Hegelian Dialectics in Benin Kingdom HistoriographyAuthor(s): Patrick ManningSource: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.20, No. 3 (1986), pp. 431-435Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/484450 .

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Hegelian Dialectics in Benin Kingdom Historiography

Patrick Manning

R. A. Sargent's article on Benin Kingdom is challenging, perplexing, and ulti-

mately unsatisfying. The subject is clear: changes in social formations of

monarchy and society in the era before the Portuguese arrival. But the nature of the author's approach - and hence the nature of his results - is set forth in such a shrouded and contradictory fashion that the reader is

required to devote an unreasonable effort to deciding what sort of an article it is. Is it an empirical study, in which the author mainly assembles data, but also sketches in a few interpretive outlines? Is it, at the other extreme, a the- oretical piece, with just enough data to illustrate the analytical framework? Is it the development of a hypothesis, in which the author organizes data into a fully developed interpretation? Or do we have here the test of a

hypothesis, developed elsewhere from theory or from other data, which is to be verified or negated with the evidence at hand? Or, finally, and this would be Sargent's most ambitious intent, do we have here the restatement of a verified historical reconstruction?

Most historical writing can be set into one or another of the above five

categories. Usually, of course, historians prefer to write with sufficient nuance and subtlety to avoid such explicit categorization of their efforts; their intention, it seems, is to avoid focusing explicitly on formal categories and straightforward deductive logic in hopes of preserving the reader's con- tact with the complex reasoning and immense number of variables which are unavoidable in real historical situations. Occasionally, however, the subliminal messages conveyed through this indirect style of historical writ- ing fail to weave themselves together into a more profound if implicit com- prehension of the situation, and instead collide with each other in the mind of the reader and create confusion, causing him to cry out for an explicit statement of the author's plan of attack.

Sargent's study begins with such an authoritative tone that the reader is willing for a moment to consider the possibility that it might be an empiri- cal study setting forth well-established facts, or even a verified historical reconstruction organizing such facts into a demonstrable past reality. But a

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432 CJAS / RCEA XX:3 1986

glance at the references reveals that the documentary record is simply too narrow for either an empirical study or a verified reconstruction to have been the author's intended approach. The evidence is limited to the com-

pendia of oral tradition by J. U. Egharevba, to A.F.C. Ryder's work with

European documents, to anthropological studies by H.L.M. Butcher and R.E.

Bradbury, and to some archaeological work. Of these, only a portion of

Egharevba's work and the archaeological work refers directly to the period under study (c. 1293-1536).

More plausible is the notion that Sargent's study should be seen as the test of a hypothesis against data available for Benin Kingdom. The hypothe- sis, in this view of the article, is drawn together from J.B. Webster's typology of African social formations and Bernard I. Belasco's interpretation of Benin

Kingdom; the data on which it is tested are those noted above. But the article does not measure up as a hypothesis test, even an informal one, because of weakness in the data base, problems in the exposition of the argu- ment, and an incomplete logical structure for the test. On the data, Chief

Egharevba's edition of Benin oral tradition is a valuable and apparently reli- able compendium, but one must recognize the limits of what can be drawn out of lists of kings, of offices and institutions set up by reign, and concise summaries of court controversies (196o, 9, 23, 78-79). Sargent presents reg- nal periods in precise form (e.g., c. 1293-1320), and it may even be that these

figures are nearly as accurate as they are precise. But that is no guarantee that a migration stated by Egharevba to have taken place in a given reign did not take place in the previous reign.' The format of Sargent's presentation is dominated by the announcement of his conclusions rather than by discus- sion of the evidence; this absence of multi-sided review of evidence reduces the reader's freedom to share in evaluating the hypotheses, and further sug- gests that a hypothesis test was not the author's intent. In addition, a fair test requires the presentation of some alternative hypothesis and a measure- ment of data against both hypotheses, but no such alternative is set forth.

The data, though they seem to be receding in importance in this study, might yet play a role; data which are too scanty to verify a hypothesis may yet legitimately be sufficient to generate one. That is, perhaps I have misun- derstood Sargent's message to the reader indicating the intended direction of the relationship between data and interpretation in his study - rather than

beginning with a hypothesis and using the data to test it, he perhaps sought to begin with the data and create a hypothesis. The latter view does, in fact, seem consistent with much of what Sargent has done - for instance, his use of traditions on migrations and creation of offices to propose a chronology of transformation in the political economy - and it is a common and entirely valid approach for historians to take. But this interpretation of the article is nullified, overall, by the author's willingness to reach beyond the limits of

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433 Manning: Benin Kingdom Historiography

pre-Portuguese Benin to grasp essential elements of his hypothesis. Two

examples will be sufficient to illustrate the distinction I am proposing, each

demonstrating a case in which Sargent conceals from the reader a way in which he has used post-Portuguese evidence to construct his hypothesis on

pre-Portuguese Benin. In the first case, Sargent argues for "a rather dramatic shift toward cen-

tralised coercive state exploitation" in the period c. 1374-1455, by quoting A.F.C. Ryder to state that "elephant hunters constituted a special class in Benin with an organization recalling that of other trades and skills devoted to the service of the Oba" (4 12). What he left out was that Ryder, referring in this passage to the years 15 14-15 17, begins the sentence by saying, "In later centuries elephant hunters constituted a special class ..." (53; my italics). In a second such example, Sargent relies on H.L.M. Butcher (1935) to document the "gerontocratic Otu system" as the basic social structure of fourteenth-

century Benin Kingdom. But Butcher not only wrote his description of the Otu system in the ethnographic present, he also expressed explicitly the

