Modern Africa (Dec 2014)
‘Our Traditions are Modern, Our Modernities Traditional’: Chieftaincy and Democracy in Contemporary Cameroon and Botswana
Abstract
In this paper, I have argued that, instead of being pushed aside by the modern power elites – as was widely predicted both by modernisation theorists and their critics – chieftaincy has displayed remarkable dynamics and adaptability to new socio-economic and political developments, without becoming totally transformed in the process. Chiefdoms and chiefs have become active agents in the quest by the new elites for ethnic, cultural symbols as a way of maximising opportunities at the centre of bureaucratic and state power, and at the home village where control over land and labour often require both financial and symbolic capital. Chieftaincy, in other words, remains central to ongoing efforts at developing democracy and accountability in line with the expectations of Africans as individual ‘citizens’ and also as ‘subjects’ of various cultural communities. The paper uses Cameroon and Botswana as case studies, to argue that the rigidity and prescriptiveness of modernist partial theories have left a major gap in scholarship on chiefs and chieftaincy in Africa. It stresses that studies of domesticated agency in Africa are sorely needed to capture the creative ongoing processes and to avoid overemphasising structures and essentialist perceptions on chieftaincy and the cultural communities that claim and are claimed by it. Scholarship that is impatient with the differences and diversities that empirical research highlights, runs the risk of pontification or orthodoxy. Such stunted or reductionist scholarship, like rigid notions of liberal democracy, is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a corpse than expand his/her coffin to accommodate a man-mountain, or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is a nail.
