| Sumario: | Jan Vansina's most recent monograph presents the first regional history of West Central African societies (the Herero, Lunda, and Ovimbundu, inter alia) before their entrance into the wider Atlantic world. Vansina musters an impressive variety of sources—linguistic, archaeological, ethnographic, biological, written, and oral—to uncover how these societies were born from largely independent autochthonous forager communities through the development of institutions of governance. Cultural innovation and borrowing restricted the paths of historical change in West Central African societies to three regional variants. Briefly, societies in the drier southern region valued cattle, organizing their social, political, and economic lives to facilitate the keeping of large herds. Simultaneously, people in middle Angola recognized leaders for their skills in arbitration and the management of fertility. These societies focused on sacralized leaders and the spectacle of the court, whose elaborate title system provided even modest local notables a means of participation in courtly life. Finally, in the Kalahari Sands region to the east, the environment required settlement in small villages along the fertile riverbanks. Collective ideas about society as an interplay of statuses, roles, and individual distinction led to a variety of local elaborations on a shared institutional foundation of villages, vicinages (collectivities of villages), and sodalities based on age and gender.
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