opinion that the Otu system had developed more fully in peripheral areas of the kingdom than near the capital. For Sargent to hypothesize that Butcher's

argument should be inverted, and that development should become sur-

vival, is quite legitimate as hypotheses go. But to do so without comment

misrepresents the source as evidence for Sargent's hypothesis. Historians of precolonial Africa rarely have the luxury of working with

ample quantities of data. As a result, the importance of speculation and of

logically turning about scarce evidence is magnified for African history as

compared with that of other continents. One may go so far as to consider our data as tiny crystals of evidence, through which we shine the light of various

paradigms, and study the diffraction patterns in attempts to learn the struc- ture of the societies from which they came. Or we may turn to quite a differ- ent chemical metaphor: I once overheard a distinguished historian of Africa, when asked about the role of speculation in the field, respond, "it's oxygen." But important as speculation is in any historical analysis of precolonial Africa, one must always be ready to acknowledge the point at which the data become too scarce to sustain a steady framework, and when the specu- lation overwhelms that framework rather than fills spaces within it. To call such an analysis history, rather than theory, is to indulge oneself in the

heady effects of breathing pure oxygen for too long. Sargent's study, one may thus conclude by process of elimination, is in

substance a piece of historical theorizing. This is as legitimate an effort as any of the other categories of historical writing discussed above; the unwel- come aspect of the article is not its substance, but the difficulty of finding signposts indicating its real nature. Once one gets through the task of his-

toriographical discovery, one finds that the theory is of interest in general,

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434 CJAS / RCEA XX:3 1986

and plausible in many respects for Benin Kingdom. Given what is known from the traditions and from Portuguese documents, there must necessarily have occurred a set of transformations which led to a centralized, bureau- cratic system able to construct substantial public works, to encourage and to regulate long-distance trade, and to maintain an impressive social control over a vast and well-organized kingdom.

Sargent sets forth his theory in dialectical and materialist terms, and

then, out of a dialectic linking capital and countryside, monarchy and geron- tocracy, trade and tribute, he postulates the development of a new social for- mation by the end of the fifteenth century: the imperial trading formation. This analysis, which occupies the bulk of the article, is of interest because of the complex interactions the author seeks to identify - at local, national, and imperial levels - among social structures, chiefly titles, control of arti- sanal work, trading patterns, and royal strategies for governance. The essence of this study, then, is the effort to elucidate at a theoretical level the "laws of motion" which permitted the evolution of Benin Kingdom to such a remarkable level of development.

Of the many factors composing this theory, which dominates the dialec- tic of social change? At each point in Sargent's analysis, the royal strategies for governance, though interacting with other elements, become the deter-

mining factor:

It seems, therefore, that Oba Ewuare transformed Benin from a tribute-based social formation to a national trading state (414).

In other words,

The evolution of the national trading formation, the expansion of the conquest state, and the development of coercive integral power in the palace ultimately established what might be characterised as an imperial trading formation (417).

Sargent's reliance on state policy as the key element in his theory forces one to conclude that the materialist form of his analysis is undercut by its substance. The dialectic at work here is closer to that of Hegel than to that of Marx. In Hegel's view of history, the spirit and the Idea of freedom

struggle in a dialectical relationship with the material realities of the world and the supremacy of the human will is gradually established.

The state is the spiritual Idea externalised in the human will and its freedom. All historical change is therefore essentially dependent upon the state, and the successive movements of the Idea appear within it as distinct constitutional principles (1975, 120).

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435 Manning: Benin Kingdom Historiography

Sargent, in effect, treats the imperial social formation as the Benin equiv- alent of Hegel's ideal of freedom in world history. The notion of the imperial social formation struggles mightily, formulating itself in the minds of Benin

monarchs, seeking to liberate itself from all constraints, and interacting with other realities and ideas. Finally, in the early sixteenth century, the

imperial social formation is able to free itself and become reality. Sargent's analysis is an alternative to - rather than an example of - Marxian political economy in precolonial Africa. Free will, a key element in each of these

paradigms, has emerged here as a dominant rather than a subordinate cause of historical change. Sargent's dialectical analysis is attractive precisely because it links diverse factors into a systemic whole, and it is fascinating in its formulation of the rule of human agency and of the state. On the one

hand, his approach corresponds to a common-sense analysis of African soci-

ety, for which attempts to delineate modes of production have given less sat-

isfying results than for Asia and Europe. On the other hand, his focus on the state as the agent of historical change must be seen as generating a limited or

pessimistic view of history for the Old World continent where the state has

developed the least. In sum, the theoretical issues inherent in this study are of great interest

for Benin Kingdom and for precolonial Africa generally. It is unfortunate that the issues themselves and the overall design of the article could not have been set before the reader more clearly and directly.

I. Sargent has relied in a chronology proposed in 1976 by F.B. Ataba; this chro- nology shows regnal dates to be somewhat more recent than those proposed by Egharevba. See Sargent, note i and regnal list; Egharevba (1960, 75-76).

Butcher, H.L.M. i935. "Some Aspects of the Otu System of the Isa Sub-tribe of the Edo People of Southern Nigeria." Africa 8.

Egharevba, J.U. 1960. A Short History of Benin. 3rd edition. Ibadan. Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by H.B.

Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A.F.C. Ryder. 1969. Benin and the Europeans. New York: Humanities. R.A. Sargent. 1986. "From a Redistribution to an Imperial Social Formation, Benin c.

I293-I 536." Canadian Journal of African Studies 20, no. 2: 402-427.

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