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Organization & Mystification
in an African Kingdom

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G. Delegating Authority: Nyoro “Feudalism”

As he learned more and more about pre-colonial Nyoro society, Beattie was intrigued by its similarity to feudalism in Europe during the Middle Ages. European feudalism (from Latin feodum, “fief”) involved the delegation of authority over a specific region (the fief) from a lord (a “suzerain”) to a chosen subordinate (a “vassal”), who held the land “in fee” (or “in feud” or “in fief”), that is, on indefinite loan.

The feudatory vassal owed legal and military support, as well as honor, to the lord, but governed the fief pretty much as he pleased and enjoyed its revenues. A vassal could divide the fief among sub-vassals, who might divide it yet further. In the course of time, many of these designations were inherited by the sons of the original vassals and came to be experienced as permanent rights, which a weak lord could be hard-pressed to withdraw even when support from a vassal diminished.

The term “feudalism” is a modern one, initially applied specifically to Europe (which exhibited variation) and then extended to similar systems. Today many scholars object to the application of the term outside Europe because it tends to obscure differences. And some object to using it at all, considering it to be too vague to be useful even in Europe. Still, the comparisons can be instructive.

The problem being solved in both Bunyoro and medieval Europe is how a monarch can govern a large territory by “farming it out” to subordinates without losing control. In the Nyoro case we have seen the important use of charter myths and of rituals of mystification. In both of these areas the Nyoro certainly exceeded the Europeans. But in terms only of social structure, the two societies had surprisingly similar approaches, Beattie argues.

• In a way remarkably parallel to European feudalism, a critical feature of Nyoro society was that essentially all political authority derived from the mukama himself.
• The local chiefs held their lands as fiefs from the mukama, with whom they had a personal relationship, sealed by an oath of loyalty and a certain amount of ceremonialism.
• As in Europe, when the mukama granted (or renewed a grant of) an estate to a vassal, he was granting rights to govern the land and its inhabitants, including the right to tax them in various ways.
• As in European feudalism, such grants tended to become hereditary, even though the mukama could in theory withdraw them. (Indeed Beattie found cases in which the mukama did just that.)
• As in medieval Europe, the grandest chiefs governed vast tracts of land, essentially what are today counties. The most minor chiefs might govern a single hamlet.
• The petty chiefs, who were vassals of other chiefs rather than directly of the mukama, still had to have their position approved by the mukama. In theory their loyalty was primarily to the level just above them, but in practice, loyalty to the mukama was still an absolute prerequisite for even the most minor “lord” in this system. [Note 14]

  14 Seeing the Nyoro struggling to accommodate their institutions to a twentieth-century civil service, Beattie was struck by the extent to which Nyoro values rewarded loyalty and interpersonal relations above all else in the allocation of resources and in appointment to office. A merit-based civil service was simply unintelligible in such a value system, and by no means desirable.

One of the functions of a chief at any level was to adjudicate disputes among their subordinates. The subordinate who had a complaint against his superior or lord was best advised to keep quiet and put up with things, for the system had no place for such “rebellion.” Beattie writes than even at the end of the British period the Nyoro attitude was still very hierarchical, and he provides the following twentieth-century example:

In one court case a mission teacher accused a local village headman of accepting a bribe. The headman was acquitted, but the complainant was charged with slandering the village headman and was himself convicted. The judgment was not based on the truth or falsehood of the allegation of bribery; it was concerned with teaching the defendant that it was none of his business to criticize the village headman. Such criticism is only tolerable from an official superior. (Beattie 1960: 45)

The understanding that all power flowed from the mukama had other implications:

• In Nyoro tradition, the mukama was seen as entitled to all goods and services, but also as the source of good things.
• As in other feudal systems, goods and services were provided to a person’s lord (the person next up the hierarchy).
• All vassals passed upward a proportion of whatever their own vassals provided to them. As a result the great chiefs all received considerable tribute from those below them, and the mukama received often spectacular quantities of goods, ranging from agricultural products to cattle and even sometimes slaves.
• nlike other lords, the mukama was lord of all, and he received tribute not just from the lords below him, but from virtually all Nyoro. [Note 15]

  15 Beattie was impressed that an enormous flow of gifts continued even in the 1950s, although the mukama at that time was having difficulty finding the resources to be as generous as tradition required in handing out to people below him the goods which flowed to him as gifts.

When the gifts he received were perishable foodstuffs, there was little use for them except to use them to feed his huge entourage, and so the mukama’s world was one of continual feasts, with all the attendant logistic challenges of receiving the right kinds and amount of food and then preparing and serving it before it deteriorated. The mukama was expected to be the very personification of generosity.

