Myth and/or History: a Reply to Christopher Wrigley

Abstract

Christopher Wrigley's objections, in ‘The River God’, to my historical interpretation of some Mbona stories do not differ substantially from those of Luc de Heusch against Vansina. In essence, the allegation is that the historical information I think can be derived from those stories finds little support in the historical facts insofar as they are known to us. Or, put somewhat more mildly, even if my historical interpretation of the Mbona stories were correct, there is no way to ‘prove’ its correctness, not even to the lawyer's standard, ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, that Wrigley claims for his own exegesis. More concretely, he holds with M. D. D. Newitt, my earlier discussion partner, that there is little or no evidence for the existence of a Lundu kingdom at the time of the Zimba raids, just before A.D. 1600. He further maintains that the few seventeenth-century references known to us do not suggest that the Lundus were different in kind from other regional power-holders, whereas I claimed — and still claim — that between the 1580s and 1622 the Lundus managed — initially with the help of the Zimba — to organize a state system, which differed from neighbouring systems in that it was considerably more centralized and repressive.