Lele Erotic

The Lele are the people anthropology students meet through a pangolin. They live on the western side of the Kasai River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in rolling country where the southern edge of the equatorial forest breaks into grassland, and they became one of the best documented small societies in Africa after Mary Douglas lived among them around 1950. The fame is a little lopsided: a farming and hunting people numbering in the tens of thousands, known worldwide for a scaly anteater. But the detail matters, because it shows how the Lele think. The forest is where God, Njambi, placed the spirits and everything good: game, medicines, raffia palms, fertility itself. The tree pangolin, a scaled animal that climbs, and bears one young at a time the way humans do, breaks every category, and so initiated Pangolin men eat it in a rite meant to bring children and good hunting to the village.

Their language, Lele, is Bantu and sits close to Bushong, the language of the Kuba kingdom across the river, and to neighboring Wongo. The Lele and the Kuba tell a shared story of origin, but the Lele never built a court. A chiefly clan existed with little real power; each village ran itself, ranked its men by age sets, and deferred, loosely, to its oldest man. Wealth was counted in raffia cloth, woven by men from palm fiber and handed over for marriages, cult entry fees, fines and compensation. Old men held the cloth and the wives, young men waited, and one answer to that pressure was the village wife, a woman married jointly to an age set, whose children belonged to the village as a whole. Rights over women also settled blood debts, a system of pawnship that tied clans together across generations. Belgian administrators and missionaries suppressed the village wife, pawnship and the poison ordeal used to test accused sorcerers.

Most Lele today are Christian, largely Catholic, and many have left for the river port of Ilebo or for Kinshasa. The old cults have thinned, but fear of sorcery has not gone with them. When Douglas returned in the 1980s she found accusations running hotter than before, with anti-sorcery campaigns now led in a Christian idiom. Village life still turns on cassava and maize fields, palm wine, and the communal hunt, whose success or failure was long read as a verdict on the moral state of the village.