How Competition to Attract Subjects Formed Precolonial Subsaharan States

“[T]he powers of the Dinka chief were weak … because rather than submit to his authority, dissident groups could move to a new territory if they were dissatisfied.” The freedom of movement that allowed such bands to leave their chief’s dominion granted precolonial Africans a degree of power to choose the polity to which they wished to belong. This choice placed pressure on political leaders to exert only that force to which their subjects might willingly acquiesce. The Dinka chief, for example, needed to satisfy the consumers of his governance and of the public services his state could provide.

In a similar fashion, according to Jeffrey Herbst, in the Fanti Confederation of southern Ghana needed “it was up to each king and chief to carry out the resolutions approved by the king president. Even then, the Fanti noted that their rule would be exercised over those who would join it rather than through extension of control via administrative fiat.” To the degree that the leaders of this Confederation had to sell their policies to local leaders, they acted somewhat as entrepreneurs who needed to take into account the preferences of their subjects. In this case, however, the state sought not the membership of a band of individuals or the business of merchants but the voluntary submission of local political leaders to the rules of membership in that polity.

This inquiry aims to explicate in what ways precolonial states faced the necessity of competing with one another to attract and retain their subjects’ loyalties. Specifically, how they promoted themselves above their competitors; and how this competitive pressure formed their political institutions and the role of the state in their societies. We break down this task by looking first at the various services precolonial Africans expected their leaders to provide. In doing this, we will apply an analog of the Tiebout competition model, by which states compete to attract residents through offering greater public services, to the various precolonial state-types, keeping in mind that the variety of state forms often made membership in a state non-exclusive. This will involve asking such questions as, “to what degree did chiefs or other political actors display entrepreneurial qualities?,” and “to what degree was citizenship in a particular state voluntary?” We will then consider how political leaders attracted the voluntary submission of smaller political entities into the fold of a greater state. The tools of attracting and retaining subordinate groups included the incentive of trade and the disincentive of violence that might be wielded against a body that chose not to pay tribute. Having laid out the generalities, we then analyze in more depth several cases of political communities that seem to have formed on some basis of consent and discover the incentives that may have lead their subjects to join or remain in such groups, and will then compare the nature and degree of force wielded by their leaders to that wielded by a state which relied primarily on violent coercion, and seek to discover the sources of their differing tactics. Groups considered will span time and distance, evidencing the commonality of this attitude toward the state. They will include the Nawuri, Gonja, and Fanti of Ghana, the Igbo of Nigeria, the Ndebele of Zimbabwe, the Bunyoro of Uganda, and some mention of the Basotho of Lesotho. I will ultimately argue that the expectation of enhanced service provision placed upon many tribal leaders developed because the radical mobility of both states and individuals placed a competitive pressure on leaders to offer such benefits as patronage to their followers. Political power therefore derived from a leader’s ability to offer those benefits which would attract skilled individuals and tributary clans into his dominion. Though this dynamic model of statecraft proved quite common, we will look also at particular elements of the Igbo and Ndebele societies that seem to contradict our model, and discover the cause of this discrepancy. Before doing this, however, we must ask, what are the universal expectations of a state?

