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 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.

Tables and figures
Acknowledgements
Note on Language
List of Abbreviations of Referenced Works

Introduction: Endogenous Kingship

PART I: DIVINATORY SOCIETIES

Chapter 1. The Forest Within
Chapter 2. Beyond Turner's Watershed Division

PART II: MEDICINAL RULE

Chapter 3. A Sukuma Chief on Medicine
Chapter 4. Endogenizing Vansina's Equatorial Tradition
Chapter 5. From Cult to Dynasty: Nilotic and Niger-Congo Extensions
Chapter 6. Magic and the Sole Mode of Production
Chapter 7. Tio Shrines of the Forest Master

PART III: THE CEREMONIAL STATE

Chapter 8. Kuba, Kongo and Buganda 'Miracles': Reversions in Transition
Chapter 9. From Divinatory to Ceremonial State: Narrative Proof from Rwanda

Conclusion: Reversible Transitions

References
Index