Istwa Nou

In northeastern Africa, among peoples speaking Cushitic languages, a third kind of clan religious figure goes back at least to the sixth millennium BCE. In some Soomaali-speaking parts of the Horn the waab or waaber is also called rooble, possessor of rain, which indicates plainly what people believed he could do. Holders of the office never became political rulers. They commanded reverence, and their views carried great weight whenever a community had a decision to make. That makes three inherited traditions of authority, all traceable to the sixth millennium BCE or earlier, in three different language families. The Nilo-Saharan sacral king fused spiritual and temporal power. The Niger-Congo kumo mediated between the living and the ancestors inside a matrilineal clan. The Cushitic rain possessor held religious standing that gave his voice weight without ever hardening into rule. Political authority has more than one origin story, and Africa preserves at least three of them.

By the later fourth millennium BCE dense populations had formed in a handful of places: the Nile valley through Egypt, Nubia and northern Sudan, then Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, the two great river valleys of China, and the coast of Peru. In each of them access to resources and to power grew steadily more unequal. Social classes formed, then chiefly authority, then kings and the full apparatus of stratification, with religious authority consolidated into formal priesthoods alongside. None of that started from zero. The societies of the previous three thousand years were smaller and less intensely ranked, and they already had inherited offices, ritual specialists and differences of status. The large states took those materials and hardened them, formalised them and put them in stone. Africa is where the process can be watched most closely, because reconstructed vocabulary and comparative ethnography reach into periods that left no writing, while the records of the literate civilisations begin only after the outcome was settled.