attacked or kidnapped. In the Bushong country, this rarely, if ever, happened.
What lay behind these differences in the patterns of production, agricultural technology, and prevalence of order? Obviously it was not geography that induced the Lele to use inferior hunting and agricultural technology. It was certainly not ignorance, because they knew about the tools used by the Bushong. An alternative explanation might be culture; could it be that the Lele had a culture that did not encourage them to invest in hunting nets and sturdier and better-built houses? But this does not seem to have been true, either. As with the people of Kongo, the Lele were very interested in purchasing guns, and Douglas even remarked that“ their eager purchase of firearms … shows their culture does not restrict them to inferior techniques when these do not require long-term collaboration and effort.” So neither a cultural aversion to technology nor ignorance nor geography does a good job of explaining the greater prosperity of the Bushong relative to the Lele.
The reason for differences between these two peoples lies in the different political institutions that emerged in the lands of the Bushong and the Lele. We noted earlier that the Lele lived in fortified villages that were not part of a unified political structure. It was different on the other side of the Kasai. Around 1620 a political revolution took place led by a man called Shyaam, who forged the Kuba Kingdom, which we saw on Map 6, with the Bushong at its heart and with himself as king. Prior to this period, there were probably few differences between the Bushong and the Lele; the differences emerged as a consequence of the way Shyaam reorganized society to the east of the river. He built a state and a pyramid of political institutions. These were not just significantly more centralized than what came before but also involved highly elaborate structures. Shyaam and his successors created a bureaucracy to raise taxes and a legal system and police force to administer the law. Leaders were checked by councils, which they had to consult with before making decisions. There was even trial by jury, an apparently unique event in sub-Saharan Africa prior to European colonialism. Nevertheless, the centralized state that Shyaam constructed was a tool of extraction and highly absolutist.