Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0012/00121.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 33KB | 519 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00121}
$Pretitle{259}
$Title{Angola
Chapter 2C.   Local (Rural) Social Systems}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{groups
party
portuguese
ovimbundu
descent
lineage
group
africans
community
mbundu}
$Date{1978}
$Log{}
Country:     Angola
Book:        Angola, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 2C.   Local (Rural) Social Systems

     In the absence of extensive and intensive modern research of high
quality, it is difficult to determine the significant social arrangements in
Angola even in the late years of the Portuguese period, let alone in the
postindependence era. A few broad generalizations may be made, however.

     Kingship and chieftainship over territorially organized polities,
characteristic in some form of the Mbundu and Ovimbundu until the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the Kongo earlier, and of other
groups on a smaller scale, had for all practical purposes been destroyed by
the mid-twentieth century. A king of the Kongo was recognized by the
Portuguese; his office was largely symbolic, and for that reason, succession
to it was a focus of conflict in the 1950s among various Kongo groups oriented
to ethnic nationalism and between some of these and the Portuguese. The
office, however, was of no practical significance for the ordinary Kongo
villager. In some other groups the Portuguese also permitted the retention of
chiefs (sobas) chosen on a more or less traditional basis, and some of these
played an administrative role. Elsewhere incumbents of such roles were chosen
without reference to local criteria.

     At the level of the local community (a village or group of villages) a
headman was appointed, again sometimes from among those who would have been
chosen by local standards but who also met Portuguese criteria. Sometimes,
however, a quite different person was appointed, and in this case activities
of the more traditional leader and the elders of the community were carried
on to some extent even if formal authority was held by the man chosen by the
colonial regime. Chiefs and headmen (regedores) had, among other tasks, those
of collecting taxes, helping to maintain order, and recruiting labor.

     In most cases in the early 1960s and later, after the outbreak of African
opposition to colonial rule, most chiefs and headmen were, if not loyal to the
Portuguese, reluctant to support the anticolonial movements. Given this
history, the dislocations of parts of the countryside before independence and
since, and the insistence of the MPLA-Labor Party on local administrators
loyal to it, it is unlikely that former chiefs and headmen have a significant
role. On at least one occasion, however, a party leader suggested that where
chiefs still have the trust of their people and are willing to cooperate with
the regime, some use for them will be found. How this situation will in fact
develop cannot be foreseen.

     The crucial, and in some form continuing, units in local social systems
are villages (or other form of local community) and groups based on common
descent, actual or putative. These were basic entities, even if subject to
change in form and function in the period preceding the Portuguese incursion
and during the centuries when they exercised only indirect influence in the
interior. Throughout these hundreds of years changes in the structure of local
political systems and the influence of trade, slave raiding, and the like had
their impact on local communities and kin groups, as did urban migration,
forced labor, African involvement in cash cropping, and specific legal
measures after the establishment of full Portuguese control; but local
community organization and the organization of kin groups, often linked,
remained the most significant elements in the lives of ordinary Africans.

     In general, the connection between a local community and a descent group
(or some other kin-based set of persons) lay in the fact that the core of each
community consisted of a descent group of some kind. The other persons in the
community were tied to the members of the group by marriage or, in an earlier
period, by a slave or client relationship, the effects of which may well have
survived the formal abolition of slavery as they have elsewhere. Except for
the village in which a king or major chief resided, the village was usually
small, and even the community in which a king lived was not very large.
Partial exceptions were some of the major trading towns of the Ovimbundu in
the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century.
Typically neighboring villages were tied together either by virtue of the fact
that their core groups were made up of members of related descent groups (or
different segments of a larger descent group) or, in some cases, by fairly
frequent intermarriage among members of a limited set of villages.

     Ordinarily descent groups in Angola are matrilineal; that is, they
include all persons descended from a common female ancestor through females,
although the individuals holding authority are, with rare exceptions, males;
in some cases junior males inherit from (or succeed to a position held by)
older brothers; in others males inherit from their mother's brother. Descent
groups, the members of which are descended from a male ancestor through males
(hence patrilineal), apparently occur in only a few groups in Angola and have
been reported only in conjunction with matrilineal groups, a comparatively
rare phenomenon referred to as a double descent system.

     It must be heavily emphasized that even where double descent systems did
not exist, kin traced through the father were important as individuals in
systems in which group formation was based on matrilineal descent. In some
cases, e.g., the Kongo, an individual was tied through his father to the
latter's matrilineage, appropriate members of which had an important say in
aspects of that individual's life.

     Broadly speaking, matrilineal descent groups alone have been reported for
the Kongo (but well described only for some of the Zairian Kongo), the Mbundu,
the Chokwe, and the Ambo, but it is probable that they occur elsewhere. A
double descent system has been reported for Angola's largest ethnolinguistic
group, the Ovimbundu, and may also be found among some of the southern groups.

     The way in which the double descent system of the Ovimbundu was
structured and worked has not been adequately described. In any case
ethnography done about the middle of the twentieth century suggests that
patrilineal groups as such (as opposed to links with the father and some of
his kin) had virtually disappeared and that matrilineal groups had, by and
large, lost most of this significance in response to major changes in patterns
of economic activity.

     Descent groups vary in size, degree of localization, function, and degree
of internal segmentation. In the kinds of groups commonly called clans the
links between a putative common ancestor and the living cannot be traced, and
no effort is made to do so. Such groups are larger in scope than the units
into which they are divided, although they need not have many members in
absolute terms. They are rarely localized, and their members may be widely
dispersed. Clans have not been widely reported in Angola. The only large
ethnic category in which they have been said to exist is the Kongo. Even there
they do not seem to have political or economic functions.

     More typical of Angolan communities are the kinds of descent groups
usually called lineages, in most cases matrilineages. Here the common ancestor
is not so remote, and genealogical links can be traced to her. Structurally
lineages of greater depth (for example, those five to seven generations in
depth from ancestor to most recent generation) may be further segmented into
shallower lineages (perhaps three to four generations in depth), lineages at
each l