THE FORMATIVE COMMUNITY OF EARLY IRON AGE TIMES, AT ANY rate before about AD 500, was typologically a small group of related families established in a homeland they had occupied or inherited. Its immediate boundaries might be no more than a few miles wide; beyond them there might or might not be a handful of neighbours. Always, the lands of the unknown stood menacingly near, and into these a man would venture at his risk and peril. A village or a cattlecamp : one or two other villages or cattle-camps whose evening smoke climbed wispily grey in the middle distance to hills of mystery and danger: such was the outline of the world of long ago.

Within the formative community there was food and friendship, shelter from raiders whether animal or human, a sanctioned law and order. But there was more. There was also a psychological security: personal identification within a system both suprasensible and material in its terms of reference, within a society both ‘right and natural’ in that it was ‘godmade’ as well as manmade. Beyond, there stood the void in strong and ever-present contrast. Outside this ancestrally chartered system there lay no possible life, since ‘a man without lineage is a man without citizenship9: without identity, and therefore without allies. Ex ecclesia non est vita; or, as the Kongo put it, a man outside his clan is like ‘a grasshopper which has lost its wings’.

This political unit was, even more, an economic one. Having made their homeland, the cluster of families had to survive in it. They could survive only by a process of trial and error as they grappled with its ecology; with its tsetse or floods of rain, its shallow soil or towering forest trees, its slides of hillside pasture or pockets of arable amid lizardgleaming humps of rock. This was the saving process of invention and adaptation that rounded out the group's charter and gave, to those who were fortunate, the sanction of success.

The result was persistently ambiguous. Ideally', in Gluckman's words, ‘a tribal situation is stationary … [and] any change is an injury to the social fabric’ It is an ideal that flows from a pattern laid down by the ancestors, the paradigm of a perfect and unmoving social balance.