As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.

“Koen Stroeken has developed an argument that is subtle and profound… [He] covers immense territory historically and geographically, but without sacrificing rigorous empiricism, deep ethnography, or conceptual sophistication.” • Journal of Anthropological Research

“Admirably clearly written… [the volume exhibits] high scholarship, methodological ingenuity, and sound use of history.” • David Parkin, University of Oxford

Koen Stroeken is Associate Professor in Africanist anthropology at Ghent University (CARAM) and the coordinator of a long-term academic exchange with Mzumbe University, Tanzania. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Sukuma healers, his publications – including the monograph Moral Power (2010, Berghahn) – mainly deal with African cosmologies and the sensory materiality of magic.