THE BEMBA TRIBE OF NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA 99
food, and to protect his person and that of the sacred relics from the contagion of illness, death, or sex defilement.1
The ritual by which a successor to the chieftainship is converted from an ordinary individual to a ruler with almost divine powers, has a good deal of political importance. It confers authority on the priests—in this case hereditary officials (bakabild) who cany it out—and gives them, as we shall see, considerable power to check the chief himself. The complete ritual by which the umupashi of a dead ruler is liberated to guard the land he governed, and the new heir is installed, is too complex to describe here and now. Briefly speaking, it consists of the desiccation of the body during a period of a year, from one kafir-corn harvest to the next; its burial in a special grove (with human sacrifices in the old days); and the building of a shrine on the site of the deserted capital. To make the new chief, bakabtlo must preside at the installation of a new great wife, arrange for the sexual purification of the royal pair, and the lighting of their new sacred fire.2 They must hand over to the heir the heirlooms (babenye) of which they have been in charge during the interregnum, and must finally found a new village and build again the sacred huts in which the relics are to be kept. Such a ceremonial may take eighteen months to two years and the participation of all the bakabtlo and hereditary buriers (bdfingo) in the case of the paramount; a lesser time and very many fewer priestly dignitaries in the case of the territorial chiefs. The secrecy and awe surrounding these ceremonies is, I believe, one of the ways by which the people's reverence for their chiefs is maintained.
(b) Legal Rules of Descent and Succession. Against this background of beliefs as to the continuity between one generation and another, the nature of descent and succession is defined exactly by legal rule. Descent in the royal family is reckoned to the time of first occupation of the country, and twenty-five to thirty Citimukulus are remembered. In the case of a territorial chief, the line of ancestors is not so long, and most are described as having been 'born in the country'. Most of the names honoured are those of men but some are those of women, and it seems that
1 cf. my Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (iQ39), chap. xvii.
2 Hence the importance of the great wife of the chief (umukolo ua calo) in the political life of the tribe and the belief that her behaviour also influences the welfare of the land.