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and of dissonance within the Royal Family con- cerning political parties and their role in Swazi- land. Of these, some details are available only on the last topic: the first two remain shrouded in secrecy. Yet, surely, if the reader is to be able to assess comprehensively the relative advan- tages of a traditional monarchy as against re- publicanism for Swaziland, these matters are of vital importance.

I stress this aspect because Kuper’s book will appeal, rightly, not merely 1.0 an audience al- ready acquainted with the Swazi and their polit- ical system through her previous works, but also to people whose knowledge of modem Swaziland is filtered through a perceptictn of the monarchy as a ruling clique (albeit a large clique) con- cerned to preserve its own jpition of power, privilege, and wealth. Withn the book itself, of course, there is some evidence to support such a view, in the large number of politi- cal appointees in the modern system who are part of or affiliated to, through special ties, the Dlamini clan. Kuper emphasizes that the reason for these appointments, as seen by Sobhuza and his advisors, is that personal background and family connections count as much as formal qualifications within the Swazi tradition of ap- pointment to high office. Yet, to carry over such criteria into modern government, whatever else it indicates, must also entail an extension of tra- ditional authority in a changing era, a continu- ation of privilege as well as changing responsi- bility. And it is clear that Sobhuza himself per- ceives the significance of royal unity in the political sphere when, in receiving Prince Dumisa back into the fold after his fling with the political parties, he is quoted as saying: (’If the burden of kingship is too heavy, and I have to flee, you will have to go with me. Do not think you could stay behincl and rule in my place. . . . Others, outsiders, may be the op- position” (p. 275).

For those with antimonarchical tendencies, there is further evidence of the protection of royal interests in the changing political sphere: the expulsion of black expatriates; the dissolu- tion of the Constitution just when party opposi- tion had won legitimacy in the 1972 election; the case against Ngwenya; the question of just how effectively the supposed checks in the dual monarchy have in fact worked since 1889, when the death of King Mbandzeni precipitated Ndlovukati LaBotsibeni into office. From the evidence of Kuper’s book, admittedly fragmen- tary, it would appear that the monarchy has, since 1889, in practice been dominated by one

monarch even when two have been equally pres- ent, particularly during Sobhuza’s extended reign.

To still the nagging doubt that, behind Sob- huza’s personal charm and achievements lies a determination to preserve kingship for the sec- tarian interests of the royal family, the reader needs to know at least something of what lies behind the public politics of kingship, what goes on within the private bounds of the royal capitals. For, in the history of the Swazi mon- archy, it is clear that irregularities, deaths, and tragedies are commonplace, that the rules of political procedure are honored most frequently in their breach. Under such circumstances, can one agree that the “power and privilege . . . in- herent in the kingship” (p. 347) constitute ap- propriate political institutions for a moderniz- ing Swaziland, even if Sobhuza himself has been “a good King, a wise statesman, a gracious man,” delivering his people peacefully from the fetters of colonialism?

In the clash between the old and the new, in religion, in education, in ethnicity, in formal political relationships and in foreign affairs, Sobhuza emerges as a just conservative with boundless common sense. Hilda Kuper, his pro- tegee of many years, clearly admires Sobhuza as king and man. She expresses his system with the insights of a special member, the sympathies of a confidante. Yet, in the end, for one who lives in another part of Africa, where the same con- flicts are writ larger than in Swaziland, and where traditional leaders have recently suffered a decisive political demise through the ballot box, I am not convinced that responsible king- ship has a future, even in Swaziland.

Womunafu’s Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Communi- ty. David William Cohen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. x + 216 pp. $15.00 (cloth).

