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Myth and/or History: a Reply to Christopher Wrigley

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Matthew Schoffeleers
Matthew Schoffeleers
Affiliation:
Free University, Amsterdam
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Extract

Christopher Wrigley's objections, in ‘The River God’, to my historical interpretation of some Mbona stories do not differ substantially from those of Luc de Heusch against Vansina. In essence, the allegation is that the historical information I think can be derived from those stories finds little support in the historical facts insofar as they are known to us. Or, put somewhat more mildly, even if my historical interpretation of the Mbona stories were correct, there is no way to ‘prove’ its correctness, not even to the lawyer's standard, ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, that Wrigley claims for his own exegesis. More concretely, he holds with M. D. D. Newitt, my earlier discussion partner, that there is little or no evidence for the existence of a Lundu kingdom at the time of the Zimba raids, just before A.D. 1600. He further maintains that the few seventeenth-century references known to us do not suggest that the Lundus were different in kind from other regional power-holders, whereas I claimed — and still claim — that between the 1580s and 1622 the Lundus managed — initially with the help of the Zimba — to organize a state system, which differed from neighbouring systems in that it was considerably more centralized and repressive.

Type
Myth and History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , November 1988 , pp. 385 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 de Heusch, Luc, Le Roi ivre ou l'origine de l'itat (Paris 1972);Google ScholarEng. trans. Willis, Roy, The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State (Bloomington: 1982).Google Scholar Also: de Heusch, Luc, ‘What shall we do with the Drunken King?’, Africa, 4 (1975), 363–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Newitt's, M. D. D. reply to M. Schoffeleers, J. Afr. Hist., XXIX, 3 (1987), 272.Google Scholar

3 Schoffeleers, M., ‘Oral history and the retrieval of the distant past: on the use of legendary chronicles as sources of historical information’, in van Binsbergen, W. and Schoffeleers, M. (eds.), Theoretical Explorations in African Religion (London, 1985), 164–88.Google ScholarWillis, Roy, A State in the Making. Myth, History and Social Transformation in Pre-Colonial Ufipa (Bloomington, 1981).Google Scholar

4 ‘The interaction between the Mbona cult and Christianity’, in Ranger, T. O. and Weller, J. (eds.), Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa (London, 1975), 14–29;Google Scholar‘Cult idioms and the dialectics of a region’, in Werbner, R. (ed.), Regional Cults (A.S.A. Monograph no. 16; London, 1977),Google Scholar and ‘Economic change and religious polarization in an African rural district’, in Beinart, W. et al. , Malawi — An Alternative Pattern of Development (Edinburgh, 1985), 187–242.Google Scholar

5 See Schoffeleers, M. (ed.), Guardians of the Land (Gwelo, 1979), 146. Guardians contains ten case histories from Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi by different authors, which are relevant to my argument.Google Scholar

6 ‘M'bona the guardian-spirit of the Mang'anja’ (unpublished B.Litt. thesis, Oxford, 1966).Google Scholar

7 Schoffeleers, M., reviews of de Heusch, The Drunken King and Rois nés d'un cur de vache, in Anthropos, LXXVIII (1983), 587–9 and 589–91.Google Scholar

8 Wrigley, C. C., ‘Myths of the Savanna’, J. Afr. Hist., xv, 1 (1974), 131–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Review by Peel, J. D. Y. of van Binsbergen and Schoffeleers, Theoretical Explorations, in Africa, LVII, 3 (1987), 400–1. The essay referred to is ‘Oral history and the retrieval of the distant past’.Google Scholar

10 At one point Wrigley asserts that the Lundus have no dynastic traditions of the timedepth I claim for some of the Mbona stories. This is not altogether correct, since such traditions do exist, one of them being the ‘court version’ of Mbona's biography, summarized in Wrigley's paper, which is not, as he seems to think, a charter myth of the cult but a charter myth of the court. That the latter myth contains extensive information on the origin of the cult only seems to confirm my point that the two histories are intimately connected. However, more material on the early history of the Lundu dynasty may be found in the Rangeley Papers held by the Society of Malawi (File 2/1/17 ‘Port Herald and Chikwawa Notes ‘), and in the oral records section of the Department of Antiquities (File CK/3 ‘Chief Lundu the Paramount’).Google Scholar

11 As regards Tundu being transformed into Mbona's mother, I do not really understand Wrigley's argument. Saying, as he does, that changes of gender are common in African theology, supports rather than destroys my argument, because this is precisely what is being done. It is entirely immaterial whether the person whose gender is changed was once a real human being or not.Google Scholar

12 Newitt, M. D. D., ‘The Early History of the Maravi’, J. Afr. Hist., XXIII, 2 (1982), 152.Google Scholar

13 See Schebesta, Paul, Portugals Konquistamission in Südost-Afrika (St Augustin, 1966), 194–7.Google Scholar

14 The text of this particular tradition is to be found in Schoffeleers, J. M., ‘The story of Mbona the martyr’, in Schefold, R. et al. (eds.), Man, Meaning and History (The Hague 1980), 246–66.Google Scholar The Santos text referred to is to be found in Theal, G. M. (ed.), Records of South-East Africa, vol. 3 (London 1899), 292. For a discussion of the congruence of the two texts, see Schoffeleers, ‘The Zimba and the Lundu state’.Google Scholar

15 Alpers, Edward A., Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (London, 1975), 46–58.Google Scholar

16 Schoffeleers, J. M., ‘The history and political role of the Mbona cult among the Mang'anja’, in Ranger, T. O. and Kimambo, Isaria (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion (London, 1972), 89.Google Scholar