Introduction^{Footnote 1}

Jan Vansina’s work was “compelling” in the many senses of the word. His stories explored the aspirations of Africans who lived in early pasts by making political traditions and collective imaginaries as legible to his readership as the more concrete qualities of forest environments, the demographics of patrilineal kinship systems, or the migration of isohyetal lines. Here, Vansina’s work was “compelling” in the sense of the word as a modifier: it was “irresistible, demanding attention, respect, etc.”^{Footnote 2} But Vansina’s work was also “compelling” in the sense of the verb: “to urge irresistibly, to constrain, oblige force: a person to do a thing, ... a person to (into) a course of action, etc.”^{Footnote 3} Through letters and, later, emails, Vansina urged colleagues to particular conclusions, interpretations, or methods.^{Footnote 4} Vansina’s articles were provocative in this sense, too, as Pete Robertshaw relates in his essay in this journal.^{Footnote 5} Vansina read widely, reinterpreting the historical significance of other scholars’ and other disciplines’ findings, whether new classifications of the Bantu language family or archaeological evidence for changing Iron Age farming practices.^{Footnote 6} Tellingly, he, himself, could be compelled to reconsider his position.^{Footnote 7}

For those who study early history, Vansina’s contributions to methods stand out. In conversation with Christopher Ehret, he pioneered the use of comparative historical linguistics to produce evidence for early African history. As discussed by Colleen Kriger in this volume, we can track the slow development of Vansina’s engagement with language as an archive for history through his book appendices: from the “Glossary of African Expressions” in Kingdoms of the Savanna (1966), to the robust “Lexical Comparisons” in Children of Woot (1978), to the archive-like appendix of “Comparative Lexical Data” in Paths in the Rainforests (1990).^{Footnote 8} The organization of these long appendices into categories like “environment,” “farming,” “crafts,” “kinship,” and “political organization” mirrors the chapter headings of early ethnographies, reminding us of the impact of Vansina’s ethnographic work on his approach to writing history.^{Footnote 9} Vansina interpreted such linguistic evidence with an interest in the historical experiences of people more than the historical development of languages.^{Footnote 10} This interpretive stance – rooted equally in history and anthropology – allowed Vansina to foreground words’ creative force in the social contexts of ancient societies.

Applying Vansina’s linguistic methods to recover the history of the word “compel” fittingly and quite poetically describes Vansina’s contribution to the methods by which we study early African history. The term is a Latin compound of the prefix com- (meaning “together”) and the Latin verb pellere (meaning “to drive”). Thus, for speakers of Latin, “to compel” was “to drive (something) together.” And Vansina’s work was compelling in this sense, too: he drove together assemblages of historical and ethnographic source material in innovative ways. These accomplishments have shaped the work of many readers of this journal.

In tribute to Vansina’s contributions, we might focus on another aspect of the act of compelling: how forcing, urging, and driving together produces proximity and intimacy. Although his historical arguments focused on big-picture processes like the spread of pastoralism or reinterpretations of the durable equatorial political tradition, Vansina’s work is also rich with observations that inspire new questions about the intimate negotiations of Africans living in early periods and the value of placing in close proximity the historical traces such communities left behind. To ask new questions with Vansina’s work, we must first understand how he approached the intimacy of historical subjects and the proximity of sources. The examples here will focus on How Societies Are Born, the last major work in which Vansina compelled linguistic, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence into conversation.

