The Politics of Custom – Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa - Hardcover

Comaroff, John; Comaroff, Jean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022651076X ISBN 13: 9780226510767

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2018

Synopsis

How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post–Cold War era―changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated.
 
This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises―from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers–but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that “traditional” authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Authors

John L. Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology and an Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. He is also an Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. For more information, please visit https: //www.johncomaroff.com/.

Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology and an Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. For more information, visit https: //www.jeancomaroff.com/.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Politics of Custom

Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa

By John L. Comaroff, Jean Comaroff

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-51076-7

Contents

Editorial Note, 
ONE / Chiefs, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa: An Introduction JOHN AND JEAN COMAROFF, 
TWO / African Chiefs and the Post–Cold War Moment: Millennial Capitalism and the Struggle over Moral Authority PETER GESCHIERE, 
THREE / Chieftaincy, Land, and the State in Ghana and South Africa SARA BERRY, 
FOUR / The Salience of Chiefs in Postapartheid South Africa: Reflections on the Nhlapo Commission MBONGISENI BUTHELEZI AND DINEO SKOSANA, 
FIVE / The Politics of States and Chiefs in Zimbabwe JOCELYN ALEXANDER, 
SIX / Paramount Chiefs, Land, and Local-National Politics in Sierra Leone MARIANE FERME, 
SEVEN / Republic of Kings: Neotraditionalism, Aristocratic Ethos, and Authoritarianism in Burkina Faso BENOÎT BEUCHER, 
EIGHT / Corporate Kings and South Africa's Traditional-Industrial Complex SUSAN COOK, 
NINE / The Currency of Chieftaincy: Corporate Branding and the Commodification of Political Authority in Ghana LAUREN ADROVER, 
TEN / Fallen Chiefs and Sacrificial Mining in Ghana LAUREN COYLE, 
ELEVEN / Colonizing Banro: Kingship, Temporality, and Mining of Futures in the Goldfields of South Kivu, DRC JAMES SMITH, 
TWELVE / Third Contact: Invisibility and Recognition of the Customary in Northern Mozambique JUAN OBARRIO, 
Acknowledgments, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Chiefs, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa

An Introduction

John and Jean Comaroff

Chieftaincy manifests itself in complex figurations ... Each chiefly position [has] its own "grammaticality," even as we recognize that the institution has been considerably shaped by antagonistic forces ... A new vision of the chief — global, modern, entrepreneurial — must be constructed ... Chiefs [are] brokers of the present and the future.

— Adjaye and Misawa 2006

History often plays havoc with the certitudes of sociology. Recall the once confident prediction of many theorists of modernity, left and right, that chiefship and the customary in Africa would wither away with the rise of nationalism, democracy, and market economics? That cultural difference would recede in the face of universal advancement? That "for the nation to live, the tribe must die"? Well, the future-then has proven obdurately otherwise in the here-and-now. So-called "traditional" offices, and the culturally distinctive species of authority they presume, continue to manifest themselves in a vibrant array of forms across the continent, coexisting in various ways — sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in contestation, sometimes in creative confusion, always in reciprocally transforming interplay — with dominant regimes of power, governance, knowledge, and capital accumulation in the late modern world.

The twenty-first century African sovereign comes in many guises. He may be a Sierra Leonean university lecturer who divides his time between his campus abode and his royal residence (chapter 6). As in parts of Ghana, he may be a professional with substantial venture capital in agriculture or mining (chapters 3, 10) — and/or an absentee landlord who lives, perhaps abroad, on rents extracted from patrimonial land that he treats as his own property. He could also be a "Nigerian chief ... known to run huge businesses around the world and [to sit] on the boards of big companies." Or, to cite a well-known South African example, he may rule as king over a platinum-rich realm and as the CEO of a large ethnocorporation — having been borne to his installation on a donkey cart, enrobed with a leopard skin, in a ritual staged by a major commercial events-planner (chapter 8; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009:112).

Elsewhere on the continent, he may be a migrant, an illiterate laborer, a subsistence farmer, a spirit medium, a school teacher, a lay preacher. Or a scholar, a medical doctor, a corporate lawyer. Or, like Olusegun Obasango of Nigeria, a retired national president. And, possibly, an un/common criminal, like, at the southern end of the continent, ex-King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo of the AbaThembu, recently imprisoned for arson, assault, and homicide, uncommon because he, a former antiapartheid freedom fighter, claims — with the support of many vocal, local "traditionalists" — that the acts in question were committed under the sovereignty of custom. If an indigenous ruler has long lived overseas, again as in Sierra Leone, he may be an "American chief," one believed by his people to have contacts who could be persuaded to contribute to their development. Nowadays, he also may be — increasingly is in some countries — a she. In fact, he may not be African at all but a former colonial officer, even, as in the case of Honorary Chief Tony Blair, an ex-British prime minister.