Archeologist J. Cameron Monroe finds the organization of a state always marked in the archeological record by the development of “irrigation agriculture, metallurgy, monumental art and architecture, … iron technology, urbanism, … settled farming, [and] long-distance trade,” all the “classical indices of civilization and the state.” This is not to say that states typically organize the production of all these things directly, although sometimes that is the case, especially with agricultural and urban infrastructure. Rather, as Ghanan economist George Ayittey notes, “No tribal government enterprises existed” in precolonial Africa. Nonetheless, each of these elements of early infrastructure developed, if not by direct state action, then at least within the realm of peace created by the state. Some states coalesced explicitly for the purpose of creating shared infrastructure for their various constituent groups, like the Fanti Confederation in Ghana, which Herbst notes, needed “to create roads in order to give meaning to their confederation.” Precolonial “states underpinned specialization and trade; they terminated feuds; they provided peace and stability and the conditions for private investment; they formed public works. . . . In these ways,” noted political scientist Robert H. Bates, “the states secured prosperity for their citizens.” “Chiefs and kings,” Ayittey describes, “played little or no role in economic production. Their traditional role was to create a peaceful environment for trade and economic activity to flourish. No tribal government enterprises existed.” Even the minting of money fell to private enterprise. However, while no tribal government competed directly with private tradesmen, they did provide services such as the peacekeeping and infrastructure construction mentioned above. Thus, if they competed with each other in offering these services, then these states themselves could be considered enterprises of their own sort. Interestingly, these states offered uniquely-African services beyond those above, which are typical of states everywhere. When we return to the question of competition following a greater explication of the services provided by African states, we will first ask what conditions drove these states to offer such enhanced services, and then ultimately identify them as conditions of radical mobility.

In addition to maintaining peace, organizing infrastructure, and administering justice in the Ndebele society, for example, “the king … distributed the proceeds of tribute and of raiding.” These spoils sometimes included captives to be enslaved, especially in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries in which European demand for slaves provided significant economic incentive for African leaders to go on the hunt. “The slave trade and competition over resources had fueled many of the tribal wars in precolonial Africa. The abolition of the slave trade in the 1840s eliminated a major cause of war,” notes Ayittey. Leaders used force against outsiders to collect wealth such as slaves, cattle, or other mobile commodities, to distribute, in a clientelist manner, to the members of their own community. A leader would have been judged on his skill at providing value for his subject this way. Notes one author:

“The king and his chiefs were expected to be generous with food and productive resources. They were also expected to provide protection against enemies and drought. … [King] Mzilikazi was respected by his people mainly because of … his ability to seize cattle from his enemies for the benefit of the Ndebele. … The Ndebele king’s legitimacy was enhanced by judiciously distributing wealth to his people in consultation with other influential men in the state. The chiefs were also obliged to grant some material support to their subordinates. … Political power and economic wealth were interdependent. [Leaders] safeguarded their secular power through the strategic redistribution of cattle and land to their followers. The simple logic of clientage ensured that no one escaped accountability to the governed in the Ndebele political hierarchy.”

Leaders derived their authority from the value they could produce or appropriate from neighboring tribes through subjection and tribute or through raiding. Thus, in a sense, leaders purchased power over populations since that leader would more likely gain a following who could distribute the greatest wealth to his constituents. Beyond distributing patronage, the Ndebele also expected their leaders to conduct rituals to provide spiritual benefits and bring about good weather, among their other duties.

“The king assumed the role of a successful rain-maker, administering a system of grain production, distributing cattle, and heading a cult of ancestor worship. … The king became the ‘rainmaker in chief’ and ‘a collector of charms and medicines designed not only to secure rain but to protect the state against the machinations of its enemies.’ … [He] was no longer the absolute and arbitrary tyrant of “European travelers” tales.’ The king became involved more in ivory trade and spiritual satisfaction of his people.”

In all cases, the king fulfilled a role less like a figurehead or commander and more like a service-provider. He acted as a trader; a market participant, taking into account the interests of his clientage before making decisions.

The precolonial African state, though it wielded force against outsiders, ruled its own constituents more by persuasion than by violence. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, researcher of historical African politics, has sought, for example, to refute the “general belief that precolonial governance was nothing but a long night of savagery and violence within which the spear played a fundamental role” Rather, as regards the Igbo of Nigeria, James Africanus Horton wrote that they “cannot be driven to act … but with kindness they could be made to do anything, even to deny themselves of their comforts. … They would not, as a rule, allow anyone to act the superior over them, nor sway their conscience, by coercion, to the performance of any act, whether good or bad, when they have not the inclination to do so.’” The Igbo people held commanding heights above their rulers analogous to consumer sovereignty in the marketplace. Ayittey notes that “the clan was free to engage in whatever economic activity it chose. It did not line up before the chief’s palace for permission to engage in trade, fishing, or cloth-weaving.” Similarly, taking a “closer look at the governance styles of many Nguni pre-colonial societies tempts one to argue that pre-colonial leaders were more accountable for their actions than some present day African leaders.” For example, in Zimbabwe, Ndebele “kings were sympathetic to their subjects. They tried to ensure happiness for their people.”

