Cannibals, Warriors, Conquerors, and Colonizers: Western Perceptions and Azande Historiography

Abstract

Mainly as a result of the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the Azande are among the best-known African peoples. In anthropological theory they have become indissolubly associated with the study of religion and magic. Also remarkable is their expansion under the leadership of the dynasties of the Avungara and the originally Ngbandi-speaking Abandia. Starting from a small core area in the basin of the lower Mbomu, where the ancestors of the Avungara and Abandia had established themselves as rulers over parts of the resident, mainly Zande-speaking, population around the middle of the eighteenth century, the Abandia extended their rule into the region of the lower Mbomu and lower Uele, while the Avungara and their Azande followers swept eastward in a vast movement and in less than one hundred years conquered a huge area reaching as far as the upper Sue and upper Uele, integrating the population into their system of rule.One of the reasons for the speed of this expansion is that individual members of the Avungara dynasty (who all claimed descent from Ngura, the first historical ruler in the lower Mbomu area) repeatedly founded principalities of their own in new territories. This led to the existence of a varying number of polities under numerous, more or less, powerful rulers who descended from several dynastic branches, thereby preventing the formation of a single kingdom, stable in time and place. Through the integration of numerous groups of different linguistic and ethnic origins, the population cluster was formed for which the collective name Azande has become established. The history of Azande expansion thus provides a very interesting example of a society being created through political processes, which raises questions concerning the origin, acceptance, and characteristics of centralized political organizations, as well as assimilation and acculturation processes (besides the Mangbetu in the Uele-Bomokandi area, the Azande were the only group in the region to develop centralized political structures on a wide scale).