ROGUE KINGS AND DIVINE QUEENS IN CENTRAL SULAWESI AND GUINEA-BISSAU

Retrospective narratives about stranger-kings obtained from fieldwork among the Lauje in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and the Manjaco in Guinea-Bissau, Africa, are examined against the historical record in order to question the levels of violence in communities where stranger-kings reigned. It is argued that information used by earlier scholars is perspectival rather than factual because it is steeped in a ‘politics of difference’ rhetoric. This binary rhetoric is used to convince audiences that stranger-kings are good or bad, depending on the narrator's point of view. Such accounts fail to reflect the nuanced roles stranger-kings played in communities, unless a number of perspectives are compared and contrasted. The conclusion is that assumptions about violence in native communities, and whether stranger-kings reduce or exacerbate conflict, are based on binary, oversimplified characterizations produced both by colonial authorities and by ‘natives’ who wish to dominate their economic and political world with rhetoric about ‘evil others’.