Chapter 10: The Unwritten Constitutions

There is a wampum belt — two rows of purple shell beads running parallel against a field of white — that encodes a governance principle Western political theory still lacks words for.

The Two Row Wampum, or Kaswentha, records an agreement between the Haudenosaunee people and the first European newcomers to arrive in their territory. The two purple rows represent two vessels — a canoe and a ship — each carrying its own people, its own laws, its own customs, traveling side by side on the same river. "Neither Brother will try to steer the other's vessel," the teaching explains, "by passing laws or hindrances to their Brother's way of life."

This is not a treaty of subordination. It is not a merger. It is a governance concept for which European languages barely have a word: parallel sovereignty. Two peoples sharing a territory, each governing themselves, neither claiming authority over the other. The river is wide enough for both.

The Europeans, of course, would not honor it. But the principle — and the governance tradition that produced it — would endure.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and later the Tuscarora — was governed by the Great Law of Peace, Kaianere'kó:wa, an oral constitution predating European contact by centuries — estimates range from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The story of its founding is told as the story of the Peacemaker — a figure who arrived among nations at war and persuaded them to bury their weapons beneath a great white pine, whose four roots extended in the four directions, inviting all peoples toward peace.

The governance structure the Great Law established was neither monarchy nor democracy in any European sense. It was something distinct.

Fifty chiefs — hoyaneh — sat in the Grand Council, representing all clans from the member nations. But they did not choose themselves. Clan mothers — iakoia:ne — selected them. The women held the power to nominate chiefs, approve or reject their decisions, and, crucially, remove them. The process was called "dehorning" — stripping the antlers of authority from a chief who had failed in his duties. This was not impeachment — not a crisis procedure but a routine one. Removal was a normal function, not an emergency measure. Power was granted conditionally and could be withdrawn by those who granted it.

The Grand Council itself operated through a bicameral structure — Elder Brothers and Younger Brothers — that required agreement between both divisions before decisions could be taken. Deliberation was not merely permitted but structurally required. The process was slow. It was designed to be slow. Speed was not the goal. Consensus was.

And the gendered architecture was not decorative. Chiefs made policy. Clan mothers decided who led and whether they continued to lead. Lineage ran through the female line: "Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil." This was not matriarchy — a misleading term that simply inverts the hierarchy — but distributed authority, gendered by design. Power was not above. It was between.

The question of whether the Haudenosaunee Confederacy influenced the United States Constitution has produced more argument than evidence. There are facts worth noting.

Benjamin Franklin knew the Haudenosaunee system. He reviewed Cadwallader Colden's History of the Five Indian Nations and wrote admiringly of their ability to maintain a multi-nation union. Members of the Confederacy attended the Albany Congress in 1754, where colonial representatives discussed forming a common government. In 1988, the United States Congress passed a resolution acknowledging "the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations to the development of the United States Constitution."

But scholars disagree sharply about the nature and extent of that contribution. Haudenosaunee historian Elisabeth Tooker identified "little resemblance between the two documents." Stanford historian Jack Rakove pointed to European antecedents for democratic institutions and found no evidence in the Constitutional Convention's debate records. And the differences are real: the Great Law emphasizes consensus, not majority rule. It grants political authority to women — something the original Constitution explicitly denied. It operates through clan-based representation, not individual suffrage.

The binary framing — copied or not copied — misses the point. What is beyond reasonable dispute is this: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy demonstrated, for centuries before 1787, that a multi-nation federation could govern through consensus across a significant territorial expanse. It was a living proof of concept. Whether specific constitutional clauses were borrowed matters less than the proof of concept. Many European theorists considered it impossible — sustained, peaceful governance across diverse nations without a king. The Haudenosaunee had been doing it for centuries.

But the Haudenosaunee are not alone. Across the world, other societies built governance systems of comparable sophistication — without writing anything down.

Among the Akan people of modern-day Ghana, chieftaincy has operated for centuries through a system of structural accountability that many written constitutions would envy.

A chief — ohene — holds political authority. But the queen mother — obaahemaa — holds the power that creates and destroys chiefs. She nominates candidates when a chieftaincy becomes vacant. She approves or rejects the chief's decisions. And she can initiate destoolment — formal removal — if the chief violates customs, abuses power, neglects duties, or fails morally.