Asking “Why?” over the Longue Durée

In his scholarship on early history, Vansina delivered an encyclopedic level of detail sifted from a massive archive of primary and secondary sources. Vansina combined such dense detail with sensitivity to historical contingency and the anthropologist’s interest in the relationship between culture and social life. The resulting stories not only considered how social institutions and cultural practices developed and changed over time but also proposed why and to what effect. Such why’s are difficult to tease out of the source base from which early African history is written, but Vansina was committed to addressing them.^{Footnote 11}

In How Societies Are Born, for example, Vansina carefully tracked the multiple innovations and diffusions of practices of matrilineality in west central Africa. He argued that practices of reckoning kin through ties to one’s mother’s family constituted new political, economic, and social strategies. Matrilineality could serve as a strategy precisely because, as MacGaffey pointed out, individuals could mobilize ties to different matrikin depending on their own needs and ambitions without violating the community’s ideals.^{Footnote 12} Vansina illuminated such strategies at work in the deeper past. Around the eighth century, communities in southern Angola began to reckon kinship through the mother’s line as a way to organize the labor needed to sustain growing cattle herds and to control inheritance, lest hard-won herds dissipate upon their owner’s death. Vansina argued that this novel system for governing wealth and crafting dispersed networks of kin eventually spread through Zambia, Katanga, and into east central Africa, though it was put to different use in each place.^{Footnote 13} In contrast, farmers in Kongo-speaking regions to the north independently innovated practices now labeled “matrilineality” as a strategy to support men’s efforts to establish themselves as the heads of new settlements and, thereby, as the heads of founding matrilineages. Later, Vansina argued, the political strategy of using matrikin as support groups spread to the middle Kwilu.^{Footnote 14}

Vansina’s approach to matrilineality as a set of strategies rooted in the economy and politics of a particular time and place stands in stark contrast to arguments for the antiquity of the so-called matrilineal belt of southern central Africa.^{Footnote 15} While raising important questions about gender in early African communities, some of this work treats matrilineality as a reified “system,” particularly in foregrounding its assumed evolutionary advantages as part of the argument for its antiquity.^{Footnote 16} More than reconstructing a kinship “system” at great historical remove or treating it as a historical “hangover” from time immemorial, Vansina described a range of practices only later homogenized under the label of “matrilineality.”^{Footnote 17} Here we see, I think, the impact of Vansina’s early years of fieldwork on his later historical writing: his recognition of the plurality of matrilineality seems to stem from an intimate understanding of – perhaps even a personal experience of – the way that values, ideals, and practices are put into the service of individuals’ audacious ambitions and shaped by the complex micro-politics in which individuals are embedded, even in very early pasts when such intimate details are nearly impossible to discern.^{Footnote 18} Vansina’s experiences in the field were undoubtedly shaped by his status as a male researcher and, in this way, might also explain why he focused more on the instrumental benefits of matrilineal kinship strategies to men and offered little information on how such practices afforded women opportunities or constrained their actions.^{Footnote 19}

Narrative Scale and Historical Imagination

Vansina frequently described the development and outcomes of the institutions he studied in a unique narrative form: well-informed but necessarily imagined historical reconstructions of what “would have” happened in intimate negotiations among individuals and between groups. This style of narrative is an effort to mitigate the vast scale of comparative historical linguistic evidence. Without the historians’ informed imagination, linguistic data lacks the evocative power of the vignettes historians of more recent periods use as exemplars of historical processes and persuasive encapsulations of their historical arguments. Vansina’s discussion of the development of sodalities, or associations, “as institutions for common governance” among communities farming the Kalahari Sands in the inner regions of west central Africa serves as a good example of his narrative style and its value in generating new research questions.^{Footnote 20}

Vansina identified the origins of cross-cutting “sodalities organizing the various rites of passage” in local environmental conditions:

There is a brute instrumentalism here, but in a move that echoes Colleen Kriger’s insistence on the significance of smithing as a form of labor, Vansina emphasized initiation as something more than ritual – it was a domain of hard work.^{Footnote 22}

As this fairly typical passage continues, its narrative qualities grow richer. Vansina draws on the ethnographic record to fill in the gaps left by the nearly absent archaeological record and the anonymizing scale of the linguistic record. Vansina imagines the sequence and seasonality of the initiation in earlier periods:

