 | How societies are born: governance in West Central Africa before 1600 Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years? Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history of African societies before European contact in How Societies Are Born. In this complement to his previous study Paths in the Rainforests, Vansina employs a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly focus to governance, studying the creation of relatively large societies extending beyond the foraging groups that characterized west central Africa from the beginning of human habitation to around 500 BCE, and the institutions that bridged their constituent local communities and made large-scale cooperation possible. The increasing reliance on cereal crops, iron tools, large herds of cattle, and overarching institutions such as corporate matrilineages and dispersed matriclans lead up to the developments treated in the second part of the book. From about 900 BCE until European contact, different societies chose different developmental paths. Interestingly, these proceeded well beyond environmental constraints and were characterized by "major differences in the subjects which enthralled people," whether these were cattle, initiations and social position, or "the splendors of sacralized leaders and the possibilities of participating in them." Belgium-born and educated, Jan Vansina is known internationally for his many contributions to social anthropology and to African history. Currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he received his Ph.D. in modern history from the University of Leuven in 1957, during which time he was a research scholar at the International Center for African Research in Belgium. That same year he became director of the center, a position he held for the next several years. After serving for some time as professor of history and anthropology, he joined the University of Wisconsin at Madison as the Vilas Research Professor. He has held concurrent positions as visiting lecturer at the University of Lovanium, Leopoldville, and at Northwestern University and as visiting professor and then professor at the University of Lovanium, Kinshasha. Vansina is one of the foremost pioneers in the development of techniques and methods in the history of culture that employ the use of oral traditions in the search for the African past. Although he was not the first scholar to use oral traditions in African history, he was the first scholar to evolve a rational methodology---one that has become the standard adopted by Africanists in many disciplines for using oral data. The evolution of Vansina's rational methods for the most effective use of oral traditions is reflected in his many publications, the most recent of which is Paths in the Rainforest: Towards a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (1990). In this work he has successfully resolved a question that has long perplexed historians of Africa---how the Bantu peoples passed from their origins in the Niger-Benue region through the great tropical rainforests of Zaire to the savanna lands to the south, where they proliferated throughout eastern, central, and southern Africa. (Bowker Author Biography) |