“The Ndebele proverb inkosi yinkosi ngabantu (a king is king because of the people) provides an indication of the Ndebele understanding of the source of political power. They knew that power lay with the people, not the king. … By stating that it was the people who made the king, the Ndebele were claiming power for the people, reminding their leaders to rule according to the people’s will.”

Ndebele kings ruled according to people’s will perhaps because they knew that their failure to rule according to popular will would result in an exodus of their own subjects to greener pastures.

This was the case for the Nawuri of Ghana, who “left Larteh- Akuapem because [of]… a sense of insecurity generated by frequent dissensions in the fourteenth century, which caused a general exodus of some … peoples in search for new lands to settle. [Similarly,] In the seventeenth century, the Gonja arrived in Nawuriland, not as invaders, but as immigrants.” Tribal leadership predicated its competition to attract such immigrants on those groups’ freedom of movement. This service-provider monarch described earlier thus differed from the “protection” offered by European feudal lords for example, in that African peasants, unlike their European counterparts, had an exit option. One might even say continued residence in a community, given this exit option, signified the implicit consent at the heart of some interpretations of social contract theory. Even some skilled individuals benefited from this radical mobility inherent in Africa’s political geography, such as one group “distinct to Africa: itinerant blacksmiths.

Unlike in Eurasia, where heavy, immobile tools were used for forging from before Roman times until the modern day, simplified tools gave African blacksmiths the possibility of a nomadic life. Likewise, vast spaces outside the control of adjacent kingdoms and empires allowed smiths to be free of commitments to family groups or guilds, such as the Benin guilds. Consequently, many smiths traveled, carried what they needed, and could set up a forge in an afternoon.”

One author has identified “many small kingdoms [that] were largely founded by itinerant blacksmiths. The modern country of Angola gets its name from the word ngola, meaning sword or knife, referencing the Kuba’s smith-kings. … King Mbop was renowned for his iron work.”

This evidence shows that not only did consumers of public services benefit from the freedom of movement that came from Africa’s political geography, but so did their producers. Evidencing the entrepreneurial quality of public servants in a state of mobility, traveling blacksmiths offered a service we in the west assume must be offered by the state:

“The shape currency and tribute objects frequently took was that of knives or other weapons. This was because the same smiths who forged knives and swords also crafted money, right up until the last 100 years. One example of weapon shapes used in currency is the giant spear blade of the Topoke people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), … The Topoke and neighboring Mbugbu people used a form of iron throwing knife currency.”

Mobility moved many more public servants more than mere money-minters. Even those at the center of governance, patriarchs, chiefs, or kings exhibited entrepreneurial qualities of risking their reputation and wealth on the provision of services. This was noticeably the case in the Gonja society in Ghana. “The Gonja also claim that ablisaa [clan heads], who rendered good services were elevated to the rank of Mbowura (War Captain).” These services included road construction, which perhaps un-coincidentally, improved mobility. Early in the colonial experience, British administrators wanted to better relations with the tribes of Ghana by giving a special medal to their foremost leaders. “The Gonja [claimed] the award of the medallion to the paramount chief[s] of the Nawuri, … was given … not in recognition of their status as chiefs but for their meritorious services in respect of roadwork.” This expectation might make one questions nature of political leadership. Chiefs and other leaders, it seems, were not legislators and as such never changed the customs of their people, their unwritten laws, in response to competitive pressure. Rather, it was as administrators, judges, priests, and military commanders that leaders channeled their entrepreneurial qualities. For example, leaders sometimes staked their success on founding entirely new political bodies. Monroe highlights “the agency of indigenous political entrepreneurs in driving state formation across the continent” The nation of Lesotho, for example, had its origin in such an entrepreneurial endeavor. Lesotho “owes its existence to its founding king, Moshoeshoe, who in the early nineteenth century gathered together several disparate refugee populations — which became known as the Basotho people — and created a small enclave in the mountains.” Moshoeshoe later sought protection from the British against the Boers.

