The
new style of social anthropology, introduced in the 1930s by the teachings of *A.R.Radcliffe-Brown
and *B.Malinowski, soon began to affect the type of ethnographic research
conducted in East Africa, especially its emphasis on social institutions. This trend
was also greatly influenced by the fieldwork of †E.E.Evans-Pritchard in the neighbouring
southern Sudan among the Bantu Zande and the *Nilotic Nuer.
It is
within this general context that †Jomo Kenyatta’s monograph on the Kikuyu, Facing
Mount Kenya (1938), should be specially mentioned. In his introduction, Malinowski
testified to Kenyatta’s competence as a trained anthropologist and to the excellence
of his work. Malinowski’s words were not mere pleasantries, but a clear statement
of the need for professional training as a basic requirement for ethnographic research
(Malinowski in Kenyatta 1938:viii). Of course Kenyatta displayed his own bias in
writing, as he put it, ‘for the benefit both of Europeans and of those Africans
who have been detached from their tribal life’ (Kenyatta 1938:xvi) and in
defence of the land claims of his countrymen. This may at once justify the
emotional passages in his writing, and also explain the freshness of his
insider’s account. Though Kenyatta was involved in the political struggle for
independence in Kenya, and went on to become the President of the new republic,
his monograph remains the best record of traditional Kikuyu society.
Evans-Pritchard’s
influence is made evident in his introduction to †Peristiany’s monograph on the
social institutions of the Kipsigis in which he makes two points: firstly ‘that
the Kipsigis have a political system’, and secondly ‘that the †age-set system
of the Kipsigis has a very political importance’ (Evans-Pritchard 1939:xxiii,
xxxi). In the following years these two aspects of East African societies were
prominent in anthropological research, especially in Kenya and Tanzania where
most societies were based on stateless and decentralized systems. This kind of
social organization had been mapped out by †Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard,
the editors of African Political Systems (1940): out of the eight
essays, five were related to African kingdoms, three to stateless and
segmentary societies. East Africa was represented by the kingdom of Ankole in
Uganda (Oberge in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940) and by the stateless society
of the Logoli, one group of the then so-called Bantu Kavirondo, now called
Luyia (Wagner in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940). The Ankole were one link in
the chain of the Great Lakes kingdoms of Buganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The
efficient bureaucracy of these kingdoms, and the majesty of their kings, had
provoked such great admiration among early European observers that they became
seen in an idealized way—‘fetishized’ according to one modern commentator
(Chrétien 1985:1,368)-as heirs of a mythical empire believed by the Europeans
to have been founded by the Bacwezi, supposedly a superior race of ‘whitish’
immigrants. This historical invention was readily endorsed by the standard
handbooks of East African history.