Elizabeth Hopkins Smith College

Anthropologists and historians who engage in research among the Lwo or Bantu-speaking peoples of the Victoria Nile had reason to wel- come David Cohen’s first monograph, The His- torical Tradition of Bwoga. In that meticulous reconstruction of the royal traditions and mi- gratory patterns of the contemporary Basoga, the author ranged well beyond the modem polit-

212 AMERICAN A N THR OPOL 0 GIST 182, 19801

ical unit that bears their name. Now, with the appearance of Womunafu’s Bunafu, the reader is drawn from the wider regional context and from a chronology of some seven centuries to an atypical microcosm. The mechanism is auda- cious. Abandoning the inevitably linear and schematic conventions of the dynastic history, Cohen now focuses on the fortunes of Womuna- fu, an illegitimate and fugitive prince, who dur- ing the four final decades of the 19th century parlayed perilous exile and claims of superna- tural power into an uncontested hegemony over Bunafu. So far as I am aware, Womunafu’s Bun@ represents an unprecedented effort at undertaking a longitudinal study of community politics through indirect contemporary evidence.

Unlike the kingdoms to the west, the Basoga lacked any formal oral tradition in either their courts or clans. This disability becomes the strength of the author’s analysis. The absence of either a carefully perpetuated official history or indeed of any narrative conventions permitted a wide range of information to filter into the social memories of his informants. Congruence of accounts in such circumstances weighs far more heavily than in those societies where court traditions are often little more than a validation of existing structures of privilege. Cohen was also to profit from the population dislocations of precon t act Busoga , for distant represent a tives of local Bunafu clans provided important inde- pendent corroboration of the contest that oc- curred with the arrival of Womunafu.

Readers interested in Cohen‘s methodology may refer to the appendix but will find a far more explicit and extended statement of his use of sources in The Historical Tradition of Bu- soga. It is a most telling indicator of his shifting concerns that marriage alliances, which re- ceived marginal attention in the earlier study, now become the most fertile and reliable source of data on migrations, changing clientage align- ments, and the appropriation of existing politi- cal networks.

While formal interviews provide the primary corpus for the reconstruction of the political his- tory of Bunafu, readers will admire the skill with which Cohen enlists ecological and mateiial evidence to both complement and aug- ment the oral accounts. Variations in the size, style, alignment, and location of Womunafu’s four enclosures, for example, prove to be signifi- cant, if tacit, indicators of Womunafu’s shifting ideological appeals to local populations as well as of external strategies of deference and eva- sion.

The density, diversity, and range of data that Cohen has marshaled to reconstruct the world of 19th-century Bunafu would, in themselves, secure this monograph a distinguished reputa- tion. As the author notes, this isolated small community lay beyond the attention of the early European or the major East African courts. The narrative that unfolds is a prodigious tribute to his indefatigability in collecting hundreds of in- terviews throughout Busoga, to his ready com- mand of regional ecology, ethnography, and history, and to his alertness to the implications of discontinuous or oblique evidence. In a field that is rife with spurious assertions and false quantifications and has an unfortunate disposi- tion to reify oral evidence as fact, one is partic- ularly grateful to the author for his readiness to articulate, when necessary, his own reservations about either the data themselves or the circum- stantial nature of the interpretation.

The parochial scale of the study is deceptive. Bunafu lay in an uncontested buffer zone on the marches of eight Basoga states. The conspicu- ous political vacuum that marked this unadmin- istered enclave made it a favored refuge for dis- sident princes and estranged clients from adja- cent kingdoms as well as for more-distant popu- lations during periods of Baganda harassment. Nineteenth-century Bunafu thus offers a singu- lar vantage point from which to chronicle both the internecine struggles of the Basoga courts and the fluctuating prominence and shifting ex- pectations of these kingdoms within the larger political field.

Womunufuk Bunufu is of unquestioned value to the Africanist. It will also claim the attention of a wider audience by virtue of its innovative approach to the mechanisms of clientage, ex- pansion, and absorption. Although the official traditions of the larger East African states em- phasize “conquest” through open contest, the realities of expansion, as Cohen so commend- ably documents, speak to labile systems of cli- entage, defections, competition for recent refugees, and the formalization of new align- ments through marriage alliances.

The analysis should also prove of compelling interest to political anthropologists and historians who concern themselves with the ten- sions - and potentialities - attendant upon claims to charismatic or hereditary leadership. The ultimate erosion of Womunafu’s charis- matic status under secular pressures betrays lit- tle of the artifice with which he vacillated be- tween these roles to extend his influence over Bunafu.

