Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa

"If the study of political and religious institutions, economic and social patterns , philosophical and scientific ideas is indispensable for an understanding of what our civilization has been and is, why shouldn't the same be true of the study of our feelings, among them both imaginary and real, for a thousand years? "- Octavio Paz, Nobel-prize winning Mexican poet1In their 1920 ethnography of the Ila, Reverend Edwin Smith and District Commissioner Andrew Dale described as "prostitution" the Ila institution of kuweza lubono mung'anda (lit. "to hunt for wealth at home," also called "hunting cattle"), in which a wife and husband agree that she take lovers to attract gifts shared between them. Smith and Dale categorized kuweza lubono as prostitution because they associated the sensuous experience of sex with material exchange or the sincerity of affection, but could not imagine a link between all three without negating the sincerity of lovers' affection.2 Kuweza lubono was all the more complicated because the instigator might be the wife or the husband, confounding categories, such as female "victim" or male "cuckold." The practice of kuweza lubono inspired in Ila husbands and wives jealousy over both personal relationships and the material gains.3 Yet, kuweza lubono was also a source of husbands' pride in industrious wives who accumulated great stores of wealth and wives' satisfaction in both the material and social success facilitated by kuweza lubono. ,4 Indeed, for Ila speakers, the verb kuweza also described the "seeking for wealth and power" in the quest to establish one's social position and the ever-present possibility of failure, conjuring up the uncertainties of striving for social mobility.5 Women often developed deep attachment to their kuweza lubono partners, cultivating such relationships over long periods of time, and even shifting into lubambo relationships (publicly acknowledged lovers) with them.Ila men and women instructed Smith and Dale on meeting economic and social aspirations through kuweza lubono and teach us about entanglements between the sensuous, the affective, and the material in human relationships in Bwila during the first years of the twentieth century. Their descriptions capture instances of affectivity with roots in precolonial life, however recent. The feelings, gifts, and sensory experiences shared or exchanged through kuweza lubono reveal new categories of historical actors, such as lovers, with the potential to bring a subjectivity rich in sensory experience and emotional depth to histories of the precolonial past. They dramatically recast what was at stake in processes common in histories of precolonial Africa, such as the circulation of wealth in the pursuit of social ties.Oral traditions, recovered burial sites, words' shifting meanings, and other residue of early African life also resonate with affectivity, but all too often our narratives of the deep African past do not capture the emotional experiences of the subjects who shared stories of estranged families and jealous husbands,6 who visited gravesites carrying worn pebbles to purposefully deposit on the newly mounded earth of fresh graves,7 and who drew on familiar concepts and words to name new sources of both terror and honor.8 Our precolonial histories, which illuminate the causal power of, for example, novel technologies and political institutions in explaining historical change, might seem dry and overly instrumental to colleagues (and students) studying more recent periods or other world regions because they lack the narrative depth of human emotion. Incorporating the affective dimensions of life into histories of early African societies holds great promise for bringing much needed subjectivity to central themes of early African history, making it "legible" to a broader audience,9 and for transforming how we understand the developments to which we already assign great explanatory power. Indeed, narratives about the development of political institutions, the spread of technologies like metallurgy, cattle keeping, and cereal cropping and even the familiar problem of the Bantu Expansions may well be comprehensible only when we know more about the subjective emotional stakes for the agents of these transformations. …