The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (68 page)

While the king’s first two queens were expected to dominate all others in his harem, he was encouraged to form political alliances by marrying other noble women from neighboring groups. For their part, the princesses born to the Swazi king’s wives were given in marriage to allies, including both foreign rulers and the heads of Swazi clans other than the Dlamini.

The Swazi had no official state religion. They built no great temples to deities but did conduct rituals honoring their ancestors. Like the Zulu, the Swazi believed that their king had magical powers beyond those of ordinary men. Members of the royal family continually reinforced this belief by carrying out rituals that confirmed their magic. Swazi elites also worked hard to appear generous, confirming the fact that generosity remains a first principle even in monarchies.

Some Swazi commoners became wealthy by accumulating cattle, entering into politically advantageous marriages, or winning choice bureaucratic appointments. Such prominent commoners could mobilize their own large work parties, rewarding them with feasts and lavish amounts of beer.

Finally there were the
tifunjwa,
captives of war. The concept of slavery was foreign to the Swazi, but war captives presented to the king were often assigned as servants to his wives or his most renowned warriors. There were also children in Swazi society known as
tigcili,
whose fathers had been executed as evildoers. These children might be given to foster parents.

The Swazi Kingdom

Kuper was mainly concerned with the social organization of living Swazi, but she also collected information of use to archaeologists. For example, she diagrammed the administration of the Swazi kingdom and revealed that it had a hierarchy of four levels (
Figure 61
). It is worth noting that Kuper outlined the four-level organization of the Swazi state more than 30 years before archaeologists began to identify similar four-level state hierarchies in the ancient Near East.

At the apex of the Swazi hierarchy were the king and his mother. The king maintained two royal homesteads; he placed his mother in one and resided mainly in the other, thereby avoiding friction with her. The settlement where the queen mother lived was considered the capital of Swaziland. The settlement where the king spent most of his time was called “the king’s village.” These two settlements occupied Level 1 of the hierarchy.

Level 2 consisted of a series of “royal villages.” These settlements were occupied by the princes who oversaw the provinces of Swaziland. Each prince had power over only one province and was kept at a distance from the king to lessen the chance of usurpation. Level 3 and Level 4 settlements were found in every province, and a prince could reorganize his subjects as he saw fit.

FIGURE 61.
   The queen mother’s village was considered the capital of the Swazi kingdom. Her village, and the king’s, comprised Level 1 of the political hierarchy. Below them were royal villages (R), chiefs’ villages (C), and commoners’ homesteads. This drawing shows both the hierarchical arrangement of levels and the way settlements were spread out on the landscape.

Level 3 consisted of “chiefs’ villages,” of which each province had several. Each local chief reported to the prince of his region. In turn, he oversaw a series of
umuti,
or commoner homesteads.

Level 4 consisted of hundreds of these umuti, which were the basic building blocks of Swazi society. Each consisted of the residential compound of an extended family. The household head took multiple wives if he could afford to. His homestead usually consisted of a
sibaya,
or cattle corral; his
indlunkulu,
or “great hut”; the huts of his wives; and a
lilawu,
or bachelors’ quarters. There might also be a small hut for ritual activities. Each homestead’s grain supply was carefully hidden from outsiders.

Commoner homesteads averaged 7.2 occupants, while those of chiefs and princes averaged 22 to 23. Polygamy accounted for much of the difference. Some 60 percent of all married men could not afford a second wife, while King Sobhuza had 19 wives and 30 children in his compound.

Kuper’s sketch of the queen mother’s compound at Lobamba provided the template for our
Figure 62
. In Kuper’s day Lobamba’s population was only 265, providing a striking contrast to the huge cities seen in some ancient kingdoms.

The first structure created in any homestead was the cattle corral. The corral at Lobamba was the largest in Sobhuza’s kingdom, measuring 180 feet in diameter and facing east toward the rising sun. To either side of the corral were barracks for the senior age regiments of warriors who guarded the capital. A third barracks, filled with more junior warriors, was placed behind the experienced troops as a second line of defense. Protecting the rear of the homestead was a semicircle of more than 30 households, some of which belonged to men of high rank. This semicircle created a barrier that enemy raiders would have had to penetrate.

In the center of the homestead was an open yard called the
sibuya,
and here the indlunkulu and the sigodlo were built. The indlunkulu in this case was more than a “great hut”; it was actually a great walled enclosure consisting of 11 huts under the supervision of the queen mother. This enclosure included a ritual hut 15 feet in diameter, storage huts for meat and grain, and a platform for the drying of pumpkins.

The sigodlo was the harem for Sobhuza’s wives. This harem was deliberately located in the queen mother’s homestead, because one principle of Swazi behavior was that new wives were supposed to spend time serving their mothers-in-law. This was a departure from the old African hunter-gatherer principle, which required the groom to serve his mother-in-law.

FIGURE 62.
   Among the Swazi, the queen mother’s village was considered the capital of the kingdom. Its cattle corral alone was 180 feet in diameter. The queen mother occupied the
indlunkulu,
a walled enclosure containing 11 huts. The Swazi king’s harem was located nearby so his wives could attend the queen mother. The village was defended by warriors from several age regiments.

