Reconciling Lineage and Trade in Precolonial Kongo Society

In the setting of the ancient Lemba cult of affliction in Lower Zaire, the local lineage was challenged to come to grips with the mercantile wealth of the great trade with the coast without having its egalitarian ethos shattered. I have suggested, in chapter 1 of the present work and elsewhere (1982:70–79), that this was possible through the judicious creation of alliances between lineages, which forged links across the countryside along the trade routes, and through adequate exchange and distribution within these nodes of society, thereby assuring that Lemba members could safely travel from market to market, and to the coast with their caravans.

The demographic profile of coastal Kongo society during the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, during which Lemba existed, is known to have suffered from an overall decline of about 50 percent of what it had been in the sixteenth century (Sautter 1966:2–71). An objective assessment of the factors involved in this would include not only the slave trade, which drew the best young adults out of the society, but the compounding influences of societal breakdown resulting from raids and epidemics.

Lemba initiation rituals approached these conditions at several levels. One was the divination and treatment of specific symptoms and signs related to the fear of subordinates' envy. However, a more important criterion of the initiates' acceptance was their ability to pay for the final stages of the initiation rite, the "graduation," whether with their own or their lineage's patronage. Effectively, Lemba was a cult of affliction of the elite households of north bank Congo River society, in the face of the disintegrative forces of the mercantile trade with the coast.

The social structural particulars of this arrangement are well known. Of strategic significance in the whole Lemba scheme of social reproduction was the Lemba household, which brought together two types of

groups. One was the alliance that linked major landowning freeholder lineages in adjacent communities; the second was the alliance that bonded such freeholder lineages with client lineage fragments. In the first instance, the marriage tended to be of the patrilateral, cross-cousin type between lineages of equal status, between whom equal exchange marked successive marriages of this type. In the second setting, they were often, from the perspective of the marrying male in the dominant lineage, matrilateral cross-cousin marriages. This pattern expressed the unequal exchange between the two lineages, serving nevertheless to weld the community of several exogamous lineages together in a hierarchic local society. The Lemba marriages between freeholders assured a regional network for the trade and peaceful relations in a region where no historic state extended its hegemony. The Lemba marriages between unequal—master and client, or slave—lineages enhanced the local community by enlarging its population and political base. Indeed, the rhetoric of Lemba stated that the lineage in possession of Lemba "could not die out."

In these two ways Lemba helped to socially reproduce the society in the face of the centrifugal forces unleashed by the coastal trade from 1600 on, economic divisions within lineages, slave raids, feuds and wars, and epidemics. We have no way of knowing whether Lemba diminished the episodes of fear of envy by subordinates, either through protective medicine or through redistribution of goods and food. However, it is clear, and north Kongo informants stress, that Lemba was usually an important deterrent to local feuds and thus averted the bloodshed, loss of property through burned houses, and chaos that otherwise resulted from local wars. In this sense Lemba did have a measurable effect on the well-being of the region where it was implanted.

We have only glimpses of the numbers of individuals in a region involved in Lemba. In terms of the percentages of marriages that might have been "Lemba marriages," extrapolating from historical data in the village on which I have such records, it appears that less than 5 percent were involved. Yet as the elite, they were influential, and the impact of Lemba was considerable.