Nobody voted for him, and state policy was dictated from
the top, not by popular participation.
This political revolution introducing state centralization
and law and order in the Kuba country in turn led to an
economic revolution. Agriculture was reorganized and new
technologies were adopted to increase productivity. The
crops that had previously been the staples were replaced
by new, higher-yield ones from the Americas (in particular,
maize, cassava, and chili peppers). The intense mixed-
farming cycle was introduced at this time, and the amount
of food produced per capita doubled. To adopt these crops
and reorganize the agricultural cycle, more hands were
needed in the fields. So the age of marriage was lowered
to twenty, which brought men into the agricultural labor force
at a younger age. The contrast with the Lele is stark. Their
men tended to marry at thirty-five and only then worked in
the fields. Until then, they dedicated their lives to fighting
and raiding.
The connection between the political and economic
revolution was simple. King Shyaam and those who
supported him wanted to extract taxes and wealth from the
Kuba, who had to produce a surplus above what they
consumed themselves. While Shyaam and his men did not
introduce inclusive institutions to the eastern bank of the
Kasai, some amount of economic prosperity is intrinsic to
extractive institutions that achieve some degree of state
centralization and impose law and order. Encouraging
economic activity was of course in the interest of Shyaam
and his men, as otherwise there would have been nothing
to extract. Just like Stalin, Shyaam created by command a
set of institutions that would generate the wealth necessary
to support this system. Compared to the utter absence of
law and order that reigned on the other bank of the Kasai,
this generated significant economic prosperity—even if
much of it was likely extracted by Shyaam and his elites.
But it was necessarily limited. Just as in the Soviet Union,
there was no creative destruction in the Kuba Kingdom and
no technological innovation after this initial change. This
situation was more or less unaltered by the time the
kingdom was first encountered by Belgian colonial officials
in the late nineteenth century.