Chapter Eight: Healer or King

This chapter explains the tensor of kum which features centrally in the author’s anthropological work on chiefdoms in eastern and central Africa that centralized into kingdoms. The data intertwine with conversations with a modernly educated chief, a man of the world living in the metropole of Dar es Salaam. The effort of the previous chapter continues as we extend our analysis from frame and sphere to cultural systems and the human species. Ethnographic reflections about lifeways come to the fore, as do intuitions one acquires after being trained in medicine. The training draws on a long-standing initiatory network spanning central and eastern Africa. Divination and initiation keep the chief’s rule medicinal. They prevent power from corrupting into autocracy. Can Western democracies, which presently go through rough times, learn from the mechanisms? An intriguing similarity is how the tensor splits into simplexes, and that members of the human species intuit the split as ‘no good’. Elections are politics of the real that reveal collective reason. The chapter ends with the contrasting case of a European country after 400 days without government. Do the better educated know best?