The tradition of a mukama’s generosity was still very much alive during Beattie’s time in Africa, and perhaps the comparative impoverishment of the mukama of his era was made worse by memories, probably exaggerated, of enormous general feasts and spectacular gifts made available by his predecessors. Meanwhile a decrease in cattle production and the development of a cash economy in which people tended to sell their produce and keep their money seriously reduced his income.

When the mukama received gifts of cash, he tended to keep them rather than redistribute them, for cash can be stored and need not be used immediately as food must. In that context, feasts seemed less feasible.

In general, then, the mukama’s role, while supremely political and supported by an elaborate system of both charter myths and rituals of authority, was also economic, involving a flow of goods and the integration of a system of rights and responsibilities that in the end integrated the energies of virtually every Nyoro.

Rebellion

In a “feudal” system it is always tempting for the “vassal” to imagine that he has an inherent right to the territory that the “lord” grants to him only conditionally. European history is full of rebellions by vassals against their putative lords, just as it is full of lords rallying other vassals to put down rebellions. (The same tended to be true in pre-Imperial China and other feudal systems.)

In the Nyoro case too, a chiefship over a grant of territory tended to be inherited by a chief’s heir. As we have seen, Nyoro chiefs were required to be physically present at the mukama’s court much of the time, a requirement that was ritually necessitated because of the need to participate in ceremonial milk drinking. This provided a constant reminder of who their benefactor was. Beattie writes of the arrangement:

This served as a check (though not always a very effective one) on rebellion. It also strengthened the group of advisers upon whom the king could rely; in political systems of this “feudal” type there was no need for a central secretariat, for the same people could serve both as royal councillors and as territorial administrators. (Beattie 1960: 36)

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The “Feudal” Chiefs

Because a chief was frequently, or even usually, away from home to be in attendance at the mukama’s court, he would leave behind a delegate, and therefore the same concern about loyalty from a subordinate needed to be accommodated at home.

Since chiefships were granted based on service or gifts to the mukama, they were not limited to members of the Bito clan. Indeed, the majority of chiefs were, like the majority of the Nyoro, huma cattle-owners or iru farmers. Since chiefships tended to be passed down to male descendants, Nyoro society had occasional non-Bito “great families” of considerable wealth and influence. Among them were non-Bito relatives of the mukama (his maternal and affinal relatives), who received gifts from him in order to avoid the awkward situation of the mukama having “poor relations.”

One could not simply walk into the mukama’s court and expect to be appointed to an office, let alone to become a chief. Chiefs in particular, even the most petty of them, had to be personally known to the mukama, often by being introduced by existing chiefs (or by being their sons), but important too was the idea that any candidate needed to have rendered significant service to the mukama (or to have provided significant gifts). It was a critical rule of Nyoro royal etiquette never to come into the presence of the mukama empty-handed!

Since personal service to the mukama was potentially well rewarded, those lucky enough to land positions in the mukama’s court (most of them non-Bito) were in a position to be rewarded for personal loyalty (and, of course, flattery).

In the language of modern sociology, the relationship between a political superior and his subordinate was “diffuse” rather than “specific”; that is, the chief’s dealings with his subordinates were not restricted to a narrow official sphere, but extended over the whole of the subordinate’s personal life. Even today many Nyoro feel that chiefs should be interested in them as persons, and not simply in their tax-paying or working capacity … (Beattie 1960: 37)

Besides the mukama, no one in Bunyoro technically owned land. The great estates were granted by the mukama, and even when inherited they were held as though on loan from the mukama, who could in theory reallocate them. However, as under European feudalism, being the holder of an estate entitled one to govern the people on it and to enjoy a portion of their produce, as well as their labor and their loyalty.

This was very different from our own world, as became very clear when British administrators sought (under the Uganda Agreement of 1900) to introduce a legal system involving land ownership or (under the Bunyoro Agreement of 1933) to create a civil service based on merit and involving employment contracts. It is arguable that much of the “corruption” in eastern Africa today derives ultimately from misunderstandings about the differing nature of human relations in traditional African kingdoms and modern bureaucratic states.

Beattie’s striking (and controversial) findings of close similarity between the organization of the Nyoro state and the feudalism of his native England after its invasion and conquest by William the Conqueror and William’s band of French Normans gives us some insight into the structural problems being solved by “feudalism” in both societies. We conclude with the following chart, showing some of the similarities Beattie noted.

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