ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the position of leaders-they can hardly be called chiefs-among the Anuak who live on both sides of the Ethiopian-Sudan border. It considers it better to speak here of a 'symbolic or ceremonial kingship' rather than a 'ritual kingship', to emphasize the mystical powers of a kingship like that of the Shilluk, confreres of the Anuak. Like the Anuak, Shilluk kingship was striven for in recurrent civil wars rooted in the territorial dispersal öf the population, but its high ritual power enabled it to unite 110,000 people in a nation. The chapter argues that those Anuak villages which competed for the kingship and the Shilluk settlements were united in a kind of recurrent civil war, which resolved the conflict between the centripetal tendencies of unity and the centrifugal effects of territorial dispersion. It deals with the influence of technology on the distribution of population and the relation between rulers and subjects in a series of African states.
