Intertribal Hunting among the Rukuba

Abstract

A vast literature has been published on hunter-gatherer peoples; whereas comparatively few accounts have been devoted to the study of hunting practices among agriculturalists. This is quite understandable since hunting is generally, among agriculturalists, a pursuit which is not essential to the survival of the society and which, in many cases, is considered a sport rather than a necessary contribution to the diet. In such a setting hunting may be ideologically important and, in spite ofthe relatively little chance of bagging a significant amount of meat, a culturally highly valorized endeavor. Described here is the part played by hunting in Rukuba society and the way in which communal hunting, in the form of battues, culminates in recurrent annual hunts on given tracks of bush said to belong to one or the other tribe taking part in the hunts. I endeavor to find the reason or reasons for such invitations to tribes sometimes classified as enemies and which were on a head-taking basis when affrays arose. Another question to be addressed is why people so greedy for meat invite others to their hunting ground instead of trying to keep the game for themselves. The Rukuba number about 12,000 and their territorial center is about 25 miles northwest of Jos, the capital of Plateau State, Nigeria. They live in 24 villages, most of them surrounded by bush where the hunting takes place. Each village is headed by a chief and villages are geographically grouped into five sections (see Map 1); three of these sections are under a village chief who is head ofthe section and whose duties are to arbitrate in intrasection disputes and to open the rituals pertaining to his section. The two remaining sections have two head villages, one dealing with the most important rituals and the other arbitrating disputes arising between the villages belonging to the section. I call the former the head ritual village and the latter the head political village. Hunting enters into this scheme of subordination/superordination in a very significant way: the heads of several species of animals?and formerly human heads taken from enemies?must be brought to the head village of the section in the three sections having only one head village and to the political head of the sections having two head villages. The animals are the leopard, the dwarf buffalo, the bush pig, the hyena, and two species of antelopes that I could not positively identify, although from the heads and horns shown me they appear to be the roan antelope and the hippotrague. Anytime one of these is killed the village of the successful hunter stages a dance called kaship at home and, if the village is a subordinate village, the hunting party brings the head to the superordinate village of the section, regardless of where the animal has been killed (Muller 1980:293-298). Other animals of lesser size, the anteater (orycteropus afer), and several species of antelope including the hartebeest, only require a dance called aso, and their heads are retained by the chief of the hunter's village to be plastered on the walls of the village sacred hut (Muller 1977). But heads of big animals are not the only trophies to be similarly