Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

50
power’s value and necessity deserving a corresponding attitude to its holders
was perceived as something going without saying and vitally important for
every Bini. Not occasionally the Second dynasty supreme ruler’s title, the Oba,
may etymologically derive from the word ooba that can be translated as “it is
difficult.”
The student of the Andean Moche culture Bawden has defined as
“structural paradox” the collision between social order “embedded in a
structural tradition defined by kinship principles” and “elite power, by
definition exclusive in nature” that “must be constructed within a context that
innately resists it” (1995: 258). As well as in the Moche culture (and many
others – vide stricto Claessen and Oosten 1996a; Bondarenko and Korotayev
2000a), in Benin what provided the means for overcoming the contradiction
was ideology. As has been emphasized above, the core of this ideology was the
ancestor cult. It was the core of not ideology as a political construct only, but
of religion and, in the final analysis, the Binis’ world outlook first and
foremost. Predominantly just its “philosophy” and morality formed the
foundations of the socio-economic and political relations (Bradbury 1965;
1973: 229–250; Willett and Picton 1967; Dean 1983; Aghahowa 1988;
Bondarenko 1992b; 1995a: 24–31 et al.; 1996b; 1997a; 1997b; 2000a).
Precisely due to this the ancestor cult could be so effectively employed in
ideology of a polity of the Benin type.
The outstanding early student of Nigerian peoples, including the Binis,
Percy Amaury Talbot (1926: II, 298) emphasized basing on his many-year
experience of life and work in the country that “[n]o one can hope to appreciate
the thoughts and feelings of the black man who does not realise that to him the
dead are not dead but living, in full command of all their faculties, including
memory, and endowed with greater abilities and powers than when on earth”.
In its most fundamental spiritual features and their reflections in rituals the
ancestor cult of the Binis had very much in common with the same cult of other
African and non-African peoples but, as Parrinder (1978: 124–125) pointed out,
in the vast ethno-cultural area of the coastal tropical forest extending from
Ghana to Eastern Nigeria just among the Binis it was especially profoundly
elaborated and played a more important part in private and socio-political life
than anywhere else. In our time for the Binis ancestors still “… are never left
out in the scheme of things in the society” (Aghahowa 1988: 63). Ancestors
were attributed with the ability to influence social life even more actively and
crucially than the living. 33 Naturally, the spirits demanded constant care: they
were believed to be able to punish their improperly behaving offspring by any
calamity one could imagine, including even death (Emowon 1984: 8;
Aghahowa 1988: 64–65).
Like fear of the Hell was a “great social fact” in medieval Europe
(Bloch 1961/1939–1940), lack of this fear in Benin influenced directly her
socio-economic order and especially political culture and system. An early