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Finally, the structure of the monograph is in itself a challenge to the anthropologist. As one is drawn into the personal history of Womunafu, one is aware of the meticulousness with which the author avoids the synthesizing dispositions of the discipline. Readers are spared, in turn, the dispiriting and unproductivi: atemporal gener- alizations that mark the “classic” monograph on the African state. Womunufu’s Bunufu, in its cery fidelity to the particular, requires the reader to acknowledge both the complexity and capriciousness of the political arena and the ex- igencies that dictate the ascendancy of prince, commoner, or priest.

The Cultural Definition of Political Re- sponse: Lineal Destiny Among the Luo. David Parkin. Language, Thought and Culture: Ad- vances in the Study of Cognition. London: Academic Press, 1978. xix t 347 pp. $30.65/ 214.80 (cloth).

Roy G. Willis University of Edinburgh

This book is an impressive demonstration of the relevance of “classical” anthropological knowledge to the understanding of what is go- ing on in a modem urban society. The Luo community living in Kalcdeni, a low-status suburb of Kenya’s capital ciiy of Nairobi, is the subject of Parkin’s study. ?Parkin is a British social anthropologist who has established a solid reputation among Africanists with his studies of Luo associations in Kampala and social change among the rural Giriama of Kenya. In this latest and overtly ambitious book he deploys not only his own previous experience of Luo society and culture but earlier contributions by Evans- Pritchard and Southall to .analyze urban Luo ideas and actions in a context of rapid modern- ization and industrialization.

What Parkin’s carefully documented study shows is that Nairobi’s urban Luo remain for the most part solidly and surprisingly “tradi- tional” in both social organization and ideology. One of the most interesting parts of his analysis concerns how the established Luo institution of polygynous marriage has been successfully adapted to urban conditicns. By circulating wives between their urban homes and the rural land-base, polygynist husbands and fathers are able to maintain and reconcile their interests in both “traditional” and “modern“ societies. In

fact, there is really only one Luo society strad- dling rural and urban environments, with wo- men in plural marriages working effectively to maintain social and cultural continuity in this complex situation. Parkin goes on to analyze the astonishingly complicated array of Luo voluntary associations in Nairobi, showing how they are structured by the same complementary prin- ciples of segmentary opposition and hierarchy that underlie the polysegmentary lineage system of the Luo; more, he shows that the patterned network of associations is simply the form assumed by the old (and continuing) lineage organization in the new urban context.

Parkin’s material is obviously of considerable anthropological, sociological, and even political significance. It shows clearly and in formidable detail how “tribalism” (or what is nowadays more acceptably called “ethnicity”) actually works in a modernizing African society. As Par- kin describes it, the built-in forces of Luo so- ciety and culture exert themselves increasingly powerfully and effectively as young Luo grow up. Children who earlier mixed with children of other ethnic groups and spoke Swahili have learned by their teens to consort with members of their own group and speak Luo. Young men who often express a preference for monogamy tend to end up as polygynists. Arguments in fa- vor of limiting family size so as to give a small number of children a better education break down before the dual pressures of Luo egalitar- ianism and the prestige value of numerous off- spring. Parkin shows further how a mysterious affliction called chiru sanctions adherence to or- thodox norms.

For all its intrinsic interest, however, this is not an easy book to read. One difficulty is the li- terary style, which is verbose, ridden with jar- gon, and repetitive. (The wordy and eminently forgettable title is symptomatic.) A more pro- found trouble with this book is what I would call its “theoretical inflation,” the author’s unfortu- nate attempts to magnify8its significance for an- thropological theory by multiplying references to authorities ranging from Marx. LPvi-Strauss, and Sahlins to Saussure, Bernstein, and Leach. The labored ruminations provoked by the ideas of these and other luminaries end by obscuring rather than clarifying the Luo data, and issue in the scarcely original conclusion that cultural concepts have an internal logic of their own that imposes itself on thought and action. This is clearly happening in the case of the urban Luo. But I think one needs to go further than Parkin does and examine factors outside the Luo com-