Medicinal Rule

<p> As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil they looked for the equivalents of their kings - and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine - and not the colonizer's despotic administrator the missionary's divine king or Vansina's big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.</p>