None of these personages is anything like the political figures described, classically, in African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940), let alone in the large library of studies on chiefship published in its wake — although some features of the office detailed back then, like its structural position vis-à-vis the colonial state (e.g., Gluckman 1940a, 1940b; Busia 1951), have left palpable traces. As Jocelyn Alexander pithily puts it (chapter 5), "Chiefs are as varied as African states, in part because their fates are so often intimately linked ... Chieftaincy seem[s] an extraordinarily flexible institution, never wholly of the state or of the customary but nonetheless always bound by them." Which, in turn, renders spurious an increasingly noisy debate — alike in the academy, in policy circles, and in the public media — over whether the institution is, endemically, a backward-looking, dangerous anachronism, a once noble, princely form of governance irrevocably disfigured by colonial misrule; or the authentic politicoethical embodiment of peoples with an inalienable right to their difference, their culturally validated collective will. As we shall see, it is all and none of these things, depending both on circumstance and on the angle of vision from which it is regarded.

Customary Authority in Africa

Appearances, Disappearances, Reappearances

It was not merely European social scientists who were certain that African traditional leadership was doomed to extinction. Almost a half century ago, in 1969, we encountered Kebalepile Montshiwa, chief of the Tshidi-Barolong, a Tswana polity centered at Mafeking (now Mahikeng), near the South Africa-Botswana border. A philosopher-king of sorts, the forty-ish royal was the scion of a dynasty with a venerable history: his great-grandfather, the famed Montshiwa I (1814–1896), had spent the second half of the nineteenth century dealing, skillfully if not always successfully, with Boer and British incursion (Molema 1966). Given to reflecting expansively on life under apartheid, Kebalepile was especially concerned with the political economy of the countryside, once the sovereign domain of rulers like himself. Under siege at the hands of the South African government, to which he had constantly to answer, his experience suggested to him that, six decades after the passing of his great-grandfather, bogosi — usually translated as "chiefship" — was finally in its death throes. Despite the claims of the British colonial and apartheid regimes to respect, recognize, and ratify "native law and custom," the office had been reduced to a shadow, a mere trace of its former self. To the degree that it survived at all, he opined, it did so in bureaucratic servitude to the purposes of the state and the industrial economy. Indeed, although he did not say so in so many words, it was the cooperation of local chiefs with the apartheid regime, willingly or under duress, that gave them such a bad name among many black South Africans, especially "young lions" committed to the struggle; Kate O'Regan (2016:111) writes of a seSotho song of liberation, Nako e fedile, nako ya magosi ("The time is over, the time of the chiefs"). She also recalls a statement by Chief Albert Luthuli (1962:200), African National Congress leader and Nobel Peace laureate, in which he said that the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, a signature statute in the construction of "separate development" South African-style, "ma[de] our chiefs ... into minor puppets and agents of the Big Dictator." Some years earlier, Govan Mbeki (1939:1, also pp. 6–7) had already spoken of their power as "vestigial," no more than an "eye-wash."

A far cry, this, from Mahmood Mamdani's characterization, in Citizen and Subject (1996), of colonial chiefs as "decentralized despots," backed by white military might. Rather like Isaac Schapera's (1970:238) Bechuanaland dikgosi, some of them very powerful in the nineteenth century, who, he says, had been reduced by the 1940s to "subordinate government officers" (see Fokwang 2009:102). Or even more like Max Gluckman's (1940a; 1963:173) "intercalary" Zulu rulers, their sovereign authority "radically curtailed ... and altered" by the late 1930s, caught haplessly between their imperial masters and their demanding subjects; this last an especially telling example, since Mamdani (1996) argues that apartheid in South Africa was the very apotheosis of colonialism — and therefore, by implication, should have epitomized his ideal typification of chiefship under European rule. The internal mechanisms of Tswana democracy, which Kebalepile likened to the classical Greek demos — he was possessed of a lively historical sensibility — had been laid to waste, ossified. In part, he asserted, this was the brute effect of overrule, in part a product of the sheer ignorance of white colonizers about how African political systems actually worked. And how they expressed the political philosophy of the peoples for whom, and by whom, they were designed. Not surprisingly, his perspective on those systems, heavily tinged with ethnostalgia and noblesse oblige, was unequivocally affirmative. Other, more critical black thinkers across the continent, back then as now, were much less favorably disposed toward chiefship, toward the kind of authority on which it was based and the forms of power it sanctioned (e.g., Molutsi 2004; Ntsebeza 2005; chapter 4, this volume) — although, for others, it always has had anti-imperial, counter-hegemonic potentialities precisely because it was seen to be founded on an/other species of sovereignty. But that story will emerge, in sharp relief, in the pages below.

Deeply depressed by the future he foresaw and forswore for his subjects, for his office, and for himself, Kebalepile died in 1971. Local legend has it that he was killed by witchcraft; this, allegedly, at the behest of Lucas Manyane Mangope, the soon-to-be president of the putatively independent ethnic "homeland" of Bophuthatswana, whose capital was built on Kebalepile's terrain. Mangope had been placed in his new position to rule over all the South African Tswana polities as proxy for the apartheid regime; some, at the time, had it that he was "really" a paramount of sorts, a "decentralized despot" in fact, although the government insisted that he was not, that he was the head of a modern democratic state. In Kebalepile's view, though, his appointment had an even more thoroughgoing, sinister mandate: to do away forever with the legitimate authority of the chiefship in its "authentic" (adj., nnete, "real"; n., "reality, truth") customary form, leaving it "like an empty chair." This image was his final epitaph for the office as he conceived of it. He was convinced that its end-time was close at hand all over Africa, albeit for different reasons in different places.