Flanking the great enclosure and the harem was an inner circle of huts occupied by men of high rank, whose nobility was acknowledged by allowing them to live near the queen mother. To the south lay the household of the chief civil official of the kingdom, the Swazi equivalent of a vizier. To the north lay the household of the military official in charge of age regiments.

Kuper’s work shows future archaeologists what a royal homestead at the capital should look like and what to expect to find at each level of the administrative hierarchy. But her potential contributions to archaeology did not end there. She also gave archaeologists a way to study inequality by describing differences in the way Swazi nobles, officials, and ordinary commoners were buried. One of Kuper’s discoveries was that the color symbolism of black oxen and goats figured prominently in burial ritual.

Let us begin with a typical commoner homestead. When the headman of such a homestead passed away, he was wrapped in the hide of a black ox and buried in the corral, accompanied by his personal possessions. His main wife was buried either at the entrance to the corral (if she were a native of that settlement) or at the back of the homestead (if she were from a different settlement). His junior wives were buried behind the huts they had occupied in life, accompanied by their personal belongings.

Swazi governmental officials, regardless of clan, were honored by being wrapped in a black ox hide and buried in a royal cave. The tinsila, bonded as they were to the king by transfer of blood, received special treatment. Were an insila to die before his king, the Swazi refused to treat him as a dead person, as this would be considered a threat to the king’s well-being. Such tinsila were buried quietly and privately, accompanied only by their personal possessions. Only after the king himself had died could an insila’s own relatives begin to mourn him.

As for the princes who ruled the Level 2 royal villages, they were wrapped in black ox hides and buried in one of several royal caves. A black goat was buried alive with each of them; the skeleton of this sacrificed animal would be an archaeological clue to the deceased’s high rank.

The queen mother was buried in the cattle corral of her homestead at the capital. She, too, was wrapped in a black ox hide. In addition, a sheep bladder was placed on her forehead, along with other symbolic insignia.

Finally we come to the Swazi king. His body was embalmed so that he could lie in state until spring. At that time he was wrapped in a black ox hide and buried in a special royal grove of trees, accompanied by his personal possessions and insignia of office. Before there were Europeans around to object, the king was buried not only with a live, black goat but also with a number of live men.

Kuper’s descriptions of the type of burial associated with the different ranks of Swazi society did not go unnoticed. An archaeology student named Arthur Saxe eventually wrote a doctoral dissertation on burial ritual that featured Kuper’s work. While Saxe’s dissertation was never published, it became an underground classic, and photocopies of it are still circulating among archaeologists.

There is no evidence that Kuper had any interest in archaeology, nor were there teams of archaeologists working on the origins of the Swazi state during her stay. This is a shame, because the potential for a wonderful collaboration was there.

The Nature of Swazi Inequality

Swazi society had an interesting mix of institutions, some of which had endured from an earlier era of chiefly society and others of which were more typical of kingdoms. Swazi society was organized as a series of ranked clans, which had not yet broken down as they had in many ancient states. The Swazi king controlled numerous homesteads whose occupants filled his storage huts with food, but he owned no private estates. Magic and witchcraft were widespread, but no land was set aside for high gods and temples.

Along with long-lived institutions such as lineages, clans, and ancestor rituals, the Swazi displayed some of the multiethnic aspects of an empire. Rulership was monopolized by the Dlamini clan, and other “true Swazi” clans were relied on to provide the tinsila and the ruler’s two principal queens. Ethnic groups already present in the region when the Swazi arrived were treated differently from ethnic latecomers such as the Sotho, Nguni, and Tonga.

In addition to the hereditary differences in Swazi society, commoners had ways of achieving renown. Some rose as military commanders and were rewarded with female captives or shares of plunder. Others managed to accumulate large herds of cattle. In both cases men of renown took as many wives as they could afford. Each aspired to be buried in the black ox hide that symbolized a man of substance.

Archaeologists sometimes infer that they have evidence for a chain reaction in which several kingdoms arose through competitive interaction and strategic marriage alliance. Often this inference cannot be confirmed with historic data. Fortunately, the chain reaction involving the Zulu, Swazi, Mthethwa, Ndwandwe, Sotho, and Nguni is historically well documented. It also shows us that a kingdom does not need settlements larger than 265 people to have the multilevel hierarchy of an archaic state.

THE RISE OF THE ASANTE

One of the most frequent scenarios for the rise of a second-generation state is for an outlying province to break the grip of its overlords and emerge as a monarchy in its own right. The irony of this scenario is that the rebellious province has usually acquired its knowledge of statecraft by studying those very overlords.

Once again, Africa provides us with a historic example. This time the story was played out on the Gold Coast of tropical West Africa, the region known today as Ghana.

Archaeologists are still not sure how many early kingdoms succeeded one another in West Africa. For the purposes of this chapter we need only go back to the eighth or ninth century
A.D.
By that time the residents of Igbo Ukwu, an archaeological site near the delta of the Niger River, had witnessed the burial of a man who was either a paramount chief or an early king. He was buried in the seated position in a wooden tomb, holding a fan or fly-whisk and wearing a copper crown, breastplate, beaded armbands, and copper anklets. His burial offerings included the tusks of several elephants.