¹ The lineage mode of production was proposed by Rey, P-P., Colonialisme, néocolonialisme et transition au capitalisme: exemple de la Comilog au Congo Brazzaville (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar, on the basis of Congo ethnography. By the late 1970s it was being used to analyze groups as different from the Punu as Southern African pastoralists, e.g. Guy, Jeff, ‘Ecological factors in the rise of Shaka and the Zulu kingdom’, in Marks, S. and Atmore, A. (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980), 102–19Google Scholar. The concept of wealth-in-people (with or without hyphens) seems to have been first used by Miers, S. and Kopytoff, I. (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977)Google Scholar. It was applied to the Kpelle by Bledsoe, C., Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society (Stanford, 1980)Google Scholar, and brought back again to Equatorial Africa in the works of Miller, J., Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, 1988)Google Scholar, and Vansina, J., Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar. It has recently been used by Vaughan, M. and Moore, H., Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (Portsmouth NH, 1994), with respect to the Bemba.Google Scholar

² Bohannan's, P. seminal article on spheres of exchange among the Tiv, ‘Some principles of exchange and investment among the Tiv’, American Anthropologist, LVII (1955) 60–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, places women at the top of the hierarchy of value. In his definitive work on the Bene of Southern Cameroon, Laburthe-Tolra begins his chapter on the economy with an indigenous proverb: ‘If you hear wealth it means people’; Laburthe-Tolra, P., Minlaaba (Paris, 1977), 495.Google Scholar

³ Vansina, , Paths.Google Scholar

⁴ These thoughts are largely stimulated by Vansina's synthesis of the Equatorial history and ethnography, which both highlights the issues and also provides us – in his unification of the entire area as a single ‘tradition’ – with a rationale and excuse for using varied cases for inspiration without immediately falling into an inextricable tangle of ethnographic and historical localism. His own boldness in suggesting that there are common themes amongst the variations and innovations of Equatorial social history, of which wealth-in-people is one, gives the rest of us a window of opportunity for the kinds of speculation we pursue here.

⁵ Ibid. 251.

⁶ Ibid. 263.

⁷ Ibid. 257.

⁸ Ibid. 89, 255, emphasis added.

⁹ Evans-Pritchard, for example, never saw a leopard-skin chief mediation, nor major warfare, although both of these figure centrally in his path-breaking study of the Nuer political system. Of the leopard-skin chief he emphasised, ‘I repeat that I have not seen this method employed…’; Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, 1940), 164Google Scholar. His detailed descriptions of groups mobilized for warfare and feuding come entirely from oral history and not from ethnography.

¹⁰ There is always a problem in designating the ‘ethnicity’ of the groups that constitute a contiguous cluster in Southern Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea and that speak mutually intelligible dialects of the same language. Each sub-group in a ramifying segmentation has its own marked characteristics. The famous Fang reliquaries, for example, were not made outside a particular region, and styles of performance were said to have specific origins. So, for accuracy's sake, references to groups from here onwards will refer to the relevant sub-groups. The entire cluster is part of the ‘Equatorial Tradition’ as defined by Vansina, , Paths.Google Scholar

¹¹ See Guyer, J. I., ‘Wealth in people and self-realization in Equatorial Africa’, Man, (n.s.) XXVIII (1993), 243–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kopytoff's, I. model of the ‘African frontier’, in Kopytoff, (ed.), The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington, 1987)Google Scholar, is influential here but overstates the conservatism of new community formation to a fairly extreme degree. Not only do some of the papers in the collection suggest social innovation, but by holding the history of material life constant he fails to incorporate the extremely rapid growth in knowledge, of cultigens and monies in particular.

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¹⁵ His name may also relate to the word akom, meaning the essence, the nature of something; Tsala, T., Dictionnaire Ewondo-Français (Lyon, 1956), 41.Google Scholar

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¹⁸ We have to remain aware that this is a single performance and not a total repertoire; in the larger repertoire of mvet narratives there are stories in which women play a much larger role.

¹⁹ These names refer to an abbreviated genealogy of about thirty generations. Ekan is the closest ancestor to the present population, Nna is the ancestor of the Ekan, and Mebe'e is the divinity.

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