conquistador named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo witnessed the funeral of another Panamanian chief. Preparations began while the man was still alive, but fading fast. As his death approached, his relatives and allies dug a rectangular pit 12 to 15 feet on a side and more than 10 feet deep. They set up a bench in this pit and covered it with a brightly colored blanket.

The well-dressed chief, now dead at last, was propped up on the bench and supplied with water, corn, fruit, and flowers for the afterlife. Women who had volunteered to be buried with him took their seats on the bench beside the corpse; they, too, were dressed in finery and adorned with gold.

Then came a two-day funeral feast with dancing and chanting. There were songs praising both the chief and the women, who presumably included some of his wives and concubines. Large quantities of corn beer were consumed. As soon as the women on the bench were completely drunk, workmen rapidly filled the pit with earth and timbers, smothering the women. Trees were then planted on the grave, perhaps to conceal its location.

Fernández de Oviedo was told that up to 40 or 50 wives and servants might be entombed with a chief. In some cases the sacrificial victims were given an herbal concoction that brought on rapid loss of consciousness. Many of these sixteenth-century accounts of Panama’s chiefly burials have now been confirmed by excavation, thanks to archaeologists such as Samuel Kirkland Lothrop and Olga Linares.

A key archaeological site on Panama’s Pacific coast was Sitio Conte, a chiefly burial center whose heyday occurred 1,500 to 1,100 years ago. There Lothrop found 60 graves with elegant gold items, polychrome pottery, and human sacrifice. Grave 26, for example, appears to have been the burial of a chief with 21 sacrificed subordinates. The subordinates were buried at the bottom of the grave in fully extended positions. Some of the sacrificial victims had gold items with them, suggesting that they may have been relatively important individuals. For his part the chief was seated atop the layer of subordinates in such a way as to suggest that he may have been placed on a wooden bench or stool, long since disintegrated. Many Central American chiefs had servants carry their stools wherever they went, much the way Tikopian chiefs used coconut-grating stools to keep their heads above everyone else’s.

THE BEMBA OF ZAMBIA: MALE CHIEFS IN A MATRILINEAL SOCIETY

Agriculture and animal husbandry had a long history in the Nile Valley. From the Nile headwaters south, however, Africa was for thousands of years occupied by hunters and gatherers analogous to the Basarwa and Hadza. Impeding the spread of agriculture were regions of poor tropical soils. Impeding the spread of herding was the tsetse fly, which transmits sleeping sickness to cattle.

Roughly 2,400 years ago the craft of ironworking reached western and central Africa, probably by means of trade routes crossing the Sahara Desert. Iron tools made it possible to till tropical soils and grow crops such as sorghum and millet. Sheep and goats provided meat, and cattle were added wherever the tsetse fly allowed.

Ironworking spread rapidly over the next few centuries, often through the dispersal of Bantu-speaking peoples. The homeland of the Bantu language may have been north of the forests of the Congo, but 1,700 years ago, speakers of Bantu had spread east to Lake Victoria in Tanzania and south to the Limpopo River, on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. During the next 500 years they crossed the Limpopo and, finding no tsetse flies, turned much of South Africa’s steppe land into cattle-herding country.

Bantu societies took millions of acres away from hunters and gatherers, driving them into refuge areas such as the Kalahari Desert. One reason for their success was that Bantu speakers not only lived in societies with clans but were also hierarchically organized under hereditary chiefs, making it nearly impossible for foragers to compete with them.

Some of the earliest hints of hereditary rank come from a twelfth-century cemetery at Sanga, near Lake Kisale in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the artifacts in the cemetery were fragments of iron bells, which, according to historian Andrew Roberts, have long been symbols of chiefly rank. Similar bells have been found at the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century chiefly center of Great Zimbabwe, an archaeological site that has lent its name to an entire nation.

The Sanga cemetery lies in the territory of a Bantu-speaking group called the Luba. This is significant because the historical legends of several other Bantu groups claim that they emigrated from Luba country to their present location.

One such group was the Bemba, a Bantu-speaking group occupying what is now Zambia. In 1933, when first visited by anthropologist Audrey Richards, the Bemba lived at 4,000 feet above sea level on the Tanganyika plateau, surrounded by Lakes Malawi, Mweru, Bangweolu, and Tanganyika. They grew finger millet
(Eleusine coracana),
sorghum or kaffir corn
(Sorghum bicolor),
a variety of legumes, and two crops imported from the New World: corn and pumpkins. Because Zambia has tsetse flies the Bemba were unable to raise cattle; however, the Bemba added protein to their diet by hunting and fishing. Bemba agriculture involved slash-and-burn cultivation on relatively poor soils, requiring villages to move every four to seven years while the old fields recovered. As a result, 140,000 Bemba needed a territory of more than 22,000 square miles.

