The Political Development of West African Kingdoms

Abstract

SCHO LARS have long sought to identify the common characteristics of African kingdoms. Thus, over two decades ago Irstam plotted the distribution of the traits associated with divine kingship suggesting an origin of this institution in Ethiopia.2 Later, Murdock identified the African despotism of the sacred and near absolute monarch, living in a complex royal court.3 Oliver and Fage, too, trace the kingdoms of 'the Sudanic civilization' to a common source from which deployed a considerable fund of common political ideas.4 Nevertheless, the monographs on individual kingdoms display their great variety-in their political systems, in the values associated with kingship, in their scale and power. Of all parts of tropical Africa, kingdoms have existed longest and in greatest number in West Africa. The foundation of the empire of Ghana takes us back one and a half millennia; and the radio-carbon dating of the sites of the Igbo bronzes, found east of Onitsha in Eastern Nigeria, suggest that some form of kingship-perhaps more sacred than secular-existed in this part of the forest margins a thousand years ago. Yet the descriptions of West African states have excelled in quality rather than in quantity. The government anthropologists Rattray, Meek and Field have given us detailed and highly competent ethnographies.5 Nadel, with his study of the Nupe emirate, vividly demonstrated the complexity of its political organization at a time when most social anthropologists were interested primarily in societies of smaller scale.6 In recent years Smith, Jones and Lombard have given us descriptions and analyses of the growth and development of kingdoms which have, in their detail and perception, few equals elsewhere in Africa.7