ABSTRACT
A series of remarkably detailed reports describes the Nyakusa as an expanding people whose segmentary-or ultrasegmentary-political or ganization was nicely geared to producing maximum ferment wi thin an orderly but always burgeoning framework of personal authority and ritual-ceremonial practice (Wilson, 1951, 1957, 1959). The Kinga had also been a politically expanding people, before European contact, but their expansion was on a smaller and probably much less ebullient scale. Numbers make a difference, and so perhaps do mountains, for the latter seem to have set Ukinga apart for a life harder than that on the Nyakusa plains, a life more suited to goats than cattle-and certainly without banana groves. Whatever the demographic and ecological factors that set special conditions for the development of the Kinga polity, I shall be concerned in this paper to describe a balance between priest and prince, religion and politics, rather different from that which has been described for the Nyakusa.
