Leopards and Ritual Combat in the Angolan Savannah
The Kongo-Njila-speaking peoples of west central Africa - a zone that I will simply refer to as Angola - practised a wide range of danced combat rituals across both civilian and military contexts.
Although the region was also dominated by a savannah, there were no African cavalries to create sweeping empires like the Mali or Songhay. In the northern half of the region, the most influential of many states was the Kingdom of Kongo. This kingdom became Christian in 1491, and in this early period claimed some degree of suzerainty between the Kongo and Kwanza rivers. Below the Kwanza lay the kingdoms of the agricultural central highlands and the pastoralist kingdom of Matama in the southern highlands. To the east of Kongo around the Kasai River was a region governed by sodalities (confraternities) of headhunters. In the west, the Portuguese established two coastal colonial towns: Luanda in the north and Benguela in the south along the coast of the highlands. Throughout this entire region and well beyond, the leopard was a major emblem of political power due to the feline's association with occult knowledge and the ability to kill. Two distinct traditions of leopard metaphors existed in pre-colonial times: the association of the leopard with kingship, and its association with the power of sodalities that normally operated outside the control of monarchs.Sodalities were dominant in the area of the Kasai River where they were associated with asymmetrical violence. In this north-eastern region of Angola, female sodalities ruled and adjudicated over female concerns in the society while their male counterpart, the ngongo, focused on the male concerns of hunting, initiations and protecting the community; it taught young boys both the physical arts of combat and hunting, as well as the metaphysical arts they needed to be successful. Formal training concluded with a circumcision ceremony that made the boys novitiates associated with the society.
However, to become full members of the ngongo they first had to prove themselves as successful headhunters. Headhunting was endemic to this region, and males had to succeed in collecting heads in order to move up the ranks of a sodality. The lethal asymmetrical violence of headhunting was conducted in the form of lightning raids that paralleled the unannounced attacks of leopards on communities. In these highly ritualised events, headhunters began by performing special rites of spiritual protection, travelled with stealth, and then ideally attacked their enemies with surprise, rushing into close combat with their feared machete-like blades, called muela na nvita. Successful new braves were then allowed to become full initiates of the ngongo and could then perform the matambu dance that publicly declared them war aces, able to move up the hierarchy of levels within the association, which may have required further exploits in battle.11 The drive to obtain this honour of brave status and the emphasis on surprise tactics in raids mitigated against a firearms revolution here such as had transformed warfare in other rainforest areas like the Gold Coast. Scholars have linked the presence of Europeans as slave traders and later colonists to another form of sodality-related ritual violence that appears to have increased in the nineteenth century; ritual murder with special claws to make the victim appear slain by a predatory feline. Murders of this type, known as the man-leopard murders, remained a conundrum to Europeans until well into the colonial period throughout western Africa.[871] [872]For most of Angola, warfare was dominated by leopard leaders and symmetrical violence. Lightning raids against unsuspecting victims were carried out by pastoralists in the far south in search of cattle or by the headhunting sodalities of the Kasai in the north-east. Among states of the rest of Angola, however, the most common forms of warfare were ritualised local battles and national wars.
Symmetrical local battles between the chiefs of rival lands were highly ritualised conflicts. Here the numbers of casualties were kept extremely low since at the close of the war each army had to pay a stiff fine for any rival they killed. National wars between large states were more utilitarian, yet most of the fighting was still conducted hand to hand.Unlike in western Europe or the savannah of the Niger River where infantry developed the tradition of closing into tight ranks as an ingrained defence to cavalry charges, there were no horses among west central African nations. Only the Portuguese maintained a cavalry, which was an important basis of their military advantage.13 Firearms were not by themselves decisive in this region, in part because Angolan armies fought spread out instead of presenting a solid mass target for volley fire in the manner of European or Songhay infantry. Further, these soldiers closed by performing leaps and tumbles making them extremely hard to hit with inaccurate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century firearms. Thus the most decisive factor in warfare was shock tactics carried out in scattered close combat. 14 The techniques and skills used in this close fighting were developed though danced combat rituals connected in varying degrees to the sanga, or blade dances, of chiefs and kings.