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...