Yet the Tiv hadn’t signed up for that, and they weren’t too pleased with Lugard’s plan. Trouble quickly brewed. Things exploded in 1929 in nearby Igboland, home of another stateless society, the “loosely knit community” of the Igbos. By the summer of 1939, most social and economic activity had come to a standstill in Tivland. The trouble came from a cult called Nyambua, which can be viewed as the Tiv’s revenge against Lugard, now a baron, enjoying his peaceful retirement in England, and his warrant chiefs. The head of the cult was a man called Kokwa, who sold charms to provide protection from mbatsav, or “witches.” Mbatsav is derived from the word tsav, which means “power” in the Tiv language, particularly power over others. Tsav is a substance that grows on the heart of a person and can be examined after death by cutting open the chest. If you have it, you can make others do what you want, and kill them using fetishes. Crucially, although some people naturally have tsav, it can be increased by cannibalism. As Paul Bohannan put it:
A diet of human flesh makes the tsav, and of course the power, grow large. Therefore the most powerful men, no matter how much they are respected or liked, are never fully trusted. They are men of tsav—and who knows?
The people with tsav belong to an organization—the Mbatsav. Mbatsav has two meanings: powerful people (it is the plural of tsav); and, as we saw, a group of witches. These witches could engage in nefarious activities, for example robbing graves or eating corpses. This is an interesting double meaning. Imagine if in English the word “politicians” simultaneously meant “people who contest for or control elected government offices” and “a group of witches organized for nefarious purposes.” (Not a bad idea, actually.)
People initiated into the Nyambua cult were given a leather wand and a fly whisk. The whisk allowed one to smell out tsav created by cannibalism. A photograph taken by Paul Bohannan of a Tiv diviner with a fly whisk is included in the photography section. In 1939 the whisks were pointed toward the warrant chiefs accused of being witches, an accusation that stripped them of any authority and power that they got from the British. Were the Tiv fighting back against the British? Yes and no. Looking deeper you can see that the movement was not simply anti-British; it was anti-authority. As a Tiv elder, Akiga, told the colonial official Rupert East at the time:
When the land has become spoilt owing to so much senseless murder [by tsav] the Tiv have taken strong measures to overcome the mbatsav. These big movements have taken place over a period extending from the days of the ancestors into modern times …
In fact, religious cults like Nyambua were part of a set of norms that had evolved to protect the Tiv status quo, which meant preventing anybody from becoming too powerful. In the 1930s, the warrant chiefs were the ones getting dangerously powerful, but in the past others had similarly become too big for their boots. Bohannan pointed out how
men who had acquired too much power … were whittled down by means of witchcraft accusations … Nyambua was one of a regular series of movements to which Tiv political action, with its distrust of power, gives rise so that the greater political institution—the one based on the lineage system and a principle of egalitarianism—can be preserved.
What’s really significant here, and brings to mind Athenians’ preoccupation with hubris and ostracizing powerful individuals, is the phrase “distrust of power.” We have so far talked of the power or the capacity of the state. But the state itself is controlled by a set of agents, which includes rulers, politicians, bureaucrats, and other politically influential actors—what might be called the “political elite.” You cannot have the Leviathan without having a political hierarchy, without somebody—the political elite, a ruler, or a state builder—exercising power over others, giving orders, deciding who is right and who is wrong in disputes. Distrust of power breeds fear of this political hierarchy. The Tiv norms didn’t just regulate and control conflict; they also severely restricted social and political hierarchy. Since curbing political hierarchy means curbing the power of the state, some of these norms, including witchcraft accusations, simultaneously stopped state building in its tracks.
A Slippery Slope
The Tiv society was terrified of the fearsome face of the Leviathan and the dominance that it might bring once it got off the ground. It also had powerful norms preventing the emergence of political hierarchy, so the Tiv ended up living with the Absent Leviathan. But there is a puzzle. If society was so powerful and the state and its elites so weak, why were the Tiv terrified of the Leviathan? Why couldn’t they activate the Red Queen effect and benefit from the dynamics that would bring a Shackled Leviathan? Why couldn’t they develop the same sorts of solutions for controlling political hierarchy that Solon and Cleisthenes and other Greek institutional innovators or the American founding fathers devised?
The answer is related to the nature of the norms guarding against the emergence of political hierarchy. But it also highlights that it is difficult to build the conditions for a Shackled Leviathan and there are limitations to the different types of societal power. In contrast to general societal mobilization and the institutionalized forms of political power, Tiv norms relying on rituals, witchcraft practices, and general beliefs against hierarchy could not be easily “scaled up”; they were not the sort of institutions and norms that would be useful once one group within society became sufficiently powerful and exercised authority over the rest. So the Tiv had the capability to nip the emergence of political inequality in the bud, but not necessarily the capacity to control the process of state building once it was under way. This made any state-building attempt a bit of a slippery slope for the Tiv—once you go down that path, you might slip and end up somewhere you did not intend.
To understand this better, it is useful to contrast the social tools available to the Tiv for controlling political hierarchy to those at the disposal of Athenians and Americans while they were engaged in their state-building efforts.
Americans had at least two robust weapons in their arsenal for combating an overeager Leviathan. First, they had institutionalized power for controlling the Leviathan, since state legislatures were influential and could not easily be cast aside, and the federal state would be subject to electoral and judicial controls. Second, American society was mobilized in a way that Tiv society certainly wasn’t. America, in many ways, was a society of smallholders, nurturing not just economic but also political aspirations. It had norms making it unwilling to accept despotic authority and ready to erupt into a rebellion (as the British discovered). As a result, even if they were apprehensive about a centralized state acquiring much greater powers than might have appeared advisable a decade before, Americans still thought that they could prevent the state from turning into a Despotic Leviathan.
Athenians had similar weapons and used them to the same effect. Athens had come out of the Dark Ages with a society intent on reining in the dominance of the elites and their privileges. Its economic structure facilitated societal mobilization. After Solon’s reforms, Athens had become a smallholder society, like the thirteen American colonies, with all of the mobilization that this engendered. Critically, Greek society around this time also became more assertive thanks to changes in military technology. While during the Bronze Age the metal of choice for weapons was bronze, by the eighth century BCE, iron had supplanted it. Bronze weapons were expensive and hence the natural monopoly of the elite. Iron weapons, on the other hand, were much cheaper and “democratized warfare,” in the words of the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. In particular, they led to the famous hoplites, the heavily armed Greek citizen-soldiers, who could fight not just other city-states and the Persians but also overeager elites. The balance of power thus tilted further in favor of Athenian society against the elite. All of this mobilization was institutionalized by Solon, Cleisthenes, and other leaders after them, making it much harder for elites to usurp power and quickly reassert their dominance. As a consequence, Athenians, worried though they were like the Tiv about elites becoming too strong and dominant, nonetheless believed that they could rein them in with their ostracism law, iron armor, and assemblies. They weren’t completely wrong.