The Bemba of that era were as impressive as the largest of the sixteenth-century Cauca Valley societies: all 140,000 citizens were ruled by a single paramount chief, or
chitimukulu.
The paramount lived at the
umusumba,
or chiefly village, which was both a secular capital and a ritual center. Boasting an estimated 150 to 400 households, it was the largest single settlement in Bemba territory and was supported by tribute so that the chief need not move.

The chitimukulu was at the apex of a political hierarchy. Below him were a series of
mfumu,
or district chiefs, each of whom was in charge of a district called an
icalo
. The district surrounding the paramount chief’s village needed no mfumu because it was administered by the paramount himself. Finally, at a level below the mfumu, there were subchiefs who controlled individual villages or small tracts of land. These subchiefs moved around within each district whenever old fields were left fallow.

As we have seen, rank societies that reckoned descent in the father’s line (or in both parents’ lines) had a variety of rules for the succession of chiefs. These rules could range from primogeniture (the firstborn son inherits the office) to ultimogeniture (the last-born son inherits). The Bemba were different: their chiefs were male, but they were chosen from a clan that reckoned descent in the mother’s line. Let us examine their system.

Each Bemba was born into his mother’s lineage, or “house.” Several such houses were, in turn, grouped into one of 30 matrilineal clans. In Bemba social logic a child was formed from the blood of a woman. Since a man could not pass on his blood, there was no continuity between father and child.

The 30 Bemba clans were ranked relative to one another, and a woman’s position within a lineage determined her rank. Like many societies described earlier in this book, the Bemba used the order in which each clan allegedly arrived in the area as justification for its rank. The Bemba told Richards that they had emigrated to Zambia from Luba country in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Such an origin, according to Richards, was supported by the fact that a number of words used by the Bemba chief during religious ritual were Luban words. This knowledge of Luban confirmed the priority of the chiefly clan’s arrival. Here, once again, we encounter the principle “We were here first.”

The Bemba in 1933

Each of the 30 Bemba clans studied by Richards took its name from an animal, a plant, or a natural phenomenon such as rain. The Crocodile clan was first in rank, providing both the paramount chief and the mfumus. The paramount chief was chosen from among the sons of the highest-ranking women of the Crocodile clan. His father played little role in the decision, since he was a member of a different clan and had simply had the good fortune to marry a Crocodile woman.

The paramount chief’s mother, or
candamukulu,
served on the high council of the Bemba and controlled several villages of her own. For their part, the paramount chief’s sisters were given their own villages and allowed to have sexual relations with as many men as they chose—even men of low rank, since any offspring that resulted would be credited to the elite woman’s blood.

The chitimukulu administered all of Bemba territory; he was not only a secular authority and a high judge but also a ritual expert. Many paramount chiefs-in-training served for years as mfumus, both to hone their administrative skills and to allow their performance to be evaluated. The chitimukulu was supposed to observe ritual taboos and remain virtuous and pure because the agricultural success of the Bemba depended upon his reservoir of life force. The chief was supported by tribute and could call upon his citizens for the kind of obligatory labor the French call
corvée.
He had the right to mutilate anyone who offended him. As a result, commoners were sometimes heard to say, “The Crocodile clan tears common people apart with their teeth.”

Chiefs were the offspring of elite mothers, but the Bemba also created fictional ties between a new chief and his male predecessors. Upon his inauguration the new chief inherited his predecessor’s title, insignia, rights, and duties. Eventually he became so identified with past chiefs—to the point of assuming their names and histories—that it became difficult to tell whether he was referring to events in his own life or the lives of his predecessors. He was aided in this process by assistants who memorized the oral histories of 25 to 30 former chitimukulus.

In the Bemba system elite brothers, half brothers, and cousins did not compete for leadership; rather, the women of the Crocodile clan competed to have their sons chosen, and there were cases of usurpation by district chiefs with ambitious mothers. Usurpers, of course, then had to rewrite history, claiming that they were somehow part of a long line whose privileges extended back to the first chitimukulu.

Upon his death the Bemba chief was treated in ways that remind us of funerals in Panama and Colombia. His corpse was desiccated for a year and then buried in a sacred grove with the bodies of sacrificial victims. The chief’s burial was supervised by a council of 30 to 40 elite elders known as the
babakilo.