1000 BCE–1000 CE: (Secret Societies as the Social Infrastructure of Congo Basin Commerce — Merchant Associations Composed of Traders and Leading Figures from…

1000 BCE–1000 CE: (Secret Societies as the Social Infrastructure of Congo Basin Commerce — Merchant Associations Composed of Traders and Leading Figures from Chiefdoms and Small Kingdoms, Open to Both Women and Men, Structured with Ranks and Rituals Similar to Masonic Societies, Extending Across the Eastern Half of the Congo Basin from the Lomami River to Lake Tanganyika, Enabling Merchants to Call Upon Hospitality and Protection Across Independent and Sometimes Rival Polities): An associated social feature of the wider Congo basin commercial revolution was the institution of so-called secret societies — associations composed of the merchants who carried out the trade and also other leading figures from the chiefdoms and small kingdoms involved in the wider networks of commercial relations. Women as well as men could belong. These societies existed across most of the eastern half of the Congo basin, extending in the west from the areas along the length of the Lomami River eastward to Lake Tanganyika. The societies were “secret” in much the same way that Masonic societies are secret, and they were similar to the Masons in having ranks through which members could advance upward. Particular rituals marked one’s advancement in rank, and there were different rituals to participate in once one had attained particular status. The presence of these institutions enabled a merchant traveling with goods to call upon the hospitality and protection of local communities in each of the areas the merchant traveled to, because in each area the merchant could find members either of the same society or of a society allied to the merchant’s own. These relations served to protect and facilitate the passage of goods over great distances and through a skein of independent chiefdoms and small kingdoms, even when those polities might otherwise be at odds with each other. Here was the social technology that made long-distance commerce possible in the absence of a single overarching state: a network of mutual obligation, cutting across political boundaries, binding merchant to merchant and polity to polity through shared ritual and shared interest. The societies that facilitated trade in the upper and middle Congo River regions certainly already existed in the early second millennium or later first millennium CE, though for the still earlier periods the institutions that protected trade remain to be discovered.