A Different Sort of Government As the Bantu people migrated, they carried their style of government with them. Their social groups are often called stateless societies, but a better term for them might be kin-based societies. Stateless societies were very different from modern Western governments. For one thing, they lacked a centralized hierarchy of government officials (like a president or a congress) and a bureaucracy to take care of daily business. Instead, a stateless society was led by family groups that balanced the ruling power among them and made decisions together for the good of the whole society. Sometimes these family groups controlled just one village through a council of elders, which was comprised of the male heads of the families and occasionally an elected chief who spoke for the council. Other times, the family groups exercised their power over several villages to form a district. In this case, village chiefs met together to discuss and decide important issues. These networks could sometimes grow very large and contain thousands of people, but they were always governed by families and never by officials or bureaucrats.