Unity Through Competition and Its End

The pervasiveness of conflict or, at least, of sharp competition, which was sometimes difficult to differentiate, between the two sections continued in a variety of forms for roughly three decades after the end of World War II. It was mainly in competition that the whole community came together. The important joint prayer on Friday was no more, but the men's dances, dirigi and, especially, tware, exhibited and affirmed some of the most prized values for men in the context of a competitive unity. The other competitions and oppositional joint appearances did not have the dignity and value-heavy significance for community coherence that tware had and the joint prayer had had, but they did bring community members together in actively functioning alignments that took in all parts of the group.

These sorts of activities, however, received a serious blow from a single, dramatic event in the early 1940s when the long-standing contests between sectionally based women's dancing groups escalated into street fighting involving the police (ibid., 177–181). This happened in some part because of changes in the women's understandings of what limits there were on their public behavior. Particularly at issue was the extent to which they were willing to be guided by the understandings men (i.e., their husbands, fathers, and brothers) had of how they should behave, especially how they could express themselves publicly.

The most prestigious men in the community had always looked on the women's societies as unacceptable expressions of tendencies in the community that they deplored: the public appearance of women, direct and open attacks on the private lives of community members, and the participation of waungwana and the descendants of slaves in common groups. They opposed the latter because the women's organizations did not practice the exclusion of those of other than "noble" birth as the men's dances did.

The riot shocked both men and women, but it did not surprise the senior men—or so some of them told me—who deplored the women's organizations and their activities from the outset. The most important consequence of the excesses of the women's dancing competitions for the future of the community was the unfavorable light it cast on all competitions, including the traditional ones between sections.

The women's riot led directly, informants have told me, to the abandon-

ment by members of the Twelve Tribes community of this whole type of competition. This is an exaggeration since, in fact, the men's dances, card games, and such went on for as long as two decades after the riot, and some of the boys' soccer teams are still sectionally based.^[6] Nevertheless, it is probably true that the riot gave all competition a more worrisome connotation. It is a matter of fact that the experience is cited forty-five years later as an example of the foolishness and danger of competition, especially between women, given the widely shared understanding that they are uncontrollably emotional.^[7]