This passage has the feel of someone who knows personally the rhythms of agrarian life and the “ideal” time for pursuits in the bush. As the rich detail on environment in all his books reveals, Vansina knew from experience how long it took to acquire even a cursory understanding of the hourly and seasonal habits of game, the location and timing of the fruiting of wild plants, the relative force of different poisons and the way variations in their preparation interacted with particular species, much less the “long time” it takes “to become thoroughly familiar” with the technologies and offerings of the bush.^{Footnote 24} The passage also reads like the work of an ethnographer who has sat under the verandah, listening to elders in the mid-twentieth century insist on the importance of initiation in making young men into fully-formed adults invested in the ideals of gerontocracy: better that willful youths be molded to “a certain overall maturity” than that they run off to seek wage-work without permission or marry into some unknown family under a local missionary’s welcoming gaze!

Imagining initiation to be populated by young men and women and knowledgeable trainers, Vansina was able to recognize it as an arena of work – of striving, competition, and the control older men (and women?) sought to maintain over ambitious youths. The politics of this striving, competition, and control “spawned further series of rites of passage to mark passage into the status of mature adult and, in some cases, even a later one to acquire the status of initiator.”^{Footnote 25} One can’t help but wonder whether Vansina’s own observation of (and participation in?) the politics of competition and striving unfolding around initiations during fieldwork allowed him to understand historical developments like the proliferation of rites of passage and their ever-greater economic requirements as outcomes of intimate gendered and generational micro-politics rarely directly attested in language evidence.

As the passage continues, Vansina draws ever nearer to his subjects, probing the kinds of personal ties and experiences engendered by initiation rites, again relying on ethnography:

The entire passage is a typical example of the kind of compelling narrative style Vansina deployed. This style generates new historical questions for scholars of Africa’s early pasts. Just as he unpacked the variety of practices of matrilineality and age set initiation, we might compel Vansina to elaborate on his sociological category of “friendship” – to dwell more carefully on how proximities staged, forced, and enjoyed in initiation engendered both large-scale cohorts and new intimacies that also had social and political impact. For friendship, too, has a history – at least in other parts of the world. As homogenizing as the English word “friendship” is, it has a robust vocabulary in Africa. Vansina, himself, reconstructed some of this vocabulary but he did not interpret it with the same attention to multiple forms and historical contingencies that he applied to larger-scale institutions like matrilineality, initiation, or age-sets. There is, then, a tension in Vansina’s work between the institutions he foregrounded and his sensitivity to the social ties crafted by the individuals populating those institutions.

To think about early history in this way – as stories of proximities and intimacies among our historical subjects – is to scale down our research topics nearer to individuals’ experiences. This necessarily requires the narrative style of historical imagination Vansina pioneered by drawing on his own and others’ fieldwork. Of course, historical imagination figures into all historians’ work. Colleagues working on contexts with rich troves of documents face the challenge of imagining the futures their subjects sought, particularly when those efforts were unrealized or when the factors impinging upon subjects’ aspirations have disappeared. Working with the evidence of deeper pasts, scholars of early African history face a different problem: imagining the possible pasts their subjects lived. Through Vansina’s style of informed historical imagining, it is possible to study the outcomes of proximities and intimacies even with the large-scale, anonymizing evidence of language, treating as equal historical problems the friendships and rivalries fostered in initiation camps and the development of the institutions that housed, stoked, or supported such intimate ties.

Archaeological evidence is an important component of this strategy of scaling down our research questions nearer to our subjects’ experiences.^{Footnote 27} In addition to the familiar use of the archaeological record to contextualize language evidence of regional processes, such as the spread of pastoralism, Vansina also focused on specific sites, such as those at Tsodilo, to talk about both extraordinary and typical settlements.^{Footnote 28} Scaling down further, singular archaeological artifacts and unique archaeological contexts illuminate individuals’ iterations of broader regional practices. We can see such detail in studies of material culture that pay attention to variation, an approach that has allowed historians and archaeologists to identify techniques developed by individual potters and smiths and to consider the social implications of such virtuosity and creativity.^{Footnote 29} Vansina similarly pondered the significance of singular efforts, as seen in his discussion of “the attempt to render a guilloche design on undated rock engravings near the headwaters of the Zambezi, (…) which could well be an imitation of Kansanshi pottery” onto which the same guilloche design was first inscribed in the seventh century, becoming “ubiquitous” in the ninth century.^{Footnote 30} For Vansina, this “attempt” signified the possibility of earlier than expected trade ties between the Copperbelt and the Upper Zambezi, but we might also wonder at the hopes communicated by this singular copy-cat design carved into the new medium of stone.