The mechanism is not theoretical. Historical records document destoolments and, remarkably, the destoolment of queen mothers themselves — for "not advising their sons well." Accountability extended to the accountability-holders. Who watches the watchmen? In the Akan system, the answer was: someone watches them too.

The 1992 Ghanaian Constitution formalized these mechanisms, giving traditional authority structures legal recognition through National and Regional Houses of Chiefs. This is not preservation of a relic. It is the ongoing integration of an indigenous governance technology into a modern state.

What the Akan system achieves is a collaborative ethic of governance — founded on complementarity, counsel, and accountability. Power serves the people — not because a constitution says so, but because the structure makes it so. The chief who forgets this discovers that the stool he sits on can be pulled away.

Five thousand miles east of Accra, on the highlands of Ethiopia, the Oromo people have governed themselves through a system so structurally ingenious that scholars and UNESCO alike have recognized it as a major governance innovation.

The Gada system organizes governance into five classes, with leadership rotating every eight years. Each class progresses through a series of age-grades — stages of life that prepare members for different civic roles — before assuming politico-ritual leadership. A given class comes to power once every forty years. It has governed the Oromo for at least five centuries. In 2016, UNESCO inscribed it as Intangible Cultural Heritage, calling it "an indigenous democratic socio-political system."

The structural anti-dynastic logic is beautiful. No individual or family can accumulate permanent power because power rotates on an eight-year clock. No class can entrench itself because the forty-year full cycle means a generation passes before the same group governs again. Leaders have been socialized through multiple roles — warrior, economic contributor, community member — before they assume governance responsibility. They are not elected to power. They are prepared for it, over a lifetime.

And the rotation creates a natural feedback loop that no election system can match: if you will soon be governed by others, self-interest aligns with good governance. The ruler who exploits his position knows that in eight years, the people he exploited will be making decisions about him. Accountability is not enforced from above. It is structural — built into the cycle itself.

Ibn Khaldun's asabiyyah cycle describes how governance dynasties decay over three or four generations as comfort dissolves solidarity. The Gada system solves this problem by preventing dynasties from forming. There is no third-generation decadence because there is no third generation in power. The system's architecture is a direct answer to the pattern that doomed the caliphates.

And then there are the Igbo.

Pre-colonial Igbo governance had no chiefs. No kings. No centralized authority of any kind. Political scientists call it "acephalous" — headless — which sounds like an absence. It was not. It was a choice.

Igbo governance operated at the village level through overlapping institutions: councils of elders, lineage groups, age-grades, title-holding societies, and the town forum — oha or ama-ala — where all adult males could speak. Senior age-grades maintained order; junior age-grades performed community services. Title societies conferred prestige based on achievement, not birth. No single institution monopolized authority. Each checked the others.

The governing principle was consensus. Without any coercive apparatus — no police, no courts, no prisons — consensus was the only viable means of securing voluntary adherence to decisions. Decisions that required broad buy-in were made slowly, through extended deliberation in the town forum. They were slow because they had to be. When you have no mechanism for compelling obedience, you need a mechanism for generating agreement.

This is governance through resonance in its purest form. A decision was legitimate not because an authority pronounced it but because the community arrived at it together. The cost was speed. The benefit was depth. Decisions that everyone had agreed to were decisions that everyone would uphold — not because they feared punishment, but because the decision was theirs.

The system's weakness was scale. It worked beautifully for villages and towns. It had no mechanism for confederating into larger units. And that vulnerability would prove devastating.

When the British arrived in southeastern Nigeria, they found Igbo governance incomprehensible.

The colonial administrator's toolkit assumed hierarchy. Indirect rule — the strategy of governing through existing authority structures — required chiefs. You needed someone to issue orders to, someone to collect taxes through, someone to hold accountable when the district wasn't functioning as desired. The British looked for chiefs among the Igbo and found none.

So they invented them. "Warrant chiefs" — individuals appointed by the colonial government, armed with a warrant certifying their authority — were imposed on communities that had spent centuries deliberately refusing to concentrate authority in single individuals. The warrant chiefs lacked legitimacy. Many used their colonial-granted power for personal enrichment. Communities that had governed themselves through consensus were now governed by appointees answerable to foreign administrators in distant offices.

