Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2xdlg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-04T03:49:24.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Blood brotherhood revisited: kinship, relationship, and the body in East and Central Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

Luise White
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This article is a reinterpretation of blood brotherhood in three East African societies based on a reading of three ethnographic accounts, Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, Roscoe on the Baganda and Beidelman on the Kaguru. It argues against a construction of blood brotherhood as a single institution with one meaning, suggesting instead that the blood pact should be seen as a mechanism by which men formed ties of filiation with other men, in part on the basis of the kinds of relationships they idealised. In this way, blood was sometimes a magical substance and sometimes a fluid of reproductive power. This article suggests that scholars should look not only at the fluid of the blood pact but also at the part of the body from which blood is taken, in order to see the kinds of relationships men sought to establish with one another. Thus when the blood of blood brotherhood was taken from near the navel, or the chest, it suggested the intimacy of uterine ties, or the closeness of infant and nursing mother. When blood was mediated by cooked meat, it suggested a dilution of the power of blood and its association with the fluids of biological relationship.

Résumé

Cet article est une réinterprétation de la fraternité de sang dans trois sociétés de l'Afrique de l'est basée sur une lecture de 3 compte-rendus ethnographiques, celui d'Evans-Pritchard sur les Azande, Roscoe sur les Baganda et Beidelman sur les Kaguru. Cet article argumente contre une construction de la fraternité de sang comme seule institution avec un seul sens, suggérant a la place que le pacte du sang devrait être considéré comme un mécanisme par lequel les hommes forment des liens de filiation avec d'autres hommes, en partie sur la base du genre de relations qu'ils idéalisaient. De cette façon le sang était quelquefois une substance magique et d'autres fois un fluide de pouvoir reproductif. Cet article suggère que les érudits devraient non seulement regarder le fluide du pacte de sang mais aussi la partie du corps d'où le sang en est pris afin de voir les types de relations que les hommes cherchent à établir les uns avec les autres. Done quand le sang de la fraternité de sang était pris près du nombril ou de la poitrine, cela suggerait l'intimité des liens utérins ou l'intimité de l'enfant avec la mere nourricière.

Quand le sang provenait de la viande cuite, cela suggérait une dilution du pouvoir du sang et de ses associations avec les fluides des relations biologiques.

Type
Liquid Assets
Information
Africa , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 359 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ambler, C. 1988. Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism: the Central Region in the late nineteenth century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bamunoba, Y. K. 1964. ‘Blood brotherhood in Ankole’, Uganda Journal 28 (2), 217–18.Google Scholar
Beattie, J. M. H. 1958. ‘The blood pact in Bunyoro’, African Studies 17 (4), 198–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beidelman, T. O. 1963. ‘The blood covenant and the concept of blood in Ukaguru’, Africa 33 (4), 321–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beidelman, T. O. 1986. Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Chanock, M. 1982. ‘Making customary law: men, women, and courts in colonial Northern Rhodesia’, in Hay, M. J. and Wright, M. (eds.), African Women and the Law: historical perspectives, pp. 53–67. Boston University Papers on Africa 7. Boston, Mass.: African Studies Center.Google Scholar
Cordell, D. 1979. ‘Blood partnership in theory and practice: the expansion of Muslim power in Dar al-Kuti’, Journal of African History 20 (3), 374–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elam, Y. 1974. ‘Fighting of the bulls as symbolic expression of divisions in the Hima camp’, Africa 44 (2), 136–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1933. ‘Zande blood brotherhood’, Africa 6 (4), 369–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1970. ‘Sexual inversion among the Azande’, American Anthropologist 72 (4), 1428–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1973. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press (abridged from the 1937 edition).Google Scholar
Feierman, S. 1974. The Shambaa Kingdom. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Feierman, S. 1990. Peasant Intellectuals: anthropology and history in Tanzania. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Gilman, S. 1987. ‘The struggle of psychiatry with psychoanalysis: who won?’ Critical Inquiry 13, 293–313.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Herlehy, T. J. 1983. ‘Ties that Bind: palm wines and blood brotherhood at the Kenya coast during the nineteenth century’, Working Paper 68. Boston, Mass.: African Studies Center, Boston University.Google Scholar
Hocart, A. M. 1952. ‘Blood brotherhood’, in The Life-giving Myth and Other Essays, pp. 185–9. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Karp, I. 1978. ‘New Guinea models in the African savannah’, Africa 48 (1), 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, G. 1980. Day of Shining Red: an essay on understanding ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, M. 1992. The Colonial Disease: a social history of sleeping sickness in northern Zaire, 1900-40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. C. 1976. Kings and Kinsmen: early Mbundu states in Angola. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Mair, L. 1934. An African People in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mudimbe, V. Y. 1991. Parables and Fables: exegesis, textuality and politics in Central Africa. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Musisi, N. 1991. ‘Women, “elite polygyny” and Buganda state formation’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (4), 757–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neumann, A. 1898. Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa. Reprinted 1982, Bulawayo: Books of Zimbabwe.Google Scholar
Ray, B. 1991. Myth, Ritual and Kingship in Buganda. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Richards, A. 1950. ‘Some types of family structure among the central Bantu’, in Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. and Forde, D. (eds.), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, pp. 207–51. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Reprinted 1987, London: Kegan Paul International.Google Scholar
Roscoe, J. 1911. The Baganda: an account of their native customs and beliefs. Reprinted 1965, London: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. C. 1992. Milk, Honey, and Money: changing concepts in Rwandan healing. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Tegnaeus, H. 1952. Blood Brothers: an ethno-sociological study of the institutions of blood brotherhood, with special reference to Africa. Stockholm: Ethnographical Museum of Sweden.Google Scholar
White, L. 1990. ‘Bodily fluids and usufruct: controlling property in Nairobi, 1917-39’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 24 (3), 418–38.Google Scholar
Williams, F. L. 1934. ‘Blood-brotherhood in Ankole (Omukago)’, Uganda Journal 2 (1), 33–41.Google Scholar
Williams, F. L. 1935. ‘Blood-brotherhood in Ankole’, letter to the editor, Uganda Journal 2 (3), 252.Google Scholar
Winter, E. H. 1959. Beyond the Mountains of the Moon: the lives of four Africans. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Wright, M. 1983. ‘Bwanikwa: consciousness and protest among slave women in Central Africa, 1886-1911’, in Robertson, Claire C. and Klein, M. A. (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa, pp. 236–67. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar