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Angola Mbundu Social Structure
Among the Mbundu, the matrilineage survived centuries
of change
in other institutions. Membership in and loyalty to it was
of great
importance. The lineage supported the individual in
material and
nonmaterial ways because most land was lineage domain,
access to it
required lineage membership, and communication between the
living
and their ancestors, crucial to traditional religion, was
mediated
through the lineage.
The Mbundu lineage differed from Bakongo and Ovimbundu
groups
in its underlying theory; it consisted not of individuals
but of
statuses or titles filled by living persons. In this
system, a
Mbundu could move from one status to another, thus
acquiring a
different set of relationships. How, in fact, this
theoretical
system affected interpersonal relationships between
biological kin
has not been described, however.
The Mbundu matrilineage was in some respects a
dispersed unit,
but a core group maintained a lineage village to which its
members
returned, either at a particular stage in their lives or
for brief
visits. Women went to the villages of their husbands, and
their
children were raised there. The girls, as their mothers
had done,
then joined their own husbands. The young men, however,
went to the
lineage village to join their mothers' brothers. The
mothers'
brothers and their sisters' sons formed the more or less
permanent
core of the lineage community, visited from time to time
by the
women of the lineage who, as they grew old, might come to
live the
rest of their lives there. After a time, when the senior
mother's
brother who headed the matrilineage died, some of the
younger men
would go off to found their own villages. A man then
became the
senior male in a new lineage, the members of which would
be his
sisters and his sisters' sons. One of these younger men
might,
however, remain in the old village and succeed the senior
mother's
brother in the latter's status and take on his role
completely,
thus perpetuating the older lineage. According to one
account, the
functioning lineage probably has a genealogical depth of
three to
four generations: a man, his sister's adult sons, and the
latter's
younger but married sister's sons. How this unit
encompasses the
range of statuses characteristic of the matrilineage in
Mbundu
theory is not altogether clear.
Data as of February 1989
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