Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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important than belonging to a more or less noble family. The division into
the elder and the younger was the primary one for both the community and the
society as a whole. This way the gerontocratic principles and forms of
communal government, on the one hand, and the evidently homoarchic (conic)
type of the Benin megacommunity, on the other hand, were determined.
Indeed, the prevailing of the sex-and-age principle of socio-political
stratification (sanctified by the ancestor cult, the backbone of the Binis’ picture
of the universe [Bondarenko 1995a: 24–31]) was clearly felt in the upper
circles of the megacommunity. In this respect the fact which Ajisafe (1945: 13)
tried to comprehend is very revealing: “Though naturally, personality played a
great part, there were certain chiefs and elders who by reason of their age and
experience exercised more influence in the affairs of the land and in the
Council (at the supreme ruler. D. B.) than their rank would seem to warrant.
It may thus be admitted that apart from the personality of any particular chief,
age is respected more than their rank and rank is respected more than the law”
(see also Ibid.: 87–88).
In the Bini community kin ties were accompanied and supplemented
by territorial ones. No doubt, in the megacommunity the importance of
territorial ties grew considerably. However, as well as before its formation,
such ties were built in and to the kin relations not in the ideological sphere only
but in realities of the socio-political organization as well (Bradbury 1957: 31).
The community did not just preserve itself: it went on playing the part of the
fundamental socio-political institution notwithstanding the number of
complexity levels overbuilding it. As before, the community predetermined the
homoarchic nature of the whole Benin socio-cultural and political model and
fastening all the levels of the Benin society’s structure, made it was firm and
durable: Benin remained a megacommunity till the very end of her independent
development.
Even in the mid-15 th – 19 th centuries, when the initially local,
communal nature of the society came into contradiction with the imperial
political and cultural discourse, the principles and system of governing the
empire (the preservation of local rulers in subjugated lands, migrations of the
Obas’ relatives with followers to weakly populated territories, residing of the
Bini governors of the dependencies in Benin City and not in “colonies”, the use
of the same ideological pillars that supported the Obas’ power in Benin for
substantiation of the center’s domination in the dependencies, etc., etc.) witness
that by the moment of Benin’s occupation in 1897 the megacommunity still
was the form of organization of the Benin society proper with which sociopolitically
different “colonies” sided. Thus the megacommunity had turned out
able to absorb and “reinterpret” those elements of the imperial discourse that
could have seemed insurmountable for this essentially local, ethno- and sociocentric
form of organization. So, the megacommunity managed to avoid
radical transformation of its fundamental socio-political principles and the