Engaging Vulnerability seminar on ”Against the polity prism: Tracing an African tensor”

How come Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique and Zambia do not exhibit the kind of autocracy found in countries of the former kingdoms Ruanda, Kongo and Buganda? Colonial history readily comes to mind. Despite the call to decolonize African studies, remarkably little is known of internal cultural processes driving precolonial history. In western politics, the secularization that pitted conservatives against progressives is a ‘tensor’ bundling many tensions. In the region spanning central and eastern Africa, I argue, another idea has long been socialized. Ethnographic fieldwork of initiations, a cultural comparison of five kingdoms, altered rites of enthronement, linguistic data and interviews with chiefs together point to the tensor of ‘medicine’. Precolonial kingdoms originated by bending the medicinal tradition of chiefs, who themselves were a special type of healers. Scholars anno 2023, unable to lead us out of the frame of war and governance, may be willing to desert the ‘polity prism’ and rethink politics as the safeguarding of life.

Koen Stroeken is associate professor of Africanist anthropology at Ghent University, Belgium. His publications – including the monographs Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft (2010, Berghahn) and Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa (2018, Berghahn) – mainly deal with African cosmologies and the sensory materiality of magic, medicine and healing.