African Political Systems.

Abstract

XV societies the actions which are thus repressed, and which are therefore, in those societies, crimes or pubhc delicts, are most commonly various forms of sacrilege, incest-which is itself generally conceived as a kind of sacrilege-^witchcraft, in the sense of the exercise of evil magic against members of the same community, and sometimes the crime of being a bad lot, i.e. habitually failing to observe the customs of the community.Dr. Wagner, in his essay on the Bantu Kavirondo, describes how offenders could be expelled from their group or could be put to death by what he speaks of as lynching, and writes^: ' Such group action in the face of threatened danger, taken spontaneously, i.e. without a hearing of the case and often on the spur of the moment, is clearly not the same as institutionalized jurisdiction of the tribal society through recognized judicial authorities.'But it seems highly likely that if such actions could have been carefully observed it would have been found that they were directed by leaders who had some measure of recognized authority.In the kingole of the Kamba and Kikuyu and in the injoget of the Kipsigis and Nandi, where individuals who had offended against the community were put to death or otherwise punished, this was done by an orderly procedure directed by men in authority .^My own view is that in collective actions of this kind, in which it may be said that the community judges and the community inflicts punishment, we may see the embryonic form of criminal PREFACE xxiii from the one previously existing.With a serious disturbance the process of readjustment may take a long time.A political system, as we have seen, involves a set of relations between territorial groups.How the study of this as an equilibrium system may be approached in African societies is illustrated in the last two essays of this book, on the Nuer and the Tallensi.Within the community, the political constitution must also be studied as an equilibrium system.Dr. Gluckman's essay on the Zulu shows how the former system of a balance between the power of the chief, on the one side, and public sentiment, on the other, has been replaced by one in which the chief has to maintain as best he can some sort of balance between the requirements of the European rulers and the wishes of his people.No attempt can be made to indicate the great variety of equilibrium situations that can be studied in the political systems of African peoples.It must suffice to draw attention to the need of studying political organizations from this point of view.In writings on political institutions there is a good deal of discussion about the nature and the origin of the State, which is usually represented as being an entity over and above the human individuals who make up a society, having as one of its attributes something called 'sovereignty', and sometimes spoken of as having a will (law being often defined as the will of the State) or as issuing commands.The State, in this sense, does not exist in the phenomenal world; it is a fiction of the philosophers.What does exist is an organization, i.e. a collection of individual human beings connected by a complex system of relations.Within that organization different individuals have different roles, and some are in possession of special power or authority, as chiefs or elders capable of giving commands which will be obeyed, as legislators or judges, and so on.There is no such thing as the power of the State; there are only, in reality, powers of individuals-kings, prime ministers, magistrates, policemen, party bosses, and voters.The political organization of a society is that aspect of the total organization which is concerned with the control and regulation of the use of physical force.This, it is suggested, provides, for an objective study of human societies by the methods of natural science, the most satisfactory definition of the special class of social phenomena to the investigation of which this book is a contribution.