Medicine and Kingship

Despite a vast and recently reinvigorated body of research, a glaring lacuna remains in the literature on African chief- and kingship. Exogenous sociostructural explanations (Vansina) and the universalist concept of sacred kingship (de Heusch) disregard the endogenous regional process of political centralization. This article proposes a corrected structuralism as a method to detect in cultural processes their endogenous basis, or “tensor”: a syntagm paradigmatically “stretched” in time and space. Ethnographic fieldwork in east and central Africa reveals that both chieftaincy and status acquisition revolve around medicine, not governance. The tensor of medicine combines two sacrificial practices, divination and initiation, and two gift-oriented practices, magic and association. In terms of this tensor, kingship is a freak development, violating the democratic principle of medicine. Ethnographic comparison confirms that kings split the tensor by privileging the binding logic of gifts at the expense of divination and initiation, which control the chief’s power. In contrast, the colonial impact on centralization is a collapsed tensor, banning the mixed political-religious practices of magic and divination in favor of a religiously legitimated political hierarchy. Tensor dynamics bring out pivots of meaning that shake the European default model of the polity.