Medicinal Rule

A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa

Koen Stroeken author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Berghahn Books

Published:7th Sep '18

Should be back in stock very soon

Medicinal Rule cover

As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.

“Koen Stroeken has developed an argument that is subtle and profound… [He] covers immense territory historically and geographically, but without sacrificing rigorous empiricism, deep ethnography, or conceptual sophistication.”• Journal of Anthropological Research

“Admirably clearly written… [the volume exhibits] high scholarship, methodological ingenuity, and sound use of history.”• David Parkin, University of Oxford

ISBN: 9781785339844

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

328 pages