Let us now contrast this dynamic model of statecraft in which the exit option given to their subjects placed a competitive pressure on leaders that granted them political power in proportion with their ability to offer those benefits which would attract a following, with the traditional conception of the state more similar to the European model, in which the political leader and entrepreneur are irreconcilable positions. We do this to see where our dynamic model did not hold and ask why it failed there. The more familiar state model, known as the “organic state,” held prominence where people saw the citizenry and ethnicity as synonymous, as did the Ibgo of Nigeria. According to this origin story of the state,

“the township … is natural to man, and is always conscious of its independence. … In its purest form the autonomous community in Igboland is supposed to be composed of people with consanguinal relationship. In any case, in the pre-colonial period, … it was a moral, social, economic and political society which traced its origin or ancestry to a single, larger-than-life founding father.”

Ethnic exclusivity, an element of the organic state philosophy, posed a barrier to migration in what is now Nigeria, where

“many [Igbo] communities are called umu (children) of so and so. Anyone who does not belong to this true stock was regarded as a stranger even if he had lived in the community for a hundred years. The term stranger is used here advisedly to describe even a long time resident in a community who did not have all the full rights of citizenship.”

Unlike migration, which was conducted merely by consent, the Igbo restricted citizenship to its genealogical heirs. Igbo leaders, and those of other groups where this mindset prevailed, thus did not face pressure to attract new citizens per se, but merely new subjects.

“consanguinal relationship is a sina qua non for citizenship. Any Umunoha person who cannot trace his ancestry directly to Nnoha Okechi cannot aspire to be and will not be accepted as a true citizen of the town. Indeed, a citizen of Umunoha, even today, proudly describes himself as … ‘uterine child of Nnoha Okechi’ … He regards, often with contempt, non- Umunoha people as … ‘barbarians’.”

As a consequence of this sentiment, repatriates lost the ability to participate in the otherwise highly democratic Igbo government. The dynamic state model failed to hold in these respects among the Igbo of Nigeria, perhaps because their size of their community insulted many Igbo from significant contact with neighboring groups. Yet the dynamic model held in other respects. While Igbo cultural and ethnic hegemony prevented the total exit of whole clans or substates to other lands, it did not prevent an internal movement of power away from a centralized leader. “[T]he wise and effective Eze [king],” notes one Igbo expert, “always strove to reach a consensus on all matters and refrained from using a veto power which he knew could not be enforced if the representatives firmly were opposed to any policy.” The relationship between voluntary subject villages in a larger political entity consisted of a ruler of the larger entity who must entice the member substates to choose to go along with his propositions. Yet local leaders could essentially opt out of any particular policy, even when they could not exit the polity per se because of strong ethnic or cultural ties. In this confederation built on the ability for constituent communities to opt-out of the king’s decisions on what amount to a line-item basis, substates essentially possessed something akin to consumer sovereignty, much like the individual Igbo who would be moved never by force, but only by kindness.

The tendency for internal power to move away from a centralized leader unless he could persuade local leaders to voluntarily adopt his suggestions existed not only among the Igbo local leaders who would enforce only those rulings of the king with which they agreed, but also among the Bunyoro of what is today Uganda, who, rather than relocating their entire population, merely relocated their leader’s court within their state, to overlap with the sphere of neighboring groups with which they may have wished at any time to align. Monroe discovered, for example,

“The material pattern visible at sites in the Bunyoro- Kitara region [of modern-day Uganda], seems to reflect a fundamentally different political model, a corporate ideology in which elite power depended on public service and the accumulation of followers rather than symbolic displays of royal distinction. That power in the nineteenth-century kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara was multicentric, defined in terms of loosely integrated ritual centers and political capitals, attests to the long-term durability of corporate models of political authority in this region.”

