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Much speculation has been devoted to the possible connexions between the different clusters of kingdoms in Africa. Scholars have been puzzled for over half a century by the similarities in organization and ideology between different African states. They have tried to explain them either as the product of the diffusion of a common pattern, the ‘Sudanic State’ or the ‘Sacral Kingship’, or by maintaining that similar functional needs led to parallel independent inventions in many different areas. In Central Africa the specific positions taken have been that the Katanga states diffused their model of government to the Lower Congo cluster, or, as I myself have claimed, that these were independent. Dittmer links the Lower Congo with Katanga, and derives the latter cluster itself from the interlacustrine and Ethiopian clusters
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969
References
1 Birmingham, D., Trade and Conflict in Angola (London, 1966), 8–10, is the most recent statement of this position.Google Scholar
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3 Much help was received from many authorities. We thank Messrs Alagoa, Vrijdagh, Wachsmann, Fielder, Hiernaux, Willett, Hartle, Shaw, Fagan, Anderson, Maesen, Laurenty, Isaacman, Schechter, Leroy-Vail and Lamm for new data. A complete presentation of the materials with the relevant documentation in full, which we think is necessary when distribution studies are made, and a full linguistic treatment, cannot be attempted here. A monograph is in preparation. Since it may be a year or even more before this is published, it seemed worth while to give the most general results now.
4 Wrigley, C., ‘Speculations on the economic prehistory of Africa’, J. Afr. Hist. I, no. 2. (1960), 201–3, stresses the spear.Google Scholar See Dittmer, K., Afrika Südlich der Sahara, 593–4,Google Scholar and Davidson, B., Old Africa Rediscovered (London, 1960), 82–3.Google Scholar
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24 Willett, F., Ife in the History of West African Sculpture (London), (1967), p. 117 plate 84, p. 148. The plate clearly shows a clapperbell which the author thinks represents a metal prototype.Google Scholar
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