Stateless Societies in Africa. Another form of culture that was popular in ancient Africa was the stateless society. A stateless society is a non-nomadic civilization that is not governed by any sort of central authority. People in a stateless society most often practice agriculture and are settled in one place,...
These two cultural systems were effective enough that hunter-gatherer and stateless societies were a major part of Africa all the way into the modern era and the colonization of Africa by Europe. To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
People in a stateless society most often practice agriculture and are settled in one place, but they retain the democratic process and are opposed to one person being dramatically more powerful than the rest. A major factor in this is population. Again, the greater the population, the more need there is for some form of government.
With fewer than about 10,000 people, it was still possible for many African civilizations to remain stateless societies. In fact, many historians believe that up to a third of African societies were stateless before European colonization. One example of a stateless society is the Igbo people, an ethnic group who lived in modern-day Nigeria.
Stateless Societies: these are societies that organize authority around kinship or other obligations. Sometimes these stateless societies were quite large while others were small. No need to tax people if you don't have a large government. Authority only affected small parts of peoples lives.
Decentralized or stateless political societies in Africa were often made up of a group of neighboring towns or villages that had no political connection with a larger kingdom or nation. Most stateless and decentralized societies did not have a system of chiefs. However, some of these societies had chiefs.
In archaeology, cultural anthropology and history, a stateless society denotes a less complex human community without a state, such as a tribe, a clan, a band society or a chiefdom.
Stateless societies were those that had no centralized authority, no administrative machinery and no courts of justice. They were without any kind of pyramidal structure of power. There were no chiefs or councils with the authority to issue commands that would be binding on all.