An historical introduction to a study of Zande society

SYNOPSIS

The political institutions of the Azande people of Central Africa cannot adequately be understood unless their history during the past century or so is known, at any rate in outline, for it was a time of, for them, momentous happenings. Fortunately, it has been recorded by a number of writers, particularly de Calonne‐Beaufaict, but in such detail and in so complicated a manner that it is very difficult and probably also unrewarding for students of Africa to attempt to read them. In this article a selection has been made from this voluminous and tangled material to present, as far as is possible, a simplified and less factually‐weighted picture of an historical situation in which some of the more significant features of the political life of the Azande can be stressed. Even when this has been done, the picture is still highly complicated. That can in no way be avoided; and it is furthermore one of the main purposes of the article to emphasize precisely this very great complexity of the tangle of political relations and events and of peoples and personalities which form the background of Zande political institutions as Europeans found them when they first began to take over Zandeland and to administer it. What happened in the past cannot, it is true, be understood without a knowledge of these institutions, but it is also true that such understanding as we are able to have of these institutions is due to our knowledge of the more distant past as well as to anthropological studies of the more recent past.