Kebalepile was not alone in his view. In 2000, the assembled kings and chiefs of South Africa walked out of a national conference on governance because, they declared, the ruling African National Congress (ANC), then under President Thabo Mbeki, had voided their sovereignty: the constitution of 1996 might have accorded them recognition, but, beyond minor perogatives provided for under statutory law, it gave them no real executive power. Quite the opposite. The Local Government Municipal Structures Act (no. 117) of 1999 had restricted them to the administration of customary law, communal land allocation, and various ceremonial activities; an amendment a year later, moreover, stipulated that they were expected to "carry out all orders given [them] ... by competent authorities." Said one of them to us, one of the most influential, most vocal: "Our history is finished. Chiefship is finished. We are just nothings." Their perception had real enough grounds. The mid-1990s, a period of deep ambivalence on the part of the ANC regime toward traditional leaders (see, e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2003:449; Oomen 2005:3 et passim), was taken by many observers to be "the nadir of [their] political legitimacy" (O'Regan 2016:112). It also rang like a coda to the script written in Europe many years before: the script according to which the ascent of rational-bureaucratic authority, under liberal democracy — the highest political expression of modernity — would eventually do away with all things customary, traditional, parochial, premodern. Or, if not, it would confine them within the narrow limits of tolerated cultural difference. Little wonder, then, that the country's leading cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro (a.k.a. Zapiro) would portray a meeting, on 11 October 2000, between two traditional leaders and the Minister of Local Government, Sydney Mufamadi — whom they see as a creature from another planet, just landed in a spacecraft called "Democracy" and bearing a weaponized "power vaporizer" — in the following terms (figure 1):

MUFAMADI (SAYS): "We need to set a date ... for local government elections."

THE CHIEFS (HEAR): "... to destroy you and your culture. Do not resist."

But appearances often their hide their obverse: phenomena taking shape, so to speak, in the interstices of the observable, just beyond the edges of public life; beyond, even, the peripheral vision of many of the South African chiefs themselves. Far from being an "empty chair," the office was already under reconstruction, being re(s)tooled, in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, as a crucible for new forms of power, new deployments of the customary, new modes of accumulation — of which, it is clear in retrospect, "President" (Chief) Mangope had been one kind of foreshadowing; despite being a marionette-monarch, a colonial cipher, he had managed, alchemically almost, to turn faux political authority, sans any legitimacy, into various forms of hard capital (Lawrence and Manson 1994). Even before 2000, by the early 1990s in fact, it was becoming evident that African chiefship — and the customary, of which traditional authority is one element, albeit an iconic one — was a long way from "finished." Neither was it going to be confined, at the far edges of state power, to the prescribed terrain of tolerated cultural difference. Like other predictions of the end of history, this one was way off the mark.

Ever since fin de siècle, in sum, indigenous sovereigns across Africa — although unevenly and not everywhere, as Peter Geschiere shows (chapter 2, this volume; also chapters 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12) — have seen their fortunes grow, their authority consolidated by law, their political, cultural, economic, and moral capital accrete, their legitimacy and affective appeal enhanced, their hold over the customary and its forms of civility harden. In South Africa, again, where their powers have been incrementally redefined by statute, notably by the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act (2003), the Communal Land Rights Act (2004), and the Traditional Courts Bill (2012), it has been argued that this has eventuated in a new era of chiefly despotism, resembling and extending the old order of things (e.g., Maloka and Gordon 1996; Ntsebeza 2005, 2011; LiPuma and Koelble 2009; Sibanda 2010:33; but cf., e.g., Oomen 2005; Williams 2010; Turner 2014; Krämer 2016). Said Mamphela Ramphele of the Traditional Courts Bill, in a public address, "communities ... are being held captive by chiefs ... [W]elcome [back] apartheid in 2012" (cf. Ntsebeza 2005). The point is echoed, and amplified, by Buthelezi and Skosana below (chapter 4). The passage of these statutes is often attributed to the capacity of traditional rulers to mobilize mass support, and votes, for the ANC (van Kessel and Oomen 1997; Murray 2004; du Preez 2013:179ff.; also chapter 3, this volume), persuading it to forego its earlier ambivalence toward those rulers, whose de facto following the ruling party had grossly underestimated. Another explanation lies in the claim (e.g., Crais 2006; see also Murray 2004:14) that, due to its administrative weakness, the postapartheid state eventually came to realize that it could not really do without chiefs to rule over "space[s] of ungovernance"; Lawson (n.d.:9) notes much the same thing for Africa at large.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022651076X
• ISBN 13: 9780226510767
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368