The heterogeneity on display in the variations preserved in the material record is masked in the linguistic record when a single name is applied to the variety of expressions of a practice or an idea. The problem can be addressed by bringing linguistic evidence into conversation with archaeological evidence, as Vansina’s work has long compelled us to do. Linkages between the records have a long pedigree in scholarship on early Africa, usually taking the form of correlations between ceramic traditions and protolanguages or direct associations between regional material records and regional protolexicons. But these familiar approaches miss the significance of variation on display in the unique artifacts, contexts, and sites Vansina considered because the archaeology in his regions of interest was too underdeveloped to yield the sorts of broad patterns foregrounded in other studies. The different scales of space and activity attested by linguistic and archaeological evidence allow us to keep both regional practices and variation – even individual’s efforts – in our sights.^{Footnote 31}

We can see the promise of this approach in the interpretation of two isolated pits dug under the floors of two successive houses from early second millennium Isamu Pati in what is now central Zambia. The pits were filled with animals bones, predominantly of two of three antelope species recently gendered feminine in the contemporary argot of communities speaking proto-Kafue. Beyond new, gendered names for particular antelope species, Kafue-speaking men and women also innovated a new form of virilocal cross-cousin marriage connected to similarly novel strategies of reckoning kinship through the mother’s family. These innovations surely facilitated Kafue-speakers’ efforts to expand settlements from the middle Kafue River region to the Batoka Plateau, where Isamu Pati is located.

It is all too easy ignore the two intentional deposits of antelope bones at Isamu Pati because they were isolated incidents (as far as we know). Evidence of singular artifacts and one-off contexts defy easy explanation because, by definition, they attest to strategies that weren’t successful enough to become regional practice as identified in region-wide patterning of relevant materials in the archaeological record. But, as seen in studies of smiths’ and potters’ work, singular artifacts and rare contexts illuminate individuals’ unique strategies and households’ creative manipulations of wide-spread regional practices and ideas. By bringing linguistic and archaeological data into proximity without seeking to match the scales of action and space to which each attest, the two Isamu Pati deposits snap into focus as the unique, fleeting experiments of two generations of households seeking to engage with new practices of kinship and marriage and novel ideas about the relationship between particular forms of hunting and fertility that diffused out from the middle Kafue region, following in the footsteps of immigrant brides and neighbors. For these two Isamu Pati households, the commitment to foreign practices of marriage and kinship might well have felt uncertain as they began the work of building a home to house a newly-established family. We can’t know whether Isamu Pati natives or immigrant Kafue-speakers suggested digging a pit, filling it with bones of those species whose own mating habits seemed to conform to the new ideal of virilocal marriage, and plastering the house floor over the cache of bones. But, bringing together linguistic and archaeological evidence to highlight both wide-spread regional practices and local iterations thereof offers a compelling story of aspiring Isamu Pati residents seeking to stabilize the foundations of households in a world in which ideas about family and household were rapidly changing.^{Footnote 32} The bone caches did not “catch on;” perhaps time (and children and grandchildren) worked out the uncertainties of what had been new practices of blending families and claiming rights in children in the early centuries of the second millennium. Compelling material and linguistic evidence into close proximity while allowing them to attest unique scales of space and action offers us access to intimate stories highlighting the contingencies of those larger-scale processes and institutions, like matrilineality, around which Vansina crafted his historical arguments.