Istwa Nou

West Africa produced its own inherited office, the kumo, which linguists trace back to proto-South Volta-Congo around the start of the sixth millennium BCE. Comparative ethnography across a wide band of the continent indicates the holder began as a clan ritual chief in clans that reckoned descent through the mother. His work was spiritual mediation: keeping the community on proper terms with the ancestors. Early on the office picked up civic duties too. The kumo moderated communal meetings, oversaw deliberation about law and custom, and spoke for his people in dealings with other communities. In later centuries the position gained real powers in a number of regions and turned into chiefship or kingship. Set against Nilo-Saharan sacral kingship, this is a different route to authority. One concentrates the spiritual and the temporal in a single divine figure. The other spreads authority across a network of ritual specialists whose standing rests on what they do. Africa was running both experiments at once.

Between 6000 and 4000 BCE, as populations grew, ritual and political offices in many parts of the world began to be inherited inside particular families. Africa has a distinctive version of this. Sacral chiefship and kingship, where one person holds political authority and religious authority together, was in place in Upper Egypt in the later fourth millennium BCE. Archaeology and comparative ethnography put its origins centuries earlier, in Nubia and the middle Nile basin, among Nilo-Saharan speakers, and it went on thriving for thousands of years afterwards in states across the Sahara and the Sudan belt. Ehret pushes the origin back further still. He argues the institution most likely emerged among the communities that lived off the aquatic resources of the green Sahara, possibly before the middle Holocene, and reached the herders and cultivators only later. That puts the ancestor of the divine right of kings among people who fished lakes and rivers in what is now desert.