The result, predictably, was resistance. In 1929, Igbo women organized what the British called the "Aba Women's Riots" and the Igbo call the Women's War. Thousands of women, furious about taxation and the warrant chief system, attacked colonial infrastructure, besieged warrant chiefs in their compounds, and disrupted governance across two provinces. It was not a riot. It was a governance protest — communities rejecting an illegitimate governance structure and demanding the return of systems that actually resonated with their needs.

The colonial destruction of indigenous governance operated through several mechanisms. Institutional substitution — replacing indigenous institutions with colonial ones. Co-optation — absorbing indigenous leaders into the colonial hierarchy, compromising their independence. Forced simplification — forcing complex, flexible systems into rigid categories the colonial state could manage. And epistemic erasure — treating oral traditions as "no law" because they weren't written.

That last mechanism may have been the most destructive. The internalized assumption — shared eventually by many post-colonial elites — that "modern" governance must look Western, that it requires written constitutions, legislative bodies, judicial hierarchies, and the whole apparatus of European state-building, delegitimized indigenous governance innovations that might have informed more locally resonant institutions. The colonizers didn't just destroy governance systems. They destroyed the belief that those systems were governance at all.

But the traditions persist.

In New Zealand, Maori governance principles have not merely survived but have been integrated into the constitutional order. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) — whose English and Maori versions differ significantly in their provisions regarding sovereignty — remains the country's founding document. Co-governance arrangements since 2008 have given Maori communities shared decision-making power over rivers, coastlines, and natural resources. In 2017, the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood — Te Awa Tupua — reflecting the Maori principle of kaitiakitanga, guardianship, a governance concept in which a river is not property to be owned but a being to be protected.

Legal personhood for a river. Think about what that means for governance. It means that an indigenous ontology — the river is alive, the river has rights — has been translated into a Western legal framework and given enforceable standing. It means that governance concepts from an oral tradition have expanded the repertoire of a written legal system. It means that the traffic can flow both ways.

Stand back now and see what these traditions share.

Across the Haudenosaunee, Akan, Gada, and Igbo systems, several structural principles recur — not because these peoples were in contact with each other, but because they were solving the same problems.

Conditional authority. Power is granted provisionally and can be withdrawn. Clan mothers dehorn chiefs. Queen mothers destool kings. Eight-year rotations prevent entrenchment. Consensus requirements mean that authority exists only as long as the community sustains it.

Distributed accountability. No single institution monopolizes power. Overlapping authorities — elders, age-grades, women's councils, title societies — check each other. The Igbo system takes this furthest: governance without any centralized authority at all.

Consensus over majority. Decisions require broad agreement, not narrow victories. This makes governance slow but durable. A 51-49 vote creates a discontented minority. A consensus decision creates shared ownership.

Anti-accumulation mechanisms. Term limits, destoolment, rotation, consensus requirements — all prevent the permanent concentration of power that threatens every governance system in this chronicle.

And here is what oral constitutions achieve that written ones cannot: living interpretation. Without a fixed text, governance principles are continually reinterpreted through practice. There is no "originalism" debate because the constitution is always being performed, always adapting to new circumstances while maintaining its core patterns. Oral governance is resilient to some threats — you cannot burn an unwritten constitution — but vulnerable to others. You can kill the knowledge-holders. You can remove children from their families and forbid them their language. You can break the chain of transmission. Colonial powers understood this, even if they did not articulate it in these terms.

The lesson from these traditions is not that oral governance is superior to written governance. It is that governance sophistication has nothing to do with writing. The equation of "unwritten" with "primitive" is not merely wrong. It is a category error — like measuring intelligence by height. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy maintained a multi-nation governance system for centuries before any European state managed the same. The Gada system solved the problem of dynastic decay that toppled caliphates and empires. The Igbo governed through consensus in ways that anticipate modern deliberative democracy theory.

These systems were not stages on the way to something better. They were complete answers to the governance question — answers that the modern world is only now beginning to recover.

Back in Europe, meanwhile, a different governance experiment was taking shape — one built not on consensus but on obligation, not on equality but on reciprocity, and not on oral tradition but on the personal bond between a lord and the man who knelt before him and swore to serve.