The fact that power depended on public service and could be objectively measured by a leader’s wealth and following imposed a meritocratic standard upon those who sought power that required them to develop the arguably entrepreneurial skills of responsiveness to their “clientele,” and of salesmanship. While royal or noble titles sometimes passed in a hereditary manner, their possessors could not inherit power unearned. In the region of northern Zimbabwe beginning in the 1840s,

“Achievement or meritocracy was increasingly replacing ascriptive status in the Ndebele state. … the king was no longer able to exercise absolute power with this new development. Relatively strong subsidiary chiefs and headmen who maintained a great deal of independent wealth and power based on personal ownership of cattle and achievement had emerged.”

This meritocratic standard made power more participatory and thus presented a further check upon the power of the king. Regarding the Ndebele,

“The king had to listen to their views in order to keep in touch with the popular sentiments of his people. Chiefs of izigaba were initially appointed by the king especially during the inception of the state and the formation of specific izigaba as the state grew. Provincial chiefs, however, had to work hard to cultivate the allegiance of the people within the territorial area of their rule.”

The internal movement of power away from central rulers that placed pressure on those rulers to act in the interests of their constituent groups existed among both the Igbo and Ndebele, relatively large communities both in terms of land area and population. By contrast, the Nawuri of Ghana, given their minute size, (only 20,000 even today), could not likely have influenced the rulers of any large confederacy in this fashion. For that very reason, the Nawuri opposed the later move by British administrators to consolidate the Nawuri under the umbrella Gonja rule, one in which Gonja represented the vast majority of the population, and thus one in which the Nawuri lacked influence. Additionally, Nawuri and Gonja cultures and institutions such as regarded land ownership and the role of the chieftaincy diverged too significantly for the successful integration which would be necessary for the Nawuri to influence Gonja political culture. That homogeny of political institutions likely served the Igbo and Ndebele well by allowing small local communities to hold sway in the larger sphere. The Nawuri, be caused they lacked both the size and the political culture of their neighbors and thus could not participate in a voluntary confederation, instead exercised the power of wholesale exit.

The small population under the Nawuri chieftaincy, like that of Lesotho, certainly contributed to its mobility, and thus its ability to respond to competitive pressures. Entire states of this size could relocate intact. For example, the fact that “chieftaincy among [the Nawuri] was established as a political institution in their original home in Larteh-Akuapem in southern Ghana long before their arrival in Nawuriland,” implies this possibility. This possibility gave whole substates the power of exit. “Bunyoro-Kitara, characterized by peripatetic capitals that integrated rural communities in reference to ritual suzerainty, as a prime example of the segmentary state in Africa.” The ability of leaders themselves to utilize freedom of movement facilitated voluntary suzerainty, a scenario in which a state could relocate its capital or court to within the sphere of another state, to become a substate. The region of Bunyoro-Kitara has maintained that relationship with Uganda until today. Some states, like that which would become Lesotho, voluntarily chose to become a substate of a European colonist state. For example, the preamble of a treaty with Nawuri leaders reads: ‘the King, Chiefs and Principal Headmen of Nadawle, having declared that they have not made any treaty with any other Power, do hereby voluntarily place their country under the protection of Great Britain.’”

Ironically, by choosing to enter into voluntary suzerainty with the European powers, dynamic African polities set up the conditions of their own erosion and ultimate incorporation into the European state model when the application of Westphalian-style borders ended the mobility that formed this dynamic model of statecraft.

