IT MAY BE SOME WHILE YET BEFORE WE HAVE A UNIVERSAL HISTORY nourished by all the new knowledge of the last fifty years, so that the particular structures and institutions of Africa or Europe, or any other major region, may be considered systematically as variations upon common themes. At least we are approaching this kind of world synthesis. Time has worked inversely on the essential differences and distances between ‘them’ and ‘us’: the more the facts pile up, the smaller do these differences and distances appear.

They did not always appear great. During their early years of discovery along the African seaboard, the Portuguese thought they had come upon kingdoms very like their own. Were they, after all, so much mistaken? The king of Portugal was astray in thinking that his royal friend and brother of Kongo stood at the apex of an aristocratic hierarchy like his own. All those prestigious titles recommended in the regitnento sent from Lisbon to the Mani-Kongo in 1512, with its princes and dukes and counts and marquises, derived from a social stratification of a depth and nature not present in Africa. Yet it can now be seen that the chief stratification of feudalism—the distinction between lord and vassal, or patron and client—had its clear development in Africa as well as Europe. If the forms of these relationships were extremely different, being shaped by sharply divergent systems of power, their content—what Bloch has called ‘the ties of dependence’— were sometimes remarkably alike. The concept of kingship shows this. So does the relationship of patron and client.

It shows this, moreover, in cases where no external influences came in to move the wheels of change. Further on I am going to look at the consequences of external influence: of the trans-Saharan trade and Islam, of the Atlantic trade and Christianity, as well as of the influence of interregional borrowing and reaction. Here I want to consider briefly a series of kingdoms which emerged in the hill country of east-central Africa, and did so in apparently complete isolation from factors external to the region.