Tribal mixing is a social characteristic in East African societies. This paper aims to seek a probability to classificate and systemize social units such as family, neighbourhood, village, chiefdom and town in African Bantu societies according to two indexes, population and number of tribes co-existing in each social unit in these societies.
Here I adopted two indexes, (1) number of population (
P), and (2) number of tribes which members form more than 1 percent of total population of a social unit (
N).
Then I tried to locate each social unit on coordinations which set number of population as horizontal axes in logarithm scale and number of tribes as vertical axes. In this attempt to locate each social unit on coordinations, I can find a number of systems of succession in development of each social units, which are showed in incline of line which link up each set of same social units.
As I showed in Fig. 7, 8, 9, (Page 16, 17, 18) we can find a number of systems in incline of lines, namely the lowest incline
C1 (Succession of societies of exclusive chiefdom), next incline
C2 (Succession of societies of inclusive chiefdom) and (Succession of societies of old settlement type) and the highest incline
T (Succession of societies of new settlement type-i.e. colonial towns).
All lines of
C1,
C2 concentrate on one point (
P=500,
N=4). I ordained this point
C as the hypothetical original setting of each set of succession of social units such as chiefdom, old town settlement, and also point
T (
P=500,
N=11) as the hypothetical original setting of succession of new town settlement.
This systems of social units would be able to show in a formula as following;
P=p⋅10
N-n/kP=number of population of a social unit.
N=number of tribes in a social unit.
P=hypothetical number of population of the original setting of succession.
n=hypothetical number of tribes of the original setting of succession.
k=coefficient of tribal mixing.
According to this formula, we can indicate population formula of each succession type.
inclusive chiefdom P=500⋅10
N-4 (k=1)
exclusive chiefdom P=500⋅10
N-4/2 (k=2)
also P=500⋅10
N-4/3 (k=3)
also P=500⋅10
N-4/4 (k=4)
old settlement P=500⋅10
N-4/5 (k=5)
new settlement P=500⋅10
N-11/4 (k=4)
So each succession is provided in three invariable number
p,
n, and
k.
In this paper I showed some examples of application of this principle to some Bantu societies of north-western region of Tanzania. I think that this principle of explanation of societies will be able to apply to other African societies and to provide comparative criterion to studies of African societies.
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