The sacral king in Africa

Abstract

Not a few students have with varying success tried to penetrate the baffling and almost inconceivable veil of mystery that hedges round the sacral kings in Africa. It may be that each individual investigator has too one-sidedly grappled with the problem and only seen some detail or other; here and there attempts have been made to follow up some particular theory and to establish it with but little regard to evidential material; while in single cases (e. g. Roheim) inadequate elementary knowledge was the rock upon which the attempt was wrecked. Different schools oppose each other. Evolutionism is represented by Frazer, and culture-historical trends by students like Frobenius, W. Schmidt, Schebesta, Spannaus, Baumann and Schilde. Apart from these there arose under the leadership of Seligman a school followed, among others, by Brauer, Driberg and Wieschhoff. This school maintains that the complex of customs that is generally summed up under the name of sacral kingship has been imported into Africa from the Near East by means of (ancient) Hamitic immigration, and consequently constitutes an Hamitic culture element in Africa. About this, these latter decades opinions have been much divided, and discussions have at times been very heated. In his doctoral treatise, »The King of Ganda» (The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden, New Series, publication No. 8, Lund 1944), T. Irstam gives with regard to Africa special attention to the valuable results that Widengren and Engnell have published in their fundamental studies of the sacral kingship in the Near East and Egypt. After having thouroughly scrutinized the African material and carefully gone through the