“In re-drawing the administrative boundaries of the Northern Territories for the effective implementation of indirect rule, the colonial administrators amalgamated the so-called tiny societies with the bigger ones for the purpose of eliminating the problem of plurality of traditional states. The essence of the amalgamation policy was to rationalize existing social and political structures for administrative purposes. It aimed at maintaining the paramount chiefs of the Mole-Dagbani and the Gonja and absorbing the small communities scattered about under them. The objective was to ensure that the Mole-Dagbani and Gonja states should become strong native states, each with its own system of government of the European model.”

The Nawuri given their still-small size, likely would have opted again to entirely relocate rather than acquiesce to Gonja rule had the imposition of Westphalian-style borders not obstructed this strategy. The British administration could likely have better patrolled the borders of a small country like Ghana, unlike many larger African nations between which colonial borders existed in name only, in order to enforce this restriction of mobility. Precolonial expectations of special services from the chieftaincy continued, to a degree, under British indirect rule despite barriers erected to mobility and despite the relief of pressure on chiefs to be service providers as that load was taken off of them by colonial administrators who took more of a role in implementing infrastructure projects and administering justice. That many groups under colonial rule such as the Gonja still expected the same services like road construction from their chiefs, probably resulted more from tradition, which had historically been formed by competitive pressure, then from the actual application of such pressure in the present. Where only indirect colonial rule had been practiced, the dynamic state model faded by the period of independence and its wave of nationalism. By immobilizing African polities, colonialism promoted the conception of the organic state above that of the dynamic state, thus strengthening the belief in ethno-nationalist exclusivity. Ndlovu-Gatsheni notes that

“colonialism bifurcated colonial populations into citizens and subjects. This became the beginning of hierarchized citizenship determined by race… Colonialism ossified Africans’ identities into rigid ethnic groupings and sealed these through legal coding. This created many problems for Africa. In the first place it meant that African nationalism developed as ethnic consciousness. In the second place, it created the intractable problem of the ‘native’ and the ‘settler’ which is sometimes termed the national question.”

Ndlovu-Gatsheni finds that presidential incumbency, life-presidencies, and unaccountable governance are ‘invented traditions’ of African nationalists and other post-colonial authoritarians. Rather, he argues, precolonial African governance tended to be accountable and its positions filled temporarily and for relatively brief periods. Before the colonial application of the nation-state model to Africa, the expectation of enhanced service provision developed because the radical mobility of both states and individuals placed a competitive pressure on leaders to offer the benefits of patronage to their followers. Political power therefore derived from a leader’s ability to offer those benefits which would attract subjects clans into his dominion.

Bibliography:

Ayittey, George B. N. 2011. “Indigenous African Free-Market Liberalism.” Freeman: Ideas On Liberty 61, no. 7: 15. Points of View Reference Center.

Herbst, Jeffrey Ira. 2014. States and power in Africa: comparative lessons in authority and control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mbowura, Cletus K.1. 2013. “CONSTRUCTING THE HISTORICITY OF CHIEFTAINCY AMONG THE NAWURI OF NORTHERN GHANA.” Contemporary Journal Of African Studies 1, no. 2: 21–44. Humanities Source.

Mogel, Joseph, and Jonathan Moore. “Fire, Swords, and Magic.” American Mensa. January 08, 2018. www.us.mensa.org/read/bulletin/features/fire-swords-and-magic/.

Monroe, J. Cameron. 8. 23. 2013. “Power and Agency in Precolonial African States.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1: 17–35.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 2008. “Who Ruled by the Spear? Rethinking the Form of Governance in the Ndebele State.” African Studies Quarterly, Fall, 10, no. 2 & 3: 71–94.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 12. 2008. “Inkosi Yinkosi Ngabantu: An Interrogation of Governance in Precolonial Africa — the Case of the Ndebele of Zimbabwe.” Southern African Humanities 20: 375–97.

Uzoigwe, Godfrey N.1. 2004. “EVOLUTION AND RELEVANCE OF AUTONOMOUS COMMUNITIES IN PRECOLONIAL IGBOLAND.” Journal Of Third World Studies 21, no. 1: 139–150. Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson).